While Siegel with mob money had opened the Flamingo, Las Vegas’s first lavish casino resort on what would become the Las Vegas Strip, it wasn’t his idea at all. Public understanding of Siegel is far more myth than fact, thanks to over-hyping authors, short memories and a popular movie portrayal fudging the facts and glorifying his image. Yet his eternal identification with Las Vegas comes notwithstanding his remarkably short residential stint here–barely one year. Siegel was a truly despicable character with, despite his relative youth, a decades-long history of murder, extortion and racketeering on both coasts and points in between. His eye was found 15 feet from his once-handsome but now blasted-away face, an image immortalized in famous newspaper pictures. Where? The living room of the home of Siegel’s girlfriend–280 miles away in Beverly Hills, Calif. Just 41, he was shot multiple times at point-blank range while reading a newspaper by an unknown sniper wielding a. I’m referring to the grisly assassination on June 20, 1947, of Las Vegas organized crime boss Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel.
Yet the crime didn’t happen here, or even within the state. The killing, which officially remains unsolved, profoundly changed the future gambling mecca forever. Seventy-five years ago this month, the most famous murder of consequence in Las Vegas history took place. Murdered body of Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, Beverly Hills, June 20, 1947
