Bugsy Siegel

Born Benjamin Siegel, young Siegel's career began by extorting money from Jewish pushcart peddlers on New York's Lower East Side. Around 1918 he joined up with Meyer Lansky as an auto thief and later graduated to bootlegging and gambling rackets in New York, New Jersey & Philadelphia.

Siegel and Lansky also operated a murder-for-hire operation and in 1931 was one of the four executioners of Joe "the Boss" Masseria. In 1937 the syndicate leaders sent Siegel to the west coast to create rackets there. In California the handsome mobster successfully developed gambling dens, gambling boats (offshore beyond the 12-mile limit), drug smuggling, blackmail, and other illicit enterprises, as well as befriended many Hollywood motion picture stars and celebrities.

After establishing a nationwide bookmakers' wire service, in 1945 Siegel commenced realizing his dream of a gambling oasis in the desert northeast of Los Angeles. In that year he developed the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The project, originally budgeted at $1.5 million, wound up costing $6 million, much of it in syndicate money from the East.

The cost overruns involved widespread "skimming" by Siegel, who arranged for his girlfriend Virginia Hill to deposit the cash in European banks. Siegel also got into the habit of writing bad checks to cover building costs. These actions as well as others angered Lansky and other bosses in the East. Late at night on June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot down in his palatial Beverly Hills home by a barrage of bullets fired through his living room window. At around the same time, three of Lansky's henchmen stepped into Vegas' Flamingo Hotel and declared that they were taking over.