Virginia Hill: Mistress To The Mob

Source:The Mob Museum- Hollywood actress and organized crime businesswoman Virginia Hill.

"On March 24, 1966, passersby walking on a footpath beside a picturesque brook near Salzburg, Austria, found the body of a woman in the snow beside a tree. Her coat was neatly folded on the ground. A possible suicide note indicated the person was simply “tired of life.”

The woman was Virginia Hill, the onetime so-called “Queen of the Mob,” a courtesan and entrusted cash courier for household-name American gangsters from the mid-1930s through the 1940s. An Austrian official concluded the 49-year-old Virginia died of a self-administered overdose of sedatives, not a surprise given her history of near-fatal pill-swallowing going back to the 1940s.

Hill, born in 1916, was surely something of a mental case, perhaps diagnosed today as bipolar, sociopathic, borderline personality or worse. But while still only a teenager in 1934, she showed her mettle as the beautiful and beguiling redheaded apprentice of Mob bookmaker Joe Epstein in the rough and corrupt city of Chicago. Soon, with incredible ease, using her looks, sexual liaisons and talents for laundering money and stolen merchandise, Hill rose higher than any other woman in the national underworld, an equal among the most infamous male racketeers in the United States, among them Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Johnny Rosselli, Charles and Joe Fischetti, Tony Accardo, Frank Nitti, William “Ice Pick Willie” Alderman, Jack Dragna and, most famously, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel." 

From The Mob Museum

"Virginia Hill (August 26, 1916 – March 24, 1966) was an American organized crime figure and the Mob's top courier for nearly 30 years. She was famous for being the girlfriend of mobster Bugsy Siegel who was killed at her palatial mansion." 

Source: Bloodletters and Badmen- Actress & Mob Lady, Virginia Hill.

From Bloodletters & Badmen 

If you watch the movie Bugsy from 1991 with Warren Beatty playing Ben Siegel with Annette Being playing Siegel's mistress Virginia Hill, the movie portrays Virginia as much more than a mobster's mistress. Mistresses are common with mobsters and mobsters who are married with children is also common with both Italian and Jewish mobsters and perhaps Irish mobsters as well.

Mob women are generally, but always babes in the woods. ( To use a Goodfellas line ) Basically unaware or ignoring what their husbands do for a living at least until their husbands go to prison for the first time. Then maybe, they get a clue that their husbands actually aren't construction workers or auto mechanics, legitimate businessmen, or whatever lie their husbands feed them as far as what they do for a living.

If you watch the movie Bugsy you see Virginia Hill as not just a mobster mistress but she basically handled the finances of Ben Siegel's Las Vegas operation and business. Siegel had the vision that Las Vegas would become a gambling and entertainment mecca that it is now today and has been since the 1960s, if not farther back. 

In the 1940s when Siegel got this vision Las Vegas was basically a pitstop four hours east of Los Angeles. Where people would go to gas up, get a bite to eat, perhaps stay for the night, but generally not a place where people would go to vacation. Unlike what it is now which is one of the top vacation towns in America.

Virginia Hill was not a babe in the woods. She knew who Ben Siegel was and that he was married with kids and that he was a New York mobster before they got involved out in Los Angeles. And didn't have any major issues with that. 

Virginia was attracted to Ben physically, but his charm, his humor, and perhaps the most of all his power and wanted to be with him. And became his business partner and had a role in helping his build his Las Vegas casino which was the Flamingo. 

You can also see this post at The FreeState, on Blogger.