Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1940s, 1930s
[p. 227] ". . . Al Capone was alleged to have visited Los Angeles in 1927 with an eye to organizing the city. By the mid-1930s, Phil Capone, Al's brother, Bugs Moran, Busgsy Siegel, and others had established themselves in Los Angeles . . . In the late 1930s gangster Willie Bioff penetrated and took over the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees and shook producers down on a regular basis . . .
[p. 227] "The 1930s also witnessed a fusion of mob and Hollywood interests in the evolution of the gangster movie . . . George Raft . . . an open friendship with Busy Siegel.
" . . .
" . . . There were more than two hundred identifiable gangster or gangster-prison films released in the 1930s, a figure falling by more than half in the 1940s . . . The prison film was even more schematic than the gangster movie, for here there were no distracting themes of social class and urban sociology, as there were in gangster films. In the prison film, society was collapsed back into its basics, prisoners and guards, the powerless and the all-powerful, in a setting that awaited the analysis of French theorist Michel Foucault for its more complete construal . . .
[p. 228] " . . .
"And so too, like the movie they eventually became, were the last days of George Raft's good friend Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, then busy with the construction of a gangland institution of another sort, the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas . . .
" . . . At some point during the war, Siegel had taken up with a rather mysterious woman from Chicago named Virgina Hill . . . Siegel's open association with Hill eventually [led] Esta Siegel [mother of Bugsy's children] to sue for divorcc in Reno in December 1945, and in the fall of 1946 Siegel and Hill were secretly married in Mexico.
"By this time, Siegel had discovered the one great venture that would give him . . . glamour and power, legitimacy, respectability: a resort hotel in the Las Vegas desert . . . Every dream, however tawdry and meretricious, that had pulsated through the collective imagination of Los Angeles-Hollywood Bugsy Siegel brought to Las Vegas. [Along with George Raft's $200,000 investment], told his associates-among them Meyer Lansky . . and Charles (Lucky) Luciano-that the Flamingo, which they bankrolled, would cost $1 million. Siegel hired Del Webb to build the hotel. [p. 229] Through his good friend United States Senator Pat McCarran, Webb arranged priorites for construction materials still scarce in the post-war period. Siegel interfered constantly with his architects and with Webb, ordering expensive adjustment, and the cost fo the project pushed toward $6 million. Part of the money Siegel raised from loans and the sale of hotel stock (no one ever fully accounted for how many shares Siegel issued); much of it came from Siegel's colleagues on the East Coast.
[p. 229] [On 26 December 1946, a storm kept Hollywood from the grand opening of the hotel.] In January of 1947, the hotel was closed to finish construction. [He was summoned to Havana for a meeting with Luciano, Lansky and others. He opened for a seond time on 1 March 1947. The Flamingo continued to lose money. . . . ]
" . . . The 20th of June 1947 was Siegel's last day on earth. . . . At 12:53 that morning Siegel and an associate, Swifty Morgan, boarded Western Airlines flight 23 for Los Angeles. In Siegel's briefcase was $600,000 in cash . . . Flight 23 landed at Mines Field in Los Angeles at 2:30 a.m. Siegel went directly to Virginia Hill's house on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills and went to bed. That morning and afternoon, Benjamin Siegel . . . embarked upon a prototypical day that seemed almost choreographed in its evocation of Siegel's personal version of the good life, Los Angeles style. He spent the morning with his associated Mickey Cohen, a tough guy out of Chicago, and his longtime friend George Raft. In the afternoon, Siegel went to his favorite barbershop in Berverly Hills, where he ordered a shave, a haircut, a manicure, a neck and shoulder massage, and a shoeshine. In the early evening he phoned the Hollywood office of Daily Variety and thanked columnist Florabel Muir for her favorable review of the floor show at the Flamingo. Later that evening he went with his associate Allen Smiley, Virginia's brother Chick, and Chick's girlfriend Jerri Mason out to Ocean Park for a seafood dinner at Jack's at the Beach.
[p. 230] "As if he had not a care in the world, Siegel ate dinner with his back towards the door, as opposed to the usual gangster style of always eating back to the wall, facing the entrance of a restaurant. Leaving Jack's shortly after nine, Siegel picked up a complementary copy of the next day's Los Angeles Times. Good Night, the front page was stamped. Sleep Well, With the Compliments of Jack's. On the way home he stopped briefly at the Beverly-Wilshire drugstore . . .
"[Shortly after arriving in the Beverly Hills house] Bugsy was shot nine times throught the window with a rifle. The next day , a photograph of Siegel's body in the Los Angeles County Morgue . . . went out over the wires. Just about the same time, Moe Sedway and Morris Rosen walked into the lobby of the Flamingo in Las Vegas and assumed control of the hotel in the name of its Eastern investors. A few days later, Jewish services were held at Groman Mortuary on West Washington Boulevard. Only five people showed up. Virginia Hill not among them. She and Siegel's other friends were very frightened as to who might be next."