I really like the Bugsy episode as it tells the actual story of the Flamingo and not the myth of him having a vision as he stared into the desert.
Yes, the story of Bugsy Siegel and the Flamingo encapsulates all the BS about the Mob--what people like to write about, and what really happened:
Bugsy Siegel didn't "invent Las Vegas." When he took up residence ca. 1940-41, it was a boomtown with seven hotel/casinos, some of them air-conditioned. The Flamingo had been named by its builder, Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, a degenerate gambler whose debts left him unable to finish the hotel. Siegel bought him out and got his NY pals to invest.
The only thing new about the Flamingo was that it was the first Vegas hotel/casino to be built in a "modern," "eastern" style, not the western "corral" style of the El Rancho Vegas or the the other six hotels. Siegel lost his shirt on the
Flamingo. But after he was assassinated, his successors (Gus Greenbaum, Little Moe Sedway, and especially, Moe Dalitz) made a fortune on the Flamingo's model.
