1 case tagged “Cold War era crime”
Accused: Onie Virginia Hill
On the evening of June 20, 1947, a .30-caliber carbine was pressed against the window of a Beverly Hills mansion and fired nine times. Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, reading the newspaper on the sofa inside, was dead before he hit the floor. His right eye was found fifteen feet away. His girlfriend, Virginia Hill, had flown to Paris four days earlier. She described it as a spontaneous vacation. Nobody believed her. Not the investigators. Not the mob. Not the men who had watched her move money across state lines, carry intelligence between crime families, and charm her way through two decades in the highest ranks of American organized crime. Born dirt-poor in rural Alabama in 1916, Hill had transformed herself from a seventeen-year-old shimmy dancer at a World's Fair restaurant into the only woman ever officially identified as a Mafia associate. The United States Senate called her a "central clearing house" for organized crime intelligence. Everyone else called her the Queen of the Mob. When her body was found beside an Austrian brook in March 1966, authorities ruled it a suicide. Bruises on her neck, an unidentified substance in her blood, and a diary full of mob secrets suggested the real story was considerably more complicated. It almost always was, with Virginia Hill.
