Virginia Hill

Early life

Virginia Hill was born on August 26, 1916 in Lipscomb, Alabama. She claimed to have neither worn nor owned a pair of shoes until the age of seventeen, when she ran away.

Adult life

Hill found a job waitressing at the 1933 Century of Progress Chicago's World Fair, then happened to come to the attention of a wealthy bookmaker and gambler, Joseph Epstein, who became her lover, financial advisor and ultimately, her entree into the Chicago Outfit crime organization. She was used to pass messages to mobsters. One contemporary commentator explained Hill as:

...more than just another set of curves. She had ... a good memory, a considerable flair for hole-in-the-corner diplomacy to allay the suspicions of trigger-happy killers and a dual personality, close-lipped about essentials, and able to chatter freely, and apparently foolishly about inconsequentials.

She became the lover of Luciano family capo Joe Adonis. Even law enforcement eventually concluded that she was a "central clearing house" for intelligence on organized crime and enjoyed an independent power base within the Mafia. She told people when arriving in Chicago that she was a Southern-belle society girl who had gone through four rich husbands, all divorced or dead, and that she had received $1 million each from their estates, but authentic socialites saw through the ruse. She built up an entourage of hangers-on and Latin gigolos hanging out on Broadway Avenue and frequently picked up the check. Four days before her lover, mobster Bugsy Siegel, was assassinated at her home in California (June 1947), she took an unscheduled flight to Paris, France. There were rumors that she and Siegel secretly got married in Mexico after Siegel divorced his wife Esta in 1946, but there has not been any evidence to prove the theory.

Lore has it that Siegel named the Flamingo Las Vegas resort after Hill, who loved to gamble and whose nickname was "Flamingo," a nickname Siegel gave her due to her long, skinny legs, but Hill was in fact short and somewhat matronly in form. Organized crime king Lucky Luciano wrote in his memoir that Siegel once owned an interest in the Hialeah Park Race Track and viewed the flamingos who populated nearby as a good omen. The "Flamingo" name was given to the project at its inception by original resort financier Billy Wilkerson.

In 1950 she married Hans Hauser, an Austrian skier.

In 1951, Hill was subpoenaed to testify before the Kefauver hearings, where she denied having any knowledge of organized crime despite being described by Time magazine in March of that year as the "queen of the gangsters' molls."

After she was indicted for income tax evasion in 1954, she moved to Europe, where she lived for the rest of her life with her only child, Peter Hauser. She died of an overdose of sleeping pills in Koppl, near Salzburg, Austria on March 24, 1966 at the age of 49. Hill is buried in Aigen Cemetery in Salzburg.

According to Andy Edmonds' biography Bugsy's Baby: The Secret Life of Mob Queen Virginia Hill, her death was suspicious despite it being an apparent suicide. The Austrian media, which were well informed about her former relationship with Siegel, speculated that she tried to get money by using her knowledge of the Italian-American Mafia and the Mexican drug cartels.

Legacy

Hill was the subject of a 1974 television movie, in which she was portrayed by Dyan Cannon. She was played by Annette Bening in the 1991 film Bugsy, a dramatization of her relationship with Bugsy Siegel (portrayed by Warren Beatty).