Three Bullets for Bugsy

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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          One night 76 years ago this week, the mobster Bugsy Siegel was sitting in the home of his mistress in Los Angeles when three bullets came through the window. He was killed instantly. His death represented the waning of an era of the almost untouchable gangster. The story of Siegel – he hated the nickname “Bugsy” because it implied he was crazy – is deeply ingrained in the story of gangsters in the U.S., which had begun the previous century in New York.

          The 2002 Martin Scorsese movie Gangs of New York was mostly about the primetime of the Irish gangs who ruled lower Manhattan, and this continued for decades after the Civil War, personified by Tammany Hall-backed Big Tim Sullivan. Then wave after wave of two groups of immigrants, many settling in the Lower East Side, instigated a change: Italians and Jews. That they found a way to unite in crime instead of killing each other is a pivotal point early in the story. First, Big Tim mentored Arnold Rothstein, who in turn mentored the next generation of young, ambitious men.

According to Jeffrey Sussman in his collection Big Apple Gangsters: “Although there were gangs in New York City after the Civil War, the gangs did not become organized until Arnold Rothstein mentored four young gangsters who would help create the ‘National Crime Syndicate’: Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel.”

Rothstein was the first great Jewish gangster who paved the way for the next and most powerful generation of American mobsters. The model for Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls and Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, he had a simple motto: “Treat the sucker right, he is paying your salary.” He never smoked or drank but made millions off such vices. That he could fix the 1919 World Series was one example of his power, as was fixing the Dempsey-Tunney bout in 1926. An impeccable dresser, his idea of a lovely evening was to stroll down Broadway and savor the adulation of pedestrians. Though the godfather of the National Crime Syndicate, he never got to be in the upper echelon of it: Card-playing was his addiction, and he was murdered in 1928 for refusing to pay off a $322,000 poker debt.

Salvatore Lucania was the “father” of the Italian mob in America which spawned the five families. The chance encounter between him and Lansky as teenagers (see below) was the beginning of the strong ties between the Italian and Jewish gangs that would ultimately rule the country. Unlike many of his colleagues, Lucky Luciano was flamboyant, a beautiful dresser who enjoyed the attention of celebrities. His flash hid total ruthlessness.

          Meyer Lansky was the lifelong leader of the Jewish mob. The career arc of him and Luciano from 1916 to 1938 is the clothesline of the overall story of the mob in America. As an adolescent he formed his first Lower East Side gang with Bugsy Siegel then teamed up with Luciano. The ultimate businessman who the FBI once caught saying, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel,” he led the efforts to take New York crime national, though Lucky was more the front man.

          Francisco Castiglia mostly was a smooth operator in the background, the ultimate fixer. He handled most of the politicians who cooperated or turned a blind eye to the National Crime Syndicate. Second to his childhood friend Lansky in the Jewish mob, Siegel was a handsome homicidal enforcer who certainly at times was crazier than a bedbug.

The pioneer of what became a national crime syndicate was Big Tim Sullivan. He was born two years after the Civil War ended when the Irish gangs were firmly entrenched in the breeding ground of lower Manhattan. There was no escaping them, even individual alleys had names, like Bandit’s Roost.  The first of the infamous Irish hoodlum gangs was the Forty Thieves, who controlled the acre-square Five Points District and was purportedly run by a young woman, Wild Maggie Carson. There were also the Bowery B’hoys, Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, and Roach Guards. The greatest “boss” of them all was Paul Kelly. In turn, backed by Tammany Hall, Sullivan ruled and he made crime more organized in New York.

When Arnold Rothstein took over during World War I, the Irish gangs were waning. “Mr. Big” specialized in gambling, labor rackets, loansharking, and eventually illegal booze. And he was ready to nurture Luciano, Lansky, Costello, and Siegel. A chance meeting in 1916 between Luciano and Lansky – the former tried to bully the latter – led to a powerful new and very effective gang being formed. They were ready three years later when booze was banned.

Attempts by law enforcement were at first sincere, then many of the cops gave up. Prohibition created a whole new upper level of crime and there was not the budget and manpower to combat it. The real money was aiding or at least ignoring the criminals. The well-meaning Police Commissioner Richard Enright was outspent and out-gunned and he essentially turned New York over to the gangsters.

In the early 1920s, the Lucky and Lansky mob was in full operation. They recruited expert gunmen and they supplied bootleggers with stolen trucks and drivers. The expanding gang handled protection, truck hijacking, murder, and illegal gambling. They were ultimately responsible for helping to destroy or subordinate by assassination and political bribery any potentially rival gangs. And they did not discriminate – they extorted from Jewish moneylenders and storekeepers as well as Irish and Italian shop owners and gamblers. They fronted illegal operations by owning a car and truck rental garage that served as a warehouse for stolen goods. Lansky and Siegel, especially, were responsible for an alliance with Joe Adonis’s Broadway Mob throughout the 1920s. During the Castellammarese War, Lansky and Siegel helped Luciano eliminate the “Mustache Petes” and organize the modern American Mafia. The takeover was complete when the Lucky and Lansky gang assassinated Joe Masseria and then Salvatore Maranzano was shot and stabbed to death in his Manhattan office.

With so much killing to do, Lansky and Luciano created a special outfit to handle "enforcement.” It was named Murder, Inc. by the press. This special branch was headed by Lepke Buchalter and Albert “Mad Hatter” Anastasia.

With New York secure, it was time to go national. The first step was working out a deal with the power base in Chicago. This was the new frontier for the organized crime galaxy. Beginning in 1926, Chicago saw over 12,000 murders annually. Al “Scarface” Capone had quite a kingdom. At one time there were as many as 1300 gangs operating in Chicago. Initially, at the top of this murder-filled mountain were Capone and George “Bugs” Moran and Roger “Terrible” Tuohy, who outgunned their rivals and then went after each other, until Capone was left standing. For the remainder of the 1920s, the murder and mayhem and personality of Capone would captivate the nation and enrage the few good cops left.

A climactic event took place in 1929: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre was the most brazen example of gangster power and hubris. That bloodbath and the takeover of the Purple Gang in Detroit represented the national triumph of the mobster in America.

Back in New York, the gangster grip tightened. The Lucky-Lansky operation has taken over everything, and in a few cases it has lucrative arrangements with a few loose cannons like Legs Diamond and Dutch Schultz. (The latter had the former killed in December 1931.) What if New York and Chicago had a stronger alliance . . . or even better, had the ability to control crime in the entire country? That was Luciano’s vision, fully endorsed by Lansky. How could lawmen like Eliot Ness, Melvin Purvis, an emerging J. Edgar Hoover, and young crusading D.A.s like Thomas Dewey stand up to such firepower?

Three months after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Lucky’s vision was for the Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangs to pool their resources and muscle and turn organized crime into a lucrative business for all across the country became reality. Coppers were impotent to stop the convention in Atlantic City in the spring of 1929, attended by all the major gangsters – including Lansky, Capone, Siegel, Schultz, Buchalter, Anastasia, and more. The United States now belonged to the National Crime Syndicate.

Organize crime branched out to just about every part of the U.S., with one example being the bloody Kansas City Massacre in 1933. Along with this, the Depression produced disorganized but just as deadly desperados in the heartland of the country. They became known as Public Enemies and they prowled through the midland of America. However, a rebounding law-enforcement system went after them quite effectively: John Dillinger was killed by Purvis in July 1934; Mad Dog Coll was killed in February 1932; Bonnie and Clyde was killed by Frank Hamer in May 1934; Machine Gun Kelly was arrested September 1933 and died in prison; Pretty Boy Floyd was killed by Purvis in October 1934; Ma Barker was killed by Purvis in January 1935; Baby Face Nelson was killed by feds in December 1934; and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis was nabbed by Hoover in May 1936.

The rise of the FBI and new techniques like fingerprinting and forensics galvanized a national law enforcement effort that by 1938 put Luciano in jail, Lansky in exile, and most of the other bad guys in their graves. As Ness, Purvis, and others were out in the field after the bad guys and tactics like tax-cheating indictments were catching bosses like Capone (in 1931), in Washington, Hoover was pulling together a modern law-enforcement organization that will ultimately be the downfall of the National Crime Syndicate. November 1932 sees the birth of the FBI Crime Lab, which will become the envy of the world. It had only one employee for a year, then by 1938 there were 46 men and women at the lab. The National Crime Syndicate still existed but it no longer controlled America. Most of the “bad guys” are dead, in prison, or slipped into obscure retirement.

          Back to Bugsy: If we was one of the main guys in the gangster saga, why was he assassinated? He had been a visionary in seeing Las Vegas as the new mecca for the mob. There, dirty money could become laundered, the law was virtually non-existent, and criminal enterprises could be converted to legit. But building the Flamingo Hotel was his downfall. It came in way over-budget and Siegel thumbed his nose at his New York backers, figuring the end would justify the means. He figured wrong and it was the end for him on June 20, 1947.

          The same night Bugsy Siegel died – in fact, within moments of the murder – men sent by Lucky Luciano marched into the Flamingo Hotel and announced that they were now in charge. Viva Las Vegas.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including the recent (and instant!) New York Times bestseller Follow Me to Hell and his latest collaboration with Bob Drury, The Last Hill. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.