About this ebook
On a June night in 1947, on a chintz davenport in Beverly Hills, a .30-caliber carbine fired nine times through an open window and killed Benjamin Siegel where he sat reading the paper. Three hundred miles away, minutes later, three men walked into the pink hotel he had bled six million dollars to build and announced a change of management. To understand how a Lower East Side street rat became the reluctant patron saint of Las Vegas, you have to go back to a tenement by the Williamsburg Bridge, and to a boy the neighborhood called a wild thing.
ALL ABOUT BUGSY SIEGEL is a fast, immersive, and richly detailed portrait of the most glamorous and most dangerous gangster of his age: the fearless truck-guard who charged Tommy guns for a living, the elegant sportsman who dressed like a movie star, the devoted son who secretly put his brother through medical school, and the dreamer who died for a hotel in the desert.
Inside, you'll discover:
- The Williamsburg streets and the lifelong partnership with Meyer Lansky head and nerve.
- The bootleg hijack legend that made "Bug and Meyer" feared from Canada to the docks.
- The nickname he hated, the temper that earned it, and the FBI's verdict: "insane along certain lines".
- Hollywood, George Raft, and the movie colony that mistook a killer for one of its own.
- The race wire, the mob's westward gamble, and the birth of modern Las Vegas.
- The Flamingo, the overspending, the open curtains, and the bullet that founded a city's myth.
Part of the ALL ABOUT collection: short, modern biographies for readers who want the full story of a remarkable life without reading 800 pages to get it.
One coffee. One sitting. One unforgettable life.
