Read Online The World's Most Evil Gangs by Nigel Blundell - Free Book Online
Authors: Nigel Blundell
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nightclub owner who killed presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (of which more in a subsequent chapter). Meyer Lansky died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Miami Beach on 15 May 1983, leaving a widow and three children. He was buried in Miami in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony. By then, his fortune may well have exceeded $500 million but of course no one, least of all the US government, could tell with any certainty how much and where it really was.
So, of those four friends and partners from the rip-roaring Twenties, three of them – Luciano, Genovese and Lansky – who between them had ordered thousands of murders, all died of natural causes. The exception was the fourth member of that merging of Italian and Jewish gangsters, ‘Bugsy’ Siegel.
Benjamin Siegel hated his nickname, which he had earned early in life. He once said: ‘My friends call me Ben, strangers call me Mr. Siegel, and guys I don’t like call me Bugsy, but not to my face.’ Among the friends he was referring to, the closest and most long-standing was his trusted partner in crime, Meyer Lansky. And it was Lansky who ordered him murdered.
In the Thirties, Siegel had survived a number of attempts on his life. His car was once raked with machine-gun fire and on another occasion a bomb went off in the function room in which he was hosting a meeting with senior mobsters. He survived both attempts and extracted revenge on his would-be assassins. In hospital being treated for minor injuries from thebomb plot, he slipped out of his bed overnight to kill the bomber before creeping back in unnoticed – and with the perfect alibi.
‘Bugsy’ felt himself safe from his many enemies when, in 1936, his friend Lansky sent him on a mission far away from the mean streets of New York. Prohibition had come to an end and the Mafia and their associates needed to replace their lost income. They decided to expand westwards, into California and Nevada, and on Lansky’s advice the Syndicate appointed Siegel as their emissary. This suited Siegel, who in 1935 had been indicted in New York for shooting a rival gang member, one of ‘Dutch’ Schultz’s men, and had therefore been advised by Lansky that he should leave town for a while. So his friend set him up with a $500,000 investment pot and sent him to Los Angeles to team up with local mobster Jack Dragna.
For the sharp-suited, high-living, celebrity-chasing ‘Bugsy’, California was a dream world. After two decades as Lansky’s second-in-command, he was king of his own sun-blessed domain. Siegel settled in Beverly Hills, renting a mansion and joining all the right clubs. In Hollywood, he was on first-name terms with stars like Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, but his greatest friend was actor George Raft, famous for his film gangster roles. He and Raft went on a gambling spree on the French Riviera – until Siegel got a cable from Lansky ordering him to ‘stop acting like a movie star’ and get back to work.
During this exotic period, ‘Bugsy’ seduced a string of starlets but his closest female companion was a millionairess divorcée, Countess Dorothy Di Frasso, who took the handsome newcomer under her wing. They travelled to Italy, where they met Mussolini, and launched an expedition to seek Spanishtreasure on an island off Costa Rica – but after blasting the island with dynamite they returned empty-handed.
Siegel still had business interests back in New York and Lansky regularly remitted money to him. He was a heavy spender and a wild gambler, however, and he also had a very expensive new girlfriend, a spendthrift beauty named Virginia Hill, labelled by
Time
magazine as ‘Queen of the Gangster Molls’. Lansky had constantly to remind Siegel that his mission to the West Coast was, after all, to develop new revenue streams for the Syndicate, and he was ordered to start pulling his weight in the partnership with Dragna.
Jack Ignazio Dragna was an old-style Sicilian Mafioso who bootlegged in
So, of those four friends and partners from the rip-roaring Twenties, three of them – Luciano, Genovese and Lansky – who between them had ordered thousands of murders, all died of natural causes. The exception was the fourth member of that merging of Italian and Jewish gangsters, ‘Bugsy’ Siegel.
Benjamin Siegel hated his nickname, which he had earned early in life. He once said: ‘My friends call me Ben, strangers call me Mr. Siegel, and guys I don’t like call me Bugsy, but not to my face.’ Among the friends he was referring to, the closest and most long-standing was his trusted partner in crime, Meyer Lansky. And it was Lansky who ordered him murdered.
In the Thirties, Siegel had survived a number of attempts on his life. His car was once raked with machine-gun fire and on another occasion a bomb went off in the function room in which he was hosting a meeting with senior mobsters. He survived both attempts and extracted revenge on his would-be assassins. In hospital being treated for minor injuries from thebomb plot, he slipped out of his bed overnight to kill the bomber before creeping back in unnoticed – and with the perfect alibi.
‘Bugsy’ felt himself safe from his many enemies when, in 1936, his friend Lansky sent him on a mission far away from the mean streets of New York. Prohibition had come to an end and the Mafia and their associates needed to replace their lost income. They decided to expand westwards, into California and Nevada, and on Lansky’s advice the Syndicate appointed Siegel as their emissary. This suited Siegel, who in 1935 had been indicted in New York for shooting a rival gang member, one of ‘Dutch’ Schultz’s men, and had therefore been advised by Lansky that he should leave town for a while. So his friend set him up with a $500,000 investment pot and sent him to Los Angeles to team up with local mobster Jack Dragna.
For the sharp-suited, high-living, celebrity-chasing ‘Bugsy’, California was a dream world. After two decades as Lansky’s second-in-command, he was king of his own sun-blessed domain. Siegel settled in Beverly Hills, renting a mansion and joining all the right clubs. In Hollywood, he was on first-name terms with stars like Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, but his greatest friend was actor George Raft, famous for his film gangster roles. He and Raft went on a gambling spree on the French Riviera – until Siegel got a cable from Lansky ordering him to ‘stop acting like a movie star’ and get back to work.
During this exotic period, ‘Bugsy’ seduced a string of starlets but his closest female companion was a millionairess divorcée, Countess Dorothy Di Frasso, who took the handsome newcomer under her wing. They travelled to Italy, where they met Mussolini, and launched an expedition to seek Spanishtreasure on an island off Costa Rica – but after blasting the island with dynamite they returned empty-handed.
Siegel still had business interests back in New York and Lansky regularly remitted money to him. He was a heavy spender and a wild gambler, however, and he also had a very expensive new girlfriend, a spendthrift beauty named Virginia Hill, labelled by
Time
magazine as ‘Queen of the Gangster Molls’. Lansky had constantly to remind Siegel that his mission to the West Coast was, after all, to develop new revenue streams for the Syndicate, and he was ordered to start pulling his weight in the partnership with Dragna.
Jack Ignazio Dragna was an old-style Sicilian Mafioso who bootlegged in
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