Drawing on FBI reports, court files, and exclusive interviews, this is the first-ever, definitive dual biography of legendary mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—the real-life inspiration for The Godfather’s Moe Greene—and his fiery mistress Virginia Hill, tracing their star-crossed pursuit of the American Dream from New York to Hollywood and ultimately to the creation of Las Vegas.
New York during the height of Prohibition was fertile ground for bootlegger Bugsy Siegel, who found an enterprising way out of an impoverished immigrant ghetto. With mobster Meyer Lansky, who’d be Bugsy’s lifelong best friend, Siegel looked west for the next big haul: California and a gold mine called the Nevada desert. Shrewd and movie-star handsome, Bugsy would rise to the top echelons of Hollywood and the Mob.
Like Siegel, Alabama-born Virginia Hill was no stranger to a hardscrabble childhood. It also gave her a wily, independent edge. An avid reader of fan magazines, she had dreams, too. At 17, she followed them. Ben and Virginia were meant for each other. Their hot-wired connection would eventually lead to the construction of the Flamingo hotel and casino, the establishment of Las Vegas as a gambling empire, and an inevitable end to lives lived in the violent world of organized crime.
Bugsy and Flamingo dispels the myths about a couple who reached an unmatched level of celebrity and, through firsthand accounts from the Siegel and Lansky families, delivers the truth with stories never before revealed publicly: Virginia Hill’s orders from the Mob to spy on Siegel and the warnings she instead gave the man she loved; Siegel’s decades of Hollywood connections from Jean Harlow and George Raft to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack; the FBI’s unprecedented 10-agent, 24-hour surveillance of Siegel; the Nuremberg trials that implicated Virginia’s husband and his brother as Nazi sympathizers; and the true identity of the man behind Siegel’s murder in Virginia’s Beverly Hills mansion—it wasn’t the Mafia.
A panoramic history of organized crime in America and its influence—from the turn of the 20th century to today—this is the stuff of legend. But as told by Siegel and Lansky’s last surviving friends and family, it’s finally time to shed light on the real story before it’s lost forever.
