Neon Mirage (25 page)

So I drove back to Los Angeles, and on the way stopped at the place where it had happened, the crime scene if you will, and the beach stretched to the ocean like a pristine blanket of sand. There wasn’t a single crumpled candy bar wrapper, let alone a corpse, and certainly no cops marking off the area for investigatory purposes. Nothing. Just the sound of gulls and the reflection of the sun off the sea and the gentle crash of the surf.

I touched my head where the grazed area was, scabbed over now. I did feel a little shaky, still. A warm breeze calmed me. Had all that happened last night? On this lonely stretch of sand? Or perhaps it was all a dream.

Like Ben Siegel’s Flamingo.

Something interesting had happened, the night before, that only days later, via Fred Rubinski, became known to me.

Twenty minutes after Ben Siegel’s handsome face was shattered by carbine fire through the window of Virginia Hill’s home, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum walked into the Flamingo and, in the name of its eastern investors, took over operations.

Less than twenty-four hours later, a stockholder’s meeting was called. Greenbaum was put in charge of the resort; Sedway remained affiliated. The resort, after yet another million dollars was sunk into it, began to flourish. Hotels sprang up like cactuses on the Strip, albeit gaudy ones; the Thunderbird, the Desert Inn, the Sands, the Sahara.

And the Stardust, which was Tony Cornero’s last great dream. Tony dreamed even bigger than Siegel, envisioning the biggest resort hotel in the world. Working from a base of only ten grand, Tony got the 1,032-room hotel off the ground by luring in small investors via billboards and newspaper ads; unfortunately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t like the way he was going about it, including his not having registered with the SEC. “I’ll win this battle or they’ll carry me out feet first,” Tony said, shortly before stepping up to a Desert Inn table where, while shooting craps, he fell across the green-felt table, dead of a heart attack.

Trans-American, of course, died just as suddenly; it was buried with Ben. Continental, run by Mickey McBride with certain silent partners, continued its land-office business until heat from the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee got it shut down.

Siegel’s funeral was attended by his ex-wife, his brother (a respectable, respected doctor), and his two teenaged daughters. Virginia Hill was not there; nor was Raft or Cohen or Smiley or Chick or me; nor was anyone who worked at the Flamingo.

I was never drawn into the Siegel shooting, other than having a deposition taken at Central Headquarters in Chicago, where the cops didn’t even ask about the bandage on my forehead; the deposition covered the dinner at Jack’s-at-the-Beach and nothing else. According to the papers, neighbors reported seeing a man fleeing the house out the front, taking off in a Ford, but this stopped short of a viable physical description and a license number.

Dr. Snaden’s death was ruled a suicide; the three dead men at the beach simply fell off the edge of the earth.

And I did tell Peggy about the beach shooting, and the “consultation” with Snaden, and she was delighted by the outcome of both, though reassuringly horrified by my having been through such scrapes.

My forehead remains scarred.

The indictment against Bill Drury was dropped due to a general unreliability of the two witnesses, but Bill was then called before a Grand Jury which demanded he reveal his dealings with those witnesses. Bill said he would gladly do so if he were promised immunity, should he reveal things indicating he might have been “shading” the law. Immunity wasn’t granted, Bill refused to testify, and was dismissed from the force by the Civil Service Board for refusing to give testimony before a grand jury.

Bill did come to work for A-1 for a time; and he worked for the
Chicago American,
as well, doing crime exposés. He was about to give testimony to the Kefauver Committee when he was murdered in his car by hitmen with shotguns—a familiar enough scenario.

Bill had brought Mickey Cohen into the Kefauver fold, but after Bill’s murder, Mickey turned out not to have anything much to say to the Committee. Incidentally, the Mick assured me, every time I encountered him in years to come, that he’d had no part of the attempt on my life at the El Camino. I believed him. When the clotheshorse roughneck died in 1976, I was sorry.

Mickey died of “natural causes”—not everybody in the rackets went out bloodily like Ben Siegel. Many a mob guy went quietly into that good night, including Meyer Lansky himself; Luciano, too; Sedway stepped off a plane in 1951 and had a heart attack and died (his partner Greenbaum, however, had his throat slit).

One evening in 1956, Jake Guzik died with greasy thumbs intact, having a heart attack while in the midst of pork chops and pay-offs at St. Hubert’s; he was buried in a five-grand bronze coffin, and one of the boys mourning him was heard to say, “Christ, we coulda buried him in a fuckin’ Cadillac for that!”

As for Virginia Hill, she became, of course, a star witness at the televised Kefauver hearings, managing to say very little while achieving a big celebrity. When next heard from, she’d taken a new husband and, fleeing the IRS, was living in Salzburg (Virginia had written the tax boys to tell them she’d not be setting foot in “your so-called Free World again,” concluding by saying, “So fuck you and the whole United States government”). Forty-nine years old, less beautiful, less ornery, she swallowed sleeping pills that March morning in 1966, and lay down in the bed of snow by a stream in the woods and watched the clouds until they turned forever dark.

A year or so ago I visited Las Vegas, my second wife and me. The place seemed full of old people, myself and the missus included. Vegas all seemed so innocent now, and the neon, the glitter, seemed faded, shopworn. Jimmy Durante was dead. In his place you got Wayne Newton and faggots making tigers disappear. I wondered what Ben Siegel would’ve thought.

Hell, he probably would’ve loved it. He would take one look at Caesar’s Palace or Circus Circus and be in heaven (as opposed to where he likely was now). He would ride up and down the wide neon-flung Strip and feel proud of what he’d accomplished with his life.

Funny, isn’t it? The mob had worried about the bad publicity Ben was generating, afraid it would scare customers away; but it was the urge of Puritan Americans to take a safely sinful timeout that drew them to Lost Wages. It was a killing in Vegas, by way of Beverly Hills, that sparked their morbid curiosity, sent them flocking to the Flamingo in the wake of Siegel’s bloody demise. To see where it all happened.

They still talk about him at the Flamingo Hilton, staff and guests alike; a flower bed near the pool is whispered about as being the grave for some hapless Siegel foe. Most of all, folks still want to see, even stay in, the penthouse (the Presidential Suite, now) where Ben and Tabby loved and fought.

You can see it, as clear as neon at night, can’t you?

It wasn’t Ben’s life that gave birth to Vegas.

It was Bugsy’s death.

Photo Credit: Bamford Studio

Max Allan Collins has earned fifteen Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for his Nathan Heller novels,
True Detective
and
Stolen Away
, and receiving the PWA life achievement award, the Eye. His graphic novel,
Road to Perdition
, which is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks, was followed by two novels,
Road to Purgatory
and
Road to Paradise
. His suspense series include Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, and Eliot Ness, and his numerous comics credits include the syndicated
Dick Tracy
and his own
Ms. Tree
. He has written and directed four feature films and two documentaries. His other produced screenplays include “The Expert,” an HBO World Premiere. His coffee-table book
The History of Mystery
received nominations for every major mystery award and
Men’s Adventure Magazines
won the Anthony Award. Collins lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, writer Barbara Collins. They have collaborated on seven novels and numerous short stories, and are currently writing the “Trash ‘n’ Treasures” mysteries.