![]() One night, Wilkerson confessed his gambling problem and the financial woes that followed to his friend Joseph Schenck, the wealthy film executive and chairman of 20th Century Fox. He was also a compulsive gambler who would routinely spend several thousand dollars in Las Vegas at a time, according to his son, Willy Wilkerson, who wrote the biography of his father titled “Hollywood Godfather: The Life and Crimes of Billy Wilkerson.” Wilkerson was a successful Los Angeles businessman in the 1930s and 1940s who founded The Hollywood Reporter and owned several popular nightclubs on the famed Sunset Boulevard. Siegel gets most of the credit for opening the Flamingo, but the idea to build a Miami-beach style hotel in Southern Nevada actually came from his one-time business partner Billy Wilkerson. “It is a hotel that really is a pivot point for Las Vegas,” said Larry Gragg, an emeritus history professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology and author of the 2015 book “Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel: The Gangster, the Flamingo, and the Making of Modern Las Vegas.” Its past, which includes everything from the mafia to Kirk Kerkorian to the decade-long run of Donny and Marie Osmond, is a reflection of the Strip’s history and the iconic corridor’s ability to reinvent itself time and time again. Now at 75, The Flamingo is the oldest resort on the Strip. Certainly not condoning the method of operations, but it is a part of the history of the Flamingo,” said Sean McBurney, president of regional operations for Caesars Entertainment, the current operators of the Flamingo.Ĭoupled with moves like the opening of the Mob Museum a decade ago, UNLV history professor Michael Green said that the acceptance shows the maturity of the city, “that we can actually look back at this mob past and, granted that we may be too nostalgic about it, but still look at it and come to grips with it.” ![]() It’s an undeniable part of the history, and it’s something that’s unique to Flamingo, and leaning into that and sharing it we thought was appropriate. “I think it’s just that it’s acknowledging the true history of the Flamingo. There’s even a memorial plaque to Siegel that now sits in the resort’s famed flamingo habitat. In 2020, the Flamingo unveiled the new Bugsy and Meyer’s Steakhouse, a throwback-style restaurant named after those two mobsters, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. The Flamingo isn’t outright celebrating the mobsters who opened the resort, but there’s now some level of recognition of those origins. We’ve made a conscious decision to distance ourselves from the Bugsy heritage.”Ī quarter-century later as the hotel commemorates its 75th anniversary, those sentiments are changing. We want to remember the history of the Flamingo without glamorizing it. ![]() ![]() We’re talking about a robber, rapist and murderer. “This was not George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. “The Bugsy image was not something that was particularly endearing to the Flamingo or Hilton,” Flamingo Hilton spokesman Terry Lindberg said in 1996, the Las Vegas Sun reported at the time. Megaresorts such as The Mirage, Treasure Island and Luxor were opening all over the Strip, and Las Vegas was growing ever conscious of its public image. The era of mob rule had come to an end by the mid-1980s. Las Vegas was in the midst of a culture shift. When the Flamingo turned 50 in 1996, there was no celebration, no fanfare to mark the occasion, no public recognition of the resort’s origins and its ties to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the mob. (Review-Journal file)Īccepting the past can be difficult, especially when it involves murder and mobsters. The Flamingo hotel-casino pictured in 1952.
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