Review: Michael Shnayerson’s “Bugsy Siegel”

“It is a short and gripping panorama of life in 1920s-1940s America, that defining epoch of struggle and stardom, hardship and grandeur, fortune and bankruptcy—and Bugsy Siegel experienced it all.”

Peering out over the Mojave Desert, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel supposedly dreamt of building “the god damnedest biggest hotel and casino you ever saw.” That is the story we are familiar with, indoctrinated into us from mob romanticism and Hollywood. Siegel, the suave and womanizing Jewish gangster who killed, plundered, and stole to the height of power, prestige, and the American Dream, is remembered as the mobster who built Las Vegas.

Michael Shnayerson, writing as part of Yale’s “Jewish Lives” series, is tasked with producing a biography of one of the most iconic, villainous, and seductive characters in American lore on the eve of the coming of the American Century. Shnayerson begins his book, which was released last month, by noting that “of the nearly fifty biographies that so far have constituted the Jewish Lives series, all are admirable figures. There are no bootleggers among them, no racketeers, gamblers, or murderers. Until now.” Siegel may not be an admirable figure, but he is certainly a romantic, seductive, and enticing character: a man from a bygone era, a man who seems to encapsulate the worst of the American experience but also the hope of opportunity, legitimacy, and power.

Perhaps one of the reasons we find such figures like Bugsy Siegel captivating is because he stands out. In the midst of the dull, mechanical, and rote, Siegel is a “larger-than-life figure” who embodied “excitement, sensuality, and fear.” In our current malaise against the exotic, the exciting, and the fearful, such men like Siegel still drag us to him because he was a sublime individual.