When Bugsy was 14 years old he was running his own criminal gang, and soon became a power on the Lower East Side. He teamed up with
Myer Lansky and the two formed the Bugs and Myer Mob, which handled contracts for the various bootleg gangs operating in New York and New Jersey. They kept their operation to hijacking and to bootlegging. While Lansky was clearly the brains of the operation, Siegel stood at equal footing with him. By the time he was 21, he was guilty of hijacking, bootlegging, narcotics trafficking, burglary, bookmaking, robbery, numbers racket, extortion, and many murders.
Along with Lansky he hooked up with rising mobsters such as:
Luciano, Costello, Joe Adonis,
Anastasia, Lucchese, Genovese and others. These men would become the founding members of the national crime syndicate. In the 1930s Siegel was sent from New York to California to run the syndicate’s West Coast operations, including the lucrative racing wire to service bookmakers. In the early 1940s Lansky has Siegel scout Las Vegas as the possible site for a lavish gambling casino and plush hotel. Siegel convinced the mob to putting up a couple of million dollars to build a place, and the figure soon escalated to $6 million.
He named the place the Flamingo after the nickname of Virginia Hill.
But the mob became worried about the amount of money that was needed to build the casino. When the casino first opened, it proved a financial disaster. The bosses from around the country became irate and demanded retribution. The thing that really pushed the bosses over the edge was the fact that Bugsy was skimming off the casino revenues and building costs, and was having Virginia take it to Switzerland.
The syndicate passed a death sentence on Siegel in 1946 with Lansky giving the deciding vote. On June 20, Bugsy was sitting in the living room of Virginia’s mansion in Beverly Hills. He was reading the Los Angeles Times when all of a sudden two slugs crashed through a window and into his face. Authorities found his right eye on the dining room floor 15 feet from the body.
