Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel
1903-1948

He wasn’t a Boston gangster, but this is one of the classic Mob endings of all time. Ben Siegel, partner of Meyer Lansky, was the first hood to realize the potential of Las Vegas, which he stopped in after leaving New York in the early 1940’s as a lot of Murder Inc. heat was coming down on him. After World War II, with the Mob’s money, he built the first of the great Vegas hotels, the Flamingo. Alas, it came in overbudget, and organized crime takes these matters more seriously than do the overseers of the Big Dig, especially after they heard rumors that his moll girlfriend, Virginia Hill, was taking their cash out of the U.S. and depositing it in Swiss bank accounts. There was only one way this story could end. One evening in 1948, with Hill conveniently out of town, he was sitting in her Belair mansion, his back to a plate-glass window, reading the evening editions when…. As you can see, one of the bullets from a high-powered rifle pushed his left eye out of his socket. Police found his baby-blue orb on the carpet. No arrests were ever made.

He was very popular with actors. Here he is with George Raft, right, another New Yorker who had hung with bootlegger Owney Madden as a youth. Bugsy also had affairs with several Hollywood starlets, including Wendie Barrie, whose B movies you can still occasionally see on Turner Classic Movies.
 

Warren Beatty played him in the movie, “Bugsy.” There’s also an out-of-print biography about him entitled “We Only Kill Each Other,” which is what he supposedly told a Las Vegas contractor worried about getting whacked. Next week Whitey Watch returns to the local underworld scene.