Flamingo Hotel owner Billy Wilkerson and mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel had been friendly since the mid-1930s, when Siegel was a regular at Wilkerson's famous Los Angeles nightclub, Ciro's on the Sunset Strip. By 1946, the long-time member of organized crime in New York and Los Angeles was receiving hefty monthly fees from bookmakers for a wire service that transmitted horse racing results.