June 20th, 1947, 810 North Linden Drive, Beverly Hills, California, just before 11:00 at night. Bugsy Siegel was sitting on the sofa in the living room, 41 years old, one of the most feared and celebrated gangsters in America, a founding member of Murder Incorporated, the man who had helped build Las Vegas out of a stretch of empty desert.
He was wearing a blue serge suit and reading a copy of the Los Angeles Times. His associate, Allen Smiley, was sitting beside him. The house was quiet. The night was warm. An assailant had positioned himself outside the window in the darkness. He rested a .30 caliber M1 carbine on the wooden trellis of the driveway archway, 14 ft from the glass. He fired nine shots.
Two hit Siegel in the head. The force of the impact was so violent that one of his eyes was propelled from its socket and found 15 ft across the room. He was dead before he fell sideways off the sofa. Simultaneously, on the other side of the Nevada desert, three men walked through the front doors of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and told the staff they were taking over.
The timing was not a coincidence. It was a handover. Siegel’s murder and the Flamingo’s transfer of control had been coordinated to happen at the same moment. The house where Siegel died was not his. It belonged to his girlfriend. She was the one who had rented it with his money from her former Hollywood agent.
Her name was on the lease. Her clothes were in the closet. Her photograph was on the walls. She was not there. She had left 10 days earlier, boarded a flight to Chicago, then Paris. Her cover story was that she was going to buy wines for the Flamingo, a mob courier sent to Europe to buy wine. Nobody believed it.
Not the police who investigated, not the reporters who covered the murder, not the senators who questioned her 4 years later under oath. The question that has followed this story for nearly 80 years is simple and has never been officially answered. Did Virginia Hill know that Bugsy Siegel was going to die? Did she leave because she was ordered to? And if she was ordered out before the hit, what does that tell you about who she really was inside the American mob? This is the story of Virginia Hill, not the girlfriend, the operator, the woman who moved millions
of dollars in cash across four countries for the most powerful organized crime figures in American history, sat in rooms with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, ran drug routes out of Mexico, spied on mob bosses for other mob bosses, and survived every single one of them until, possibly, she did not.
Here is who she actually was. Only Virginia Hill was born on August 26th, 1916 in Lipscomb, Alabama, seventh of 10 children. Her father was a horse and mule trader who drank and used his fists on his wife and children without much distinction between the two activities. By the time Virginia was 8 years old, her mother had gathered the children and moved to Marietta, Georgia, leaving the father behind.
Virginia attended Roberts Grammar School. She completed eighth grade. She dropped out. She later claimed she had never owned a pair of shoes until she was 17. She married at 15, a 16-year-old boy named George Randell. Two years later, she was gone. She and Randell left Georgia for Chicago in 1933, intending to enter the pornography business, which tells you everything you need to know about the particular kind of desperation that drives a 17-year-old girl with no education and no shoes to leave a Georgia town and head north.
Chicago in 1933 was not a safe place to arrive broke and ambitious. Prohibition had just ended. The city’s criminal infrastructure, built on bootlegging money for over a decade, was reorganizing itself around gambling, narcotics, and labor racketeering. The Chicago Outfit, the organization that Al Capone had built and that still ran enormous sections of the city’s economic life, was looking for new revenue streams and new people who could move between worlds without attracting attention. Virginia Hill left Randell
almost immediately after arriving. She divorced him the following year. She found a job waitressing at the San Carlo Italian Village restaurant, the Chicago Outfit’s showcase exhibit at the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair. She was 17 years old, red-haired, long-legged, with a squeaky voice, a volcanic temper, and a quality that people struggled to define precisely, but kept returning to when they tried to explain how she survived what she survived.
One contemporary observer put it this way, and I am paraphrasing because this is the most accurate description anyone produced of her. She was more than just another set of curves. She had a good memory, a flair for keeping trigger-happy killers calm, and a dual personality completely closed about anything that mattered, able to chatter freely and apparently foolishly about everything that did not.
That description is a precise job description for the work she was about to spend the next 30 years doing. The man who recognized what she was is worth understanding. Joseph Epstein was a ranking associate of Jake Guzik, the Chicago Outfit’s financial fixer, one of the most important men in the organization’s internal accounting.
Epstein ran bookmaking operations for the Outfit and was known as one of the sharpest financial minds connected to the Chicago mob. He was also widely believed to be gay, which made his relationship with Hill something other than romantic. It was professional, protective, and in its own way more durable than any of her actual love affairs. Epstein became her mentor.
He saw what she could do. He began training her in the mechanics of money laundering, how cash moved between fronts, how to carry it without looking like you were carrying it, how to talk to dangerous men without giving anything away. He gave her clothes, jewelry, an apartment. He transformed her appearance and manner.
The barefoot Alabama girl with the eighth grade education became, in the Outfit’s social world, a convincing facsimile of a wealthy socialite. Her first real assignment came directly from Charles Fischetti, a cousin and bodyguard of Al Capone. The Chicago Outfit had a mutual investment arrangement with Lucky Luciano’s New York organization.
The two groups had agreed to participate in each other’s gambling and vice operations across their respective territories, but Chicago did not entirely trust that New York was holding up its end. Specifically, they wanted intelligence on a Luciano capo named Joe Adonis, who ran New York’s vice rackets and was considered vain, ambitious, and potentially unreliable.
Fischetti sent Virginia Hill to New York to find out. She did it by becoming Adonis’s lover. She moved into his world. She attended his dinners and his meetings and his social functions. She listened to everything. She recorded what she learned in a diary she kept throughout her career. She passed the intelligence back to Epstein and Fischetti in Chicago.
Adonis, for his part, trusted her completely. That trust was the product of his own vanity and her extraordinary ability to perform whatever version of herself the situation required. In New York, through Adonis and his circle, she encountered another member of the Luciano organization, Benjamin Siegel. They had a brief encounter, nothing more. She was working.
He was another name in a room full of names. She moved on. The assignments kept coming. By the late 1930s, she was operating across four countries, Chicago to New York, Los Angeles to Mexico City. She was directing heroin trafficking routes out of Mexico for the Outfit, sleeping with the son of a Mexican finance minister and a connected politician to extract information and cement relationships for the drug operation.
In California, she moved through Hollywood with the ease of someone who had been trained since 17 to make powerful men feel understood. Errol Flynn, Victor Mature, Gene Krupa. She kept moving. She told people she was a Southern belle socialite who had been through four wealthy husbands, collecting millions from their estates. Real socialites could see through it immediately. Law enforcement was slower.
Law enforcement eventually concluded, in their own internal records, that Virginia Hill was what they called a central clearinghouse for intelligence on organized crime. She enjoyed, in their assessment, an independent power base within the Mafia. That is a remarkable thing to put in an official document about a woman who would later sit before a Senate committee and claim she did not know anything about anybody.
Here is where it gets interesting. By the early 1940s, Jack Dragna, the Los Angeles mob boss, had a specific concern about Bugsy Siegel. Siegel had relocated to California in 1936, ostensibly to expand the National Crime Syndicate’s operations on the West Coast. He had done that. He had also developed a volatile, unpredictable personality that made both Chicago and New York nervous.
He was what the mob internally described as a cowboy prone to impulsive violence, increasingly difficult to manage, and spending too much time with Hollywood celebrities in ways that attracted attention. Dragna instructed Virginia Hill to get close to Siegel and report back on what he was actually doing.
She moved into a house with Siegel and her brother, Chick. What happened next is not entirely reducible to professional calculation. By every account, including her own, Virginia Hill fell genuinely in love with Benjamin Siegel. The relationship was real, and it was destructive. He was violent with her. She was volatile with him.
In the casino of their own Flamingo Hotel, she once punched a woman during an argument, and Siegel dragged her upstairs and screamed at her that she had made him look like a bum. Shortly after that fight, she swallowed sleeping pills. Siegel drove her to a hospital himself to have her stomach pumped. She came back. She always came back.
They were, in whatever broken and dangerous way two people like that could be, genuinely attached to each other. And they were also, both, in their ways, destroying each other. The Flamingo Hotel was not Siegel’s idea originally. A Hollywood entertainment figure named William Wilkerson had begun building a luxury casino resort on a stretch of highway south of Las Vegas.
By 1945, Wilkerson had run out of money. Siegel stepped in, assumed control, and brought the Syndicate’s money with him. The original construction budget was 1.2 million dollars. You have to understand what that number became to understand why Siegel died. By October of 1946, the costs had already climbed past 4 million.
By the time the hotel section was completed, the total had exceeded 6 million dollars, nearly 80 million dollars in today’s money. The overruns had multiple causes. Siegel ordered extravagant changes, separate sewer systems for each bathroom, a fully rebuilt boiler room and kitchen, imported materials at black market prices. Suppliers figured out they could deliver materials, steal them back at night, and resell them to Siegel the following day.
He paid for the same lumber and pipe multiple times without realizing it. But some of the overruns were not waste. They were theft. Siegel’s mob backers, the Chicago Outfit, the Genovese family interests represented by Lansky, and other Syndicate investors became convinced that an estimated 1 million dollars of the construction overrun had been deliberately skimmed by Siegel, by Virginia Hill, possibly both.
The suspicion was that money was being laundered out of the construction budget into accounts that neither of them would ever have to account for. The Flamingo opened on December 26th, 1946, on a rainy desert night. Jimmy Durante performed. Some Hollywood friends attended. In the first 2 weeks, the gambling tables lost 275,000 dollars.
The hotel section was unfinished. Guests who had been promised rooms had nowhere to sleep. The casino closed on February 6th, 1947. It was one of the most expensive and public failures in the history of American organized crime to that point. A summit of the Syndicate’s senior leadership convened. Most accounts place it in Havana, Cuba, in late 1946 or early 1947.
Luciano was there. Lansky was there. Costello was there. The subject was Siegel and what to do about the 6 million dollars and the ongoing losses. When Siegel heard about the meeting, he flew to Havana himself. He sat down with Luciano. He asked for more time. Luciano, through accounts gathered from multiple sources, told him to start repaying immediately. Siegel refused.
He got on a plane and flew back to Los Angeles. That was the moment, the precise moment, when a man who had been insulated by his friendship with Lansky, his history with the Syndicate, and his genuine role in building Las Vegas from nothing, crossed a line he could not walk back from. The Flamingo reopened March 1st, 1947, with the hotel rooms completed.
Business improved. By May, the casino was showing a profit of 300,000 dollars for the year. Siegel believed he had bought himself time. He was still telling people the Flamingo was going to make everyone rich. He did not understand that the decision had already been made. Around June 8th, 1947, Virginia Hill received a message from the Chicago Outfit. Leave Las Vegas.
The cover story she was given, the one she was told to give Siegel, was that she was going to Paris to select wines for the Flamingo. This is the detail that makes the deliberate nature of the departure undeniable. The mob did not send its most trusted courier to Europe to select wine. Virginia Hill was not a sommelier.
The Flamingo was not the kind of establishment whose wine list required a trip to Paris. The cover story was so thin, it was almost an insult, which suggests that the people giving the order were not particularly concerned about whether it was convincing. They needed her gone. That was all. A charter pilot named Lou Gourley later wrote that Siegel himself arranged and paid for her charter flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.
Siegel booked the plane. He watched his girlfriend fly away. He did not know he was helping to execute the logistics of his own murder. Gourley noted in his account that Hill was an excellent and composed passenger during the flight, but that when he told her heavy fog might require them to divert to Palmdale, she refused.
She had to be in Los Angeles within the hour. She had a connecting flight to make. She flew to Chicago first, then to Paris. 10 days passed. On the night of June 20th, 1947, the assailant took position outside the window on North Linden Drive. He fired nine shots, and within minutes of those shots being fired, Siegel’s partners moved into the Flamingo and declared the transition of ownership.
The coordination was not coincidental. You do not coincidentally take over a casino the same night its owner is shot. The operation had been planned in advance. Everyone involved knew the timing. Virginia Hill left 10 days before that timing arrived. She was in Paris when she heard. She was at a party on a boat. Someone told her.
She said nothing and went back to the party. In the weeks that followed, she attempted suicide three times in Europe, a fourth time in Miami after she returned to the United States, at the house Siegel had bought for her. Each time she survived. Whether those attempts were grief, or guilt, or simply the collapse of a life that had been running on adrenaline and organized crime money since she was 17, nobody can say with certainty.
Four years later, March 16th, 1951, Manhattan. An estimated 30 million Americans were watching the Kefauver Committee hearings on television. Schools had dismissed students early. Blood bank donations dropped because people would not leave their sets. The New York Times described the city as being under a hypnotic spell.
Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat from Tennessee, had spent 15 months dragging mob figures, corrupt police captains, crooked politicians, and gambling operators in front of cameras in 14 cities. In terms of raw public impact, nothing in American political history had done what these hearings were doing. Ordinary Americans watching ordinary television were seeing for the first time the actual men who ran organized crime in their country, sweating, tapping their fingers, speaking in broken English about things they suddenly could not remember.
Virginia Hill walked into the hearing room wearing a platinum mink stole. She sat down. She crossed her legs. She looked at the senators. She told them that the money she received from the men in her life came from gifts and her winnings on horse races. When asked about Joe Adonis, she said she had known him, but did not know what he did for a living.
When asked about Joe Fischetti, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, men she had worked alongside for 15 years. Men in whose operations she had been a central figure. Men whose money she had personally carried across state lines and international borders. She said she did not know anything about anybody. Senator Kefauver pressed her on her income, her lifestyle, the houses, the furs, the jewelry, the first-class travel across multiple continents.
She said the fellas were generous. She said she liked nice things. She said she had been lucky. She was performing. Every word of it was a performance. She had been trained by Joe Epstein since she was 17 years old to talk freely about nothing while giving nothing away. The Senate Committee broadcasting to 30 million Americans could not crack what a Chicago bookmaker had built over 15 years in a 17-year-old Alabama girl.
When it was over, she stood up and walked toward the door. The photographers surged. The reporters pushed forward. Virginia Hill punched a female reporter in the jaw. She kicked a photographer who had crouched down to get an angle. She called reporters dirty bums. She shoved through the crowd and out of the building and onto the street.
And as she went, she screamed at the assembled press corps on live national television, “I hope the atom bomb falls on every one of you.” Then, she boarded a plane and left the country. The IRS eventually calculated that she had received more than $500,000 in untaxed income between 1942 and 1947 alone. Two separate tax liens against her totaled over $200,000.
A federal grand jury indicted her for tax evasion in 1954. She was never extradited. She was never prosecuted. The mob was not going to pay her taxes. Nobody was coming to help her. She was 54 years old and alone in Europe with a ski instructor husband, a young son, a tax warrant with her name on it, and the memory of every room she had ever sat in with the men who were now pretending she did not exist.
She settled in Koppel near Salzburg, Austria. Hans Hauser had been a world champion downhill skier and was well regarded in the Alpine social world. For a time, they had a life. Their son, Peter, was born November 20th, 1950. She tried to fit into the social circles of European resort towns. Those circles, when they discovered who she was, found her presence distasteful. She drank.
By the mid-1960s, she was drinking heavily every day. She had attempted suicide seven times by 1965. On the seventh attempt, her husband found her unconscious and called an ambulance. Joe Epstein, who had been sending her money through the mail since the 1930s, the last reliable friend she had from those years, the man who had found her at 17 and trained her and protected her for three decades, sent her $100,000 total between 1952 and 1965.
Then, he stopped. In 1966, with nothing left and no one left to ask, Virginia Hill made one final call. She called Joe Adonis, the man she had been sent to spy on 30 years earlier in New York, the Luciano capo who had been her lover, who had trusted her completely while she was passing his secrets back to Chicago.
Adonis had been deported from the United States in 1956 and was living in Naples, Italy, under Italian government supervision. She spoke to him by telephone on March 20th, 1966. She left her home in Koppel on March 22nd. She traveled to Naples. What happened in that meeting is not fully documented.
According to Andy Edmonds, whose 1993 biography is the most detailed account of Hill’s final years, she met with Adonis, possibly attempted to leverage her knowledge of mob operations and her diary as a form of blackmail or at minimum as a bargaining chip for money, received $10,000 in cash, and was escorted from Adonis’s house by two of his men.
Two days later, on March 24th, 1966, passersby walking along a footpath beside a brook near Koppel found a woman’s body in the snow beside a tree. Her coat was neatly folded on the ground. A note was found nearby that said she was tired of life. The woman was Virginia Hill. She was 49 years old. The official ruling, suicide by overdose of sleeping pills.
She had attempted it seven times before. She had been talking about wanting to die for years. The Austrian investigators found no signs of external violence on the body. The ruling was consistent with her documented history, but 3 days before her body was found, Virginia Hill had mailed a letter to Joe Epstein in Chicago.
Inside the envelope was a key to a bank safety deposit box. The box contained her diary. Epstein received the letter. He did not open the box until the day her death was reported. The contents of that diary were never made public. Austrian media, who knew exactly who she was and what she had done, speculated that she had tried to use her knowledge of mob operations and possibly the diary itself as leverage to extract money from Adonis.
The theory that followed, reported by multiple sources, never proven, was that Adonis had her killed. That the two men who escorted her from his house in Naples on March 22nd were not there to see her safely to the door. That the overdose of sleeping pills found in her body on March 24th was not self-administered.
Nobody was ever charged. Nobody was ever prosecuted. The diary was presumably retrieved from the safety deposit box. What it contained and what became of it is not known.
