In the early hours of June 20, 1947, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel had returned to Los Angeles from Las Vegas, where he had just completed talks with other West Coast syndicate bosses on expanding gambling and prostitution interests in Las Vegas and the rest of the West Coast. The recently opened, lavish Flamingo Hotel had just begun to flourish in Las Vegas, and had cleared some $300,000 in the month of May. But Siegel made one big mistake. He siphoned off some $500,000 in syndicate funds for his own personal use, got caught and arrogantly refused to pay it back. In the afternoon Siegel returned to his rented Beverly Hills mansion with a friend, Allen Smiley. He had just finished consulting with his lawyer and visited his favorite barber shop.
At 10:45 P.M. the pair were relaxing in the living room when a series of shots from a .30 caliber carbine, fired by an assassin standing in the bushes outside the living room window, blasted through the room. One bullet tore through Siegel's head, ripping his eye and tossing it across the room. Four more slugs struck his body, cracking his ribs and puncturing his lungs. Three more missed, shattering objects around the room and burying themselves in the wall. At the first shot, Smiley dived to the floor and escaped injury. But Bugsy Siegel had finally become what some often refer to as "A GOOD JEWISH BOY."
The American people have been led to believe that the crime syndicate in America is strictly an Italian affair. Our Jewized entertainment media has produced countless films and TV shows depicting Italo-Americans as the masters of the syndicate. But a closer look reveals that Jews, not Italians, founded and financed the syndicate in the early days before prohibition.
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