Benjamin Siegel

**Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel** (February 29, 1906—September 20, 2003) was a Jewish mobster born in New York City during the early 1900s to German immigrants from Vienna, Austria.

## Early life

Benjamin Siegelbaum  was born on February 28, 1906 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a poor Jewish family from Austria. His parents, Max and Jennie, constantly worked for meager wages. Siegel, the second of five children, vowed that he would rise above that life. As a boy, Siegel dropped out of school and joined a gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He committed mainly thefts, until he met Moe Sedway. With Sedway, Siegel developed a protection racket where pushcart merchants were forced to pay him a dollar or he would incinerate their merchandise. Siegel had a criminal record that included armed robbery, rape and murder dating back to his teenage years.

### Bugs and Meyer Mob

*Main article: Bugs and Meyer Mob*

During adolescence, Siegel befriended Meyer Lansky, who formed a small mob whose activities expanded to gambling and car theft. Lansky, who had already had a run-in with Salvatore Lucania, saw a need for the Jewish boys of his Brooklyn neighborhood to organize in the same manner as the Italians and Irish. The first person he recruited for his gang was Ben Siegel.

Siegel became a bootlegger[ and was involved in bootlegging within several major East Coast cities. He also worked as the mob's hitman, whom Lansky would hire out to other crime families. The two formed the Bugs and Meyer Mob, which handled contracts for the various bootleg gangs operating in New York and New Jersey – doing so almost a decade before Murder, Inc. was formed. The gang kept themselves busy hijacking the liquor cargoes of rival outfits. The Bugs and Meyer mob was known to be responsible for the killing and removal of several rival gangdom figures. Siegel's gang mates included Abner "Longie" Zwillman, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Lansky's brother, Jake; Joseph "Doc" Stacher, another member of the Bugs and Meyer Mob, recalled to Lansky biographers that Siegel was fearless and saved his friends' lives as the mob moved into bootlegging:

### Marriage and family

On January 28, 1929, Siegel married Esta Krakower, his childhood sweetheart. They had two daughters. Siegel had a reputation as a womanizer and the marriage ended in 1946. His wife moved with their teenage daughters to New York.

He was related to future Las Vegas casino owner Ed Greene.

## Later years and deaths

In 1971, Siegel retired and lived a peaceful life.

He was one of the many people that were present when future Erichsburg mobster Donald Hymen "Bugsy" Erikson was born in a New York hospital in Manhattan on May 11, 1998. His grandson, Benjamin Siegel III, was Erikon's godfather.

Siegel was babysitting Eriksonon September 20, 2003, when he had a heart attack and died in his garden.

### Funeral

Siegel's funeral was the biggest funeral to happen since Luciano's death in the '60s; he had several hundred friends, family, mobsters, politicians, policemen, and even the President come to the funeral. His funeral would be the biggest funeral for 16 years, until Erikson's death in 2021.