Download or read book Bugsy Siegel written by Michael Shnayerson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the notorious Jewish gangster who ascended from impoverished beginnings to the glittering Las Vegas strip "[A] brisk-reading chronicle of Siegel’s life and crimes."—Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal "Fast-paced and absorbing. . . . With a keen eye for the amusing, and humanizing detail, [Shnayerson] enlivens the traditional rise-and-fall narrative."—Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York Times Book Review In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (1906–1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill‑gotten riches, from an early‑twentieth‑century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity. Through the 1920s, 1930s, and most of the 1940s, Bugsy Siegel and his longtime partner in crime Meyer Lansky engaged in innumerable acts of violence. As World War II came to an end, Siegel saw the potential for a huge, elegant casino resort in the sands of Las Vegas. Jewish gangsters built nearly all of the Vegas casinos that followed. Then, one by one, they disappeared. Siegel’s story laces through a larger, generational story of eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early‑ to mid‑twentieth century.
Download or read book Bugsy His Flamingo written by Kevin Johnstone and published by John William TUohy. This book was released on 2011-11-04 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Testimony of gun moll Virginia Hill before the Kefauver Committee
Download or read book The Mailbox in the Forest written by Kyoko Hara and published by . This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published in Japan in 2007 by SOENSHA Publishing Co., Ltd. Renewal edition published in 2019 by POPLAR Publishing Co., Ltd."
Download or read book We Only Kill Each Other written by Dean Jennings and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Man who Invented Las Vegas written by W. R. Wilkerson and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1946, two men battled for power in Las Vegas. Bugsy Siegel stole Billy Wilkerson's dream of a luxury hotel in the desert, and died in a hail of bullets. Although Billy lived on for many years, he never spoke of the man some believe was murdered for stealing his dream. Now, in this compelling First Edition, Billy's son uncovers the secrets behind the Flamingo Hotel and the death of Bugsy Siegel.
Download or read book L A Noir written by John Buntin and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now the TNT Original Series MOB CITY Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men—one L.A.’ s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief—each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.
Download or read book Gambling on a Dream written by Lynn M. Zook and published by America Through Time. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone thinks they know the history of the Las Vegas Strip. But the real story is both fascinating and not well known. What was there before the Bellagio, the Wynn, the Venetian, or those empty plots of land that look out of place? Why is the Flamingo one of the oldest and most surviving hotels on the boulevard? From conception to implosion, you get the detailed histories of the hotels built during those formative years, including the El Rancho Vegas, Hotel Last Frontier, Flamingo, Thunderbird, Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn, Sahara, Sands, Royal Nevada, Riviera, and the Dunes. Included in these histories are architectural designs, the neon signage, and how each of the hotels evolved. This book also includes rarely seen, historic imagery. The dreamers, who saw the future like few others and who built these hotels, helped turn a five-mile stretch of blacktop highway into the Entertainment Capital of the World. This is the story of the first twenty-five years of the Classic Las Vegas Strip--how it began, and how it grew.
Download or read book Bright Light City written by Larry Gragg and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Elvis crooned "Bright light city . . . gonna set my soul on fire," he voiced and embraced the siren call of a glittering urban utopia that continues to mesmerize millions. Call it Sin City or Lost Wages, Las Vegas definitely deserves its rapturous "Viva!" Larry Gragg, however, invites readers to view Las Vegas in an entirely new way. While countless other authors have focused on its history or gaming industry or entertainment ties, Gragg considers how popular culture has depicted the city and its powerful allure over its first century. Drawing on hundreds of films, television programs, novels, and articles, Gragg identifies changing trends in the city's portraits. Until the 1940s, boosters promoted it as the "last frontier town," a place where prospectors and cowboys enjoyed liquor, women, and wide-open gambling. Then in the early 1950s commentators increasingly characterized Las Vegas as a sophisticated resort city in the desert, and ever since then journalists, filmmakers, and novelists have depicted a city largely built by organized crime and featuring non-stop entertainment, gambling, luxury, and, of course, beautiful-and available-women. In Gragg's narrative, these images form a kaleidoscope of lights, sounds, characters, and ultimately amazement about this neon oasis. In these pages, readers will meet gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, Tony Spilotro, and Lefty Rosenthal, as well as Las Vegas's most popular entertainers: Elvis Presley, Sinatra's Rat Pack, Liberace, and Wayne Newton, not to mention the Folies Bergere showgirls. And Gragg's skillful interweaving of fictional and journalistic accounts of organized crime shows just how mutually reinforcing they have become over the years. Vegas will always make people's eyes light up as bright as the Strip, witness the new TV show Vegas or the recent film The Hangover. For everyone entranced by its glitter and glamour, Bright Light City is a must read boasting color photos and bursting with insider details: an eclectic blend of stories, people, sights, and sounds that together make up this desert city's extraordinary appeal.
Download or read book Tough Jews written by Rich Cohen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning writer Rich Cohen excavates the real stories behind the legend of infamous criminal enforcers Murder, Inc. and contemplates the question: Where did the tough Jews go? In 1930s Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who now exist only in legend and in the memories of a few old-timers: Jewish gangsters, fearless thugs with nicknames like Kid Twist Reles and Pittsburgh Phil Strauss. Growing up in Brownsville, they made their way from street fights to underworld power, becoming the execution squad for a national crime syndicate. Murder Inc. did for organized crime what Henry Ford did for the automobile, and Tough Jews is the first in-depth portrait of these men, a thrilling glimpse at the muscle that made possible the success of gangster statesmen such as Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano. For Rich Cohen, who grew up in suburban Illinois in the 1980s taunted by the stereotype of Jews as book-reading rule followers, the very idea of the Jewish gangster was a relief; for once, a Jew in jail did not have to be a white collar criminal. With a clear eye and a comic sensibility, Cohen looks beyond the blood and ultimately encounters each of these ruthless killers’ matzo-ball heart. Tough Jews shows what can happen when a member of the tribe combines brains, heart, and a dangerous determination never to back down.
Download or read book The Green Felt Jungle written by Ed Reid and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expose of crime in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Download or read book Becoming America s Playground written by Larry D. Gragg and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950 Las Vegas saw a million tourists. In 1960 it attracted ten million. The city entered the fifties as a regional destination where prosperous postwar Americans could enjoy vices largely forbidden elsewhere, and it emerged in the sixties as a national hotspot, the glitzy resort city that lights up the American West today. Becoming America’s Playground chronicles the vice and the toil that gave Las Vegas its worldwide reputation in those transformative years. Las Vegas’s rise was no happy accident. After World War II, vacationing Americans traveled the country in record numbers, making tourism a top industry in such states as California and Florida. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce saw its chance and developed a plan to capitalize on the town’s burgeoning reputation for leisure. Las Vegas pinned its hopes for the future on Americans’ need for escape. Transforming a vice city financed largely by the mob into a family vacation spot was not easy. Hotel and casino publicists closely monitored media representations of the city and took every opportunity to stage images of good, clean fun for the public—posing even the atomic bomb tests conducted just miles away as an attraction. The racism and sexism common in the rest of the nation in the era prevailed in Las Vegas too. The wild success of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack performances at the Sands Hotel in 1960 demonstrated the city’s slow progress toward equality. Women couldn’t work as dealers in Las Vegas until the 1970s, yet they found more opportunities for well-paying jobs there than many American women could find elsewhere. Gragg shows how a place like the Las Vegas Strip—with its glitz and vast wealth and its wildly public consumption of vice—rose to prominence in the 1950s, a decade of Cold War anxiety and civil rights conflict. Becoming America’s Playground brings this pivotal decade in Las Vegas into sharp focus for the first time.
Download or read book We Only Kill Each Other written by Dean Jennings and published by . This book was released on 1991-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the life of Bugsy Siegel, the successful bootlegger who helped build the Las Vegas Strip and was mysteriously murdered at age forty-one
Download or read book The Last Mafioso written by Ovid Demaris and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The night Jimmy Fratianno became a government witness, not a single Mafia boss slept. As a "made guy" in La Cosa Nostra, Jimmy Fratianno knew their best-kept secrets. A soldier, capo, and ex-boss of the Los Angeles family, involved at the highest levels with bookmaking, gambling, union racketeering, extortion, pornography, and virtually every criminal activity to which organized crime is linked, Fratianno also earned the reputation as the Mafla's top killer in California.Fratianno became the highest-ranking Mafloso ever to "turn," and in the past two years his testimony, in courtrooms across the nation, has been making sensational headlines. A veteran investigative reporter and bestselling author, Ovid Demaris had the unprecedented opportunity to debrief Fratianno in order to write this book. Demaris also had access to wiretaps, surveillance reports, prison and court records, The result is the most important work to date on organized crime in America---a disturbing, yet extraordinary and vivid life story that makes the other "insider" stories of the Mafia look like tales of innocence.The Last Mafioso details eleven murders Fratianno was personally involved in, and relates Fratianno's inside knowledge of some two dozen others, including the slayings of Bugsy Siegel, Nick DeJohn, Albert Anastasia, Jimmy Hoffa, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Tamara Rand. Fratianno was a confidant of Johnny Roselli, so Demaris tells the real story of Operation Mongoose, the CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro. Here also are the behind-the-scenes deals and machinations of the Mafia in Las Vegas. Fratianno's life was not spent entirely with his criminal friends, although The Last Mafioso records the secret lives of virtually all the important Mafiosi of the last thirty years. Fratianno moved perpetually in exotic circles, a man of inexhaustible energy, an ingenious schemer and scammer, an insatiable womanizer and socializer who was quick to ingratiate him-self with Mafia royalty, Hollywood celebrities, politicians, prominent lawyers, successful businessmen, and Teamster officials. In The Last Mafioso there are countless episodes with the likes of Frank Sinatra and ex-San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto.
Download or read book Last Call written by Tim Powers and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1996-12-01 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enchantingly dark and compellingly real, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Last Call is a masterpiece of magic realism from critically acclaimed author Tim Powers. Set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas, Last Call tells the story of a one-eyed professional gambler who discovers that he was not the big winner in a long-ago poker game . . . and now must play for the highest stakes ever as he searches for a way to win back his soul.
Download or read book Cradle of Crime written by Luellen Smiley and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-11-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eye-opening memoir, twenty years in the making, chronicles Luellen Smiley's journey into her father's criminal past, beginning ten years after his death. Luellen is the daughter of the late Allen Smiley-Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's best friend and business partner for ten years. He was seated next to Bugsy the night he was murdered. Smiley's refusal to turn informant despite an order of deportation, and facing ten years in prison, earned Meyer Lansky's respect. The Mafia defended, financed, and protected Allen for the rest of his life. Luellen discounted her father's Mafia association until she was forty years old. Awakened by an identity meltdown, she cut through her silence and confronted her father's criminal activities. Discoveries derived from government surveillance records, newspaper articles, court testimony, classified FBI documents, interviews and conversations with relatives she begins to write this story. Luellen takes the reader along for the ride on her quest to understand her father's allegiance to the mob while also uncovering her own identity-a quest of humiliation, rage, shame, and acceptance.
Download or read book Family Secret written by Warren Robert Hull and published by Hats Office Books. This book was released on 2004-10-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 20, 1947 one of the most notorious gangsters of the twentieth century, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, was murdered in the Beverly Hills mansion of his mistress, Miss Virginia Hill. While there have been numerous theories in regard to who actually killed "the father of Las Vegas," the fact remains, the Siegel murder case is still officially unsolved...until now. In 1941, when Bob MacDonald married Betty Ann Rockwell, it appeared as though their relationship was the start of a very majestic affair. The teens were from the upper class of Southern California society, exceptionally good looking, and by all accounts it seemed to be foreordained that they would live a full and happy life. MacDonald's father, Archibald, was the right-hand man to America's wealthiest man, Howard Hughes, Jr., while Betty Ann's mother, Gaynell Rockwell-Applegate, was a woman of "new money." At a glance, it seemed as if the couple should have lived a life with a storybook ending. Sadly, in 1947, the life of splendor expected for the couple turned into a family nightmare with horrendous consequences. On September 13, 1947, without apparent reason or motive, Bob MacDonald, age 27, took a .30 caliber, army type, carbine rifle and shot his wife, Betty Ann, age 24, two times-once in the back and once in the head. After killing his wife, MacDonald then turned the weapon on himself and committed suicide. The high society community the couple was a part of was mortified by the event. People wanted to know what could have possessed Bob MacDonald to do such a thing. How could this man, the son of a millionaire, a war hero, the winner of three Purple Hearts, the Silver Star and the Bronze Star, and the father of twochildren, commit such a gruesome act? What could have possibly driven him to the type of madness where he would kill his wife and then take his own life? In the hours following this terrible event, the couple's parents, using their financial capital, powerful political ties, social contacts and business experience, formed a consortium of secrecy to ensure the public would never find the answer to the question of why Bob MacDonald did what he did. The families agreed to keep MacDonald's motives for killing his wife and then himself a... Family Secret. The shroud of secrecy, which had been in place over the intimate elements of this amazing story for over half a century, was lifted in 1996, when one of the "family insiders" made a dramatic deathbed confession to Family Secret author, Warren R. Hull. Honoring his father's request to tell the world the secret behind the Siegel killing, Hull provides an incredible explanation as to who murdered Benjamin Siegel, and more importantly, how and why the murder was never solved by the police!
Download or read book The Law s Flaws written by Larry Laudan and published by . This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the law's failure as a system of empirical inquiry. While the US Supreme Court repeatedly says that the aim of a trial is to find out the truth about a crime, there is abundant evidence that many of the rules of evidence and legal procedure are not truth-conducive. Quite the contrary; many are truth-thwarting. Relevant evidence of defendant's guilt is often excluded; reasonable inferences from the available evidence are likewise often excluded. When a defendant elects not to testify, jurors are told to draw no inculpatory inferences from the former's refusal to be questioned. If evidence of prior crimes committed by the defendant is admitted (and often it is excluded), jurors are strictly told to use them only for deciding whether the defendant lied during his testimony and not as evidence of his guilt. Making matters worse, the most important evidence rule of all (saying that defendant can be convicted only if there are no reasonable doubts about his guilt) is monumentally vague; and judges are under firm instruction to decline jurors' frequent requests to explain what a 'reasonable doubt' is. Lastly, this book examines the fact that American courts collect little information about how often they convict the innocent and no information about how often they acquit the guilty. This is tragic because ignorance of the error rates in trials and in plea bargains means that citizens have no grounds for confidence in the judicial system; such a condition of non-transparency should be unacceptable in a democracy. Reform is urgent and this book sketches some of the necessary changes.
