The Everything Mafia Book (22 page)

A Change in Plans

Siegel also had a crackpot plot to personally assassinate Italian dictator Mussolini. He hated him on two counts—as a Mafioso and a Jewish man. Mussolini had jailed many Sicilian Mafiosi and adversely impacted business, and he was an ally of Adolf Hitler. Even before the concentration camps were liberated at the end of the war, there were stories about what was happening to European Jews under Hitler’s tyranny.

Siegel planned to ingratiate himself with members of the Italian aristocracy, get invited to Italy for an audience with Mussolini, and whack the dictator the good-old American Mafia way. It never happened, and the rational Meyer Lansky was deeply concerned whenever his friend would ramble on about this crazy scheme.

When Dewey turned up the heat, the gang split up. Meyer Lansky went to Havana, Cuba, to open and operate casinos in conjunction with the government of the island’s dictator, Batista. Bugsy Siegel went off to Las Vegas.

There were several thriving casinos in the downtown section of Las Vegas: the Apache, the Northern, the Boulder, the Las Vegas, the Golden Nugget, the El Cortez, and the Horseshoe. Siegel looked toward the outskirts of town to an area called “the Strip.” The Strip only had a few casinos at that time, including the El Rancho. But these casinos were sawdust-floored hangouts for locals. Siegel was going to build his dream casino. It was to be a touch of urban sophistication in the middle of the desert. His vision became the Flamingo Hotel and Casino.

Bugsy Loses Out

The Flamingo was an opulent and expensive establishment, too costly for Bugsy’s benefactors back East, including his boyhood friend Meyer Lansky. Theoretically, it should have been the best of both worlds. The Mafia could step out of the dark shadows and into the neon light of semi-respectability. They could indulge in familiar vices, but in this oasis in the desert it was all perfectly legal. Bugsy, however, spent far too much money building the Flamingo, and some suggested that he was skimming money off the construction costs and putting it in his own pocket. There were rumblings that his mistress, Virginia Hill, was behind his spending. Siegel lived a lavish lifestyle. He had the grandiose ambition to outdo Clark Gable and Cary Grant as Hollywood’s latest leading man.

Mafiosi were not above mixing business with pleasure. Mob boss Sam Giancana, in addition to being a pal of Frank Sinatra, also reportedly had a long-term relationship with Phyllis McGuire of the popular singing group the McGuire Sisters.

An Eye for an Eye

Bugsy Siegel’s mismanagement and possible outright thievery earned the wrath of the boys back East, including Meyer Lansky. Their $1 million investment had ballooned to $6 million, with no sign of a profit in the foreseeable future. Mob mythos has it that Lansky stayed the inevitable execution twice, but ultimately endorsed the execution of Bugsy Siegel.

Things seemed to be headed up at the splashy opening of the Flamingo. Hundreds of patrons, including mobsters and movie stars, made it clear to Bugsy that his time and effort had paid off. But the Flamingo’s rise was going to be at the expense of Bugsy’s fall. No matter how successful the casino would be, Bugsy’s time had run out.

Some underworld figures in Vegas stole from the mob without them knowing. Eddie Trascher, the fastest hands in Vegas, devised numerous ways to steal chips while he was a dealer in mobbed-up casinos. He would sew a pocket in the sleeve of his jacket and flick the chips in so fast that the camera couldn’t even catch him.

A Shot in the Dark

On June 20, 1947, Bugsy was in the posh Hollywood home of his mistress Virginia Hill reading the paper. He was relaxing in his suit, not aware that a gunman was perched outside the window. The calm summer night was shattered by the sounds of gunfire as Bugsy was pumped full of lead and died; he was just forty-one years old. The force of the hit was so substantial that one of Bugsy’s baby blue eyes was found at the other end of the room. Bugsy was gone, but Las Vegas was just getting started.

Who was the most famous gangster ‘moll’ in history?

That would have to be Virginia Hill. A Georgian by birth, Hill moved up to Chicago where she became involved with a series of wise guys from Al Capone to Frank Nitti. Along the way she started dabbling in some rackets herself. When she went out to Los Angeles she hooked up with Siegel and became his constant companion, except on the night of his death. When questioned by authorities she was baffled, “I can’t imagine who shot him and why.”

The Rat Pack

Las Vegas has always been an almost surreal place, and as a source of pop culture entertainment it is unrivaled. Entertainers have always flocked to Vegas, and it continues to be the barometer of who’s cool and “in” at the moment. The city was a popular destination; there was plenty of money to be made, there were many ways to liberally indulge vices, and many got a vicarious thrill from hobnobbing with the hoodlum element. Perhaps no entertainer was more enamored of the Mafia and its brethren than Frank Sinatra.

Jack on the Rocks

Sinatra had an association with the mob going back to his early days as a saloon singer in Hoboken. From the 1920s to the 1940s almost every singer and comic had to contend with the Mafia, since the mob has a long history of involvement in the clubs and venues where they perform. Most performers of that generation accepted this fact and for the most part got along with their employers. Sinatra, by all reports, had a schoolboy romanticism of gangsters. And when he was down on his luck and his career was in a slump, it was his mob friends who still paid him to sing in their saloons. Sinatra was nothing if not loyal to his friends, and when the Vegas party was in full swing, he was a regular fixture at the Sands and Dunes, along with his cohorts, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop. Together they created a slice of pop culture lore that continues to fascinate people everywhere.

The Chairman

Sinatra, who was given the option to purchase 9 percent of the Sands Hotel by his mob friends, performed there often, always packing the house. And a sold-out crowd of Sinatra fans inevitably wandered over to the slot machines and gambling tables. Sinatra got it in his head to make a movie in Las Vegas. This became the 1960 film
Ocean’s Eleven
, more memorable as a time capsule of an epoch than as a cinematic masterpiece.

The Rat Pack filmed
Ocean’s Eleven
by day and performed at the Sands by night. The show was called “the Summit,” named for the Cold War conferences between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

Did Frank Sinatra ever play a mobster in a movie?

Frank played a gambler in Guys and Dolls, a mob boss in Robin and the Seven Hoods, and a satire of his “Mafia” personality in the otherwise forgettable Cannonball Run II. In fact, Sinatra played cops far more than he played bad guys.

Progressive Retro

One positive thing Old Blue Eyes did was help break the race barrier in Las Vegas. Black performers were not allowed to stay in rooms at the hotels in which they performed to sold-out crowds and standing ovations. Velvet-voiced crooner Nat King Cole was instructed not to make direct eye contact with the swooning fur-adorned and bejeweled ladies in the audience. Black performers had to withdraw to a shantytown on the wrong side of the tracks at the end of the show.

In the ultimate example of “strange bedfellows,” many of the workers, pit bosses, and managerial types in the Mafia-owned casinos were Mormons. The faithful of the Latter-day Saints do not drink alcohol, coffee, or gamble. But they are not forbidden to work in casinos. It was a strange alliance that served the Mafia well.

One day Sinatra announced that he would not go on unless his chum Sammy could stay at the Sands and play blackjack at the tables and swim in the pool. Sinatra helped pave the way for integration in Las Vegas. The Mafia did not fret much either way. Green was the only color that truly inflamed their larcenous hearts.

The Howard Hughes Era

The Mafia’s era in Vegas began to diminish when the poster boy for eccentric millionaires, Howard Hughes, decided he wanted to make the town his life-size Monopoly board. The old hoods were ready for retirement. They had gorged themselves on the sumptuous Las Vegas buffet. It was a great run for the underworld, so the big bosses decided to cash in.

Hughes was an enigmatic and megalomaniacal mega-millionaire who made his money in the aviation arena and also dabbled as a Hollywood mogul. When he arrived in secrecy, he immediately set to work acquiring a stable of properties. He bought seventeen casinos. The old hoods went back home with their loot and the young ones remained, but their power and influence were diminished. “Respectable” robber baron capitalists proved more than a match for the shady underworld.

Gone in a Flash

When Hughes bought up his cadre of properties, observers believed that Vegas was headed for a huge boom. Hughes, though, was beginning his descent into madness. He was increasingly out of touch with reality and let his business acumen fail. He lost a bundle, sold out, and left town after a few years—or rather, his handlers did. When he died several years later his corpse looked more like that of a homeless man than one of the richest men in the world. Emaciated with long hair and nails and covered in sores, he had left his handlers to rule the empire while he died an ignominious death.