VICIOUS AND RUTHLESS, standing just a tad under six-feet, with a thick head of black hair and piercing blue eyes, Benjamin Siegel seemed to be a gangster sent from central casting. He was charming with the ladies and a sharp dresser, athletically inclined and fearless. Not only did Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel talk the talk, he walked the walk of a larger than life racketeer. It seemed only inevitable that he would end up hobnobbing with the glitterati of Hollywood and for better or worse: Bugsy Siegel would eventually be remembered as, “The Father of Las Vegas.”

Bugsy Siegel was one of the most infamous and feared gangsters of his day. Born Benjamin Hymen Siegelbaum on February 28, 1906, to Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, Ben vowed to rise above the poverty surrounding him. He sought wealth, fame and power, and by the age of fourteen, Ben Siegel, as he had others call him, had already started his own gang. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan he devised his own protection racket. Pushcart merchants were forced to pay him or he would incinerate their inventory.

Soon he was dubbed “Bugsy” for his crazed aggression during fights. “When we were in a fight, Benny would never hesitate,” Meyer Lansky once said. “He was even quicker to take action than those hot-blooded Sicilians; the first to start punching and shooting. Nobody reacted faster than Benny.” In gangster circles, the nickname “Bugsy” is often a term of endearment or a bestowment of honor. It is given out to racketeers who show no fear in dangerous situations or who are willing to except jobs that others are afraid to take. Bugsy Siegel earned his nickname early in his criminal career because of his tendency to “go bugs” whenever he was angered or thwarted. It was an appellation that he strongly disliked; he despised the nickname and would not hesitate to strike out at anyone who dared to refer to him as Bugsy in person. Siegel preferred that his friends call him Ben. If you weren’t his friend, “Mr. Siegel,” would do just fine.

While still in his teens, Siegel befriended Meyer Lansky. Lansky was forming a small mob whose activities included gambling and car theft. Their friendship bonded them to a series of underworld enterprises. By age 21, Bugsy was making a great deal of money, and he flaunted it. He bought a fancy apartment at the Waldorf Hotel. He wore expensive clothes. He bought a Tudor home in nearby Scarsdale. He was good-looking and charming, and in 1929, he was able to convince Esther Krackhauer to marry him. In the years to come, they had two daughters.

It was alleged that Siegel also worked as the mob’s hit man. At times Lansky would hire him out to other crime families and that association later became the forerunner of Murder Incorporated. In 1930, as their organization grew, Lansky and Siegel formed ties to Charles (Lucky) Luciano and Frank Costello: future bosses of the Genovese crime family. Siegel, around the same time, became a bootlegger and was associated with another well known gangster, Albert (Mad Hatter) Anastasia. The territory of his illegal hooch business soon encompassed New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.

Siegel and Anastasia, with the addition of Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis, were the four gunmen who shot New York mob boss Joe Masseria to death on Luciano’s orders on April 15, 1931. Then, on September 10 of that year, Luciano again hired four trigger men from the Lansky-Siegel gang to murder Masseria’s rival, Salvatore Maranzano, cementing Lucky Luciano’s rise to the top of the U.S. Mafia and marking the birth of modern American organized crime.

In 1932, Siegel was arrested for gambling and bootlegging, but easily got off with a fine. Lansky and Siegel assisted in Luciano’s brief alliance with Dutch Schultz and killed rival loan sharks Louis (Pretty) Amberg and Joseph Amberg in 1935. The FBI determined that Bugsy Siegel was responsible, either directly or indirectly, for at least thirty murders. Siegel continued to carry out murders for Luciano. Before long, there were a number of contracts out on Bugsy, because he had angered several mob bosses. Luciano and his crew decided that it would be best for Siegel to leave for the West Coast, to escape the wrath of his enemies and to set up a new syndicate in California.

The East Coast mob wanted Siegel to develop gambling rackets with Los Angeles mobster Jack Dragna. Meanwhile back in New York City, Thomas Dewey, special prosecutor for a grand jury investigation into vice and racketeering, began a crusade against organized crime. Luciano was arrested for extortion and Bugsy became worried that the law was getting too close. His motivation to go west was overwhelming. He left New York and moved his family to Hollywood.

The year was 1937; the city was Los Angeles. Siegel relocated his bootlegging and gambling rackets to the West Coast. Settling in, he set up gambling dens and offshore gambling ships, while also consolidating the already existing prostitution, narcotics and L.A.’s half-a-million-dollar-a-day bookmaking rackets. He maintained an extravagant lifestyle in Beverly Hills and lived in the palatial estate of Virginia Hill, a money runner for the Chicago Mob who had a penchant for blackmailing Hollywood stars. The two became involved, financially, and romantically. It was a love hate relationship. They were either at each others’ throats or screwing like rabbits in heat.

While there, Bugsy met his old friend, George Raft. Ironically, Raft made a good living playing gangsters in movies. Raft introduced him to many Hollywood stars, including Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Bugsy soon acquired his own influences in Hollywood; he ended up controlling a union that represented movie extras, and he frequently called them out on strike, when it was to his benefit. Siegel also met and befriended a large number of studio owners, such as Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer; he would eventually extort money from both film moguls.

Hollywood lore has it that Siegel was flashy and vain. He was extremely concerned with appearances. “Class, that’s the only thing that counts in life,” he once said. “Without class and style, a man’s a bum. He might as well be dead.” Famed for his flashy dress, Siegel bought the most expensive, tailored hound’s-tooth jackets and silk shirts money could buy. His hair, which he was deathly afraid of losing, was always perfectly coiffed. At night, Siegel would use face creams and a chinstrap to keep his skin taut and assure that he kept his youthful looks. He even tried every cream and elixir on the market to thicken his increasingly thinning hair.

In November 1939, Harry (Big Greeny) Greenburg showed up in Los Angeles. He had given information to the special prosecutor on other gangsters to save himself, but he needed a place to hide. Unlucky for him, Bugsy Siegel was in Los Angeles. It was only a matter of time before Bugsy killed him. But this time, Bugsy was charged with the crime and couldn’t buy his way out of it. He was astonished when he found out that one of the state’s witnesses was his wife’s brother, Whitey. Whitey had actually participated in the crime. Bugsy arranged for his death and that of one of the other witnesses. Upon their demise, the state had to let Benjamin Siegel go free.

Modern folklore tries to make us believe that Ben saw a vision out in the desert somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the days following World War II; that he kicked aside some rocks in a sort of gangland groundbreaking and decreed that here would be the Monte Carlo of the Americas: a place where high-rollers and penny-ante operators alike would come to strike it rich, a good place to trap people into taking their money for the mob.

Not so. There were already two hotel casinos on the Strip by that time. The El Rancho Vegas opened in the spring of 1941, and the Frontier opened about 18 months later, in the fall of 1942. Bugsy Siegel’s calling to Las Vegas was actually less dramatic.

In the beginning Bugsy didn’t see a great deal of worth in a two-bit town like Las Vegas. There were a couple of dude ranches and resorts there in the desert, but Vegas was pretty much a miserable place. It was hotter than hell in the summer time: hot enough to melt the wires in a car trying to make the two-hour trek from Los Angeles. The only captive audience in Las Vegas was the group of soldiers from the nearby gunnery and pilot schools.

But Vegas had something else going for it that no place else in the U.S. had at the time. In Nevada, it was not only legal to gamble, but the State Legislature also expanded its gaming laws to allow off-track betting on horse races. Nevada became the only state in the union to legalize the “Race Wire,” a service that relayed Thoroughbred racing results to off-track bookies across the country. Syndicate boss Meyer Lansky sent Siegel to take over the action in Las Vegas.

Some of Bugsy’s reputation in the numbers rackets and drug smuggling were starting to catch up to him. By 1941, he needed to get away from the charges that still haunted him in Los Angeles. Once again, with the law on his heels, Siegel left his state of residence and headed to Las Vegas, this time with Moe Sedway, a faithful lieutenant of Lansky’s. They went there to eliminate a man named James Reagan, who owned a race wire that the mob could not control. First Siegel and Sedway created a rival race wire and charged lower prices. Next they got rid of Reagan by poisoning him.

Once the mob had control of the OTB wire service, it became obvious to New York’s and L.A.’s infamous denizen of the underworld that there were real opportunities for the mob in Las Vegas. Sin City was still basically a one-horse town; a train depot and a row of gaudy gambling joints surrounded by thousands of acres of undeveloped desert. But Bugsy caught wind of the economic possibilities of building a syndicate run casino.

Bugsy Siegel was one of the most crooked entrepreneurs of his era. In a couple of years, he had the mob’s Trans America race wire service running as a very lucrative and legal betting parlor business. He believed that with the horrendous war coming to an end, that the American people would be craving entertainment and escapism. America would be ready to party.

He envisioned that the casinos on Fremont Street would soon be packed to the rafters. Besides the profits to be made from legal gaming, there would be even a greater share for the mob from cash skimmed off the top. There are no taxes on a skim. There is no bookkeeping on a skim. It was their upfront money. “If the syndicate wanted to get in on the ground floor,” he told Meyer Lansky, “now is the time.”

Lansky and his buddies on the East Coast ran a number of joints in Florida that operated on the fringe of the law and Jack Dragna and Bugsy had managed a couple of floating casinos that operated outside the 3-mile U.S. territorial limit. But setting a permanent, lavish casino in Las Vegas would give the mob an entry into a legitimate business that was almost a license to print money.

Siegel and Lansky bankrolled some of their profits from the wire service into purchasing controlling interest in the downtown El Cortez hotel by 1945. But Bugsy soon had his eye on new frontiers south of the established downtown area. He was impressed with how well the resort El Rancho Vegas was doing on Highway 91 (now Las Vegas Boulevard) which is known worldwide as “the Strip”. Catching his interest was William (Billy) Wilkerson, a gambler, drunk, raconteur, owner of Ciro’s in Los Angeles and founder of the Hollywood Reporter, who had a new resort on the highway under construction.

Billy Wilkerson had bought the land in 1945. He hoped to build something much fancier than the sawdust joints to be found in the downtown Las Vegas of those days. He was desperately in need of money and Siegel was looking to establish a hotel casino for the syndicate. When Wilkerson ran out of money, that gave the New York mob, (i.e. Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and a roster that read like the Who’s Who of organized crime), a chance to elbow their way in. Using funds pooled by the syndicate, Siegel took over the construction of the hotel. It wasn’t long before Billy Wilkerson was pushed completely out of the operation.

Wilkerson and Siegel had been friends since the mid-1930s when Siegel was a regular at Wilkerson’s Ciro’s nightclub. But Billy soon found himself reduced to a mere bystander in his dream of building a luxury resort. Siegel appointed himself president of the Nevada Projects Corp., the hotel’s development company, and Wilkerson pretty much was relegated to a footnote in Las Vegas history.

“The Flamingo,” was what Bugsy crowned his new acquisition. Wilkerson had originally planned the hotel casino with a different name, but what he called it has been lost to history. The source of the name “Flamingo” differs in the memories of old Vegas. Lucky Luciano remembered that Siegel once owned an interest in a racetrack at Hialeah and that he viewed the flamingos there as a good luck omen. Others have reported that the resort was named after Siegel’s mistress Virginia Hill. His nickname for Hill was “The Flamingo,” for her skill at fellatio. Regardless of where the name came from, the motif of the Flamingo was a garish pink, with the most grandiose and lavish decorations imaginable.

The myth that Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was the great visionary who single-handedly created modern day Las Vegas is incorrect. Contrary to popular belief, the Flamingo was not the first casino on the Strip. The first Strip casino appeared when the El Rancho Vegas opened on April 3, 1941. The Last Frontier followed on October 30, 1942. The next Strip property to arrive on the scene was the one that is acknowledged as the first of those backed substantially by mob money, Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo in 1946.

The Flamingo was a far cry from the western themed El Rancho and Last Frontier. It was designed after the resorts in Havana, in which Lansky and the syndicate had been investing, along with a little bit of Beverly Hills style thrown in. Most important was that it would be a 40-acre full-fledged resort: an upscale joint with a casino, two swimming pools, a golf course, trapshooting range and tennis and handball courts, a glamorous place where staff members wore tuxedos—the first super-casino/hotel.

Siegel told his mob superiors the resort could be completed for $1 million more than the original budget of $1.2 million. But rumors have it that Virginia Hill pilfered tens of thousands of dollars from syndicate funds and Siegel mismanaged construction by making several unwise and costly changes to Wilkerson’s plans.

Siegel’s obsession with appearances extended to the construction of the hotel. He was constantly improving the blueprints for the resort, adding extra amenities, more expensive furnishings and even private sewage pipes to each and every room, as well as individual air conditioners and tiled bathrooms. Siegel’s pursuit of “class” knew no bounds.

The Flamingo was star crossed from the start. In post-war America, construction materials were hard to come by and were very expensive. Transportation to and from Vegas was difficult, and it took all the muscle Bugsy had to smooth things out with the mob-infiltrated Teamsters Union.

Bugsy was a gangster, not an architect, and some of the contractors working on the project were stealing him blind. Legend has it that expensive palm trees were shipped each day from Barstow, California, only to be returned at night, then back to Vegas the next day. Bugsy wound up buying the same trees several times. After noticing several mob-related people on the construction site, one of the contractors confessed to “Mr. Siegel” that he was concerned about getting whacked. Siegel told him not to worry, “We only kill each other.”

Ben had originally convinced his fellow racketeers to pony up with a little over a million dollars to build the Flamingo. Most of the money had come from the mob’s earlier success with two smaller scale casinos in downtown Las Vegas, but many investors had dipped into their own savings, lured by Siegel’s siren song of immense wealth and quick profits. Soon the costs spiraled upward. The $2.2 million price tag quickly became $6 million and Lansky, Luciano, and their other associates, became increasingly worried about Ben’s desert dream.

By December 1946, a year after the official groundbreaking, the casino had yet to produce a dollar of revenue and was sucking the mob treasury dry. Not only were mobsters deep in debt, but Siegel was going back to his Hollywood friends to get more cash, telling them, “You’re in on the ground floor of the biggest gold mine in the world.”

Christmas came and went, and as he had promised, Siegel opened the Flamingo’s casino for action. He pulled out all the stops, hiring George Jessel as emcee, and Rose Marie, George Raft and Jimmy Durante as entertainment. Xavier Cugat’s orchestra provided the music. Siegel certainly was making a grand show of things, according to those in attendance. “That was the biggest whoop-dee-doo I ever seen,” said Benny Binion, the downtown gambler who stopped by to check out the competition. “There were some big stars, people like Clark Gable, Lana Turner and Joan Crawford,” Rose Marie recalled on the 50th anniversary of the Flamingo’s opening. “The show was spectacular, everything was great, but no locals came. They were used to cowboy boots, not rhinestones.”

It was a total disaster. Everything that could have gone wrong did. The Flamingo opened during a downpour. People stayed away, including many of the Hollywood celebrities Siegel had hoped to attract as guests. Although Siegel had chartered several private planes to fly his Hollywood friends to the gala, bad weather forced most of the stars to remain at home. Many of the rooms were unfinished, forcing guests to spend the night elsewhere.

The rain dampened everyone’s spirits. Siegel’s guests gambled at his casino and took their winnings back to the Frontier or to the downtown hotels. The few celebrities that did attend left after the second day, leaving a vacant showroom…and empty gaming tables. “We worked to 9 or 10 people a night for the rest of the two week engagement,” Rose Marie added. To make matters worse, the gamblers, during the grand opening, had a run of luck and hit it big, putting the casino another $300,000 in the hole after just two weeks of operation. The casino managed to limp through the early part of January, leaking money the way a Murder, Inc. victim drips blood, before Bugsy gave up. Within its first month the Flamingo closed. Siegel ordered the resort shut down until the hotel could be finished. Fortunately for Ben, his staunchest allies remained Meyer Lansky and Charlie Luciano, who continued to believe that money could and would be made in Las Vegas.

Bugsy devoted all of his waking hours to making sure the Flamingo was ready for its grand re-opening in March. Lansky had managed to buy him a few more months, and Ben made sure that he didn’t waste it. He shuttled back-and-forth between Miami (where Meyer was living), Los Angeles (where his wife and mistress were ensconced) and
Las Vegas.

The casino reopened in March as the “Fabulous Flamingo” even though it wasn’t 100 percent complete. By May, it appeared that Bugsy’s dream would come true and that once again, he had tempted fate and come away a winner. Although Siegel knew he was in big trouble for having spent too much of the mob’s money building the Flamingo and for not recouping it quickly at the casino tables, he thought he would be OK because he managed to turn things around. By spring, the resort reported a profit of over $250,000 for the first half of 1947, including the disastrous month of January. Siegel thought his bosses would leave him alone so he could make them big money.

He was wrong. Months earlier, at a meeting in Havana, mob bosses agreed to have Siegel killed. His boyhood chum Lansky reportedly voted with those who wanted Siegel dead and reluctantly gave the orders to make it happen. At that conference, Lansky revealed even more disturbing news to Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese and Joey Adonis. Ben Siegel had apparently been skimming money from the mob and putting it in numbered Swiss bank accounts. There was no doubt in Meyer’s mind that Bugsy had skimmed this dough from his building budget and he was sure that Siegel was preparing to skip as well as skim, in case the roof was “gonna fall in on him.”

It was also alleged that when the opening of the casino turned out to be a fiasco, and the money did not start flowing in as expected, Lucky Luciano demanded that Siegel return the $5 million he had used. Siegel, figuring himself as big and powerful as Luciano, told him to “go to hell.”

When Vegas started turning a profit, the mob decided they didn’t want Bugsy involved anymore, so they retired him.

In mid-June, Ben had begun to relax himself. He sent a wire to his girlfriend in Paris, telling her to return to California. Virginia came back to the Golden State, but quickly she and Bugsy had one of their world famous spats. Hill reportedly smacked a female patron of the Flamingo in the face with a bottle and she left again, this time for Zurich. It has also been said that someone in the mob had given her some advice. It was highly recommended that she, “leave town for her health.”

On the evening of June 20, 1947, Ben Siegel was at home in the bungalow he and Virginia shared at 810 Linden Drive in Beverly Hills. He had just returned from an evening haircut and manicure and was lolling about on Hill’s chintz sofa in front of a partially opened window reading the L.A. Times. It was around 10:30pm. Gabbing with Siegel was another West Coast mobster, Alan Smiley. Upstairs, Chick Hill, Virginia’s brother, was romancing his girlfriend.

Outside, an assassin was sneaking up the driveway of the house next door. A fusillade of bullets from a .30-caliber military M1 carbine s crashed through the living room window.

The first shot hit Bugsy in the head, blowing his eye 15 feet from his body. Four more bullets fired from the M1 crashed into his body, breaking his ribs and tearing up his lungs. Three other shots missed their mark, but the damage was done. Bugsy Siegel was dead at age 41.

Even though Bugsy’s slaying was front page news across the country, just two people attended Siegel’s funeral: his brother and a rabbi. Hill was in Europe when Siegel was killed and Meyer Lansky was in Havana and couldn’t make it back in time. None of Ben’s Hollywood buddies managed to make it to the service.

No one was charged with the murder, and the crime remains officially unsolved. Who killed Bugsy Siegel has never really been answered, but there is no shortage of theories.

Almost before the law was called to Hill’s Hollywood home, two of Meyer Lansky’s top operatives, Maurice Rosen and Gus Greenbaum, walked into the Flamingo and announced that the Syndicate was taking over. Rosen and Greenbaum had worked for Lansky in his casinos in Miami, Havana and New York, which led many to believe that Meyer had finally succumbed to mob pressure and ordered his friend killed. On the other hand Lansky, in his later years, has been reported to say that, “if it were in my power to see Benny alive, he would live as long as Methuselah.”

Virginia Hill never spoke of Bugsy again. She probably loved him and was in mourning, but it is also likely that she threw him under the bus. In her later years, she was supported by her only child, Peter Hauser, who worked as a waiter. She died in 1966 (nineteen years after the “hit” on Bugsy) after swallowing a handful of sleeping pills and walking into a snowdrift in Austria.

The Las Vegas that Bugsy Siegel knew doesn’t exist anymore. The hotel chains and developers moved in and made many offers to the mobsters that they couldn’t refuse. For many years, the Flamingo flourished as one of the top hotels in Vegas and with more than 3,500 rooms, it was the fourth largest hotel in the world. The Flamingo of Bugsy disappeared for good in the 1980s, when the current owner, Hilton Corporation, tore down “the Bugsy bungalow,” a fortified cottage with thick concrete walls.

Even the memory of Bugsy Siegel is anathema to the current owners of the Flamingo. In 1997, Hilton celebrated the 50th anniversary of the opening of the hotel with nary a word about Ben, although they did issue a limited edition gaming chip with his picture on it.

“The Bugsy Siegel image was not something that was particularly endearing to the Flamingo or Hilton,” said a spokesman for the hotel. “This was not George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. We’re talking about a robber, rapist and murderer. Those are not endearing qualities.”

Although that’s probably the lesson that the life of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel imparts to us, a killer with a good idea is, after all, just another bum. We can’t help picturing the good-looking, nattily dressed gangster standing there in the dusty desert, envisioning the neon Sodom that was to be his monument: an oversized neon sign outside a casino that became a testament to Las Vegas excess.

BUGSY BRONZED: The only place in the world where there’s a monument to a mobster. The bronze plaque of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, was placed in the courtyard of the Flamingo, on the very spot (1/16 of a mile back, off the Strip) where Bugsy’s original Flamingo hotel, along with his personal residence in the Presidential Suite were located. Locks were changed every day on Siegel’s suite inside the Flamingo. He had five bodyguards with him at all times and stored enough food for a month within his secured “Bugsy’s Suite” safe-haven home. SLV

“The Men Who Made Las Vegas” is a twelve-part series by Byron Craft, chronicling the growth of Sin City and the men who made it possible.

ACCORDING TO “Vegas Mob Tour”,
(the inside scoop from tour consultants Former FBI Agent Dennis Arnoldy, Mob Author Dennis N. Griffin and real-life former mobster Frank Culotta): Bugsy’s girlfriend,
Virginia Hill, was no lady.

Virginia Hill was a wannabe B-Movie actress and floozy, that in earlier years, lived in Chicago, where she was the #1 Madam, controlling all the brothels in the city, and Bugsy wasn’t the only mafioso Virginia slept with—she had affairs with countless mob bosses over the years: Capone, Moe –the boss of Detroit, Joe Adonis in New York and Tony Accardo –a top man in Chicago, to name a few.

While Bugsy pursued his hopeless dream of becoming an actor in Hollywood, (he could have been one, given his good looks, but he couldn’t remember the lines…) the mobster left girlfriend Virginia to oversee the Flamingo’s construction. She helped to double the cost of the original mob-backed funds planned to construct the Flamingo, overindulging on extravagant costs, telling Bugsy, “We’re outta money.” Siegel had the hutzpah to go back to his mob bosses looking for more, and unbelievably brought loads of cash back to Virginia to complete their opulent Vegas dream.

We’re told it was Virginia herself that called Bugsy on the phone from abroad, while supposedly “on a movie”, requesting that he “please watch over” her California home, while there were some construction workers in the house finishing some projects for her. It was the mobster’s girlfriend that actually assisted in the setup to get Bugsy clipped.

Normally, the girlfriend would have been “dealt with” as well, but Virginia had been laundering money as a top courier for the mob for years, first starting to work for Joe Epstein, and it was speculated that she had been skimming with and/or possibly without Bugsy. Her best “acting” could be witnessed each time she flew overseas, bringing suitcases of money to Swiss bank accounts. She was kept alive after the hit on Bugsy, since the mob knew that Virginia was the only key (knowing all the bank account numbers) to getting every bit of their money back. It’s been considered that the bank account numbers died with her when she passed nineteen years later, suspiciously facedown in that snowdrift.

In 1951, Hill was summoned to testify for the Kefauver hearings, where she denied having any knowledge of Mafia deals, claiming all of her income came from gifts from boyfriends, due to her prowess in oral sex.

SENATOR TOBEY: “But why would Joe Epstein
give you all that money, Miss Hill?”
WITNESS-HILL: “You really want to know?”
SENATOR TOBEY: “Yes, I really want to know.”
WITNESS-HILL: “Then I’ll tell you why—because I’m the best cocksucker in town!”
SENATOR KEFAUVER: “Order! I demand order!”

—Excerpt from Virginia Hill’s testimony in front of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Gambling.
For even more details, grab Andy Edmonds’ book “Bugsy’s Baby -The Secret Life of Mob Queen Virginia Hill” on the Mob’s ‘Tail’. SLV

“The Men Who Made Las Vegas” is a twelve-part series by Byron Craft, chronicling the growth of Sin City and the men who made it possible.

Issue 57 featuring: Virginia Mae, Jordan Danielle and Valentina Vaughn