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Bugsy Siegel — the gangster straight out of a Hollywood movie

27 March 2021

9:00 AM

27 March 2021

9:00 AM

Bugsy Siegel: The Dark Side of the American Dream Michael Shnayerson

Yale, pp.248, 18.79

Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1906, he was still a teenager when he teamed up with Meyer Lansky to become a successful bootlegger and mob enforcer. But when Mayor La Guardia came along in the early 1930s to clean up New York’s underworld, Siegel moved to California, and began dressing the way film adaptations of gangsters were supposed to.

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