Question of the Day - 13 November 2017

Actually, it was exactly 70 years ago last June 20 that Ben Siegel was murdered in the Beverly Hills home of his paramour, Virginia Hill.

For decades, it was believed that Siegel’s death, which was approved by the “Board of Directors” of the national syndicate of mobsters at a meeting in Havana, was the result of the major cost overruns in the construction of the Flamingo Hotel-Casino, for which Siegel was responsible. Rumors also abounded that he was skimming some of that money for himself and Hill, who flew, suddenly, to Paris four days before Siegel was hit at her house.

There was no shortage of suspects who might have killed Siegel or hired his killer, from the countless enemies Bugsy had made in his 41 years, many of them vicious killers themselves, to Virginia Hill’s brother Chick, who’d seen Siegel beat up his sister on more than one occasion, and even Esta Krakower Siegel, Ben’s wife and mother of their two daughters who might have grown tired of his womanizing.

Ralph Natale, the big boss of a Philadelphia crime family, in his recent book Last Don Standing: The Secret Life of Mob Boss Ralph Natale, writes that Frankie Carbo, a soldier in the Lucchese crime family who worked side by side with Siegel in Murder, Inc., did the deed as a personal favor for Meyer Lansky. 

However, the new information concerns a relationship between one Matthew Pandza, known as “Moose,” and Bee Sedway, the wife of “Little” Moe Sedway, who’d grown up with Lansky and Siegel in New York and had served the interests of Lansky and the mob in Las Vegas since the mid-1930s. Moe and Ben were good friends; Siegel was the best man at Moe’s wedding to Bee and godfather to their son Robbie.

According to this account, told by Bee Sedway and retold by Robbie, Moe Sedway had tried to talk Siegel out of being his own general contractor for the building of the Flamingo; after all, Siegel had zero experience with construction and subcontractors. And it was Sedway’s unenviable job to report daily to Lansky about the cost overruns and to try to rein in Siegel’s extravagant overspending.

Siegel became increasingly enraged with Sedway’s meddling and tattle-telling and finally confided in a few friends that he was planning to personally solve the Sedway problem by killing him and “grinding up his body” in the Flamingo’s industrial garbage disposal.

Bee Sedway caught wind of the plan and convinced Moose Pandza to intervene.

Pandza wasn’t a gangster; he was a truck driver and crane operator who earned his nickname due to his size: six-three and 240 pounds. He and Bee met at a Los Angeles nightclub and began an affair (they later got married); when Bee told her husband about Moose, Moe insisted on meeting him and liked him so much that he agreed to “share” his wife with him. (Moe was having affairs of his own.)

Pandza reportedly took target practice for a few weeks in the desert. On the appointed night, he monitored police patrols in Virginia Hill’s neighborhood. At the right time, he stepped through the property’s flowerbeds, rested his gun on the windowsill, and fired away. He covered his tracks and was never found out.

Because the hit was sanctioned by the bosses, there was no retaliation.

All this is according to a 2014 Los Angeles magazine story, which reported that Bee Sedway admitted to her son Robbie that Moose killed Siegel in a preemptive strike to protect Moe. She also told the whole story in a book proposal that circulated in the early ’90s. The book was never published, but the magazine got hold of it, along with a two-hour interview Bee gave to documentary filmmakers.

Robbie, who confirmed the story with Los Angeles magazine, died of throat cancer shortly after the article appeared in 2014.   

Ben Siegel and Moe Sedway are buried close to each other at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.