There’s even a memorial plaque to Siegel that now sits in the resort’s famed flamingo habitat. In 2020, the Flamingo unveiled the new Bugsy and Meyer’s Steakhouse, a throwback-style restaurant named after those two mobsters, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. The Flamingo isn’t outright celebrating the mobsters who opened the resort, but there’s now some level of recognition of those origins. We’ve made a conscious decision to distance ourselves from the Bugsy heritage.”Ī quarter-century later as the hotel commemorates its 75th anniversary, those sentiments are changing. We want to remember the history of the Flamingo without glamorizing it. We’re talking about a robber, rapist and murderer. “This was not George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. “The Bugsy image was not something that was particularly endearing to the Flamingo or Hilton,” Flamingo Hilton spokesman Terry Lindberg said in 1996, the Las Vegas Sun reported at the time. Megaresorts such as The Mirage, Treasure Island and Luxor were opening all over the Strip, and Las Vegas was growing ever conscious of its public image.

The era of mob rule had come to an end by the mid-1980s. Las Vegas was in the midst of a culture shift. When the Flamingo turned 50 in 1996, there was no celebration, no fanfare to mark the occasion, no public recognition of the resort’s origins and its ties to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the mob. (Review-Journal file)Īccepting the past can be difficult, especially when it involves murder and mobsters. The Flamingo hotel-casino pictured in 1952.

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