FILE NO. 0198
Content warning: this case file describes gangland killings, including the shooting death of Benjamin Siegel, and refers to violent crimes he was accused of. It contains no photographs of Siegel’s body or of the scene.
Who Killed Bugsy Siegel? The Unsolved Murder on Linden Drive
Legal status: Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was shot dead on June 20, 1947, at 810 North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills, California. No one was ever charged with killing him, and the murder remains officially unsolved. As of 2022, the historian Larry Gragg wrote for The Mob Museum, the Beverly Hills Police Department file was still an open case closed to researchers. Every account of who fired the shots or who ordered them is a theory, and this file attributes each one to the person who advanced it. In his lifetime Siegel was named in many killings, but his only recorded conviction was a 1932 gambling and vagrancy arrest in Miami that ended in a $100 fine. The Los Angeles murder charge against him over the 1939 killing of Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg was dismissed in 1942, and he never stood trial for it. A 1944 bookmaking charge ended in acquittal. Where this file describes killings he was accused of, it reports them as allegations or as the claims of named witnesses and authors.
A boy from Williamsburg
A little before 11 p.m. on June 20, 1947, Benjamin Siegel sat on a chintz sofa in a rented Beverly Hills mansion with a copy of the Los Angeles Times. His friend Allen Smiley sat beside him. The drapes were open. Someone standing in the dark outside rested a .30 caliber military carbine on a trellis and fired nine rounds through the window. Four struck Siegel. He died where he sat. He was 41.
Published accounts ranked Siegel “one of the most respected and feared names in the syndicate”, the Review-Journal noted in 1999, and he had just reopened the Flamingo, the resort that made him, in Wikipedia’s words, “a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip”. His killing made headlines across the country. It has never been solved. In the nearly eighty years since, police officers, FBI informants, mob turncoats, a dying man who claimed to be the shooter, a widow’s unpublished book proposal and a long line of historians have each offered a different answer. None has been proved.
This case file sets out what the record shows about Siegel’s life, the charges he faced and escaped, the Flamingo, and the night on Linden Drive, and then lays out the competing theories about his death with the source for each.
Sources: Los Angeles Public Library; Los Angeles Times (1997); The Mob Museum (Larry Gragg, 2022; Larry Henry); Las Vegas Review-Journal (John L. Smith, 1999); Calisphere, Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection; Wikipedia.
Benjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, according to Wikipedia and the Los Angeles Public Library. (The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s 1999 profile gives 1905.) He was the second of five children of Jennie and Max Siegel, a poor Jewish immigrant family. Wikipedia records that his parents had emigrated from Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary; the Los Angeles Public Library describes them as immigrants from Russia. Wikipedia says his parents worked for meager wages.
According to Wikipedia, Siegel dropped out of school as a boy and joined a street gang on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he met Moe Sedway, a man who would later be named in theories about his death. Together they ran a protection racket against pushcart owners. The Los Angeles Public Library says that Siegel “became a bootlegger, strong arm, and hitman in his teens.”
He hated the nickname that made him famous. Wikipedia explains that “Bugsy” came from the slang term “bugs,” meaning crazy, and that he preferred to be called “Ben” or “Mr. Siegel.” The Review-Journal put it more bluntly: no one dared use the nickname to his face. Bill Friedman, a former Las Vegas casino executive quoted by The Mob Museum, wrote that “Bugsy” apparently began as a childhood nickname that newspapers later picked up.
The Bugs and Meyer Mob
As a teenager Siegel became friends with Meyer Lansky, later one of the best-known names in American organized crime. According to Wikipedia, Lansky’s first recruit for his gang was Siegel. The two built what became known as the Bugs and Meyer Mob. The Review-Journal describes it as a gang of “teen-age toughs” who “provided protection and efficiently performed a string of contract killings on behalf of the city’s bootlegging fraternity.” Wikipedia adds that the gang hijacked rival liquor cargoes and handled killings for bootleggers in New York and New Jersey, years before the group the press later called Murder, Inc.
Joseph “Doc” Stacher, another member, later told Lansky’s biographers that Siegel was fearless. “Bugsy never hesitated when danger threatened,” Stacher told the author Uri Dan, as quoted by Wikipedia. “While we tried to figure out what the best move was, Bugsy was already shooting.”
Wikipedia records that Siegel was also a boyhood friend of Al Capone and that when Capone faced a murder warrant, Siegel let him hide out with an aunt. By 21, Siegel could afford an apartment at the Waldorf Astoria and a house in Scarsdale, New York. On January 28, 1929, he married Esta Krakower, his childhood sweetheart. They had two daughters, Millicent and Barbara. The marriage ended in divorce in 1946.
In May 1929 Siegel and Lansky attended the Atlantic City Conference, a meeting of gang leaders called by Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Johnny Torrio to discuss the future of organized crime, according to Wikipedia.
Sources: Wikipedia; Las Vegas Review-Journal (1999); Los Angeles Public Library; The Mob Museum (Larry Henry).
Murder, Inc. and the accusations
The killings attributed to Siegel in this period come from mob histories, informants and later witnesses. He was never convicted of any of them. Wikipedia reports that Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis “allegedly” were the four gunmen who killed the New York boss Joe Masseria on Luciano’s orders on April 15, 1931, ending the Castellammarese War. Months later, on September 10, 1931, Luciano hired gunmen from the Bugs and Meyer Mob to kill Salvatore Maranzano; Wikipedia notes that “some sources identify Siegel as one of them.”
After Maranzano’s death, Luciano and Lansky formed the loose national alliance of crime families known as the National Crime Syndicate. Wikipedia describes Siegel and his associates forming its enforcement arm, the squad of contract killers the press called Murder, Inc. Control later passed to Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Albert Anastasia. The Los Angeles Public Library says Siegel “was linked to the deaths of many rival gangsters, including Joe Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano, three brothers in the Fabrizzo family, and Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg, who was his personal friend.”
Wikipedia’s account of the Fabrizzo killings, drawn from mob histories, says the brothers were hired by the bootlegger Waxey Gordon and tried to kill Siegel and Lansky with a bomb at the Waldorf Astoria. It says Siegel hunted the two brothers down, and that in 1932 he checked into a hospital to create an alibi, slipped out and, with two accomplices posing as detectives, shot the third brother, Tony Fabrizzo, outside his home. The same account says that in 1935 he killed the loan shark brothers Louis and Joseph Amberg. No court ever tested any of these accounts.
The one conviction on his record was minor. “Siegel’s only conviction was in Miami,” Wikipedia records: on February 28, 1932, he was arrested for gambling and vagrancy and paid a $100 fine from a roll of bills. The Review-Journal summed up his record this way: “Somehow, he had managed to walk between the raindrops and avoid conviction on a plethora of crimes ranging from bootlegging to murder.”
Sources: Wikipedia; Los Angeles Public Library; Las Vegas Review-Journal (1999).
California and Hollywood
In 1936 Siegel moved his wife and daughters to Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Public Library. Wikipedia says he had learned that he was in danger in New York, that his hospital alibi had come into question, and that the syndicate sent him west to develop gambling rackets alongside the Los Angeles boss Jack Dragna. He recruited Mickey Cohen as his chief lieutenant. Wikipedia reports that Luciano sent word from prison that it was “in [his] best interest to cooperate,” and that Dragna accepted a subordinate role.
The Los Angeles Public Library lists his California rackets as the numbers racket, prostitution and the drug trade across the Mexican border. The Review-Journal adds that he came west “to oversee the Capone mob’s successful takeover of the race wire business,” the service that relayed horse racing results to bookmakers, and that he moved into gambling ships, a Tijuana racetrack and pieces of small Las Vegas casinos. Siegel himself, Wikipedia notes, told the tax authorities that he made his living from legal betting at Santa Anita Park.
He was also a celebrity. Siegel was a fixture of Hollywood nightlife, the Los Angeles Public Library says, “hobnobbing with politicians, businessmen, attorneys, and entertainment figures including Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Frank Sinatra, and Louis B. Mayer.” The actor George Raft was a close friend who testified on his behalf in court. Jean Harlow was godmother to his elder daughter, Millicent. “He was a frustrated actor and secretly wanted a movie career, but he never quite had nerve enough to ask for a part in one of my pictures,” Raft once said, according to the Review-Journal.
Some of the stories from this period are hard to verify. Wikipedia repeats an account that Siegel travelled to Italy in 1938 with the socialite Countess Dorothy di Frasso, met Benito Mussolini and tried to sell him an explosive called atomite, which failed to detonate at a demonstration. It also cites claims that he extorted film studios through union strikes and borrowed large sums from film stars without repaying them; one of those figures is marked in Wikipedia as needing a citation. This file reports these as stories told about Siegel, not as established facts.
Sources: Los Angeles Public Library; Wikipedia; Las Vegas Review-Journal (1999).
Harry Greenberg and the charge that was dismissed
On November 22, 1939, Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg was shot dead outside his apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Greenberg was a mob associate who, according to Wikipedia, had threatened to become a police informant. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1997 that he had “squealed about mob business to the FBI.” Wikipedia says Buchalter ordered the killing and names Siegel, Whitey Krakow, Frankie Carbo and Albert Tannenbaum as the men who carried it out.
The case against Siegel rested on informants from the Brooklyn murder squad. According to the Los Angeles Public Library, Al Tannenbaum and Abe “Kid Twist” Reles “told the Los Angeles Grand Jury that Siegel was a much bigger threat than anyone knew and that he did indeed kill Harry Greenberg (Schachter).” Siegel was charged with the murder and jailed.
His time in custody became a scandal. The Los Angeles Times reported that he “was allowed his own chef,” had unlimited phone privileges and female companions, and was let out 19 times on the pretext of seeing the dentist, when in fact he was going to lunch with an aspiring actress. Siegel denied the stories. Wikipedia says he protested that they were untrue or grossly exaggerated, and when reporters wrote that his eyes were brown, he told them: “You can see for yourself that they’re not brown.” Wikipedia also quotes a threat that Siegel allegedly made to the Hollywood reporter Florabel Muir while she covered the case.
Then the prosecution fell apart. “Just a few weeks after Siegel’s incarceration began, the key witness against him abruptly died under mysterious circumstances,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “He never stood trial for killing Greenberg.” A Los Angeles Herald Examiner photograph held by the Los Angeles Public Library, dated January 6, 1942, shows Siegel with his lawyer, Jerry Giesler. Its original caption reads: “Benny ‘Bugsy’ Siegel has a reason to smile. He is shown at left with his attorney, Jerry Giesler, grinning broadly after the charge that he was connected with the rubout of Harry ‘Big Greeny’ Schachter was dismissed. His co-defendant, Frankie Carbo, must face trial.”
Wikipedia’s account differs. It says Siegel was put on trial in September 1941 and “acquitted due to a lack of evidence” in 1942, after two state witnesses died and Tannenbaum’s testimony was dismissed. The Los Angeles Times and the 1942 caption both describe a dismissed charge, not a jury verdict, and this file follows them. On either account, Siegel was never convicted of Greenberg’s murder. Wikipedia adds that he was arrested again on May 25, 1944, for bookmaking, that Raft testified for him, and that he was acquitted later that year.
Sources: Los Angeles Times (1997); Calisphere, Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection (Herald Examiner photograph, January 6, 1942); Los Angeles Public Library; Wikipedia.
The Flamingo
The Flamingo was not Siegel’s idea. “The Flamingo was the creation of Billy Wilkerson, a Hollywood nightclub owner,” John L. Smith wrote in the Review-Journal, adding that Wilkerson was one of the founders of The Hollywood Reporter. Smith noted that by the mid-1940s Wilkerson’s project was “an unfinished dream deferred.” The Los Angeles Public Library also points out that the resort was named the Flamingo by a previous investor, not after Siegel’s girlfriend, as was long rumoured.
Siegel had operated in southern Nevada since the 1930s, according to Wikipedia, and in 1946 he moved in on Wilkerson’s project. Wikipedia reports that in May 1946 he decided the partnership had to give him control, and that Wilkerson was eventually forced to sell his stake “under the threat of death” and went into hiding in Paris for a time. From then on, it says, “the Flamingo became syndicate-run.”
Smith wrote that Siegel and his partners put $1.5 million into construction, but postwar shortages of materials pushed the job over budget. The building was a fortress: walls reinforced with steel, a top-floor suite “riddled with trap doors and escape hatches,” one of them “leading to a getaway car in his private garage.” Theft on the site was “legendary,” Smith wrote, “a big part of the reason the hotel ultimately cost $6 million, an incredible figure for the times.” Siegel’s Las Vegas lawyer, Lou Wiener Jr., blamed others: “A lot of characters, I think, duped him,” he said.
Others blamed Siegel. Smith quoted Richard Hammer’s Playboy’s Illustrated History of Organized Crime, which reported that Lansky had concluded Siegel “was a thief as well,” and that Virginia Hill had been depositing several hundred thousand dollars in a Swiss account, money that “had come from the Flamingo’s building fund.” No court ever examined that claim. Wikipedia describes the belief among his partners that about $1 million of the overrun had been skimmed by Siegel, by Hill or by both.
The casino opened on December 26, 1946, before the hotel was finished. Guests were “welcomed by construction noise and a lobby draped with drop cloths,” according to Wikipedia, and The Mob Museum’s Larry Henry notes that the opening coincided with a rare winter rainstorm. After two weeks the tables were $275,000 in the red, Wikipedia says, and the casino briefly shut down; it gives the closing date as February 6, 1947. The Flamingo reopened with the hotel completed and began to turn a profit. Wikipedia and Gragg give the reopening date as March 1, 1947; Smith’s 1999 profile says March 27.
Siegel’s temper was part of the legend. Wikipedia recounts that when the contractor Del Webb looked alarmed at Siegel’s boast that he had killed men, Siegel reassured him: “Del, don’t worry, we only kill each other.” Wiener remembered a different man. “He was very generous with the help and very well liked. He was good to people,” he told the Review-Journal.
Sources: Las Vegas Review-Journal (1999); Los Angeles Public Library; Wikipedia; The Mob Museum (Larry Gragg, 2022; Larry Henry).
Virginia Hill
Virginia Hill was born in Lipscomb, Alabama, on August 26, 1916, according to the Los Angeles Public Library. She ran away from home at 17, found work in Chicago carrying messages and packages for gangsters, and moved to Los Angeles, where she became involved with Siegel in 1942. He called her “The Flamingo.” The Los Angeles Times described her in 1997 as a “trusted mob courier and party hostess.”
Their relationship was stormy. Gragg wrote that Siegel had leased the house at 810 North Linden Drive for her and that she “had run off to Paris after another of their many spats.” The Los Angeles Times reported that they had quarrelled 10 days before the shooting; Henry put it at a week. Either way, she was not in the house on the night Siegel was killed.
Sources: Los Angeles Public Library; Los Angeles Times (1997); The Mob Museum (Larry Gragg, 2022; Larry Henry).
The night of June 20, 1947
By June 1947 the Flamingo had begun to make money, but Siegel still faced large unpaid construction bills. Gragg wrote that people around him that spring “saw a man worried about how to pay off those debts.” He arrived in Los Angeles early on the morning of June 20. The lease on the Linden Drive house was about to run out, he had clothes to collect and a meeting with his publicist and lawyer about a promotional campaign for the Flamingo, and his daughters were on a train from New York to join him for a holiday, according to Gragg. It would have been the first time he had seen them since October.
That evening he went to dinner at Jack’s at the Beach in Ocean Park with Allen Smiley, Virginia Hill’s brother Charles “Chick” Hill and Hill’s secretary, Jerry Mason, who was engaged to Chick. Smiley drove them back to 810 North Linden Drive, which the Los Angeles Times described as Hill’s “Moorish-style mansion,” rented from Rudolph Valentino’s former agent for $500 a month. Mason and Chick Hill went upstairs. The house’s cook, Eung S. Lee, was also in the house. Siegel and Smiley sat down on the chintz sofa in the living room, chatting and reading the papers. Siegel had a copy of the Los Angeles Times. A table lamp lit his head, and the drapes were open. His own gun was upstairs, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Outside, the gunman stood in the dark beside the house at a rose-covered latticework, hidden from the street by shrubbery. He rested a .30 caliber military carbine on the trellis, less than 14 feet from Siegel. A little before 11 p.m., by the account in Wikipedia and Gragg (10:45 p.m., according to the Los Angeles Times and Henry), he fired nine rounds through the window.
Four of them hit Siegel: two in the head or face and two in the chest or torso. According to Wikipedia and Gragg, one bullet struck the bridge of his nose and knocked out his left eye, and another hit his right cheek. He died instantly. The other shots went into the room, damaging a statue on the grand piano and puncturing a painting of a nude.
Smiley dropped to the floor. “I heard the glass shattering, and I ducked,” he told police, according to Gragg. “I don’t know how many shots were fired, but when I looked at Siegel, I could see he had taken most of them.” Neighbours who ran into the street saw a car race away, and one later told police he heard a car speeding toward Sunset Boulevard. Police arrived within minutes and found nine shell casings outside the window. Siegel had $108 on him. “It smacked of a setup,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1997.
Sources: The Mob Museum (Larry Gragg, 2022; Larry Henry); Los Angeles Times (1997); Wikipedia; Los Angeles Public Library.
Minutes later, in Las Vegas
What happened next in Nevada is the strongest evidence that the killing was planned. Gragg, a historian who has written a biography of Siegel and a book on Sedway, set out the sequence in 2022. During the 8:30 show at the Flamingo that evening, eight men left a table in the showroom and moved to the security desk, the front door, the casino cage and the hotel registration desk, “obviously to secure the property for what was to come,” Gragg wrote.
Immediately after the shooting, Smiley telephoned a man waiting in a phone booth just outside the Flamingo and told him “Siegel had been shot in the face and chest, and he knew he was dead.” That man was an informant for the Las Vegas FBI agent Curtis Lynum. Moments later, Moe Sedway, Gus Greenbaum and Morris Rosen walked into the Flamingo and announced that Siegel was dead and that they were in control, according to Gragg. Wikipedia names David Berman among the men who walked in and lists the four men who took over as Sedway, Greenbaum, Berman and Rosen.
The author Wallace Turner, quoted by the Review-Journal, wrote in his 1965 book Gamblers’ Money that “Siegel was murdered reportedly to effect a change in management.”
Sources: The Mob Museum (Larry Gragg, 2022); Wikipedia; Las Vegas Review-Journal (1999).
The investigation
Los Angeles County deputy district attorney Ernest Roll told reporters early on: “There might have been a hundred different people who wanted him out of the way.” Before long, Gragg wrote, Roll reluctantly concluded that the shooter might “never be identified.” There were theories, suspects and questioning, the Los Angeles Public Library notes, and the district attorney, the sheriff and state investigators held an “information pool” conference on the case the next day, according to the Los Angeles Public Library’s photo archive. Nobody was charged.
Clinton H. Anderson, the longtime Beverly Hills police chief, wrote in his autobiography: “We spent many man-hours investigating the Siegel case and were convinced that he was killed by his own associates,” he wrote. “But there was never sufficient evidence to pinpoint the identity of the assassin.” The case later passed to Det. Les Zoeller, who was assigned to look into Beverly Hills’ unsolved murders. Asked in 1997 whether the case would ever be solved, he told the Los Angeles Times: “Who knows?” He added: “It’s been 50 years. If anyone has that information that gives me that extra boost, yes, it could be solved.”
The file has never been opened to the public. Gragg wrote in 2022 that more about the killing sits in Beverly Hills Police Department Crime Case #46176, but that “because the Siegel case is an open one, researchers cannot view the file.”
Siegel was buried in a silver-plated casket at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, according to the Los Angeles Public Library. The Los Angeles Times reported that the coroner’s office misspelled his name as “Seigel” on the toe tag and that only about half a dozen people attended a funeral that lasted five minutes.
Sources: The Mob Museum (Larry Gragg, 2022); Los Angeles Times (1997); Los Angeles Public Library.
Who killed Bugsy Siegel? The theories
Every answer below is a theory or a claim. None has been tested in court, and no one has ever been charged. Many of the people named are long dead and cannot respond. We set out each theory with the person who advanced it.
The Havana meeting and a mob contract
The best-known explanation ties the killing to a meeting of mob leaders in Havana, Cuba. Gragg notes that accounts disagree over whether it took place in December 1946 or February 1947, but most authors say Luciano, Frank Costello and Lansky attended. According to those who support this theory, the New York leaders decided that Siegel had to go because he had wasted or stolen their money. Wikipedia says a contract on his life was the result and that, according to Doc Stacher, Lansky reluctantly agreed. The 1991 film Bugsy, based on Dean Jennings’s 1967 book We Only Kill Each Other, follows this version.
Those who hold this theory differ on who pulled the trigger. Gragg writes that, depending on the author, Jack Dragna is said to have given the job to one of three men: Frankie Carbo, Eddie Cannizzaro, or Robert McDonald, a Second World War veteran who, according to the author Warren Hull, owed the mob a large gambling debt.
Frankie Carbo
Carbo, Siegel’s co-defendant in the Greenberg case, is the name most often given. The former Los Angeles crime family figure Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, who became a government witness, claimed in Ovid Demaris’s 1980 book The Last Mafioso that Dragna told him Carbo did the killing on Lansky’s orders. Messing with other people’s money, Dragna told Fratianno, was the “fastest way to get clipped,” according to the book. The former Philadelphia mob boss Ralph Natale, also a government witness, believes the hit was carried out by Carbo and set up by Lansky, according to the author Larry McShane, as reported by Henry. Carbo was never charged with Siegel’s killing.
Eddie Cannizzaro’s deathbed claim
In 1987 Eddie Cannizzaro, who said he had been a bodyguard and driver for Dragna, summoned federal agents and a Herald Examiner reporter to his bedside and confessed to seven underworld killings, including Siegel’s, the Los Angeles Times reported. He said he had used a semiautomatic carbine and that “I was picked because I knew Siegel and wouldn’t make a mistake.” He died of heart failure on March 6, 1987, at 66. Det. Zoeller confirmed that Cannizzaro had worked as a gofer for Dragna, but said he could neither verify nor disprove the story. Police had no record that Cannizzaro was ever questioned, as he had claimed, and his account of the getaway car heading toward Wilshire Boulevard conflicted with a neighbour’s report of a car speeding toward Sunset Boulevard. “I couldn’t get any more information to confirm what he’s saying, or to disprove it,” Zoeller said.
Two shooters and the “Two Tonys”
Clark Fogg, for many years the senior forensic specialist in the Beverly Hills Police Department lab, argued in his co-authored 2013 book Beverly Hills Confidential that there were two shooters. He concluded that “it would have been nearly impossible for just one gunman” to make such precise shots to the face, because “the mobster’s head would have turned upon impact from the first bullet.” Fogg believes Joe Adonis hired the “Two Tonys,” Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino, to kill Siegel because he was stealing from the New York mob, Gragg reported. The Los Angeles Public Library also describes Brancato as “one major suspect.” Brancato and Trombino were shot dead in their car in Los Angeles in August 1951. Neither was charged with Siegel’s death.
Moe Sedway and Mathew “Moose” Pandza
In 2014 Amy Wallace, writing in Los Angeles Magazine, drew on an unpublished book proposal by Moe Sedway’s widow, Beatrice “Bee” Sedway. According to that account, as summarised by Gragg, Siegel planned to have Sedway killed for reporting the Flamingo’s mounting debts to Lansky. Bee Sedway claimed her husband learned of the plan and got Lansky’s approval to have Siegel killed first, and that the gunman was Mathew “Moose” Pandza, a man with whom she was having an affair. Wallace wrote that after the shooting Pandza drove to Santa Monica, broke down the rifle and “tossed the barrel into the ocean, the butt on a rooftop.” These are Bee Sedway’s claims as reported by Wallace. They have never been tested, and Pandza was never charged.
Gragg himself has argued that Sedway, at minimum, knew about the killing in advance. He identifies Sedway as the FBI’s Las Vegas “super informant,” citing FBI reports from 1948 and 1951 that name Sedway as a confidential informant, and he cites an August 1947 FBI report in which an unnamed local police source said Sedway had “engineered the killing.” Clinton Anderson told Siegel’s biographer Dean Jennings that he was convinced Sedway “had a hand in the Siegel killing. He knew who did it.” In Gragg’s own opinion, Sedway “did not pull the trigger, but he clearly played a role in the Siegel murder.” Sedway was never charged.
Virginia Hill’s brother
In July 1947 an FBI informant reported that Lansky had suggested Virginia Hill’s brother “may have killed Siegel because of Siegel mistreating Hill,” Gragg wrote. Bernie Sindler, who worked at the Flamingo in 1946 and 1947, made a similar claim in his 2015 memoir and in a 2017 interview at The Mob Museum. Sindler said that the shooter was one of Hill’s brothers, a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton whose first name he remembered as either Bob or Bill, and that he had heard the brother, while arguing with Hill outside the Flamingo about Siegel beating her, say he was going to kill Siegel. Sindler rejected the mob contract theory, arguing that Luciano would not have allowed it and that a shot through a window was not how mob killers worked. No brother of Hill’s was ever charged.
Moe Dalitz, Chicago and the race wire
The author Gus Russo, in his book Supermob, wrote that the lawyer Sidney Korshak was persuaded that Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland underworld figure and a former lover of Hill’s, had authorized the killing because of Siegel’s treatment of her, according to Gragg. The screenwriter Edward Anhalt said a friend told him Siegel had received a warning from Detroit in the spring of 1947 to leave Hill alone. Others have suggested a feud over the race wire or a hit by Chicago or Detroit figures, Henry wrote. The Los Angeles Times summed up the range of motives in 1997: suspected skimming at the Flamingo, a war over California’s sports betting wire, or a love triangle involving Hill and “a top Chicago mobster.”
What Allen Smiley said
The man on the sofa never offered a public answer. In her 2016 memoir Cradle of Crime: A Daughter’s Tribute, Luellen Smiley wrote that she asked her father about the killing near the end of his life in the early 1980s, when he was in Cedars-Sinai Hospital. “The answer is no,” he told her, according to Henry, adding that people would ask her the question after he was gone.
Sources: The Mob Museum (Larry Gragg, 2022; Larry Henry); Los Angeles Times (1997); Los Angeles Public Library; Wikipedia.
Where the accounts disagree
The sources used for this file agree on the central facts: the date, the address, the weapon type, the nine shots and the four hits. They differ on many details, and we have not been able to resolve them from the material available.
- The Greenberg case. The Los Angeles Times (1997) says Siegel “never stood trial” for Greenberg’s killing, and a Herald Examiner photo caption dated January 6, 1942, says the charge against him was dismissed. Wikipedia says he was tried in September 1941 and acquitted in 1942. Every source agrees he was not convicted.
- His birth year. Wikipedia gives February 28, 1906; the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s 1999 profile says 1905.
- The reopening of the Flamingo. Wikipedia and Gragg give March 1, 1947; the Review-Journal says March 27.
- The time of the shooting. “A little before 11 p.m.” in Wikipedia and Gragg; 10:45 p.m. in the Los Angeles Times and Henry.
- Where the bullets struck. Most sources say two shots hit his face or head from the side and two hit his chest. The Review-Journal describes the shot as aimed at the back of his head.
- The statue. Wikipedia and Henry say a marble statue of Bacchus was destroyed; the Los Angeles Times says a statuette of the Greek god Pan.
- Allen Smiley. The Los Angeles Public Library says three bullets went through the sleeve of his jacket; Gragg says one round went through his jacket; Wikipedia says a bullet grazed his arm; the Review-Journal says he was untouched. All agree he was not seriously hurt.
- When Virginia Hill left. The Los Angeles Times says she and Siegel quarrelled 10 days before the shooting; Henry says she left for Paris a week earlier; a caption in Gragg’s article says she left Las Vegas a couple of weeks before.
- His parents’ origins. Wikipedia says Galicia; the Los Angeles Public Library says Russia.
Sources: As cited in the sections above.
Memorials and legacy
Siegel’s death turned him into a legend. “His death was a great advertisement for the city of Las Vegas in a sense,” the Las Vegas historian Frank Wright told the Review-Journal in 1999. William Thompson, then chairman of the public administration department at UNLV, called it “folklore” and “mythology.” Turner wrote that the killing, in the view of some observers, “irrevocably set the pattern for Las Vegas’ development as a gambling center.”
The Flamingo is still operating on its original site, although the 1946 building has been replaced by a modern resort. The property honours Siegel with a memorial plaque between the pool and the wedding chapel, according to Wikipedia; the Review-Journal described a bronze plaque and a small rose garden near the site of the original pool.
In New York, the Bialystoker Synagogue on the Lower East Side keeps a yahrzeit (remembrance) plaque for Siegel marking the date of his death so that mourners can say Kaddish. It hangs below the plaque of his father, Max Siegel, who died two months before his son, according to Wikipedia.
Siegel has been portrayed on screen many times, most famously by Warren Beatty in Barry Levinson’s 1991 film Bugsy, which Wikipedia describes as a highly fictionalized biography. Others have played him in Mobsters (1991), The Marrying Man (1991), Boardwalk Empire and Mob City. The character Moe Greene in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather has been identified as being based partly on him.
Sources: Las Vegas Review-Journal (1999); Wikipedia; The Mob Museum (Larry Henry).
Timeline
- February 28, 1906: Benjamin Siegel is born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (1905 in some accounts).
- 1920s: Siegel and Meyer Lansky lead the Bugs and Meyer Mob.
- January 28, 1929: He marries Esta Krakower.
- May 1929: Siegel and Lansky attend the Atlantic City Conference.
- April 15, 1931: Joe Masseria is killed; Siegel is alleged to have been one of the gunmen. He is never charged.
- February 28, 1932: Arrested in Miami for gambling and vagrancy; fined $100, his only conviction.
- 1936: Moves his family to Los Angeles.
- November 22, 1939: Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg is shot dead in Hollywood.
- 1941: Siegel is jailed awaiting trial for the Greenberg killing.
- January 1942: The Greenberg murder charge against him is dismissed, according to a dated Herald Examiner caption (Wikipedia describes an acquittal).
- May 25, 1944: Arrested for bookmaking; acquitted later that year.
- 1946: Takes control of Billy Wilkerson’s Flamingo project; divorced from Esta.
- December 26, 1946: The Flamingo casino opens.
- February 6, 1947: The casino closes after heavy losses, according to Wikipedia.
- March 1, 1947: The Flamingo reopens with its hotel complete (March 27 in one account).
- June 20, 1947: Siegel is shot dead at 810 North Linden Drive, Beverly Hills. Minutes later Sedway, Greenbaum and Rosen take over the Flamingo.
- August 1951: Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino, later named by some as suspects, are shot dead in Los Angeles.
- March 6, 1987: Eddie Cannizzaro dies after a deathbed claim that he killed Siegel; the claim is never verified.
- 1991: Bugsy, starring Warren Beatty, is released.
- 2014: Los Angeles Magazine publishes Amy Wallace’s account of Bee Sedway’s claims.
- 2022: Larry Gragg reports that the Beverly Hills police file remains open and closed to researchers.
Sources: As cited in the sections above.
Frequently asked questions
Who killed Bugsy Siegel?
No one knows for certain. No one was ever charged, and the case is officially unsolved. Theories name Frankie Carbo, Eddie Cannizzaro, Robert McDonald, the “Two Tonys,” Mathew “Moose” Pandza and a brother of Virginia Hill as the gunman, and Lansky, the Havana mob leadership, Moe Sedway or Moe Dalitz as the person behind it. Each rests on the word of an informant, an author or a witness, and none has been proved.
Where and when was Siegel killed?
On the night of June 20, 1947, in the living room of 810 North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills, California, a house he had leased for Virginia Hill. A gunman outside fired nine rounds from a .30 caliber carbine through the window. Four hit Siegel, who was 41.
Was Bugsy Siegel ever convicted of murder?
No. He was linked to many killings and was charged with the 1939 murder of Harry Greenberg, but that charge was dismissed in 1942 and he never stood trial, according to the Los Angeles Times and a Herald Examiner caption from the time (Wikipedia describes an acquittal). His only recorded conviction was a 1932 gambling and vagrancy case in Miami that ended in a $100 fine.
Did Bugsy Siegel build the Flamingo?
He finished it. The project was started by the Hollywood nightclub owner Billy Wilkerson, and the name came from a previous investor, not from Virginia Hill. Siegel took control in 1946, the costs rose to about $6 million, and the casino opened on December 26, 1946.
Why was he called Bugsy?
The name came from the slang “bugs,” meaning crazy. He hated it and preferred “Ben” or “Mr. Siegel.” According to the Review-Journal, no one dared use the nickname to his face.
Is the Siegel case still open?
Yes. As of 2022, the historian Larry Gragg wrote that Beverly Hills Police Department Crime Case #46176 was still open and could not be viewed by researchers.
Sources: As cited in the sections above.
Citations & Sources
Citations & Sources
Every source cited in the sections above, in one list. Online sources were consulted on October 28, 2026, except where another date is given.
Archives
- Calisphere, Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection (Los Angeles Herald Examiner photograph and caption), Case against Bugsy Siegel dismissed, January 6, 1942.
- Annie Murphy, Los Angeles Public Library, A Quiet Evening With a Quick Death: The Demise of Bugsy Siegel, June 22, 2017.
News
- Los Angeles Times, Who Killed Bugsy Siegel? 50 Years Later, Still a Mystery, June 20, 1997.
- John L. Smith, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Benjamin Siegel, February 7, 1999.
Museum and history
- Larry Gragg, The Mob Museum, Seventy-five years later, debate over Bugsy Siegel murder still rages, 2022.
- Larry Henry, The Mob Museum, Who killed Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel?.
Wikipedia
- Wikipedia, Bugsy Siegel.
Images
- Tony Webster, Flamingo, Las Vegas Hotel, Nevada (24012157716).jpg, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Gedstrom, Bugsy Siegel Crypt.jpg, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Dark Side of Humanity
- The Dark Side of Humanity, The Black Dahlia Murder: Elizabeth Short, Los Angeles, and the Making of an Unsolved American Crime.
- The Dark Side of Humanity, The Life and Career of J. Edgar Hoover.
Image credits
- Photo: Tony Webster, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Photo: Gedstrom, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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