Perhaps the most apocryphal myth in the history of Las Vegas is that Benjamin Siegel stood on the side of the Highway 91 south of Las Vegas, surveyed the bleak and barren Mojave, and had a blinding vision of a glorious future. Bugsy, as the story goes, foresaw the Fabulous Flamingo at the literal and figurative center of the greatest boomtown the world had even known. That’s certainly the way it was portrayed in the 1991 movie Bugsy, starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
In fact, according to the book The Man Who Invented Las Vegas, what Siegel really saw was the Fabulous Flamingo already under construction, and his vision was to terrorize the place and its people until it was his.
William "Billy" Wilkerson II was a 1930s and ‘40s L.A. bon vivant and compulsive gambler who founded and published the influential daily Hollywood Reporter and owned the hip nightspots Cafe Trocadero and Ciro's. His celebrity, business successes, and degenerate gambling combined to make him one of the great plungers of the war era, a homing pigeon for the casinos of Las Vegas.
Wilkerson hated Las Vegas, considering it vulgar and cruel, but he believed that the town held the promise to cure his gambling problem -- if he owned a casino there. But his vision, according to the book, which was written by his son William Wilkerson III, called for the class of Paris, not the hokum of the Western frontier that was prevalent in Las Vegas at the time; the El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier were the only two casinos on the Los Angeles Highway when Wilkerson dreamed up the Flamingo. He wanted his resort to "house all his passions under one roof," including a casino, showroom, nightclub, lounge, bars, steakhouse, café, hotel, shops, health club, swimming pool, tennis, golf, and trap and skeet.
Wilkerson bought a 33-acre parcel on the L.A. highway, even farther south than the Last Frontier, for $84,000 in 1945, then scraped together enough money to begin building his dream resort. But a funny thing happened on the way to casino heaven: Bugsy Siegel. At first, Siegel ingratiated himself with Wilkerson, learning his secrets, especially his vision for the hotel-casino, and his financial precariousness due to gambling.
That’s when Siegel’s true colors appeared; he was, after all, a lifelong criminal and vicious murderer. He not only started pulling the Flamingo’s strings, he also put Wilkerson in fear of his life. Initially, Siegel insinuated himself and his partners into the ownership of the Flamingo by organizing the Nevada Project Corp.; the original owners included Wilkerson, Siegel as president, and Siegel associates Moe Sedway and Harry Rothberg. Next Siegel forced Wilkerson to turn over his remaining interest in the Flamingo and negotiate a $600,000 loan with Valley National Bank of Phoenix, Arizona, in his own name. Finally, Wilkerson had to flee to Paris, where he hid out from Siegel’s murderous wrath until after Siegel himself was murdered in June 1947.
The rest of the Las Vegas part of the story is well-known. The Flamingo was taken over by Siegel’s associates and remained under mob ownership and control until Kirk Kerkorian bought it in 1967.
Wilkerson returned from Paris to L.A. and, according to the account in the Hollywood Reporter, "washed his hands of the casino business to pursue another dream, one that ultimately kicked his gambling habit: fatherhood." He met and married Beatrice "Tichi" Noble, who became his sixth wife; she was 19, he was 60. Tichi had two children, William and Cynthia. Wilkerson died at his Bel-Air home on Sept. 2, 1962, at age 72.
This story didn’t come out till recently, when Billy Wilkerson III published his book about his dad in 2000. In the end, Bugsy Siegel’s usurpation of the Flamingo from Billy Wilkerson II was so complete that he even convinced history, for more than 50 years, that the whole thing was all his own idea.
