ISBN: 9781156984420

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: … Meer...

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (February 28, 1906 June 20, 1947) was an American gangster who was involved with Italian-American organized crime. Siegel was a major driving force behind large-scale development of Las Vegas. Benjamin Siegelbaum was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a poor Jewish family from Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (February 28, 1906 June 20, 1947) was an American gangster who was involved with Italian-American organized crime. Siegel was a major driving force behind large-scale development of Las Vegas. Benjamin Siegelbaum was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a poor Jewish family from Letychiv, Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire, in modern Ukraine. As a boy, Siegel joined a gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and committed mainly thefts, until, with a youth named Moe Sedway, he devised his own protection racket: pushcart merchants were forced to pay him a dollar or he would incinerate their merchandise. During adolescence, Siegel befriended Meyer Lansky, who was forming a small mob whose activities expanded to gambling and car theft. Siegel reputedly also worked as the mob's hit man, whom Lansky would hire out to other crime families. On January 28, 1929, Siegel married Esta Krakower, his childhood sweetheart and sister of hit man Whitey Krakower. In 1930, Lansky and Siegel built ties to Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Frank Costello, future bosses of the Genovese crime family. Siegel became a bootlegger and was associated with Albert "Mad Hatter" Anastasia. Siegel was involved in bootlegging in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Siegel and Anastasia, together with Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis, were the four gunmen who shot New York mob boss Joe Masseria to death on Luciano's orders on April 15, 1931, formally ending the Castellammarese War. On September 10 of that year, Luciano hired four trigger men from the Lansky-Siegel gang to murder Masseria's rival, Salvatore Maranzano, cementing Luciano's rise to the top of the U.S. Mafia and marking the birth of modern American organized crime. In 1932. More: Books, , People-Murdered-by-the-Los-Angeles-Crime-Family~~Books-LLC, , , , , , , , , , General Books LLC<