Allen Smiley

Allen Smiley “was one of the most powerful gangsters in [California],” wrote author Gerald Horne in Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950. He was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s partner and best friend and subsequently, Johnny Rosselli’s* right-hand man.

Somewhat in the shadow of these famed men and a private person, his story is less well known. So It Really Happened! unearthed these 10 interesting snippets about him:

1) Allen Smiley, né Aaron Smehoff and also known as Abraham Smickoff, dropped out of school in Canada at age 12 and three years later, entered the United States alone, through Detroit. Born to Orthodox Jewish parents in in Kiev, Ukraine in 1907, he and his family had immigrated to the Great White North when he was seven.

2) Smiley was involved in gambling in various ways in several states. With Siegel, he operated the Transamerica Wire Service, which provided race information from the California tracks, and he helped Siegel get the Flamingo hotel-casino built in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Smiley organized gambling junkets at various locales, including the Garden of Allah in West Hollywood, California; The Knickerbocker in New York, New York; the Argyle Hotel in San Antonio, Texas; the Colony Club in Gardena, California; and the Rex gambling ship, off of the Southern California coast.

He was the ambassador of gambling relations, essentially a recruiter of high-rollers, for the Beverly Country Club in New Orleans, La.

As a player, he loved betting on and watching horse racing. “The race was the one clandestine addiction he couldn’t conceal,” wrote his daughter Luellen Smiley in her memoir Cradle of Crime.

3) Throughout his life, Smiley racked up numerous arrests, for bookmaking, running a wire service, transporting gambling cheating equipment, assault, suspicion of murder, robbery, extortion, operating without a liquor license, contempt of court and other crimes.

4) After Siegel’s murder in 1947, Smiley needed legitimate employment, as he faced possible deportation, having been indicted for falsely writing on an arrest form he was an American citizen. He asked Mob accountant Meyer Lansky if he could get back his $30,000 ($319,000 today) investment in the Flamingo, and Lansky consented. Smiley then invested the money in Texas oil exploration.

5) In 1949, at the Little Chapel in Las Vegas, he married Lucille Casey, a John Robert Powers agency model and a dancer at the Frank Costello-owned Copacabana nightclub in New York City. (The two divorced in 1962.)

6) After being convicted of falsely claiming citizenship, Smiley served nine months of a one-year sentence, from February to November 1951, at the McNeil Island Corrections Center in Washington state. He was paroled early for good behavior.

7) While imprisoned, he testified, somewhat belligerently and in handcuffs, before the Kefauver Committee.

8) Smiley contracted hepatitis B during adulthood. He’d told a confidant that he’d gotten it after being injected with blood from donors suspected of having the virus, at McNeil Island as part of medical research that used prisoners as subjects.** (We couldn’t verify that he’d been one of these test subjects but confirmed that such an experiment was done at that very penitentiary. The purpose was to determine if hepatitis B was or was not a blood-borne disease.)

9) Despite the federal government’s threats to deport Smiley to Canada or the U.S.S.R. upon his release from McNeil Island, Smiley was allowed to stay stateside and eventually become a U.S. citizen, which he did in 1966.

10) He died from hepatitis-induced cirrhosis of the liver. Near his life’s end, he chose to stop the antiviral treatment for hepatitis that he’d been on, knowing that as a result, his liver disease would worsen and cause his demise. He passed away at age 74 or 75 on March 6, 1982.

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* Johnny Rosselli was a Chicago Outfit member charged with ensuring smooth operations in Hollywood and Las Vegas.

** In the experiment, a total of 60 healthy, supposedly volunteer, prisoners at McNeil Island and at the U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg were injected. As a result, 27 of them contracted the virus; two at McNeil died not long after.

Sources

1972

Twenty-six years after the gangland assassination of mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and his debut of the Flamingo in Las Vegas, a trap door was discovered in one of the hotel-casino’s offices when the carpet was pulled up during some remodeling. It hid a 15-inch-square safe encased in cement, which was believed to have been the mobster’s.

The public had to wait over a weekend to hear what the metal box contained because a locksmith couldn’t get it open initially. After the usual method of turning the dial and listening for the tumblers to fall into place failed on various attempts, he resorted to drilling it open, which took four hours and many bits.

Finally, the moment of revelation came . . . and the safe was empty.

The article, “Las Vegas Gamblers Arming in Control Battle,” ran on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper in the third week of December, to the chagrin of Nevada gambling regulators, casino owners, officers of the law and other industry representatives.

The story reported that in the new iteration of Sin City:

• Casino owners (gamblers) were readying to fight for control of gambling there
• Many gamblers were carrying weapons and had armed bodyguards
• Men (presumably hired by the gamblers) were cruising competing casinos’ parking lots, trying to persuade guests to play at their clubs instead
• Ladies planted in cocktail lounges were directing visitors to specific casinos
• Although unreported, several physical beatings took place in gamblers’ inner circles
• One casino owner left the state because his life had been threatened*
• Fixers, dispatched by East Coast Mafia heads, were en route to negotiate a truce

Landscape At The Time

In the ’40s, downtown Las Vegas transformed when a handful of its gambling properties changed owners and names. The 1949, or post-war, Fremont Street was home to the:

Las Vegas Club (1930)
Boulder Club (1931)
Frontier Club (1935)
El Cortez Hotel (1941)
Western Club (1941)
Pioneer Club (1942)
Santa Anita Turf Bar (1943)
Monte Carlo (1945)
Golden Nugget (1946)
Club Savoy (1946)
El Dorado Club (1947)

Downtown Las Vegas in early 1950s

Also in that decade, the city saw the start of what would become the Las Vegas Strip, with the debut of this quartet of hotel-casinos:

El Rancho Vegas (1941)
Last Frontier (1942)
Flamingo (1946)
Thunderbird (1948)

Still fresh in the minds of those in the gambling world was the execution two years earlier, in 1947, of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, violent mobster (Genovese crime family associate) and Meyer Lansky pal. Siegel had overseen (badly) the building of the Flamingo in Vegas, and had run the business until his murder.

In mid-December 1949, the Flamingo double-crossed Club Savoy, which was across the street, with a play that involved a cheating gambling stunt. The incident was extensively reported in the papers when Savoy’s owner refused to pay the Flamingo its winnings. It was negative publicity that gambling regulators and state officials disliked.

Also around the time, several casinos agreed to stop some of their blatant efforts to poach customers from other gambling properties. They’d used people on megaphones and “circus-type banners” to inform passersby that their slot machines had better payouts than their competitors’.

The L.A. newspaper article didn’t specify which gambling factions supposedly were fighting one another. Perhaps it was a Strip vs. downtown beef.

Similar, Widespread Reaction

The overarching response to the newspaper report from the big names in and associated with the Vegas gambling industry was denial: A turf war? What turf war? Calling the article’s contents hogwash, they deduced it merely was an attempt to hurt Nevada’s booming sector at a time it would feel it the most, the New Year’s Day weekend.

Here are some of the individuals who publicly weighed in and their comments. (All quotes are from the Nevada State Journal, Dec. 29, 1949.)

Gus Greenbaum, mobster, Meyer Lansky lieutenant and Flamingo hotel-casino president:

“The stories to that effect are fabricated entirely,” he said, specifically referring to an impending war for control. “No guns are being carried on any hotel or club property except by authorized personnel.”

Spokesman for the Nevada Tax Commission, the then gambling regulation agency:

Any impending warfare over gambling control “is news to us.”

Spokesman for the downtown casinos, who asked to remain anonymous:

“Relations between the gambling clubs and the casinos are more harmonious than ever. We think the story was carried mainly to counteract favorable publicity given our gaming recently by another Los Angeles newspaper. This whole business has been dreamed up by some eager newspaper correspondent.”

William J. Moore, Jr., Hotel Last Frontier executive vice president and tax commission member:

He wasn’t aware of any threats on the gambling scene, he said. In fact, the various gamblers have gotten along well in recent months and hold weekly meetings to hash out any issues. The story was “a deliberate attempt to keep California dollars from coming into the state, appearing as it did on the eve of the biggest weekend in the history of gambling in Las Vegas.” He added Vegas gamblers aren’t using “steerers,” or “persons corresponding roughly to ‘B’ girls in cocktail lounges who direct visitors to a certain casino,” which the state prohibits.

Archie Wells, City of Las Vegas acting police chief:

He didn’t know about any alleged beatings of certain gambling figures, he said. “We checked thoroughly and found no violence of any kind — reported or otherwise.” His department found no evidence the reports perhaps stemmed from possible attempts at revenge by Club Savoy.

Glen Jones, Clark County sheriff:

“We’ve received the utmost cooperation from all gambling operators.” He didn’t know of any gambler who was carrying a gun openly other than the special officers with deputy sheriff status in the clubs.

Informal Peace Summit

After the story appeared, the city’s casino and gambling club owners quickly convened to address its allegations.

They must’ve come to a mutually satisfactory resolution, if in fact a battle for gambling control had been underway or imminent, as no lives were taken . . . at least that we know of.

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* One gambler, Beldon “Jake” Katleman, co-owner of the El Rancho Vegas, had traveled to the Middle East recently but was back in town at the time the newspaper article was published, the Nevada State Journal noted.

Sources

Esta Krakower Siegel

1946

Mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s wife, Esta (née Esther Krakower) filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada after 17 years of marriage. The two had wed when she was 18 and he was 23.

In the divorce settlement, Esta got their Hollywood house, their New York apartment, Bugsy’s Cadillac, $600 a week in alimony ($7,500 today) and $350 a week in child support ($4,400 today) for their daughters, Barbara and Millicent, who lived with her full-time.