Bugsy Siegel

Bugsy Siegel was instrumental in the growth and development of Las Vegas during the 1940s; he helped change it from a small mining town to the gambling Mecca it is today. The American gangster was born in February 1906 to Russian Jewish immigrants, and he associated himself with street gangs from an early age. He met Meyer Lansky when he was a teenager, and the duo eventually formed the Bug & Meyer Mob, bootlegging their way through Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey.

He married childhood sweetheart Esta Krakower in 1929, but had multiple affairs through the course of his life. In 1930, Siegel and Lansky fell in with fellow gangster Lucky Luciano, and around the same time, Bugsy found work as a hit man. During the battle for mob control called the Castellammarese War, lasting for a year, Siegel killed a mobster named Sal Maranzano, which allowed Lucky Luciano to control the Mafia on the East Coast of the US. It was during this phase of his life that his violent and erratic behavior earned him the nickname "Bugsy".

Siegel was sent by the Mafia in 1937 to affiliate himself with Jack Dragna, leader of the California mob. He also struck up a friendship with George Raft, an actor, and that friendship allowed Bugsy Siegel to access Hollywood's elite and extort the town's movie studios. Bugsy is known as the "Father of Vegas" because of his instrumentality in the development of the gambling industry there. He had several unsuccessful tries to buy existing casinos, and he finally spent five million dollars to build the Flamingo hotel and casino, which was finished in December 1946. The hotel lacked proper rooms, which discouraged gamblers from lingering, and the casino closed down after just one month.

After that failure, Siegel remodeled the hotel to include proper overnight rooms, and the Flamingo reopened to much fanfare after two months. It was profitable almost immediately, having an initial revenue of a quarter of a million dollars. Bugsy Siegel was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in Beverly Hills in June 1947; the official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. No one knows the exact details of Siegel's murder, but it's a widespread belief that it was a Mafia hit. He was buried in LA's Hollywood Forever Cemetery.