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This day in History Bugsy Siegel opens Flamingo Hotel
On December 26, 1946, in Las Vegas, Nevada, mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel opens The Pink Flamingo Hotel & Casino at a total cost of $6 million. The 40-acre facility wasn’t complete and Siegel was hoping to raise some revenue with the grand opening.
Well-known singer and comedian Jimmy Durante headlined the entertainment, with music by Cuban band leader Xavier Cugat. Some of Siegel’s Hollywood friends, including actors George Raft, George Sanders, Sonny Tufts and George Jessel were in attendance.
The grand opening, however, was a flop. Bad weather kept many other Hollywood guests from arriving. And because gamblers had no rooms at the hotel, they took their winnings and gambled elsewhere. The casino lost $300,000 in the first week of operation.
Siegel and his New York “partners” had invested $1 million in a property already under construction by Billy Wilkerson, owner of the Hollywood Reporter as well as some very popular nightclubs in the Sunset Strip. Wilkerson had wanted to recreate the Sunset Strip in Las Vegas, with a European style hotel with luxuious rooms, a spa, health club, showroom, golf course, nightclub and upscale restaurant. But he soon ran out of money due to the high cost of materials immediately after the war.
Siegel, who held a largest interest in the racing publication Trans America Wire, was drawn to Las Vegas in 1945 by his interest in legalized gambling and off-track betting. He purchased The El Cortez hotel for $600,000 and later sold it for a $166,000 profit.
Siegel and his organized crime buddies used the profits to influence Wilkerson to accept new partners. Siegel took over the project and supervised the building, naming it after his girlfriend Virginia Hill, whose nickname was “The Flamingo” because of her red hair and long legs.
Two weeks after the grand opening, the Flamingo closed down. It re-opened March 1, 1947, as The Fabulous Flamingo. Siegel forced Wilkerson out in April, and by May, the resort reported a profit, but it wasn’t enough to save Siegel.
Convinced that Siegel wasn’t giving them a “square count,” it is widely believed that his partners in organized crime had him killed while he was reading the paper June 20, 1947, at Hill’s Beverly Hills mansion. Hill was in Paris, having flown the coop after a fight with Siegel 10 days prior. The crime remains unsolved to this day.
Surviving a series of name and ownership changes, the hotel is known today as The Flamingo Las Vegas, owned and operated by Harrah’s Entertainment. The property offers 3,626 hotel rooms and a 77,000-square-foot casino.
After 50 years, Siegel legend haunts resort
Robert Macy
Friday, Dec. 20, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
The $6 million cost was chump change compared to modern times, with half-billion-dollar, eye-popping megaresorts sprouting on the Strip.
But the opening of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's Flamingo Hotel on Dec. 26, 1946, forever changed the face and fortunes of Las Vegas.
And it marked the beginning of the end for the famed mobster who spent a crime-filled life evading the law, but could not escape his own kind.
There'll be no birthday bash when the Flamingo turns 50 later this month.
Any mob ties were clipped by the time billionaire Kirk Kerkorian bought the famous resort in 1967, later selling it to hotel giant Hilton Corp.
"The Bugsy image was not something that was particularly endearing to the Flamingo or Hilton," Flamingo Hilton spokesman Terry Lindberg said recently. "This was not George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. We're talking about a robber, rapist and murderer. Those are not endearing qualities.
"We want to remember the history of the Flamingo without glamorizing it. We've made a conscious decision to distance ourselves from the Bugsy heritage."
Indeed.
A couple of years ago the Flamingo tore down the last vestige of the Siegel saga. Known as the "Bugsy bungalow," it was a fortified cottage with concrete walls 3 to 4 inches thick, built to soothe the nerves of an increasingly paranoid Siegel, who would spend the final months of his life looking over his shoulder.
Siegel was one of the mob's most feared tacticians, with a rap sheet ranging from drug dealing to white slavery, bookmaking to murder. None of the charges ever stuck. In 1936, he was sent from New York to oversee the mob's West Coast operations in Los Angeles. He made numerous visits to Las Vegas, a remote, desert-locked gambling outpost.
The suave Siegel, known for his Hollywood good looks and hair-trigger temper, dreamed of a flashy gambling oasis. Legend has it that in early 1945, he picked a lonely spot seven miles out in the desert from downtown Las Vegas and kicked at some dirt in a symbolic ground breaking for his fabulous Flamingo.
Siegel had coaxed $1 million from his mob partners, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. He found himself stretched thin overseeing West Coast rackets and Las Vegas bookmaking operations, keeping a step ahead of the law, balancing a private life that included a wife and two children in Los Angeles, and lover Virginia Hill, and nursing hemorrhaging costs at his diamond in the desert.
Building problems
World War II was winding down, Bugsy was paying a premium for scarce building materials, and some contractors were stealing him blind. Old-timers tell of expensive palm trees that were shipped each day from Baker and Barstow, Calif., only to be shipped back at night, then back to Las Vegas the next day. He wound up buying the same trees several times.
Construction snafus were the norm. A heavy beam in his private fortified enclave was 5 feet, 8 inches above the floor, a physical and emotional irritant for the 5-foot-10 Siegel.
The $1 million projected cost ballooned to $6 million.
Siegel had promised Lansky and Luciano their Flamingo would open the day after Christmas 1946.
It did ... sort of. The showroom, restaurant and casino were ready; the hotel was not.
Entertainer Rose Marie shared the billing opening night, Dec. 26, 1946, with longtime pal Jimmy Durante and band leader Xavier Cugat.
Two plane loads of Hollywood stars were recruited to make the short hop to Las Vegas for the gala opening.
"There were 30 or 40 big stars, people like Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Anne Jeffreys, Caesar Romero," Rose Marie recalled in a recent telephone interview from her home in Van Nuys, Calif. "The show was spectacular, everything was great, but no locals came. Las Vegas was cowboy hotels; this was Monaco.
"All the stars went back the second day and the only people left were the locals. We worked to 9 or 10 people a night for the rest of the two-week engagement. The locals just didn't come out to the Flamingo. They were used to cowboy boots, not rhinestones."
Rose Marie laughed as she recalled being shorted $11 in her $2,750 weekly paycheck, raising a fuss with someone, only to learn she was hassling Siegel.
"I thought 'Geez, they're going to pick me up in an envelope,'" she said.
"But Bugsy was very good to me, he treated me like a lady. He was a real gentleman."
Lose some weight
Her first brush with Hill was a little touchier.
The mob moll praised Rose Marie's performance, but suggested she lose some weight.
The entertainer told Hill she was four months pregnant, and expected to lose the weight in another five months.
Hill apologized, said she was making a trip to Paris, "and asked me if there was anything she could bring back. I told her a christening dress for my baby."
The dress has been used for several family members and she still has it today, Rose Marie said.
The Flamingo closed on Feb. 1, 1947, while construction was completed on the 200 hotel rooms. It reopened March 1, 1947, and was beginning to emerge from the red. But the recovery wasn't fast enough for Lansky and Luciano, who wanted an accounting of the money they'd sunk into the Nevada desert.
For the first time since he was a teenager, Bugsy was receiving -- not delivering -- heat from the mob.
On June 19, 1947, Siegel and Hill had one of their celebrated fights, and she boarded a plane for Paris. Some suggest she'd been warned to stay clear of her lover.
June 20, 1947: Bugsy visited movie pal George Raft in Hollywood, tended to some Flamingo business, dined with friends, then returned to Hill's Beverly Hills mansion.
About 10:30 p.m., someone crept through the shrubbery at the exquisite estate and unleashed a flurry of shots. Two bullets pierced Siegel's skull, killing him instantly. The crime has never been solved.
Within minutes, word of the execution spread to Las Vegas. Siegel's partners immediately announced they were taking control of the Flamingo.
Virginia Hill?
She was called by a congressional committee to testify about the mob in 1951. She was found dead on a mountaintop in Austria on March 14, 1966. The death was ruled a suicide, but some believe the mob, worried about what she knew, took care of her.
The Flamingo?
Under the direction of Hilton, and Horst Dziura, hotel president the past 21 years, the hotel has grown to six high-rise towers comprised of 3,642 rooms, making it the fourth-largest hotel in the world.
The mob?
The last vestiges of organized crime faded from the Las Vegas scene in the late 1970s as giant public corporations took control of the famous resorts.
Bugsy's dream?
Rose Marie recalls Siegel telling her "In a few years, this whole place is going to be filled with beautiful hotels."
"I thought, 'Are you crazy? In this desert!'"
Comedian Alan King, a longtime Las Vegas performer, remembers a similar Siegel prediction.
"I thought, no wonder they call him Bugsy."
