BUGSY I : So Vegas Wasn’t His Idea and He Was a Bigot to Boot

Hollywood? Inflate the importance of a character in a movie? Whitewash his flaws?

“Bugsy,” the glossy film version of mobster Bugsy Siegel’s conception of Las Vegas, may be be a multiple-Oscar nominee, but two experts on Las Vegas in the ‘40s say Siegel’s vision wasn’t as glittering as the movie made it seem.

According to the film, Siegel was a nasty yet brilliant dude who single-handedly conceived of a mecca for gamblers and gangsters in the Nevada desert.

But a leading historian of the Strip says Vegas and the Flamingo Hotel weren’t Bugsy’s idea at all, and the son of the man who really thought up the idea has been storming the nation’s media outlets trying to get his dad--the late William (Billy) Wilkerson--the attention he (allegedly) deserves.

At the same time, the producer of an award-winning radio documentary on segregation in Las Vegas has criticized “Bugsy,” saying it makes no mention of Siegel’s role in implementing Jim Crow-type rules in the town’s early casinos.

According to Susan Jarvis, director of the Gaming Resource Center of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, it was Wilkerson, flamboyant founder of the trade publication the Hollywood Reporter, who initially drew up the plans and broke ground for the Flamingo. And it was Wilkerson, Jarvis said, who had the idea for turning what was then a dusty stretch of land with two rough-and-tumble casinos into a posh gaming mecca.

But Wilkerson ran out of money, and that’s where Bugsy and his Murder Inc. friends stepped in.

“It was his idea, plain and simple,” said the entrepreneur’s son, William (Willie) Wilkerson Jr., who is writing a book about his father. “It was his vision, his idea, and what happened was he just ran out of money. So it’s infuriating to see a film like ‘Bugsy’ roll over history. It’s just plainly not true.”

Siegel decided to wangle his way into Wilkerson’s operation after watching him at Ciro’s, the Los Angeles nightspot that Wilkerson owned and Siegel frequented. The gangster approached Wilkerson through a front man, offering to bail him out with $1 million of what turned out to be Syndicate money.

“There is a scene in ‘Bugsy’ where Warren Beatty is standing out in the desert getting the idea of a glittering complex in the desert,” Willie Wilkerson said. “Believe me, he never saw the Flamingo until he bought into it. He wasn’t going to be caught out in the Nevada desert.”

Meanwhile, William Drummond--whose documentary “Las Vegas: Mississippi of the West or Promised Land?” is slated to air on KCRW-FM (89.9) on Monday and April 6, and on KLON-FM (88.1) Monday and Tuesday, said that Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel made segregation flourish on the Strip in the late 1940s.

“It’s like telling the story of the Civil War without mentioning slavery,” Drummond said. “It’s a grave oversight never to mention that this was a guy who decided he was going to institutionalize segregation in the entertainment industry.”

Even though Jim Crow laws were being repealed at the time, Drummond said, the Flamingo and other hotels refused to allow black performers to eat, drink or gamble in the casinos where they worked.

When Lena Horne refused to return to the run-down shacks across town, which black performers were expected to do after their shows, Siegel reluctantly allowed her to stay in a cabana. But the hotel maids were instructed to burn her linens every day.

Drummond’s documentary, which recently won a Scripps-Howard award for journalistic excellence, was produced for the 125th anniversary of Nevada’s statehood last year.

Drummond, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, thinks “Bugsy’s” producers simply didn’t know about Siegel’s role in segregation.

“I don’t think Warren Beatty did it out of any evil purpose,” Drummond said. “But if he had actually known, he could have made a fabulous picture. Just think of a scene of that maid going into Lena Horne’s room, collecting the linen and burning it.”