BUGSY SIEGEL was one of the first gangsters to achieve mainstream celebrity.

Born to Jewish immigrants in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods, Siegel began his criminal career as a boy, joining a gang at an early age and forming a small mob as a teenager that controlled local theft and protection rackets. 

His violent nature attracted the attention of the Italian mob, who put him to work as a hitman while he was still an adolescent. Siegel’s fearlessness and unrivaled skill with guns would make him one of the Mafia’s most dependable and prolific killers, vaulting him from poverty to a flashy lifestyle that he loved to flaunt with expensive clothes, cars, and residences.

During Prohibition, Siegel joined forces with childhood friend Meyer Lansky to form a small empire that controlled bootlegging operations and other rackets in several major East Coast cities. Siegel continued to accept hits from the Mafia during this time, playing a direct role in some of the most notorious assassinations in mob history. Eventually, Siegel was getting more murder contracts than he could handle on his own, so he built an extensive network of hitmen to outsource the Mafia’s killings to.

After making too many dangerous enemies in the New York organized crime scene, Siegel took his criminal operations to Los Angeles in the 1930s, running in the same circles as famous movie stars and continuing to live in the spotlight with a glamorous lifestyle worthy of Hollywood.

By the 1940s, the visionary Siegel had set his sights on the desolate desert town of Las Vegas. With gambling recently legalized in Nevada, Siegel saw The city as a future stronghold for organized crime and moved to Vegas to establish the mob’s presence. He would go on to develop and open the city’s first mega-casino, The Flamingo, helping establish the future of Las Vegas.

Despite facing multiple charges in his lifetime, including several for murder, Siegel’s 1928 arrest for gambling and vagrancy at age 22 (pictured here) was his only conviction, resulting in a $100 fine. He continued to make powerful enemies in the mob and was shot to death in 1947 at age 41. The murder is still unsolved to this day.