Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (February 28, 1906 – June 20, 1947) was an American gangster, who was behind large-scale development of Las Vegas.

Siegel was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a poor Jewish family originally from Letychiv, Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire, in modern Ukraine. As a boy, Siegel joined a street gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side and first committed mainly thefts, until, with another youth named Moe Sedway, he devised his own protection racket: pushcart merchants were forced to pay him a dollar or he would incinerate their merchandise on the spot.