The House That Bugsy Built

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The House That Bugsy Built
Las Vegas' Flamingo Hotel

By Deke Castleman


	The Las Vegas Strip half a century after Bugsy made his mark.

Benjamin Siegel, better known as “Bugsy,” was a gangster, a killer and a dreamer. A few of his favorite things included racketeering, bribing cops and judges, and rose gardening. His was the most ferocious temper, cocksure confidence, and romantic imagination of all the still-infamous public enemies during the glamorous heyday of America’s mob. And one more thing. Benjamin Siegel was a builder. He put up a hotel that still stands today, an unofficial Nevada historic site. It’s remembered as the place where modern Las Vegas was invented. It’s the Flamingo Hotel.

Bugsy hated being called “Bugsy.” He insisted on Ben and was as much a visionary as he was a hard-nosed businessman. No one stood in his way (for long) on his rampage to acquire a national monopoly on the lucrative “wire” transmitting racetrack information to bookmakers around the country. At this time, in the middle of World War II, he traveled to enemy-occupied Italy in the company of a Sicilian countess to oversee his wartime black-market dealings (with half an idea to assassinate Italian dictator Benito Mussolini). But his most fervent and feverish fantasy was to build the ultimate pleasure palace in the desert oasis of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Bugsy was a notorious loanshark, drug runner, extortionist, pimp, kidnapper, hijacker, and lover—the archetypical organized crime figure—but what he really wanted to be was an innkeeper.

Bugsy was a notorious loanshark, drug runner, extortionist, pimp, kidnapper, hijacker, and lover—the archetypical organized crime figure—but what he really wanted to be was an innkeeper.

Siegel named his dream hotel the Flamingo (after the pink stilt-legged creatures living at Florida’s Hialeah Racetrack, in which he held a financial interest). It had 100 rooms, big pool, gourmet restaurant, showroom, lounge, and, of course, a casino. “Bugsy bedecked his superluxurious hotel-plus-casino in the plushest and costliest, to date, of decors,” the authors of Las Vegas—Playtown, U.S.A. observed. Everyone—guests, gamblers, clerks, dealers, hostesses, janitors—wore tuxedos and evening gowns. Comic Georgie Jessel, popular film star George Raft, radio entertainer Jimmy Durante, and orchestra leader Xavier Cougat all flew in from the West Coast for the grand opening; mobsters, high rollers, and hotelmen flew in from the East. Yes, it had a rose garden.

It could only have happened in Las Vegas, where gambling and prostitution (and divorce) were not only perfectly legal, they were the main industries. The Flamingo was a place where the sheriff himself walked in, wife on his arm, and shot craps all night right next to a hit man. Bugsy had invaded Las Vegas with a vengeance.

Ben Siegel’s fate was inextricably intertwined with Las Vegas’s. Both were born in the same year, 1905—Bugsy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Las Vegas in southern Nevada. Las Vegas, which means “the Meadows” (for the lush grass and trees surrounding artesian springs in the midst of the Mojave Desert), was founded by the Salt Lake-Los Angeles Railroad. A hot and dusty steam-engine watering hole, it remained a whistle stop until 1931, when the federal government arrived to erect Hoover Dam; when completed in 1935, the dam supplied Las Vegas with infinite water and power, a major population boost, nearby recreation, and a colossal tourist attraction. Also in 1931, Nevada legalized wide-open gambling and became the only place in the nation where gamblers and gambling-den operators weren’t criminals.

For most of the 1930s, Las Vegas was still a small Southwest desert town huddled around a railroad depot. The gambling didn’t have much of an impact at first; then faro and poker emerged from the nocturnal back rooms of saloons into the light of Fremont Street, and a penny roulette table or two appeared. The new neon signs provided some glitter, but Fremont Street clung to its Wild West roots. Hotels built downtown were named the Apache, the Pioneer, the Silver Club, the El Cortez. Two hacienda-style resorts, the Last Frontier and El Rancho Vegas, went up outside of town on the Los Angeles highway, soon to be dubbed “the Strip.”

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Deke Castleman covers contemporary Las Vegas for his guidebooks Nevada Handbook and Las Vegas and for the "Las Vegas Advisor" newsletter, but his true Las Vegas heart lies in the 1940s and '50s when the garden of neon was at its most glamorous and innocent.