His son writes that construction of the Flamingo began in November of 1945 and that “nearly a third” of the hotel and casino were completed by the time Wilkerson ran into financial problems two months later, in January 1946. Wilkerson gambled $150,000 of his remaining $200,000 and lost all of it. “A businessman from the east coast,” G. Harry Rothberg, learned of this predicament and offered to help, Wilkerson III recounts. G. Harry Rothberg was in fact a front for Meyer Lansky, whom Billy Wilkerson would never meet and whose connection to Rothberg he may have never known.
A month later, two other Lansky associates, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum, came to visit the construction site to check on Wilkerson’s progress. “They brought with them a loudly-dressed character who enthusiastically presented himself to the publisher as his new partner,” Wilkerson III writes. “This man was Ben Siegel,” who was no longer just Wilkerson’s colorful acquaintance but now the co-manager of his hotel and casino.
STATELESS
It was legal — Las Vegas was like Cuba in this way. Among other things, Las Vegas and Cuba would have seemed like safe havens, places of refuge. They all would have seen that the same thing that had just happened to Luciano could happen to any of them. At any time they could be sent to jail or back where they’d come from.
In September of 1946, Lansky sent Luciano a telegram in Sicily that said, “December — Hotel Nacional.” It meant they were to meet in Havana at that time. The plan was for Luciano’s exile to take place not in Italy but in Havana, just a short plane or boat ride away from the U.S., the only place he had ever felt at home.
From Cuban author Enrique Cirules, T. J. English passes on to us this portrait of the first night of the “Havana Conference,” which reunited Lansky with Luciano and their cohort of Jewish and Italian gangsters, the uneasy alliance of men who had invested millions in the casinos of Las Vegas and Cuba:
There were crab and queen conch enchiladas brought from the southern archipelago. For the main course, there was a choice of roast breast of flamingo, tortoise stew, roast tortoise with lemon and garlic, and crayfish, oysters, and grilled swordfish from the nearby fishing village of Cojímar. There was also grilled venison sent by a government minister from Camagüey who owned livestock and, the most obscure delicacy of all, grilled manatee. The guests drank añejo rum and smoked Montecristo cigars.
Later, the visiting delegates were encouraged to make the most of their inaugural night in Havana. A fleet of fifty cars with chauffeurs was at the ready. Dancers and showgirls from the city’s three main nightclubs — the Tropicana, the Montmartre, and the Sans Souci — were selected and paid for their services, as were prostitutes from Casa Marina, the classiest and most renowned bordello in the city.
One reads this passage and fails to connect it in any way to what one knows about the silent, inward Lansky. What would he have ordered from that preposterous menu? What would he have done after dinner but gone to his room?
It’s finally quiet when the girl arrives, only a faint sound of music coming in through the partly opened window. She’s young and speaks no English, and he makes her a drink with a cube of ice from the bucket and they sit on the bed in the dim light and he looks down at his hands. After a while, he touches her chin and slowly turns her face and looks at her with something like mild rebuke or even pain in his eyes. He takes her glass back in his hands and she stands up and turns away and steps out of her shoes, then she reaches behind her for the zipper of her dress.
CLASS
“Class, that’s the only thing that counts in life. Class. Without class and style a man’s a bum, he might as well be dead.”
— Ben Siegel
Ben Siegel, son of Ukrainian peasants, could now look at a room and see what was really there — what kind of marble was on the floor, if the drapes were silk or gabardine. He could discern these subtle differences, or at least he told people he could.
He had once watched Billy Wilkerson speaking to Cary Grant and some blond tomboyish starlet in a picture hat, and it had been the movie star who was trying to charm Wilkerson, not the other way around, the actor holding an invisible box in his hands to signal the joke, Wilkerson in his cream-colored suit already smiling, his knuckle raised impatiently to rap the table in response. Night after night, Billy Wilkerson would move from table to table in his Beverly Hills restaurants — Ciro’s, Café Trocadero — crouching for five or ten minutes at a stretch rather than pulling up a chair, always smoking, offering some strong opinion about who was going to do what next and who was finished. He never ate before midnight and even then he just cut into his steak to assess how done it was, maybe taking a few bites with a glass of gin. He never quoted movies or told set jokes and when he used profanity, which was seldom, it was dirtier than anyone else’s.
“As time went on,” Wilkerson III writes of his father’s relationship with his partner Ben Siegel, “the gangster’s respectful admiration disintegrated into an insane, all-consuming jealousy.”
Arguments between the ostensible partners escalated. Siegel and his mistress, an ex-dancer named Virginia Hill, began revising the plans — building, tearing down, rebuilding, each time with more extravagance. Every bathroom in the guest suites was fitted with its own “private plumbing and sewer system. Cost: $1,150,000,” Wilkerson III writes.
“This is my fucking hotel,” Siegel is quoted as saying to the journalist Westbrook Pegler. “My idea! Wilkerson has nothing to do with it!”
In fear of his life, Billy Wilkerson finally fled to Paris. He “rarely went outside,” his son comments. “Every Sunday, he made a single major excursion. He took a cab to Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral.”
STYLE
Anne Lansky in photographs is sometimes dreamy, leaning forward with a nearly finished cigarette between her fingertips, dressed like an actress in a tailored suit with white fleece collar and cuffs, a string of pearls, a corsage made from a large flower, perhaps a chrysanthemum. But even in those expensive clothes, her accent would have given her away. There would have been signs of wrongness, signs that she could only guess at but never fully perceive because she herself was distorted.
AMOUR FOU
From the roof of his new palace, David first encounters Bathsheba. And it happened at eventide that David arose from his bed and walked about on the roof of the king’s house, and he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful.