By age 21, he was making money, and flaunted it. He first smoked opium during his youth and was involved in the drug trade. Siegel was also a boyhood friend to Al Capone when there was a warrant for Capone's arrest on a murder charge, Siegel allowed him to hide out with an aunt. I've never known a man who had more guts." When it came to action there was no one better. "While we tried to figure out what the best move was, Bugsy was already shooting. "Bugsy never hesitated when danger threatened," Stacher told Uri Dan. Siegel's gang-mates included Abner "Longie" Zwillman, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Lansky's brother, Jake Joseph "Doc" Stacher, another member of the Bugs and Meyer Mob, recalled to Lansky biographers that Siegel was fearless and saved his friends' lives as the mob moved into bootlegging: The gang kept themselves busy by hijacking the liquor cargoes of rival outfits, and were known to be responsible for the killing and removal of several rival gangland figures. The two formed the Bugs and Meyer Mob, which handled hits for the various bootleg gangs operating in New York and New Jersey, doing so almost a decade before Murder, Inc. ![]() He also worked as the mob's hitman, whom Lansky hired out to other crime families. He became involved in bootlegging within several major East Coast cities. The first person he recruited for his gang was Siegel. ![]() Lansky, who had already had a run-in with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, saw a need for the Jewish boys of his Brooklyn neighborhood to organize in the same manner as the Italians and Irish. The Bugs and Meyer mob ĭuring adolescence, Siegel befriended Meyer Lansky, who applied a brilliant intellect to forming a small mob whose activities expanded to gambling and car theft. He soon built up a lengthy criminal record, dating from his teenage years, that included armed robbery, rape and murder. Together with Sedway, he developed a protection racket in which he threatened to incinerate pushcart owners' merchandise unless they paid him a dollar. He committed mainly thefts until he met Moe Sedway. As a boy, Siegel left school and joined a gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His parents, Jennie (Riechenthal) and Max Siegel, constantly worked for meager wages. from the Galicia region of what was then Austria-Hungary. On June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot dead by a sniper through the window of Hill's Linden Drive mansion in Beverly Hills, California.īenjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City, New York, the second of five children of a poor Ashkenazi Jewish family that emigrated to the U.S. It reopened in March 1947 with a finished hotel, but by then his mob partners were convinced an estimated $1 million of the construction budget overage had been skimmed by either girlfriend Virginia Hill, Siegel or both. The Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, in a driving rainstorm, resulting in a poor reception and technical difficulties, and soon closed. Siegel assumed control of the project and managed the final stages of construction. ![]() Wilkerson's Flamingo Hotel after Wilkerson ran out of funds. Siegel traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he handled and financed some of the original casinos. In 1941, Siegel was tried for the murder of friend and fellow mobster Harry Greenberg, who had turned informant. His time as a mobster during this period was mainly as a hitman and muscle, as he was noted for his prowess with guns and violence. In 1936, he left New York and moved to California. ![]() After the Twenty-first Amendment was passed repealing Prohibition in 1933, he turned to gambling. and became a bootlegger during Prohibition. Siegel was one of the founders and leaders of Murder, Inc. Described as handsome and charismatic, he became one of the first front-page celebrity gangsters. Siegel was not only influential within the Jewish Mob, but along with his childhood friend and fellow gangster Meyer Lansky, also held significant influence within the Italian-American Mafia and the largely Italian-Jewish National Crime Syndicate. Benjamin " Bugsy" Siegel (Febru– June 20, 1947) was an American mobster who was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip.
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