To the list of tragic American Dreamers, people who martyred themselves for visions that stubbornly refused realization while they lived -- one thinks of rocket scientist Robert Goddard and car manufacturer Preston Tucker -- it seems we must now add the name of Benjamin Siegel. His great notion was the reinvention of Las Vegas, converting it from a sleepy cow town into a gaudy pleasure dome where everything that was illicit elsewhere in the puritanical U.S. of a half-century ago was openly available on a gloriously legal basis.
This was, to be sure, a dubious, not to say tacky, achievement. But...
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