Al Capone. Lucky Luciano. Meyer Lansky. Bugsy Siegel. As terrible as these gangsters were, they all had one thing in common. They all, at one point in their lives were heard to say to their henchmen…
“WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T LEAVE ME IN THE SAME ROOM ALONE AS THAT PSYCHOPATH MUGSY MCGILLICUDDY!”
Bald and overweight, Mugsy had, as the old cliche goes, “a face only a mother could love.” The only catch is that a young Mugsy killed his mother in a dispute over his messy bedroom, thus putting him on a crash course with the juvenile justice system and even worse, leaving him with no one to love his butt ugly mug at all.
That was ok by him. Love? He had no use for it. Respect? He could care less. What he wanted more than anything else was to be feared and in his rise to power over the Los Angeles underworld, he spilled more than enough blood to leave the citizenry petrified.
Of course, he never openly admitted to being crooked. Publicly, he relished the “I’m just a legitimate businessman being persecuted by the system” routine whenever the occasional honest cop started sniffing around.
There were few of them. Half the force was on Mugsy’s payroll. The other half was so frightened they turned a blind eye. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, racketeering, fraud, extortion…the City of Angels was Mugsy’s oyster.
But he made a grave mistake when forced an up and coming boxer named Jake Dashing aka “The Jersey Jabber” into throwing fights by threatening his then girlfriend, Peaches LeMay.
Jake held a grudge, one that bore juicy fruit years later…
Pop Culture Mysteries 