Part 1Cold Open
New York City. June twentieth, nineteen forty-seven.
A Friday.
In a room at police headquarters, two men are sitting across a table from each other, and one of them has come a very long way to be there.
His name is Clinton Anderson. He is the chief of police of Beverly Hills, California — twenty-five hundred miles west of that room — and he has flown all the way out here to collect a prisoner and take him home.
The case is a jewel robbery. A society woman in his town, relieved of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in stones. In 1947 that is not a burglary. That is a house. Several houses.
And the man across the table tells him they have the wrong man.
He has an alibi, and he is glad to give it. He was nowhere near Beverly Hills. He was in Nevada. He was at the Flamingo — the new place out on the highway that everybody in the country had been reading about that spring.
And somebody saw him there. Somebody who would say so.
The chief asks him who.
And the prisoner gives him a name that anyone in America would have known that summer. The best alibi witness a jewel thief could possibly name — a man who could put you at a table in his own casino and dare a jury to call him a liar.
Benjamin Siegel.
The one they called Bugsy.
Thirteen years later, Clinton Anderson wrote a book about what it was like to run the police department in Beverly Hills. And when he got to that afternoon in New York, he put the whole thing in one sentence.
"Two hours after I questioned him in New York police headquarters, his attempted alibi went up in gunsmoke in Beverly Hills, when a gangland executioner rubbed out Bugsy Siegel."
Two hours.
The most famous murder that town would ever have, and the chief of police was on the wrong side of the country, in a borrowed room, taking down the name of the dead man from a thief who was using him for cover.
He would spend the next twenty-two years trying to find out who did it.
He never did.
Part 2Short Intro
Welcome to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.
Now — you already know that name. Everybody knows that name. There have been movies about him. There is a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip still making money off him seventy-nine years later.
So let me tell you, right up front, why a show called Forgotten True Crime is doing Bugsy Siegel.
Because the man isn't forgotten. The murder is.
Nobody remembers that there were four other people in that house that night — awake, with the lights on. Nobody remembers the name of the man in the next driveway who woke up and shouted for the police. Nobody remembers the woman four hundred miles north who told a reporter she knew things about it.
And nobody can even agree, to this day, how many bullets were in him.
The usual reminder before we start: everything you're about to hear comes from the record, and where the record fights with itself — and it does, constantly, on this one — I'll tell you it's fighting.
And all of it is up at Section29.com. The front pages, the crime scene photographs, the FBI file. I'd rather tell you the story than read you the footnotes, so go and look at it yourself. The links are in the description.
Let's start with the town.
Part 3Anderson, and the Town He Ran
Beverly Hills, California.
About five and a half square miles of it, wedged in between Los Angeles on one side and Los Angeles on the other. Fewer than thirty thousand people live there, and a great many of their names are up on the fronts of movie theaters.
The man who ran the police department was named Clinton Anderson.
He took the job in 1942, so by the summer of '47 he is five years in. He will stay another twenty-two after that. Twenty-seven years, one town, one chair.
And in 1960 he wrote a book about it. It's called Beverly Hills Is My Beat, and it is about what you'd expect and also not at all what you'd expect — burglars, confidence men, a man who mailed bombs, Charlie Chaplin's girlfriend, and a steady, patient exasperation with rich people.
Here is how he described the work.
In thirty years, he wrote, Beverly Hills had had seven or eight murders.
Seven or eight. In three decades. Not a year — total.
And most of those, he said, weren't the kind that make the papers anywhere. They happened among the people who worked in those houses. In one of them a maid stabbed her employer to death in an argument over the correct way to bone a piece of meat.
That is the department. That is what it was built for. Burglary, mostly — and you can see why. If you were going to rob a house in America in 1947, you would have been hard pressed to find a better street to do it on.
It was not built for a man being shot through a window with a military rifle by somebody who had thought about it in advance.
Of those seven or eight murders in thirty years, Anderson wrote, only two ever became national news.
This is one of them.
And there is one more thing in that book.
Chapter fourteen.
Chapter fourteen is called "Who Killed Bugsy Siegel."
He never answers it.
Part 4The News Reaches New York
So that's the town. That's the chief.
And on the night it happened, he was not in it.
He was in New York — in a hotel, or a station house, or wherever they put you when you have come across a country to collect a prisoner. And somewhere in the hours after, a phone rang, or a wire came, or somebody knocked on a door.
Twenty-five hundred miles.
The biggest crime his city would ever have, and its chief of police heard about it the same way the rest of the country did.
We don't know what he thought.
He never wrote that part down. He wrote down the jewel robbery, and he wrote down that sentence about gunsmoke, and he never put a single word on paper about what it was to sit in a borrowed room in New York and be told that the man his prisoner had been hiding behind was lying dead on a sofa in Beverly Hills.
What we know is that he got on a plane.
And by the time he was back, it was gone. The house on North Linden Drive had been photographed from every angle by every paper in Los Angeles. The body was at the county morgue. And the four people who had been inside that house when it happened had given their statements and started to scatter.
One more thing about Anderson, and hold onto this one.
He had met him.
Benjamin Siegel had sat in the chief's own office, six months before, and the two of them had a conversation about it.
We'll come back to what was said.
Part 5The Last Day
Friday, June the twentieth, nineteen forty-seven.
He flew in from Las Vegas at four o'clock in the morning.
That's early even for a man who kept his hours. And he had three reasons to be in Beverly Hills that weekend, and every single one of them is ordinary.
The first is that his daughters were coming. Millicent was sixteen and Barbara was fourteen, and they were on a train out of New York with their mother, due in on Sunday for a visit. One of the girls had gone to Beverly Hills High School when the family lived out here. They had friends in town.
The second is money, and we'll come back to the money.
And the third is that he was moving out.
The house he stayed in when he came down wasn't his. It was a sixteen-room place on North Linden Drive, rented a couple of months earlier by a woman named Virginia Hill — from Juan Romero, who had once been Rudolph Valentino's manager. Siegel kept some clothes there. He had a gold key to the front door. He kept a thirty-eight automatic in a room upstairs.
And the lease was running out. So he came down to get his things and take them back to Nevada with him.
Virginia Hill was not there. She had left town about a week before, and by that Friday she was in Paris.
So here is that day.
In the afternoon he met Allen Smiley — a business associate, white-haired, the man he did things with — and Smiley drove him to a barber shop. He would not let anybody in Las Vegas cut his hair. He came down to Beverly Hills for his own barber.
Then he went and saw his attorney, a man named Joe Ross, about business.
At half past seven he was back at the house, because there was a dinner. Four of them: Siegel, Smiley, and the two young people who were living there — Charles Hill, who was twenty and was Virginia's brother, and Jerri Mason, who was twenty-four and was Virginia's secretary.
The four of them drove out to the beach for a trout dinner.
"Bugsy was in good spirits throughout the evening," Jerri Mason told a reporter the next day.
They came home at a quarter past ten.
And I want to put one more thing in front of you before this goes any further, because nobody ever mentions it.
Charles Hill and Jerri Mason were packing. They were leaving for Florida in the morning — going out to meet Virginia Hill there when she came back from Paris.
So think about that house. The lease is up. Siegel is there to collect his things. The two young people upstairs are leaving at first light. The woman who rented it is already four thousand miles away.
Everybody in that house was going.
Somebody came on the last night there was anyone in it.
Siegel and Smiley sat down side by side on a davenport in the living room, and they picked up the early editions of the Saturday morning papers, and they started to read.
The lights were on.
A few minutes before eleven, the window came apart.
Nine shots, very fast — fast enough that a detective would say later he thought the weapon had been worked on. From outside. From the driveway of the house next door, where a man had stood under an archway and rested a thirty-caliber military carbine on the latticework.
Twelve feet, give or take, from where the two of them were sitting.
Smiley went to the floor.
Upstairs, Jerri Mason heard it and came down, and the first thing she saw was Smiley stretched out on the floor, and she thought that he was dead.
Then she saw blood running down Bugsy's face.
And Smiley — from the floor — shouted the only words anybody recorded from inside that room.
"Douse the lights. They're shooting through the windows."
Siegel had not moved.
He was still sitting up against the back of the davenport with his hands in his lap and the newspaper between his legs, and he was already gone. One round had come in through his right cheek. The other had come in at the bridge of his nose.
That's what the county's chief autopsy surgeon said the next day. Two shots. Two.
And that is the first thing in this case that will not add up.
Because the head of the detective division said six.
The wire services, two days later, said four. The chief of police, thirteen years later, wrote four. And every book about this murder that I have ever read says four.
The man who opened his body said two.
Nine rounds went through that window. Two of them were in him, one of them went through Allen Smiley's coat sleeve, and the rest went into the wall and the paintings and Virginia Hill's marble statuary.
There is one more thing missing, and I didn't notice it for a while.
You know the story about the eye. Everybody knows the story about the eye — the shot that took it out and threw it across the room, and where it was found. It's in every account of this murder written in the last fifty years.
It isn't in the papers from that morning.
It isn't in anything the autopsy surgeon said.
And it isn't in the book the chief of police wrote.
Part 6The Scene He Came Home To
Two people outside that house heard it and did something, and both of them have names, and neither name has been printed in anything written about this murder since.
The man whose driveway the shooter stood in was called Martin Belousoff. He lived at eight-oh-eight North Linden Drive, next door. Nine shots went off at the side of his house and he came awake and did what you would do — he yelled for the police.
Across the street, a man named Lou Shane was visiting a friend. He got out to the road fast enough to see a car pull away hard and go.
That's it. That is the whole of what anybody saw.
When Clinton Anderson got back to his city and stood in that room, this is what he took from it — and I'm going to give it to you the way he wrote it, because he is very precise about it and he is not a man given to drama.
Somebody knew Siegel would be in Beverly Hills on that one day. Somebody knew he would be at Virginia Hill's house. And somebody knew when.
The heavy drapes over the living room window had been left open. There was a thin curtain across it, and the nine rounds tore through that — but the drapes were back, and the lamps were lit, and two men on a davenport were as visible from that driveway as actors on a stage.
The gunman was screened from the street by shrubbery.
The car did not park. It drove around, and around, until it was time.
And the shooting was timed to happen when there was no patrol car near — which Anderson knew, precisely, because in Beverly Hills a patrol car came through that neighborhood every thirty minutes.
Read that last part again.
Whoever did this knew the police schedule in the richest small city in America, and worked to it.
By daylight there were nine empty cartridge cases lying in Martin Belousoff's driveway. The investigators drew a chalk ring around each one and photographed them where they lay. You can still see the chalk.
Nine cases, on a private driveway, in Beverly Hills, and nobody had found them in the dark.
So the chief of police came home to a crime scene that told him almost everything.
He knew where the man had stood. He knew what he had fired. He knew he had been watched, and studied, and waited for.
And he did not have one person who had seen a face.
Part 7One Hour Later, in Las Vegas
Now go three hundred miles east, out into the desert.
Siegel had built a hotel out there. We'll get into what it cost him and who it cost — but for the moment all you need is that the Flamingo was his, and that it was his in a very complicated way.
An hour after he died in California, men walked into it and announced they were running it.
An hour.
One of them was Gus Greenbaum. One of them was a man named Moe Sedway.
And the third one — this is the part I want you to sit with — the third one, nobody can agree on. Some accounts say Morris Rosen. Some say David Berman. Two of the three names are the same in every telling and the third changes depending on who you read.
The most famous mob killing in the history of this country, and we cannot say for certain who walked through the door of his casino afterward to take it off him.
The timing has never settled either. Anderson, who investigated it, wrote one hour. Most accounts written since say minutes.
I'll take the chief's hour.
And I want to be careful here, because an hour is not less damning than twenty minutes. An hour is not a coincidence and it is not a rumor moving fast.
An hour is exactly long enough for somebody in California to make a telephone call.
Part 8The Man on the Davenport
The morning after he died, his name ran across the front page of a Los Angeles paper in letters an inch high.
And here is what shared that page with him.
The Senate had just come out of the longest continuous session it had sat in twenty years — twenty-eight and a half hours — arguing about whether to override the President on a labor bill. A racehorse called Assault had become the biggest money-winner in the world. Helsinki had been given the 1952 Olympics. And down at the bottom, the weather: a flawless day tomorrow. Not a trace of fog. The longest day of the year.
That's June of 1947. Two years out of a war. Everything being built at once.
And the man in the middle of that page had been in California for about eleven years.
He came out in 1936, when a prosecutor named Dewey started closing New York down and a certain kind of man found reasons to be somewhere else. Before that he was out of Hell's Kitchen, and he came up with the names you'd expect — Lansky, Adonis, Lepke Buchalter, a man they called Kid Twist. The rackets were furs, and dry cleaning, and for a while poultry. And the word used about him and Lansky, in the careful phrasing of the day, was that they had been trigger men.
So he bought a thirty-five room house in Los Angeles and set up as the biggest underworld figure on the West Coast, and then he did something none of the others did.
He went into society.
A countess took him up — Dorothy di Frasso, a New York heiress who had married an Italian nobleman and become the great hostess of the film colony. She thought having an actual gangster in her set was marvelous. She brought him to the parties. In 1938 the two of them sailed out of San Pedro on a three-masted schooner to hunt sharks and buried treasure, which is a real sentence about a real voyage, and it ended four months later in a federal grand jury hearing charges of mutiny.
He was charming. He wouldn't allow bad language in front of women. He didn't use narcotics and he barely drank, and he worked out and had a massage most days at the athletic club.
And he could not stand what people called him.
He'd got the name young, for what happened when he lost his temper — he went berserk, and it stuck, and he hated it. He wanted to be called Ben.
Nobody in a newspaper ever called him Ben.
But listen to the people who actually knew him. The man who worked for him, quoted two days after the killing: "I think Ben was getting a little too big for his britches." The woman whose house he died in, in Paris that same week: "Ben never gave me money."
The papers called him Bugsy in letters an inch high. Everyone who knew him called him Ben. And that includes, if you look closely at the photograph they ran of him, the shirt he had on — because there's a word stitched over the pocket, and the word is Ben.
Now. He'd been in trouble before, and it's worth knowing how that went.
In 1939 a New York mobster named Harry Greenberg was shot dead on a Hollywood street. Investigators came for Siegel the following August, and when they got to his house they found him hiding in the attic. They also found two safes behind sliding panels in the walls.
He went to the county jail to wait for trial, and the county jail was very good to him. Two officials were eventually suspended over it. He had eighteen trips outside in two months. He had his tailor make him a prison uniform in soft denim. He paid another prisoner to shine his shoes. He ate steak and pheasant for breakfast. And on one occasion he had lunch with a film actress while he was officially out getting his teeth fixed.
At a later hearing, accused of hiding Lepke Buchalter, he explained that he could not possibly have done it because at the time in question he had been in Rome, having an audience with the Pope. He also let it be known that he was on close terms with the King of Greece, the King of Italy, and the Duke of Spoleto.
The Greenberg case fell apart. And the judge who turned him loose said this:
"It must be conceded that some of the evidence discloses suspicion of a grave nature attaching to the defendant Siegel. But it is a long established rule of law that a defendant cannot be convicted on suspicion alone."
An old homicide detective, the morning after the shooting, put it more plainly.
He said Siegel had been a candidate for a slab in the morgue for a long, long time. And that honestly, it was amazing he'd kept his health as long as he did.
Part 9The Flamingo, and the Money
He had built something out in the desert, and it was killing him.
The Flamingo went up outside Las Vegas on twenty-four hour shifts — imported soil, imported trees, imported building material at a time when America had almost none to spare, and it took the grudging permission of a federal agency to get any of it at all.
He had planned to spend two million dollars. Depending on who you ask it cost five, or six, or seven. Nobody could agree what that building cost, and that is the first thing you should know about the Flamingo's books.
What we do know is that he did not own it. He had built it with other people's money — eastern money, syndicate money, men who had bought blocks of it and expected a return.
It opened in the last week of December and it was a catastrophe. It closed. It opened again in the spring. The casino lost two hundred thousand dollars at its own tables. And by that June the hotel was three million dollars in the red, and Siegel was telling people he had thirty days to find a million and a half or it was over.
Ten days before he died, he tried the last thing there was to try. He cut the room rates. He started giving away free cars and free radios, and seven hundred and fifty dollars in bingo every night of the week, a thousand on Sundays.
Some people said afterward that was too late. Some people said it was too late for the hotel. Others meant it differently.
Now here's what makes this more than an accounting problem.
Six months before he was killed, Benjamin Siegel sat in the office of the chief of police of Beverly Hills.
I told you we'd come back to that.
Anderson had heard what everybody had heard — that the money men were unhappy — and he brought Siegel in and told him, in about as many words, that he did not want anything unpleasant happening in his city.
And Siegel told him not to worry about it. He was spending his time in Las Vegas now.
A few months after that, Anderson was in New York on other police business, and he picked something up there. Siegel had been in the city for a meeting with the men who controlled the money, and he had left in a hurry.
The word going around was that his number was up.
The chief wrote later that he did not know at the time what he'd actually been told. He only understood it afterward. Beverly Hills had already been chosen.
And then there is the last thing, and it is a date.
On the Monday morning after he died, Benjamin Siegel had a meeting.
Five creditors held liens on the Flamingo totaling about one million one hundred thousand dollars, and they were all to sit down together in his lawyer's office in Beverly Hills and work out what was going to happen. The largest of those liens was held by Del Webb — the contractor who had actually built the place, a man who also owned a piece of the New York Yankees.
That meeting was set for Monday.
He was shot on Friday night.
Part 10Seven Men, and No One at All
The morning after he was killed, a Los Angeles paper put the problem in one sentence.
Placing a finger almost anywhere in any known racket could develop a reason for killing him.
And then, in a subheading, three questions.
Who did it? Why? Who's next?
That was June the twenty-first, nineteen forty-seven. Seventy-nine years ago. And people are still asking the first one.
So let's do the theories properly — starting with the ones the police were actually working while the body was still at the morgue, because they are not the ones you've heard.
They had three. And they were keeping strictly to the line that this was a professional job.
Theory one was revenge.
Remember Harry Greenberg, shot down on a Hollywood street in 1939, the case that put Siegel in the attic? Greenberg had friends. Those friends were still around in 1947, and some of them had spent eight years believing that justice had miscarried in that courtroom, and that the man who arranged it had walked.
That was the first theory the Beverly Hills police worked.
I want you to notice something about it. Go and read anything written about this murder in the last fifty years — every book, every documentary, every list of suspects — and see how many of them include it.
None of them do. It's gone.
Theory two was the money, and you already know the shape of that one. The casino had dropped two hundred thousand dollars at its own tables. The men who had bought pieces of it were, in the careful language of the day, extremely annoyed that he had failed to earn them a profit.
But there was a version of that theory that has also disappeared, and it is the strangest thing in the whole file.
One investigator told a reporter that a recent associate of Siegel's — a young man with a record that already included murder, and who was thought to have rather more guts than brains — was getting ambitious. That he wanted the whole thing for himself.
And then the investigator said this.
It is my strongest hunch that this fellow did away with Siegel. And he undoubtedly will be one of the first brought in for questioning.
He is not named.
Nobody was ever brought in. Nobody was ever arrested. And I do not know, and cannot find out, who that man was talking about.
Theory three was the biggest one — that eastern interests were quietly taking over the West Coast, and this was them arriving. The people who liked that theory pointed at a run of other killings. Big Greenie. A man called Benny the Meatball. Pauley Gibbons. George Levinson.
Now. Those are the three from 1947.
Here is what the last seventy-nine years have added.
Jack Dragna, the Los Angeles boss, given the job by the men back east. Frankie Carbo. Eddie Cannizzaro, who in 1987 said he did it himself. A man named Pandza, who supposedly killed him to protect Virginia Hill. Two Los Angeles killers known as the Two Tonys. Virginia Hill's own brother, who was upstairs. And Robert MacDonald — a war veteran and an expert marksman who owed Jack Dragna thirty thousand dollars, and whose family came forward in 2012 to say he'd done it.
Nobody ever test-fired MacDonald's carbine.
Nobody ever asked him anything at all.
And about Carbo — that name has been attached to this killing longer than any other, and there is something underneath it that almost nobody mentions. When Siegel was indicted for the Greenberg murder in 1941, he was not indicted alone. There were five men on that indictment. One of them was Lepke Buchalter.
And one of them was Frankie Carbo.
The man most often named as Bugsy Siegel's killer had sat at the same defense table as Bugsy Siegel, six years before, charged with the same murder.
That is not proof of anything. I want to be very clear about that. What it is, is a reason his name was already in the file when people went looking for one.
So: seven men.
Everyone has an answer. Which is another way of saying that nobody does.
And I'll tell you what strikes me about all of it. Every single one of those answers — the books, the confessions, the family coming forward, all of it — was built by people who have never read the police file.
Neither have I.
Nobody has, since 1947.
The paper that ran those three questions finished the story with a line I keep coming back to. Whether this was a local war or the east moving in, it said, observers were predicting more, and bloodier, of the same.
But somebody did read that file.
He read all of it. And thirteen years later, he wrote a book.
Part 11The Investigation
Here is what the chief of police wrote about it, thirteen years later.
That they spent many man-hours on the Siegel case. That they became convinced he had been killed by his own associates. And that there was never sufficient evidence to pinpoint the identity of the assassins.
So they worked it. I want that on the record before anything else, because the easy version of this story is that nobody bothered, and that is not what happened.
What happened is worse.
Start with the only man who was in the room.
Allen Smiley had been sitting close enough to Siegel that a round went through his coat sleeve. He was the single eyewitness to the most famous murder in California, and by that morning the police had him in the Beverly Hills jail as a material witness.
A detective explained why to a reporter. He was present at a murder, and we don't want anything to happen to him.
Smiley gave a statement to a deputy district attorney. He said the shooting happened about ten minutes after they got home.
And then, shortly before noon on the first day, Allen Smiley walked out of the Beverly Hills jail and left for a destination the newspapers could not discover.
That is the only eyewitness. In custody by breakfast. Gone by lunch.
Now Moe Sedway.
You remember him — one of the men who walked into the Flamingo an hour after Siegel died, three hundred miles away, to take the place over.
Anderson thought that was significant. So at the first opportunity he had, he picked Sedway up and questioned him, and then let him go, and told him he wanted to see him again the following day.
Overnight, Moe Sedway was suddenly removed to a hospital in Hollywood for treatment of a heart condition.
The chief went and found him anyway. He wrote down what he saw when he got there. Sedway was lying in bed, and on the door was a sign.
No Admittance. Oxygen.
Anderson stepped in regardless. They talked briefly. He told Sedway he would be back in the morning.
And when morning came, the sick man had been put on a train and taken to Las Vegas — where he stayed until he died, of natural causes, a short time later.
I have always felt that Moe Sedway had the information I wanted, Anderson wrote. But he wouldn't talk.
Twice. He had that man twice, and twice he was moved out of reach — once into a hospital bed behind an oxygen sign, and once onto a train out of the state.
Then it got worse.
Word got into the papers that the chief of Beverly Hills was looking into the Las Vegas end of things, and the chief of police of Las Vegas did not care for that at all.
So he went on the radio. And he announced that if he caught Clinton Anderson in his city carrying a gun, he would lock him up in a jail cell.
Sit with that. One chief of police went on a newscast to threaten another chief of police with arrest, for investigating a murder.
And when Anderson tried to get to the bottom of a violent falling-out among the men who had taken over the Flamingo, he found that the district attorney out there was also serving as the private attorney for one of the men involved.
He describes this, in print, as a rather unusual situation.
That is the chief being polite. I don't think we have to be.
And then the county's own man came back from Nevada.
The chief investigator for the Los Angeles district attorney spent four days in Las Vegas trying to make sense of it. Four days, and he came back with nothing, and what he said about it is the strangest epitaph this case has.
Everybody I talked to said they loved the guy.
He said Siegel was always good for a touch if a gambler went broke. He said city and county officials told him the Flamingo was run in a very above-board way. He came to the conclusion that there were only two motives worth considering — personal revenge, or a love affair.
And then he said this.
But it looks like Bugsy's pride in his personal appearance is what actually caused his death. He wouldn't let anyone in Las Vegas cut his hair. He came down to Beverly Hills to visit his favorite barber.
The chief investigator for the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, six days after the most famous gangland murder in America, telling a reporter that the man died because he was vain about his haircut.
The state finally turned up after that. The Attorney General of California — who two days earlier had announced he had full confidence in the local officers — decided he had better send his chief special agent down to look into Siegel's connections to black market liquor, slot machines, bookmaking, race wires, narcotics, prostitution, and anything else covered by the penal code.
Nobody was arrested.
Nobody was charged.
Not because there was no theory. The chief had a theory, and he published it in a book. Not because nobody worked it, either.
But because every time somebody who knew something got close enough to be asked, they went somewhere else.
Part 12What Washington Had
There is one more set of people who were interested in Benjamin Siegel, and they had been interested for a long time.
Eleven months before he was killed, in July of 1946, the federal government put a listening device on his telephone at a hotel in Las Vegas. They wanted to keep track of what one memo called his far-flung interests.
The investigation had a name. They were calling it the reactivation of the Capone gang.
They had files on him in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in Salt Lake City, in New York. They were watching him try to take over the racing wire — the service that carried results to every bookmaker in the West, which was the artery of the whole business. They had him tied to Lansky and Costello and Adonis. They were looking at a hotel chain he had an interest in. There was even a thought about charging him under the Mann Act for taking Virginia Hill across a state line.
And in August of 1946, they started looking at how the Flamingo got built.
Remember the imported soil, and the imported trees, and the building material that America had almost none of? Every bit of that needed federal permission, from an agency called the Civilian Production Administration. And the Bureau had information suggesting that officials of that agency had been bribed to grant it.
They were calling it fraud against the government.
And one file notes the possible involvement of a sitting United States senator — Pat McCarran of Nevada.
I want to be careful with that, because it is exactly the kind of thing this episode is about. That is an allegation in a federal file. It is not a finding, it was never charged, and Pat McCarran was never convicted of anything to do with the Flamingo. The file says possible involvement, and possible involvement is all it says.
So that is what the United States government had on Benjamin Siegel in the spring of 1947. A wiretap on his hotel telephone. A file on his casino's construction permits. A theory that reached a senator.
And on the night of June the twentieth, all of it stopped.
Because the Bureau had no jurisdiction. Nobody had committed a federal crime by shooting a man through a window in California. The inquiries came in, and the Director's instruction went back out to the Los Angeles office: tell the informants to take it to the local authorities.
The file stayed open for two more years, and there is not much in it. Newspaper clippings. A tip somebody passed along. A letter from a magazine publisher who wanted to know what the FBI thought of his coverage.
And then on the sixteenth of August, nineteen forty-nine, an agent typed two sentences and closed it.
The first sentence records that the contents of a document were furnished confidentially to somebody whose name is still blacked out today.
The second sentence is this.
It is suggested this case be closed.
That's it. That's the end of the federal file on Benjamin Siegel.
There are two more things about that piece of paper.
The heading on it — the subject line, the thing that tells you what the document is about — does not say homicide. It does not say investigation.
It says: police cooperation.
And they spelled his name wrong. Two G's. Buggsy. Three years in, on the last page in the folder, and nobody caught it, because by then nobody was reading it.
The federal government's file on Benjamin Siegel does not end with an answer.
It ends with a suggestion.
Part 13Vallejo
Back in the theories, I read you the last line of that story. Whatever this was, the paper said, observers were predicting more, and bloodier, of the same.
They were right.
Go four hundred miles north of Beverly Hills, to a Navy town on the top end of San Francisco Bay. Vallejo. Shipyard money, sailors, and a street called Georgia where a certain kind of business got done.
It is autumn, 1947. Fifteen weeks after the murder.
And the newspapers up there are printing something that nobody in Beverly Hills seems to have followed up.
They are printing that Bugsy Siegel had been taking money out of the houses on Georgia Street. That he had been supplying those houses with women. That he might have had an interest in narcotics moving up out of Solano County.
And they are printing that the person who had been collecting his money for him was a woman named Caroline Veisch.
Everybody called her Boots.
She was a redhead. She kept an apartment on Santa Clara Street. She was known around town — she'd been seen in the bars and the restaurants with respectable Vallejo people — and the papers were careful to say she was no imaginary character.
And then, at the end of September, Boots Veisch disappeared.
Here is what those papers said about it, and I am going to give it to you exactly as they gave it, because how it was reported matters as much as what was reported.
Confidential sources said she knew details of the killing in Beverly Hills. Details that might have implicated other people. And she was said to be ready to talk about them.
She vanished from her apartment early on a Sunday morning, after a visit from two men the paper called strong-arm characters.
The last time anyone saw her, she was in an all-night restaurant, in the early hours, wearing pajamas and a light coat.
She was sitting with a heavy-set man from San Francisco with cauliflower ears.
Now.
I need you to hear the other half of this, because I am not going to hand you a ghost story and call it evidence.
Everything I just told you came from crime pages in 1947, about a woman who worked in the sex trade, sourced to confidential sources and Los Angeles sources — which is to say, nobody you can check. The same papers, in the same week, reported that Siegel had been tommy-gunned to death. He was not. He was shot with a rifle, from outside, through a window. Three and a half months on, and they still had the weapon wrong — and they had it wrong in exactly the way a movie would have it.
So no, I cannot tell you that Boots Veisch was killed to keep her quiet. Nobody ever proved that. Nobody ever charged anybody. Nobody, as far as I can find, ever established what happened to her at all.
What I can tell you is this.
In October of 1947 a California newspaper printed that a named woman said she knew who had killed Bugsy Siegel and was prepared to say so, and that she had gone missing.
And in the seventy-nine years since, nobody has gone and looked.
Not one book. Not one documentary. Not one of the seven men and their seven answers.
There is one more thing, and it is not a rumor.
Back in June — six days after the murder, while Siegel was still above ground — the head of the federal narcotics bureau in Chicago told reporters that representatives of Lucky Luciano had met Siegel in Las Vegas the week before he died, and had told him to get out of the way of the narcotics syndicate. The war had closed the opium routes out of China, and the traffic was moving through Mexico and Lower California instead, and Siegel was in the road.
So the drug story was not something Vallejo dreamed up in October.
It was on the record in June, from a federal bureau chief, and nobody followed that either.
Part 14Our Theory
So let me tell you what I think, and then let me tell you where I stop.
I think he was killed over money, and I don't think it's close.
He had built a six-million-dollar building with other people's money and it was three million dollars in the hole. He had told friends he needed a million and a half inside a month. And on the Monday morning after he died, five men holding more than a million dollars in liens on that hotel were going to sit down together in his lawyer's office and decide what happened next.
He never got to that meeting.
The men who put up the money for the Flamingo took the Flamingo back within an hour of his death, three hundred miles away, and they did not seem surprised.
That's what I think. He was killed by the people who financed him, because he could not pay, and would not do what he was told.
And the second thing I think is that it was a decision, not a temper.
Somebody knew he would be in Beverly Hills on that one particular day, out of all the days. Somebody knew which house. Somebody left the heavy drapes standing open so there was nothing but a thin curtain between him and the driveway. And whoever stood in that driveway did it in the gap between two patrol cars, in a town where the patrol came through every thirty minutes.
That is not a grudge. That's a schedule.
Now here's where I stop.
I am not going to give you a name.
Seven men have been offered up over the years and I could pick one and you'd probably accept it, because that's how these episodes usually end. But the chief of police of that city had a badge, a witness, and a two-year head start, and he could not do it. I'm not going to do it from seventy-nine years away with the file still shut.
And there's a reason that sits so badly with me.
Back in 1942, when the Greenberg case fell apart, the judge who turned Benjamin Siegel loose said there was suspicion of a grave nature attaching to him — but that a man cannot be convicted on suspicion alone.
A judge said that about him.
Five years later it was true of him.
In August I asked the Beverly Hills Police Department for the file. Crime case number four-six-one-seven-six. I asked them for the reports, the photographs, the evidence logs — and for the one thing the law says they have to give you regardless, which is simply the time and the place and the circumstances of the crime.
Twenty-four days later, a records supervisor wrote back.
She told me the department had searched, and that it had found records responsive to my request. That those records are in the department's possession. And that they are exempt, and will not be disclosed.
And then she gave me the part she had to.
Crime — homicide. Reported the twentieth of June, nineteen forty-seven, at ten fifty-eight at night. Location, eight-ten North Linden Drive. Victim, Benjamin Siegel. Weapon, a thirty-caliber carbine.
And then the summary of the incident. One sentence. Written out for me this year, seventy-nine years after the fact, by the police department that has the file.
Unknown assailant shot into window of residence, fatally wounding victim.
Unknown assailant.
I also asked them what happens to a file like that. Whether a case from nineteen forty-seven even still exists, or whether it went out in somebody's basement cleanout thirty years ago.
It exists. It is on permanent retention. It is kept indefinitely, and it is not subject to any planned destruction.
And I asked who has it now. It is assigned to the Crimes Against Persons unit of the Detective Bureau. Present tense. This week.
So the file is intact. Somebody's name is on it. And the department's official position on who fired those shots — written down, this year — is unknown assailant.
That case has now been open for seventy-nine years. The federal government, which had no jurisdiction over it at all, was finished in twenty-six months. The department that actually caught the case has never closed it — and has never opened it either.
He is buried out at Hollywood Forever, and here is how he got there.
Six people came. It lasted four minutes. There was no eulogy — a rabbi read the twenty-third psalm, and it was over. It was at ten to nine in the morning and nobody was told it was happening; his own lawyer arrived five minutes too late. The casket cost five thousand dollars and it was sealed, because of what a thirty-caliber rifle does to a man's face. And afterward the family went out through a back entrance and across a rear yard so they wouldn't be seen.
There's a photograph of the casket coming out of that door.
Count the men carrying it. There are more of them than came to the service.
And that same morning, four thousand miles away, a reporter offered Virginia Hill a picture of him.
No. I don't want to see the picture. All that blood and everything. Don't show it to me.
She was getting into a green satin gown at the time. She was going to a ball that night.
Do you like my dress?
The chief of police spent twenty-seven years in that town. He wrote a book about it near the end. And there's a chapter in that book, chapter fourteen, and he called it Who Killed Bugsy Siegel.
He never answers it.
Neither do I.
And I want to be honest with you about why, because it isn't that the answer is unknowable. Somebody knew. Several people knew. The man in the hospital bed behind the oxygen sign knew. The only witness in the room knew something. The woman in Vallejo said she knew, and then she was gone.
The answer isn't lost.
Every single person who could have been made to say it was allowed not to.
Part 15Sign-off
Thank you for spending this time with me.
Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.
Everything for this episode is at Section29.com — the front pages from that Saturday morning, the crime scene photographs, the restored pictures, the FBI file, and the records request. Go and look at it. That's where the real work is.
Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast. There is no network, no studio, no staff — it's one man doing the research, the writing, the recording, the editing and the promotion. So if this was worth your fifty minutes, the best thing you can do is tell somebody about it. Share an episode. Post it. Leave a review wherever you're listening. It takes thirty seconds and for a show like this one it matters more than you know.
Music is by TrackTribe.
I'm Trevor Shelby. Thank you for listening.