Talk:Bugsy Siegel

The article photo ?

Why has Siegel's cigar been photoshopped from the photo ? Is this US Law ? If so, can't we find a better photo ? It looks abit ridiculous to have such a badly edited photo on an article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.47.71.13 (talk) 13:14, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Celebrities

Under the Las Vegas section, when it talks about celebrities that attended the opening of the Flamingo, it has Thomas Pynchon listed as one of the celebrities who was present on opening day. On December 26th, 1946, Thomas Pynchon was 9 years old. I don't think he was quite a celebrity then. These names should be fact checked. --65.113.35.130 (talk) 21:19, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Disturbing image warning??

I mean, can you just put a close-up photo of a guy shot through the eye on wikipedia? What is wrong with wikipedia??? What are the guidelines on this, this is horrible!

This is a great article.

"gangmates" is kinda awkward.

the bit about his eyeball being found 15 feet from his body is maybe too grusome of an encyclopedia-- though it fits in well with the article and its readable style.

of course its not perfect but it is very good work. Two16

Not bad, although Siegel's contribution to Las Vegas history has been (as ever) a bit overplayed and no mention is made of William Wilkerson, who actually started the Flamingo Hotel and sold out to Siegel. Suggest reading "Las Vegas: The Fabulous First Century" published by Arcadia (Nov. 2003) for a more balanced historical perspective. www.legacymemoirs.com/pages/6/index.htm

Isn't the 2nd image a bit too graphic? Clarityfiend 07:45, 10 May 2006 (UTC) -- I agree. I think there should be a warning before something like that.

Yeah, and let me just say...ew. 68.9.195.203 15:58, 20 June 2006 (UTC)Lisette

Mugshot Link

The mugshot link is broken, and I can't seem to fix it. Ideas? Johnleemk | Talk 06:27, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

External links

'Other Stuff'? Needs a much more encyclopedic wording.--DooMDrat 15:27, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Origin of parents

Why does the article say he's from russian descent, whereas the death certificate states Austria as the birthplace of his parents? Is this a mistake in the article or in the death certificate? Well, there is a possibility that his parents got the russian citizenship, but it's quite unlikely i guess. Could anyone with a reliable source check this please?

According to Chapin, David A. and Weinstock, Ben, The Road from Letichev: The history and culture of a forgotten Jewish community in Eastern Europe, Volume 2. ISBN 0-595-00667-1 iUniverse, Lincoln, NE, 2000 Bugsy Siegel was born to Max Siegel and Jennie Goldstein Siegel who were immigrants from Letichev, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). Could anyone update this info in the article? Thanks.

Well in reality he was a Polish Jew born on territories seized from the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Before that the town was called Latyczów and the vast majority of its citizens were Polish. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.84.126.146 (talk) 04:59, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

L.A. Confidence

I've heard while he was in L.A., he muscled into the projectionists union, besides extorting top studio execs. I've also heard Dragna was small-time...

On the subject of L.A., I'd be curious to know more about bootlegging & corruption out there. It's said LAPD was the most corrupt PD in the US, & (almost?) every politician & DA was on the take. I've also heard Luciano had a relationship with Thelma Todd, which got her killed when she refused to let him use her club/restaurant as a base. Trekphiler 07:53, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Trans America race wire service

Anyone know the actual year or date for this venture? I have seen sources that list this as anything from 1941 to 1945. Vegaswikian 23:50, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

From my sources, Moe Sedway was making trips out to Las Vegas on Meyer Lansky's behalf in the early 1930s to franchise the Trans-America Wire Service. Siegel initially had an opportunity to take on this project himself but loathed the desert and went back to Beverly Hills. By doing so, Siegel relinquished the operation to Sedway. As for specific dates I am not sure but I will certainly look into it more. HumanisticRationale (talk) 09:28, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Writing

The writing in this article needs to be cleaned up.

Things like "The assassin got away with it, since no one was ever charged with this bloody murder. Apparently the matinee-idol handsome 41-year-old Bugsy Siegel died instantly." sound more like a novel.

Also the mention of Moe Sedway as a fellow youth is a bit off since Sedway was actually 13 years older than Bugsy.

When you see problems like purple writing, fix them! Mostly, so long as you're massaging language and not just deleting, even the original writer (not me in this case, BTW) will not object. Usually, people can't spot their own flamboyancies. SBHarris 23:23, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Middle Name

Due to my inability to find any clean sources that support Wikipedia's claim that Siegel's middle name at birth was 'Hymen', and keeping in mind that the addition of this information dates back to November 4, 2004, I have decided to remove that claim until someone finds a source that could not have been tainted by Wikipedia's influence. -- Saaber 23:18, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Cultural references

I've removed the reference to Enemy at the Gates. The comparison of the death of Bugsy and the death of the German sniper character by the hands of the main character in the aforementioned movie is tenuous at best. 219.95.234.242 16:53, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Dec 17, 2006: Dates are wrong

Dec 17, 2006: Dates are wrong in the Bugsy Siegel section - as the list his birth at 1990 and death at 2040. Other dates are incorrect as well. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.10.85.234 (talk) 13:00, 17 December 2006 (UTC).

No sources

This article needs to cite its sources within the text. I think that would resolve a lot of the problems previously pointed out. Also note that this article conflicts with the account of the founding of the Flamingo Hotel in the article on the hotel [1].--Mantanmoreland 15:25, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely, the conflict with Wiki's own account of The Flamingo's history is glaring and helps to perpetuate the denial of credit to Wilkerson.Jrm2007 16:20, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Where'd the bullet go in?

In the section "Death", the article says both:

On the night of June 20, 1947, as Siegel sat in Virginia Hill's Beverly Hills home reading the Los Angeles Times, a long-range sniper hit him in the eye with a thirty-caliber high speed carbine bullet (the embellished popular culture description)[clarify].

and

An autopsy revealed that the bullet actually entered the back of his skull, and exited through an eye socket; investigators found the eye across the room. The cause of death was cerebral hemorrhage.

There's no cite for either of those. So... did the bullet go in the eye, or did it go in the back of the head and come out of the eye? Can't be both?

I assume the cyptic parenthetical "(the embellished popular culture description)" means, "in popular culture he is believed to have been shot through the eye, though the autopsy showed otherwise". But I'd like to see some kind of cite about the autopsy. -- Narsil (talk) 19:41, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Many web sources say an M1 Carbine was used. If true, the "long-range sniper" and "high-speed bullet" parts are wrong. The M1 carbine is mostly limited to under 200 yards, and the .30 carbine cartridge is AFAIK the weakest (by a large margin) of the .30 calibers. They also say the assassin fired 15 rounds (the entire clip), which is very un-sniperlike behavior. BogWhomper (talk) 05:26, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

copy-and-pasted block

A large chunk of this article has been copied and pasted between Bugsy Siegel, Flamingo Las Vegas, and William Wilkerson. As far as I can tell, it wasn't copied and pasted from some outside source — Google doesn’t find an outside source anyway — but being copied and pasted in these three places poses a problem for future editors, since any improvement that can be made to that text probably ought to be made in all three places. But that's ① labor-intensive, ② error-prone, and ③ unlikely to happen since there’s no way to tell that there are other copies of the text.

Is there some Wikipedia policy about what to do about duplicated chunks like this?

Further discussion about this should go to Talk:Bugsy Siegel, since I’ve copy-and-pasted my comment on the talk pages of all three articles.

Kragen Javier Sitaker (talk) 18:59, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Basically you put the bulk of the material in a single place and use the link to access it. I'd put most of the stuff about individuals in their articles and only include a snippet as necessary in the others. There should not be large portions of text included in multiple articles. Note that I don't follow this talk page. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:22, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

It looks like it ought to be possible to use the transclusion feature to include the text in multiple pages, with edit links that work; the Current Events pages use this feature to include the events from each day into a larger monthly archive page. I have done this at User:Kragen/Transclusion test to see how well it works, and it seems like it would work fine for this case; the transcluded sections even get included in tables of contents. The only downside would be that if someone read more than one of the pages, they'd still encounter the same text more than once, which could be confusing; and it's unusual. Kragen Javier Sitaker (talk) 17:46, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh hey, reading further, I found Help:Template#Pages_with_a_common_section about this. Kragen Javier Sitaker (talk) 18:52, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Air Conditioning on Opening Day

The part about the guests cursing the desert heat when the air conditioning broke down when the Flamingo opened is colorful and amusing, until one remembers that the during the day after Christmas in Las Vegas the temperature usually is in the mid-30s F to mid-50s F. Makes for very pleasant hikes in the back trails. Low 70s would be the extreme and rare high, and even then, while springlike for the northeasterners, I doubt this would've bothered a Los Angeles crowd very much. I culled the temperature ranges from http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/vef/climate/page14.php and http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMONtavt.pl?nvlasv. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roundmidnite man (talk • contribs) 06:27, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Location of wounds and pop culture

Another editor has located the head wounds correctly, and I've added a photo link if you'd like to see for yourself. It's been awhile since I looked at this article. Given the massive influence of this man on pop culture in mafia movies, etc, I'm amazed that there's no pop culture section. Take a look at WP:TRIVIA please. Like machineguns in the U.S., these things have actually not become illegal. It's just that everybody things they are. WP:TRIVIA does not give you license to delete anything that looks to you like a pop culture section. Indeed it says the opposite. SBHarris 00:22, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

This article (and many other related to the Jewish mafia) are under attack from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_sockpuppets_of_Mynameisstanley. One of his socks, User:Xd69x, removed a lot of useful material from the article. Lala m7 (talk) 18:26, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I've restored the cultural section. Feel free to restore other refs removed by this guy as well. SBHarris 02:53, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm afraid I do not have any literature on the subject, but I do notice that all references to his mistresses is gone from this article, while it still remains in say, the Marie McDonald and Virginia Hill-articles. You might also want to put Esta Krakower and Whitey Krakow on your watch-list: The socks routinely get rid of those articles by redirecting them. In fact: whenever you see an article about any Jewish mobster shrink in size: suspect Mynameisstanley-socks...Cheers, Lala m7 (talk) 07:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Paranoid?

In the Bugsy's Ghost section it states "it is plain to see that Bugsy was quite paranoid". Paranoia is generally regarded as an irrational baseless or excessive fear and suspicion. As depicted in this article Siegel was immersed in a violently aggressive milieu, was himself a murderer and may have accrued his share of dangerous enemies, had stretched the patience among his mob financiers, and, ultimately, was shot to death through the window of a residence. Perhaps bullet-proof glass was a reasonable precaution and "extremely cautious" might be a more apt description than "paranoid". Yellow-lab (talk) 14:31, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, logically he was not paranoid. The title of the para doesn't seem apt either; nonsense about a ghost, together with unsourced material about a special room and tunnels which 'may or may not still be there' - why are we including dodgy bar tales? I'll remove it all until someone can provide a source that's more than just gossip. Little grape (talk) 14:51, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Name

Why is the article of this man titled with his nickname? "Bugsy" isn't his name, his name was Benjamin. I have no love for this multiple murderer, but "Bugsy" was not his name. At the least we should put his nickname in quotations in the middle of his name. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Supertheman (talk • contribs) 05:13, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Because the Wikipedia manual of style demands that he be named that way. We use the most common name, not the birth name, and certainly not a hybrid name like you used. That is why we have an article on Pablo Picasso and not Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 21:21, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Which prompts the question of why we call the painter Picasso and not Ruiz (his father's family name). In Spanish, anybody with his name would be called Señor Ruiz, not Señor Picasso (much as Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega are known as Castro and Ortega, not Ruiz or Saavedra. I wonder what Picasso's cohorts DID call him?? SBHarris 04:49, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

We call him Picasso, because he signed his own name Picasso. But this conversation should really be on the Picasso Page, not the Bugsy Siegel Page. AJseagull1 (talk) 21:32, 30 December 2010 (UTC)