“There’s no such thing as good money or bad money. There’s just money.”
-Benjamin Siegel, Gangster
Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a family of poor Jewish immigrants who came from Eastern Europe. His parents, Max and Jennie, worked whatever jobs they could find to provide for their five children, and their neighborhood constantly invented new definitions for the word “Poor.”
As a child, the second of five, Benjamin saw that struggle as well as what his parents struggled against, and he vowed that he would rise above a life of poverty.
He dropped out of school somewhere around the age of eleven and started his life of crime. Even as a child he was familiar with violence and intimidation, learning most of what he knew from the Irish and Italian street gangs around him.
SOURCES:
Gragg, L. D. (2015). “Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel: The Gangster, the Flamingo, and the Making of Modern Las Vegas”
Anhalt, E. (1992). Bugsy Siegel: We Only Kill Each Other., Pocket Books
Bugsy Siegel. (n.d.). https://vault.fbi.gov/Bugsy Siegel
Biography.com Editors. (n.d.). Bugsy Siegel. http://www.biography.com/people/bugsy-siegel-9542063