Though neither brick nor bloodstain remains of Bugsy Siegel's original resort, the very name of the Flamingo is dripping with Las Vegas legend. Popular myth regards it as having been, in 1946, the first of the great Strip casinos. In fact, El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier had already blazed the trail by then, and the Flamingo when it started out - with barely a hundred hotel rooms - was much more a consummately stylish Forties motel than a foretaste of the neon extravaganzas of the Fifties. What it did offer, however, was the ambition to look beyond its bleak desert setting in both theming and ambience, not to mention a glamorous hint of underworld menace.
Benjamin "don't call me Bugsy" Siegel's background was as a New York mobster, co-founder with Meyer Lansky of the infamous Murder, Inc syndicate. He headed west in the early 1940s in the hope of making it as a movie star; failing that, he settled for making it with movie stars. Though Las Vegas initially beckoned as a good base for running a horse-racing betting racket, the casino business swiftly caught his eye. Hearing about the cash-flow problems of LA restaurateur Billy Wilkerson, who was building a new casino a mile beyond the Last Frontier , he put together a million-dollar package that enabled him to squeeze Wilkerson out and take control.
Construction materials were expensive and in short supply after the war, and Siegel soon found himself in trouble. There are tales of contractors delivering supplies to the site by day, stealing them back at night, and then delivering them again the next day, not so much to defraud Bugsy as to avoid his wrath at their failure to get hold of any more. Desperate to start repaying the additional $5 million he'd been forced to borrow, Siegel opened the incomplete Flamingo too early, only to have to close down after two weeks even deeper in debt. Although the hotel swiftly re-opened, and was soon running at a profit, Siegel's backers had lost patience, and he was shot dead at his girlfriend's home in Beverly Hills in June 1947. Literally within minutes, new Mob-appointed managers announced themselves at the Flamingo .
It could be said that Siegel's death was the perfect advertising gimmick; no amount of FBI investigations or congressional committees could mask the fact that the punters who flocked to Las Vegas actually liked the idea that they were rubbing shoulders with murderous gangsters. All through the Fifties and Sixties, as the Flamingo grew ever grander and glitzier, Meyer Lansky was still pulling the strings behind the scenes. When Kirk Kerkorian finally bought the Flamingo in 1967 - partly to have somewhere to train staff for his projected International Hotel - its financial records were in such murky shape that he could only get the tax authorities off his case by selling it on to Hilton in 1970. They in turn hived it off a few years back to Park Place, who also own Caesars Palace, Bally's, Paris , and the Las Vegas Hilton , and its official name was quietly changed back from the Flamingo Hilton .
The Flamingo today stakes its patch opposite Caesars with a magnificent cascade of neon. Its centerpiece is a bulbous unfurling flower of light, crested by the word "Flamingo" in a flowing, confident script. As recently as 1990, the Flamingo was briefly the largest hotel in the world, with 3530 rooms; it now has 3575, well below that of the MGM Grand , and pitches itself as a sophisticated upmarket resort, an elder statesman of the Strip too secure of its status to compete head-on with brash modern upstarts. Only a continuing predilection for the kind of pinks and oranges seldom seen out side Barbie's boudoir bear witness to its racy past.
Although there's little to see or do in the casino proper, the landscaped Wildlife Habitat and Arboretum around the back of the property is a lovely garden complex of pools, lagoons, water slides, palm-shaded walkways, and abundant flamingos, both real and plastic. There are also a few African penguins, bumbling birds also known as Blackfooted Penguins.
In an unusual twist, the Flamingo caters to customers who hanker for the old days by offering lower-stakes gaming and cheap eats in what looks like a separate casino next door, the nominally Irish-themed O'Sheas .
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