Siegel was one of the founders and leaders of Murder, Inc. and became a bootlegger during the Prohibition. After the Twenty-first Amendment was passed repealing Prohibition in 1933, he turned to gambling. In 1936, he left New York and moved to California. His time as a mobster (although he eventually ran his own operations) was mainly as a hitman and muscle, as he was noted for his prowess with guns and violence. In 1939, Siegel was tried for the murder of fellow mobster Harry Greenberg. He was acquitted in 1942.\n', '

Siegel traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he handled and financed some of the original casinos. He assisted developer William R. Wilkerson\'s Flamingo Hotel after Wilkerson ran out of funds. Siegel took over the project and managed the final stages of construction. The Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, to poor reception and soon closed. It reopened in March 1947 with a finished hotel. Three months later, on June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot dead at the home of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, in Beverly Hills, California.\n', '

Benjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the second of five children of a poor Jewish family that emigrated to the United States from the Galicia region of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents, Jennie (Riechenthal) and Max Siegel, constantly worked for meager wages. As a boy, Siegel left 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 in which he threatened to incinerate pushcart owners\' merchandise unless they paid him a dollar. Siegel had a criminal record, dating from his teenage years, that included armed robbery, rape and murder.\n', '

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