On the night of June 20, 1947, a gunman rested an M1 carbine on a trellis outside a Beverly Hills mansion and fired through the living room window, killing Benjamin Siegel as he read the Los Angeles Times. This episode traces how he got to that couch. Born around 1906 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrants, he started by charging pushcart vendors a dollar not to burn their carts, then teamed with Meyer Lansky and helped Lucky Luciano build a national crime syndicate and its enforcement arm, Murder Inc.

Sent west to stay alive, Siegel took over the Los Angeles rackets, befriended Clark Gable and Cary Grant, and squeezed the studios through the unions. After a 1941 murder trial left him unwelcome in Hollywood, he seized control of the unfinished Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and imagined a luxury resort with private bathrooms, air conditioning, and top entertainers. The budget ballooned from one million dollars to more than six million, and his partners began to suspect he was stealing from them.

• Siegel once checked into a hospital to build an alibi, slipped out a window, posed as a detective to lure Tony Fabrizzo outside, shot him, and climbed back into bed.
• By 1942 his racing wire service was earning about half a million dollars a day, partly by delaying race results so his men could place sure bets.
• On a 1938 trip to Italy with Countess Dorothy di Frasso he took a 40,000 dollar advance from Mussolini for a silent explosive that failed to go off, and offered to kill Goering and Goebbels.
• The Flamingo’s opening on December 26, 1946 was a fiasco of unfinished rooms and power drills, and the casino lost money that night.
• Minutes after the shooting in Beverly Hills, three Lansky associates walked into the Flamingo and announced they were the new management.