The Flamingo Dreams And The Dark Side Of Las Vegas

Bugsy Siegel and the Violent Birth of Sin City

von Luca Bellarosa

164 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Ask most Americans who built Las Vegas, and they'll tell you it was Bugsy Siegel - a Brooklyn gangster who walked into the empty desert with a vision and a suitcase of mob money and conjured, from nothing, the gambling capital of the world.It isn't true. The Flamingo wasn't Siegel's idea. It belonged to Billy Wilkerson, a Hollywood publisher and nightclub owner who had already broken ground on his European-style desert resort before Siegel's syndicate money ever bought its way in - and then bought Wilkerson out entirely, for a fraction of what the hotel would soon be worth.What Siegel actually did was worse than fiction and considerably more interesting: he seized someone else's unfinished dream, blew a $1.5 million budget to $6 million, opened six weeks early to a half-built hotel and a rainstorm that kept the stars away, and closed within a month, bleeding syndicate money he couldn't fully account for. Somewhere in that accounting gap sat roughly two million dollars, a girlfriend with European bank accounts, and a national crime syndicate running out of patience.On June 20, 1947, a gunman fired nine shots through a Beverly Hills window. Twenty minutes later - too fast for coincidence - three men walked into the Flamingo and announced a new management. No one was ever charged. No weapon was ever found.The Flamingo Dreams and the Dark Side of Las Vegas separates the documented record from the legend Hollywood built - and restores the forgotten man whose name the desert never learned to remember.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175675826
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 19.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published