In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (1906-1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-twentieth-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this biography, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.