Flamingo Las Vegas History: Billy Wilkerson, Bugsy Siegel, and the 1946 Highway 91 Opening

Did Bugsy Siegel Invent the Flamingo, or Was Billy Wilkerson the True Founder?

Popular cinema, most famously Barry Levinson's 1991 biopic Bugsy, portrays Benjamin Siegel stopping in the Mojave Desert, dreaming up a luxury oasis from scratch, and naming it "The Flamingo" after his fiery girlfriend Virginia Hill's long legs. Archival deeds and architectural drawings tell a completely different chronology: Siegel neither selected the site, conceived the European resort model, nor originated the hotel's name.

In early 1945, four years after El Rancho Vegas and Hotel Last Frontier established Western ranch lodges farther north on Highway 91, Hollywood Reporter publisher William R. "Billy" Wilkerson paid $84,000 to landowner Margaret Folsom for 33 acres seven miles south of Fremont Street. As the creator of Sunset Strip nightspots Cafe Trocadero, Ciro's, and La Rue, Wilkerson understood that postwar movie stars and wealthy industrialists preferred tuxedoed continental glamour over hitching posts and sawdust floors. Wilkerson named the project the Flamingo in 1945 after the exotic pink birds he admired at Florida's Hialeah Park racetrack, months before Siegel entered the partnership.

Wilkerson commissioned Caltech-educated Los Angeles Modernist architect George Vernon Russell to draft an air-conditioned resort modeled on Monte Carlo and Miami Beach: cantilevered flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling plate glass, imported marble baths, a health spa, tennis courts, specialty boutiques, a showroom without Western kitsch, and a discreetly integrated Monte Carlo casino.

How Did Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky Take Control of the $6 Million Del Webb Build?

By late winter 1945–1946, Wilkerson's original $1.2 million to $1.5 million construction estimate had collapsed. Post-World War II federal price controls and housing priorities created severe black-market shortages of structural steel, copper pipe, hardwood, and plaster, while Wilkerson simultaneously dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling in downtown Fremont Street clubs. Desperate for $1 million in immediate completion financing without surrendering creative vision to conservative banks, Wilkerson accepted an introduction through G. Harry Rothberg in February 1946 to East Coast syndicate financier Meyer Lansky.

Forming the Nevada Projects Corporation, Lansky and Eastern mob investors put up $1 million for two-thirds of the equity, installing Lansky's childhood New York partner Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, already stationed in Los Angeles overseeing Trans-America Race Wire operations, to protect their investment. Instead of remaining a silent backer, Siegel muscled Wilkerson off the job site by June 1946 (ultimately buying out Wilkerson's remaining stake under duress while Wilkerson fled briefly to Paris), replaced perfectionist architect George Vernon Russell with Fort Worth architect Richard Stadelman, and took personal command over Phoenix general contractor Del E. Webb Construction Company.

Project superintendent L.C. Jacobson and Del Webb watched helplessly as Siegel's impulsiveness and contractor kickbacks sent costs spiraling from $1.5 million to an unprecedented $6 million. Insisting that every one of the 105 luxury rooms contain its own private sewer line and imported marble bathroom, Siegel ordered completed walls torn down on whims and paid inflated invoices for black-market palm trees, some of which unscrupulous haulers reportedly dug up at night from the rear of the lot and resold to Siegel at the front gate the following morning.

Why Did the December 26, 1946 Flamingo Opening Fail Before Its March 1947 Reopening?

Pressured by East Coast syndicate investors, who gathered at Lansky's December 1946 Havana Conference suspecting that Siegel and Virginia Hill were skimming millions into Swiss accounts, Siegel forced the Flamingo casino, lounge, and showroom to open on the night after Christmas, December 26, 1946, even though the three-story hotel guest wings remained unfinished shells. Readers can compare original 1946 signage with the 1947 rework in the Flamingo archival photo collection.

Everything went wrong on opening night. Unseasonal winter rainstorms lashed Los Angeles and Las Vegas, grounding the chartered DC-3 airliners Wilkerson and Siegel had booked to fly Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, and dozens of MGM stars across the mountains. Comedian Jimmy Durante, bandleader Xavier Cugat, singer Rose Marie, and Siegel's friend George Raft performed and mingled before local townspeople and drenched motorists tracking desert mud across plush carpets while air-conditioning ducts failed.

Worse still lay at the gaming tables. Because the Flamingo had zero finished bedrooms to house winners overnight, high rollers rode luck streaks to $300,000 in house losses during the first week and checked into beds up Highway 91 at El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier, taking Siegel's working bankroll with them. Bleeding cash daily, Siegel shut down the casino in early February 1947, waited for Del Webb's crews to finish the guest suites, and quietly reopened on March 1, 1947, rebranded as "The Fabulous Flamingo." By May 1947, with rooms keeping players on property around the clock, the ledger finally turned positive.

What Happened Night-Of When Bugsy Siegel Was Assassinated on June 20, 1947?

Spring profits arrived too late to absolve Siegel of $4.5 million in cost overruns and suspected construction theft. At approximately 10:45 p.m. on Friday, June 20, 1947, as 41-year-old Siegel sat reading the morning Los Angeles Times on a floral sofa beside associate Allen Smiley inside Virginia Hill's rented Spanish Colonial home at 810 North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills (Hill was conveniently in Europe), an unseen assailant rested a .30-caliber M1 military carbine on a rose trellis outside the window and fired nine rounds. Four shots struck Siegel, two in the head, killing him instantly in an unsolved gangland execution.

Events 270 miles northeast on Highway 91 proved the hit came from inside Siegel's own partnership. Barely twenty minutes after shots rang out in Beverly Hills, before California wire services flashed bulletins across Nevada, Lansky associates Moe Sedway, Gus Greenbaum, and Morris Rosen walked calmly into the Flamingo lobby, summoned the night manager, and announced that they now controlled the hotel-casino.

Lansky tapped Gus Greenbaum, a gruff, universally respected Phoenix bookmaker and race-wire operator who had helped bankroll El Rancho Vegas expansions, to run the Flamingo as president. Eliminating Siegel's erratic spending while adding 200 moderately priced garden rooms, low-cost package flights from Southern California, and tight pit supervision, Greenbaum cleared more than $4 million in net profit during his first twelve months of 1948, triggering the 1950–1958 Strip building stampede that produced the Desert Inn, Sands, Riviera, Dunes, Tropicana, and Stardust.

How Did the 1953 Champagne Tower, Kirk Kerkorian, and the 1993 Demolition Reshape the Flamingo?

Following a 1953 exterior modernization under general manager Gus Greenbaum (shortly before Greenbaum left to open the Riviera in 1955), the Flamingo unveiled one of Highway 91's defining landmarks: a 105-foot cylindrical open-frame steel tower wrapped in stacked coral-pink and magenta neon rings that blinked upward in sequence like rising champagne bubbles, visible for miles across the desert floor. In 1955, hotelier Albert Parvin and Miami hoteliers Morris Lansburgh and Daniel Lifter led a $9 million syndicate buyout during which Meyer Lansky quietly pocketed a secret $200,000 "finder's fee" later exposed by 1960s federal skimming indictments.

In August 1967, self-made Las Vegas charter-airline tycoon Kirk Kerkorian purchased the Flamingo for $12.5 million, using its casino and accounting departments as an executive training ground, under president Alex Shoofey and Fred Benninger, before opening the 1969 International Hotel and the original 1973 MGM Grand right across Flamingo Road. Barron Hilton's Hilton Hotels Corporation bought controlling interest between 1970 and 1972, renaming the property the Flamingo Hilton in 1974 and constructing six stepped high-rise towers between 1977 and 1995 that expanded capacity past 3,500 rooms, alongside replacing the 1953 Champagne Tower in 1968 and 1976 with giant feathered pink-and-orange neon marquees.

For nearly five decades, one physical relic of 1946 survived behind the modern casino towers: the four-story concrete Oregon Building, whose top floor housed Bugsy Siegel's private fortress apartment complete with six-inch reinforced concrete walls, steel-lined shutters, false closets, and a secret trapdoor ladder leading down to an underground getaway garage. On December 14, 1993, Hilton wrecking cranes demolished the Oregon Building to construct the final tower wing and the lush 15-acre Wildlife Habitat courtyard, home to live Chilean flamingos, leaving zero original 1946 structures standing on the parcel today.

What Is the Complete Chronology of the Flamingo Hotel (1945–1993)?

Reviewing the Flamingo's documented milestones clarifies the exact handoffs from Billy Wilkerson's Sunset Strip blueprint to syndicate cash and modern corporate hospitality.

In 1999, Hilton spun off its gaming division into Park Place Entertainment (later Caesars Entertainment), which dropped the "Hilton" suffix in 2000, returning the Strip's oldest continuously operating resort brand to its historic name, Flamingo Las Vegas.