New book details the story of Virginia Hill, one of Las Vegas’s most notorious mob women
LAS VEGAS ( KLAS ) — While Hollywood mobster movies mostly feature men as main characters, with their female companions often little more than window dressing, the real-life story of Las Vegas features mob wives and girlfriends playing pivotal roles in criminal enterprises.
A new book by local author Lissa Townsend Rodgers entitled "Shameless" highlights the salacious rise and fall of several notorious women of the underworld. It's a shockingly candid history of several women who rose to the top of hyper-violent, male-dominated criminal endeavors. Two such women were right in the middle of mafia plots to plunder Las Vegas, including a redheaded firecracker nicknamed "The Flamingo."
In both the film Bugsy and real-life mob history, Virginia Hill and Ben Siegel's meeting ignited a fiery, tumultuous romance. Their on-again, off-again affair is a legendary chapter in mafia lore, culminating in the dusty desert town that transformed into modern Las Vegas. However, Hill's passionate relationship with the dashing co-founder of Murder, Inc. often eclipses her far more consequential role within the male-dominated upper echelons of the American mafia.
Rodgers started her research into Virginia Hill during the COVID-19 shutdown. She scoured old newspapers, magazines, other mob histories, and showbiz columns. Hill's familiarity with mobsters turned her into a celebrity of sorts.
Hill was born poor in a small Alabama town, married young, and then worked as a waitress in Chicago, where a mob accountant fell for her and began giving her small tasks. According to the book 'Shameless", Virginia caught on fast.
"She'd carry money, she'd carry messages, maybe drop off some bribes," Rodgers recounted. "She'd go to the racetrack and hustle a few bets, and because she was a woman, people didn't suspect her."
Police would have recognized the usual suspects, but Rodgers said Virginia was unknown to law enforcement officials.
"You send Jake 'Greasy Thumbs' Guzek to do this; the cops know him," Rodgers said. "You send her carrying all these stolen goods from Chicago to New York, nobody suspects."
Hill made the most of her menial tasks, according to the book, taking a little off the top for herself in each assignment. As the work gradually grew more serious, so did her bank account. Hill became well known for her lavish spending, flashy lifestyle, and romantic liaisons with mobsters, movie stars, and even political figures. She was a unique asset for the mafia because she was an acceptable ambassador between rival families.
"She also... started working the networks between the different outfits. Pretty much nobody is affiliated with Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles," Rodgers said. "But she could move between all those because she was a woman... and also she was safe... either to send as an emissary or as a spy between two outfits."
Sent to Mexico, Hill helped establish the foundations of organized crime's future involvement in narcotics trafficking, in part by relying on her unabashedly promiscuous nature, the same instincts that led her to rekindle a romance with Ben Siegel. When Siegel took control of the troubled project that became the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Hill came along. Hill's opinion of Las Vegas, however, was less than romantic.
"She absolutely hated Las Vegas," Rodgers said. "The Las Vegas of 1948 or so is a very different... very dull place for the most part."
In June 1947, at the Beverly Hills mansion that Siegel had leased for Hill, the fearsome gangster was gunned down. It's a crime that has never been solved. Virginia was conveniently out of the country at the time. Her demise was set into motion a few years later when the Kefauver Committee, investigating organized crime, called Hill as a witness. Virginia ducked and weaved and played dumb, not giving an inch during tough questioning. However, the appearance was the beginning of her end.
"Who really got her after that was Uncle Sam," Rodgers said, adding that authorities were questioning her lavish lifestyle.
For the rest of her life, Virginia Hill was hounded by tax agents. She fled to Europe before dying of suicide. Rodgers, however, thinks Hill may have been murdered by a deported mob boss named Joe Adonis, explaining that she had been trying to peddle a detailed diary she supposedly kept during all of her years with the mob. That journal has never surfaced.
