MYTH: Bugsy Siegel “invented” Las Vegas.
REALITY: Vegas was a boom town long before Siegel built the Flamingo Hotel.

The start of the Boulder Dam project. the largest in Nevada’s history, brought almost 10,000 workers to a site just 25 miles from Las Vegas. That’s when the Legislature legalized gambling statewide. The state received more than 200 applications for gaming licenses. And Vegas, Nevada’s fourth-largest city with 5,000 (count ‘em, 5,000) souls, became a boom town overnight.

When Siegel arrived in Vegas in 1941, he found at least seven hotel/casinos in operation, including two sizeable resorts—the El Rancho Vegas on 66 landscaped acres, and soon after, the Last Frontier, with 170 rooms. Some were air-conditioned. Siegel tried to muscle into El Rancho but was rebuffed by the owner, who lived to tell about it. He succeeded in buying the El Cortez with money from Meyer Lansky and his New York associates. They sold out a year later, doubling their money. Siegel next set his sights on a partially completed hotel on the outskirts of town. It was already called the Flamingo by its owner, Billy Wilkerson, a degenerate gambler whose debts left him unable to finish it. Siegel bought him out, and convinced his Cortez partners to reinvest their profits into the Flamingo. The new hotel lost money when it opened on December 27, 1946. Siegel closed it to finish building the sleeping rooms. It started making money when it reopened in the spring of 1947. But Siegel was soon assassinated, and the Flamingo was taken over by Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum, both big-time, Mob-connected gaming operators. It made money hand over fist.

Siegel’s main contributions to modern Las Vegas were to build the first hotel/casino in the glamorous Miami Beach style, and to use his notoriety to add “gangster mystique” to the average visitor’s concept of legalized gambling. The real “inventors” of Las Vegas were the upright Mormon state senators and representatives who had the foresight to legalize—and tax—an activity that had been going on in Nevada since it was first settled.