Bugsy Siegel and the Birth of the Flamingo

By the time Benjamin Siegel showed up, the Strip already existed in rough form. The El Rancho Vegas opened in 1941, and the Last Frontier followed a year later, both south of the city line where land was cheap and the rules were looser. The idea of a desert resort highway was already in motion.

What Vegas did not have yet was glamour. The early places were Western themed, sawdust on the floor, more roadside than red carpet. That gap is the part Siegel saw.

Siegel got involved with the Flamingo project that was already underway, backed by mob money tied to figures like Meyer Lansky. He pushed it toward luxury, imported furnishings, real landscaping, and a sense that this was Hollywood in the sand. It went wildly over budget, and the money men noticed.

The Flamingo opened the day after Christmas in 1946. The opening was a flop. Bad weather, an unfinished hotel, and stars who did not show up the way he promised. It closed, regrouped, and reopened in 1947 to better numbers, but by then the trust was gone.

In June 1947, Siegel was shot and killed at his girlfriend Virginia Hill's home in Beverly Hills. The case was never officially solved, though almost everyone connects it to the people whose money disappeared into the Flamingo.

Here is the irony. Siegel did not invent the Strip and he did not even run the Flamingo for long. But a handsome gangster, a glamorous casino, and an unsolved murder is a story Vegas could not resist. The legend outgrew the facts, and the Flamingo became the place where modern Vegas supposedly began.