Benjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906 in Brooklyn, New York. There, along with childhood friends, Meyer Lansky and Morris Moe Sedway, Siegel began a criminal career extorting local street vendors in exchange for protection from other gangs in the area. Fellow gang members started calling him Bugsy, a slang term for crazy at the time, due to his violent temper. Allegedly, Bugsy was not a nickname that Siegel cared for, and those who knew him would never call him that to his face.
Eventually, Bugsy Siegel, Sedway, and Lansky transitioned to other crimes like car theft, bootlegging, and gambling, rising through the ranks of New York’s organized crime world. It’s widely thought that Bugsy was one of the four men who in 1931 executed Joe Masseria at an Italian restaurant in New York, leading Lucky Luciano to take the throne as the chairman of the board of the American mafia. In 1937, Lansky sent Bugsy and Moe to Los Angeles to build up the Mob’s presence on the west coast. While the Mob had been heavily involved in bootlegging during the 20’s, by the time Siegel landed in California, the 21st Amendment had put a stop to money to be made on importing illegal hooch.
Bugsy decided to focus on gambling. He invested in the SS Rex, a gambling ship that was docked three miles outside of Santa Monica to try and avoid California anti-gambling laws. While authorities eventually shut it down, Bugsy set his sights on Las Vegas. Nevada had legalized gambling, so there wouldn’t be as many headaches trying to avoid police. In 1945, with money from the syndicate back east, Siegel took over a struggling construction project outside of Las Vegas’s city limits, the Flamingo Hotel and Casino.
Bugsy was responsible for building up Las Vegas
At the time, Vegas was nothing like what we think of today. The Flamingo would be the first luxury resort on the Strip. Siegel hosted the grand opening of the resort on December 26, 1946, while the project was still unfinished. Nevertheless, mega superstars like Judy Garland and Clark Gable were at the opening, foreshadowing Vegas’s glamorous future. After this party, Bugsy Siegel closed the resort to finish construction, and the Mob back east became antsy.
By this time, the project’s cost had ballooned from Siegel’s originally budgeted one million to up to six million dollars, much of the overruns believed to be due to Siegel skimming from the top. If there’s one thing to remember about the Mob, it’s that you don’t steal from it. During a meeting of Mob bigwigs in Cuba, an agreement was reached on the fate of Bugsy. If the Flamingo proved to be a success, he’d be able to make things right. Luckily for Bugsy, by May of 1947, the Flamingo had already made $250,000 in profit. Unluckily for Bugsy, that apparently wasn’t enough.
On June 20th, 1947, Bugsy Siegel was sitting on a chintz sofa in the living room of his mistress Virginia Hill’s home in Beverly Hills. At 10:45 PM, from a rose-covered pergola just 14 feet from Bugsy, a 30-caliber military rifle fired at least nine shots at the mobster. Four rounds hit him, killing him instantly. Just moments later, three of Meyer Lansky’s henchmen strolled into the Flamingo Hotel and declared the casino was now theirs. Despite his fame, coroners misspelled Siegel’s name on his toe tag, and his funeral lasted a mere five minutes with only about six people in attendance.
According to Beverly Hills Police Chief Clinton H. Anderson, “we spent many man hours investigating the Siegel case and were convinced that he was killed by his own associates but there was never sufficient evidence to pinpoint the identity of the assassin.”
Bugsy Siegel Murder Theories
Eddie Cannizzaro, AKA The Cat Man, murdered Bugsy Siegel.
- Cannizzaro was a former errand boy for Jack Dragna, who was once described in a report by the State Crime Commission as “the Al Capone of California.” Cannizzaro died in 1987 of heart failure, but before he passed on, he called a reporter and federal agents to his deathbed, where he confessed to seven murders, including Siegel’s. According to Cannizzaro’s confession, “It was a clean hit. I was picked because I knew Siege and wouldn’t make a mistake.”
- Casting doubt on Cannizzaro’s confession are a few inconsistencies in his story. Cannizzaro claimed he was questioned in connection with the murder at the time, but there’s no record of an interview with him in the Bugsy case file. As well, Cannizzaro claimed that after the murder, he drove off in the direction of Wilshire Boulevard. A neighbor questioned after Bugsy was killed, however, told police that after the gunshots, a car was heard hurdling in the opposite direction toward Sunset Boulevard. At the time of his death, Cannizzaro was living with his mother and over 30 cats in the Agora Hills neighborhood of western LA county. He was hoping to create a birth control serum for cats and had asked some of his old pals in Las Vegas for funding.
World War II vet, Robert Macdonald, murdered Bugsy Siegel.
- This theory comes from Warren Hull, an executive assistant in Nevada who said Macdonald’s role in Siegel’s murder had been a family secret for decades. On his deathbed, Hull’s father urged his son to research the story and get it out there. Hull obliged the dying man’s request, going on to create a 400 slide PowerPoint presentation laying out the points of his case.
- Macdonald was married to Hull’s mother’s cousin and best friend, Betty Ann Macdonald. Betty Ann’s mother, Gaynell Rockwell, worked at City Hall in Los Angeles. There, she met Jack Dragna, the Al Capone of California. Gaynell told Dragna her daughter was having troubles with her husband Macdonald, who could be violent at times. Macdonald also happened to owe the Mob $30,000. Dragna went to Macdonald explaining his debts would be forgiven if he offed Siegel. According to Hull, Macdonald’s time in the military made him an expert marksman, including with a 30-caliber carbine, the alleged murder weapon. Again, however, the neighbor’s report of a speeding car cast doubt on this theory. Hull thinks that Macdonald, who lived just on the other side of a golf course from Virginia Hill, would have escaped on foot, sneaking back to his home less than a mile away in the dark.
- Just three months after Bugsy’s murder, Macdonald would go on to shoot himself and his wife Betty Ann. Hull says there’s no evidence that Beverly Hills Police ever investigated Macdonald as a suspect in Siegel’s murder despite the fact that Macdonald allegedly used the same type of weapon to kill himself and his wife as he did on Siegel less than a mile away and only three months after Bugsy’s murder. Hull believes it’s even possible that Howard Hughes may have pressured police not to investigate Macdonald, as he had worked closely with the man’s father.
A third theory comes from Bee Sedway, the wife of Moe Sedway, Bugsy’s childhood friend coming up in the Mob.
- According to Bee, Moe had been sending casino numbers back to Meyer Lansky on the east coast, including gambling winnings and, crucially, construction costs. Bugsy conducted a meeting in March of 1947 without Moe. There, he reportedly said he was looking to get rid of Moe, saying, “I’ll have Moe shot, chop his body up, “and feed it to the Flamingo Hotel’s kitchen garbage disposal.”
- One of the attendees told Moe, who called his wife and asked her to drive from LA to Vegas. The two then drove out into the desert and then walked even further to ensure a private conversation.
- When Moe told his wife of the threat against him, Bee immediately called Mathew Moose Pandza, a crane operator and Bee’s lover. Moe and Bee, who married when he was 41 and she just 17, had a very unconventional marriage for the time. They were very honest with one another and knew about one another’s extramarital companions. In fact, Moe had insisted that upon his death, Moose was to marry Bee. After their meeting, Moose arrived in Las Vegas to protect Moe. After the Mob boss meeting in Cuba, where cost overruns on the Flamingo were discussed, however, Lansky gave Moe his blessing to take matters into his own hands. Moose volunteered to do the job and spent weeks practicing his marksmanship.
- According to Bee, after pulling the trigger, Moose hurried to the car and drove straight to Santa Monica, where he broke down the rifle, leaving the butt of the gun on a rooftop and throwing the barrel into the ocean. As his health was failing, Bee’s son Robbie reached out to a reporter to tell his mother’s story. When that reporter reached out to the Beverly Hills Police Department to check whether Moose had been considered a suspect, they replied, “it’s in the best interest of the city of Beverly Hills not to speak to you.”
Yet another theory suggests the Chicago Mob took down Bugsy with the help of Siegel’s mistress Virginia Hill.
- Hill had been considered a trusted Mob courier, and according to author Andy Edmonds, the Chicago Mob used Hill as a source of information on Bugsy’s dealings.
- While Siegel was building the Flamingo, the Chicago Mob was financing a competing resort, The Dunes, on the current site of the Bellagio. Siegel’s murder also took place at Hill’s home. Hill would have been able to inform an assassin about Siegel’s habit of reading the paper in her living room at night, and Hill had conveniently skipped town for Paris that day. Hill eventually moved to Europe to avoid charges of tax evasion, where she died at the age of 49. Her death was deemed an overdose, but some have their suspicions that the Mob was involved.
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