Virginia Hill (August 26, 1916 - March 24.1966)
This is a story that Hollywood has done over and over, but unfortunately, it is true. It is about a young girl born in Lipscomb, Alabama, to an impoverished family who was seventh out of ten children.
Her father was an alcoholic who abused their mother and her siblings, and she could not wait to get out of there. Virginia finished eighth grade and married George Randell at age sixteen. Her mother packed her bags and the children, and they moved to Marietta, Georgia, where the other family was in 1933.
Virginia hoped to enter show business and moved to Chicago with her husband, some say, to get into adult entertainment. She left her husband in Chicago and found a job waitressing in a mob-run establishment. She got her foot in the door at The World's Fair to pick up extra income. This is where she caught the attention of a wealthy man—Joseph Epstein.
Joe Epstein ran books for the Chicago mob and laundered money. He started buying Virginia expensive gifts, and she taught herself to be a society girl. He realized how smart, beautiful, and great a memory she had. Virginia could talk freely and keep diplomacy, so he started using her for business.
She would pretend to be a mobster girlfriend to pass on messages. She would take bags of money and goods across state lines. She was the first woman mobster associate that they trusted. She also had a temper, so she was fearless. With the money she made, she would send home to her family.
Al Capone was the head of the Chicago mob, and Virginia had won his trust. Capone asked her to go to New York and infiltrate the New York Mob. She did this by becoming the girlfriend in the Cold War between Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. She did this by becoming a girlfriend to many but finally mistress to Joe Adonis.
Virginia and Joe Adonis teamed up with gambling rackets and money laundering just as she did with Joe Epstein. She started keeping a little diary on all her dealings with the mob.
In the late 1930s, Adonis sent Virginia to Hollywood to rub elbows with the Hollywood Elite, where she had several affairs and a short-lived marriage with a dancer. There, she met mobster Bugsy Siegal. He was a member of Luciano’s gang.
Virginia met Bugsy while setting up transport for narcotics from Mexico. She planned routes and then reported them to Bugsy. They fell in love, but they had a fiery love-and-hate relationship. Their relationship lasted through the 1940s when Hollywood made several movies and glamourized them. She lived like a movie starlet in Beverly Hills, and it is said she had several houses.
Their relationship ended when the Las Vegas Flamingo crashed, and Bugsy refused to return money to the mob. The Luciano Family deserted him in this matter, and he was assassinated. Virginia was in Europe at this time.
They say Bugsy named the Flamingo after her and her long legs, but that is not true. She was short and did not have long legs. The women in her family were all short. I know her family connections in Marietta. Luciano said in his memoir that founder Billy Wilkerson had already named it. What Bugsy said is that flamingos were good omens.
In 1950, she married a ski instructor in Austria, and they had one child.
In 1950, a Democrat Senator decided to pursue organized crime. Virginia Hill claimed that she had never committed crimes and that only rich men had given her gifts. That opened the door for the IRS to pursue her.
She sold everything she had, but it was still not enough. She fled to Europe because she did not trust her lawyer. She left her child with her husband. Someone supported her while staying in resorts, living high class in Europe. She eventually returned to the States to face her court case but became very paranoid for her life in what she knew about the mob. She was afraid for her life. She fled back to Europe.
According to Dr. Lorraine Blakeman, Virginia was on the path of having a nervous breakdown. She was worried about the mob and the government. She did not know which way to go. It was obvious that she was not being supported like she was financially. Her funds had run dry.
Hill contacted Joe Epstein and Joe Adonis to blackmail them about what was in her diary. She demanded money for her silence. On March 22, 1966, in Naples, Virginia, she met Adonis and received $10,000.
The following day, two friends who were known as hit men escorted her out of the building. She was found dead by a brook gorged with pills and alcohol in her system in Koppl, Austria. It was ruled a suicide. Three days before, Epstein had received the key to a locker with the diary in it. Also, she had marks around her neck. But it was still ruled a suicide.
As intelligent and beautiful as she was, it's too bad she did not choose a better path in life. Maybe she could have helped other poor girls.
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