My Amazon Review of Michael Shnayerson's : Bugsy: The Dark Side of the American Dream"

 

The Rise and Fall of Bugsy Siegel

 

Michael Shnayerson tells the story of how a Jewish eastside kid under the tutelage of legendary mobster Arnold Rothstein rose to be among the top bootleggers in the 1920’s. By 1930 Bugsy Siegel along with Lucky Luciano and his boyhood friend Meyer Lansky became the triumvirate of organized crime. Siegel was instrumental in the formation of Murder Inc. and along the way he paid for his brother’s medical school training. Siegel was hands on in murder, rapes and robberies, a true gangster.

 

He moved from New York City to Los Angeles and with the aid former gangster and now actor George Raft, Siegel become the toast of Hollywood. His Hollywood good looks certainly didn’t hurt. Just as Hollywood found fascination with the radical left in the 1960’s, in the 1930’s Hollywood was enamored with the gangster in their midst. Remember that Warren Beatty played him in the movie, “Bugsy.” Meantime his wife and two daughters were living in the toney Scarsdale suburb of New York City.

 

Shnayerson offers up his belief as to why the Jewish gangsters were far more sensitive to the rise of Nazism in Germany than the Jewish community as a whole. His explanation is that the gangsters knew how violent people can be.

 

Although Siegel get all of the credit for the creation of postwar Las Vegas, much of the credit goes to his partner Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter and nightclub impresario. Siegel took over Wilkerson’s Flamingo project, which was to become the first modern Las Vegas hotel/casino. However, the problem was that Siegel was a horrible construction boss and the project suffered from huge cost over runs that were funded by the Mob. When the Mob suspects Siegel and his girlfriend Virginia Hill from skimming their money, at a Havana meeting in 1946 Luciano and Lansky order up a hit on their one-time buddy.

 

The hit was accomplished in June 1947, a crime that was never solved. Shnayerson offers up his theory as to who actually did it.  This is a fast-paced book well worth the read. I only wish he spent more time on Mickey Cohen, Siegel’s longtime Los Angeles accomplice.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Rise and Fall of Bugsy Siegel (amazon.com)