WHO KILLED Bugsy Siegel? The Beverly Hills Execution That Built Las Vegas HT
June 20th, 1947, 10:45 in the evening, 8:10 North Lynen Drive, Beverly Hills, California. Benjamin Bugsy Seagull, sat on a chintzcovered sofa in the living room of his girlfriend’s mansion, reading the Los Angeles Times. His associate, Alan Smiley, sat beside him. The curtains were open. The lights were on.
Through the window, someone was watching. At 10:46, nine rounds from a 30 caliber M1 military carbine tore through the glass. The first bullet hit the bridge of Seagull’s nose. The second punched through his right cheek and exited the back of his neck. Two more slammed through the sofa and perforated both lungs.
The over pressure from the headshot blew his left eyeball clean out of its socket. It was found 15 ft away on the dining room floor, eyelids still attached. Alan Smiley dove to the ground. One round passed through his jacket. He wasn’t hit. The entire thing took less than 10 seconds. The shooter rested the carbine on a trellis just outside the window, no more than 14 ft from the couch.
Then he vanished into the rose bushes. He was never found. The gun was never recovered. And to this day, the Beverly Hills Police Department still lists this case as open. You have to understand something. This wasn’t just some wise guy getting clipped in an alley. This was Benjamin Seagull, co-founder of the Bugs and Meer mob.
A man who had personally carried out murders for Murder Incorporated. A man who dined with Clark Gable, partied with Carrie Grant, and had Hollywood Studios on speed dial. He was the most glamorous gangster in American history. And he had just built a casino in the Nevada desert that would change the world.
This is the story of how one man’s vision created modern Las Vegas and how that same vision got him killed. From the streets of Brooklyn to the showrooms of Beverly Hills. From a $6 million money pit in the desert to a coordinated execution that the mob planned down to the minute. This is the rise and spectacular fall of Bugsy Seagull.
But here’s what makes this story unlike any other mob hit. 20 minutes after Seagull’s body hit the floor in Beverly Hills, 280 miles away in Las Vegas, three men walked into the Flamingo Hotel and announced they were taking over. 20 minutes, which means they didn’t just know it was coming. They were counting down the clock. Let’s go back to the beginning.
February 28th, 1906, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Benjamin Seagelbomb was born into a family of Jewish immigrants in one of the toughest neighborhoods in New York. His father worked in a garment factory. They had nothing. By the time Ben was a teenager, he had dropped out of school and joined a street gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side.
He started with petty theft, shaking down push cart vendors for a dollar at a time. You pay or your merchandise burns. Simple as that. He was fast, fearless, and completely unhinged when provoked. That’s where the nickname came from. Bugsy, as in crazy, as in this kid will shoot you over a nickel. He hated that name his entire life. But he earned it every single day.
And then he met the person who would shape the rest of his life. Meer Lansky. Small, quiet, brilliant. Where Seagull was muscle and fury, Lansky was calculation and patience. They were teenagers when they found each other, and they recognized something immediately. Seagull had the nerve. Lansky had the brains.
Together, they were unstoppable. They formed the Bugs and Meer mob in the early 1920s. A crew of Jewish gangsters who ran bootlegging, hijacking, and contract killings across New York and New Jersey. This wasn’t some neighborhood operation. They were doing hits for the biggest names in organized crime. When Lucky Luciano needed someone eliminated, he called Lansky. Lansky called Seagull.
And the problem disappeared. Here’s where it gets interesting. By the early 1930s, Seagull and Lansky weren’t just muscle anymore. They were founding members of the National Crime Syndicate, the coalition of Italian and Jewish gangsters who divided up the rackets in America. Seagull sat at the same table as Luchiano, Frank Costello, and Albert Anastasia.
He was a full partner in the most powerful criminal organization in the Western Hemisphere. And by his late 20s, he had a rap sheet that included armed robbery, multiple murders, and bootlegging on a massive scale. Yet somehow he kept beating the charges. Witnesses disappeared. Evidence vanished. Seagull walked out of courtrooms like he was leaving a restaurant.
Then Lansky made a decision that changed everything. In the mid 1930s, with Murder Incorporated drawing heat from New York prosecutors, Lansky sent Seagull West Los Angeles. The assignment was simple. Take control of the West Coast rackets. set up gambling operations, manage the wire services that transmitted horse racing results to bookmakers across the country.
Those wire services were worth millions. Whoever controlled the information controlled the bets. Seagull arrived in Hollywood and transformed himself. He bought tailored suits. He got a suntan. He became friends with actor George Raft, a fellow Brooklyn kid who had made it in the movies. Through Raft, Seagull gained access to everyone.
Studio executives, producers, movie stars. He went to premieres and dinner parties. He dated starlets. He was handsome, magnetic, and absolutely lethal. The Hollywood press loved him. They had no idea what he actually did for a living. Or maybe they did, and they didn’t care. Within a few years, Seagull had the West Coast Wire Service locked down.
He was running gambling operations across Southern California. He had connections to the Los Angeles crime boss Jack Dragna. And he was making enormous amounts of money. But for Seagull, money wasn’t enough. He wanted something bigger. He wanted to build something. And that’s when the desert called. In 1945, a Hollywood Reporter publisher named William Wilkerson had an idea.
build a luxury hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, where gambling was legal. He called it the Flamingo. He started construction, ran out of money, and that’s when Seagull stepped in. First as a partner, then as the boss. Wilkerson was eventually squeezed out entirely. Some accounts say he was threatened with death if he didn’t sell his stake.
Seagull took over the entire project and brought in mob money from the syndicate. Lansky, Costello, Luchiano, Joe Adanis, all of them invested. The original budget was $1.2 million. Now, here’s where the trouble started. You have to understand how the construction business worked in post-war America.
Materials were scarce. Labor costs were skyrocketing. And Seagull’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill, was appointed as a project overseer. Virginia Hill, born August 26th, 1916 in Lipkcom, Alabama. She was no ordinary girlfriend. She had been a Chicago outfit courier since the mid 1930s. She carried messages and money between crime families.
The FBI called her a central clearing house for organized crime intelligence. She was smart, ruthless, and she understood the business better than most of the men in it. But putting her in charge of construction oversight was a disaster. Contractors realized they were dealing with people who didn’t know building codes from bar tabs.
They double build for materials. They ordered supplies, sold them on the black market, then ordered them again. Seagull didn’t notice or didn’t care. By October of 1946, the flamingo’s costs had blown past $4 million. By the time it was done, the total would exceed $6 million. In today’s money, that’s over $73 million. The mob was furious.
They had poured millions into this desert pipe dream, and the bills kept climbing. Worse, they suspected Seagull and Hill were skimming. The rumor was that Hill had been wiring money to Swiss bank accounts. Approximately $1 million of the overrun, the bosses believed, had been stolen. Whether that was true or not almost didn’t matter.
In the mob, suspicion is enough. Remember this date, December 20th, 1946. The Hotel Nasanol in Havana, Cuba. Lucky Luchiano had called a meeting. The most powerful crime figures in America gathered in one place. Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Joe Banano, Tony Accardo from Chicago, Veto Genevvisi, Santos Trafocante Jr.
, even Frank Sinatra showed up. The official agenda covered narcotics, territories, and the future of the syndicate. But the real headline was what Lansky called the Seagull situation. The bosses wanted Seagull dead. They had voted on it. The contract was assigned to Chicago outfit concieri Charles Triggerhappy Fishetti, who would delegate the job.
But at the last moment, Meer Lansky, the man who had been Seagull’s friend since they were kids on the Lower East Side, stood up and made an argument. Wait. The Flamingo is scheduled to open December 26th. Let’s see how it does. If it makes money, the investment is saved. If it doesn’t, you can do what you want. The bosses agreed.
Seagull had a reprieve, but it came with a clock. The Flamingo opened on December 26th, 1946. Contrary to what the movies show, the opening wasn’t quite a disaster. The three-ight event actually drew large crowds. Columnist Walter Winell reported 28,000 people attended over those first three nights. Jimmy Duranti headlined the floor show. George Raft was there.
Virginia Hill appeared all three nights. changing her hair color each evening. Seagull greeted guests in a black tuxedo with a pink carnation. But here’s where the numbers killed him. Without hotel rooms ready, the big winners walked out and gambled elsewhere. The casino lost $300,000 in its first week.
Nick the Greek Dandelos alone won nearly half a million in four nights in January. Crersier were running scams at the tables. The losses mounted. Seagull shut the casino down on February 6th, 1947 and didn’t reopen until March 1st when the hotel rooms were finally completed. By May of 1947, the Flamingo actually turned a profit, $250,000.
Lansky pointed to the number as proof that Seagull’s vision was correct. But it was too late. The bosses had lost patience. $6 million invested. months of losses and the persistent suspicion that Seagull and Hill had been stealing from them. In the world of the National Crime Syndicate, there is no appeals court.
There is no second chance. Once the commission decides, the clock starts ticking. 4 days before the shooting, Virginia Hillboarded an unscheduled flight to Paris. She and Seagull had been fighting constantly. Some people believe the trip was just another one of their dramatic breakups. Others believe she was warned, “Get out of town.
Don’t be there when it happens.” Whatever the reason, she wasn’t in that house on June 20th. That was no coincidence. Now, let’s slow this down because what happened on the night of the murder wasn’t just a hit. It was a military operation executed across 280 miles. At 8:30 in the evening during the floor show at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, eight men sitting at a table in the showroom suddenly stood up. They didn’t applaud.
They didn’t order drinks. They spread out to eight strategic positions. Two went to the front door. Two went to the hotel registration desk. Two went to the security desk. Two went to the cashier’s cage. They were securing the casino. 2 hours before the trigger was even pulled. At the same time in Beverly Hills, Seagull was having dinner with Alan Smiley, Virginia Hills brother Chick, and Chick’s girlfriend at a restaurant.
They returned to the house at 8:10 North Lynen Drive around 10:30. Seagull sat down on the sofa, picked up the newspaper. Alan Smiley sat beside him. At 10:46, nine rounds came through the window. Four hit Seagull. He died instantly. His blood soaked into the chintz fabric of a sofa in a seven-bedroom mansion that his girlfriend rented for $300 a month.
Within minutes, FBI agent Curtis Lam received a phone call from a confidential informant calling from a pay phone outside the Flamingo in Las Vegas. The informant told him, “Ben Seagull has been shot and killed in Beverly Hills. Historian Larry Greg, who has spent years researching this case, is certain that informant was Mo Seedway. Seagull’s own former partner.
And then minutes after that call, Moedway walked into the Flamingo alongside Gus Greenbomb and Morris Rosen. They announced to the staff that Seagull was dead and that they were now in charge. The takeover was complete before the police in Beverly Hills had even finished processing the crime scene.
So, who pulled the trigger? That question has haunted investigators and historians for nearly 80 years. The suspects read like a mob allstar roster. Frankie Carbo, a Lucazi family soldier and boxing promoter, was the leading suspect for decades. Former Philadelphia boss Ralph Natali later claimed that Carbo did it on orders from Meer Lansky.
In 1987, Eddie Canazero, a former associate of Los Angeles boss Jack Dragna, made a deathbed confession claiming he was the shooter acting on a contract from Lansky. But the Beverly Hills police required substantiation, and Kennerero’s confession couldn’t be corroborated. Another theory points to Tony Branato and Tony Trombino, the so-called two Tony’s hired by Joe Adonis.
There’s even a theory that the shooter was a man named Matthew Moose Panza connected to Moway’s wife be the accounts vary. What’s documented is that the Beverly Hills Police Department still considers this an open case and the files remain sealed. Here is what we know for certain. The mob wanted Seagull dead.
The hit was coordinated across hundreds of miles. Someone made sure Virginia Hill wasn’t in the house. And within 20 minutes, new management was running the flamingo. After the murder, photographs of Seagull’s bullet riddled body on the sofa appeared in newspapers across the country. It was the most graphic crime scene photo most Americans had ever seen, and it put Las Vegas on the front page of every paper in the nation. The irony is devastating.
In death, Bugsy Seagull did more to advertise Las Vegas than he ever could have alive. Under Gus Greenbomb’s management, the Flamingo became wildly profitable. It became the model for every luxury casino hotel that followed. The Sands, the Sahara, the Desert Inn. All of them followed the Flamingo blueprint.
Seagull’s vision of a gambling paradise in the desert turned out to be exactly right. He just didn’t live to see it. As for the people around him, their endings were brutal. Gus Greenbomb, the man who took over the flamingo, was found murdered alongside his wife on December 3rd, 1958. Both had their throats cut. Virginia Hill fled to Europe after being called to testify before the Keover Committee in 1951.
She denied knowing anything about organized crime. In 1954, she was indicted for tax evasion. She never returned to America. On March 24th, 1966, Virginia Hill was found dead near Salsburg, Austria. She was 49 years old. An overdose of sleeping pills, officially ruled a suicide. Whether it truly was remains another open question. Mo Sedway, the man who walked into the Flamingo that night and took control, died of natural causes in 1952.
He was one of the few people connected to this story who died in his own bed. Meer Lansky never spoke publicly about Seagull’s murder. >> Not once. The man who had been Seagull’s friend since they were teenagers on the Lower East Side. The man who had pleaded for his life at the Havana conference. The man who many believe ultimately gave the final approval for the hit.
Lansky carried whatever he knew to his grave. He died on January 15th, 1983 in Miami Beach. His net worth at the time of death was officially listed at about $300,000. That was, of course, a fiction. Federal authorities believed his hidden fortune ran into the hundreds of millions. The Flamingo still stands on the Las Vegas strip today, though nothing of the original structure remains.
It’s been rebuilt, expanded, and renovated beyond recognition. But walk through that lobby and you’re walking on ground that was paid for with mob money built on broken promises and baptized in blood. >> Benjamin Seagull spent his entire life chasing a version of greatness that the legitimate world would never give him.
He wanted to be a mogul, a builder, a man whose name meant something beyond fear. And he was right about Las Vegas. He saw what nobody else could see. A city of lights in the middle of nothing. A place where the rules didn’t apply. He just forgot the most important rule of all.
In the mob, you don’t get to keep what you build. You don’t get to overspend and explain later. You don’t get to skim from men who kill for a living. Bugsy Seagull saw the future. He was right about everything except the one thing that mattered most. The men who funded his dream were not investors. They were executioners who hadn’t decided on the date yet.
If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below. Who do you think really pulled the trigger that night in Beverly Hills? Was it Carbo, Canazaro, or someone whose name we still don’t know? This is Mafia Vault. Untold stories from the world of organized crime.