Flamingo Las Vegas

This guide to the Flamingo Las Vegas opens on a June night in 1947, with mobster Benjamin Bugsy Siegel reading the paper in his girlfriend Virginia Hill's Beverly Hills house moments before gunfire tears through the window. From there it traces how Siegel muscled into publisher Billy Wilkerson's desert-resort dream, ballooning the budget with mob money, and revisits the storm-lashed opening night of December 1946 that history remembers as a flop. Jimmy Durante and Xavier Cugat's orchestra both performed that first week.