LUELLEN SMILEY ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS

Where Gaps of Expression are Liberated

ABOUT

Luellen Smiley is a creative nonfiction writer, author, columnist, and historian whose writing is deeply rooted in a controversial personal history. She is the daughter of Allen Smiley, a close friend, associate, and business partner of notorious Las Vegas gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Her father was sitting only feet from Siegel when Siegel was murdered in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1947.

That extraordinary childhood history became the foundation for Smiley’s first book, Cradle of Crime: A Daughter’s Tribute, published in 2017. The memoir explores what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a man connected to organized crime while trying to reconcile her love for her father with the secrecy, fear, and criminal world surrounding him.

Smiley’s work has appeared in publications including the New York Post, MORE Magazine, Southern California newspapers, and Authorlink. She wrote the newspaper column Smiley’s Dice—Adventures in Livingness, which earned a Blue-Ribbon Award from the California Newspapers Association for her Growing Up With Gangsters columns.

Her interest in her father’s history also led her to become a researcher and commentator on organized crime history. She has participated in television, radio, and documentary interviews.

Smiley’s next book, Gaslighting Greta, will be published this year. A personal story that reads like fiction. Her own website describes the project as exploring a woman whose life is destabilized by gaslighting and psychological manipulation.

Her writing career reflects a recurring theme: using personal experience and research to uncover the truth behind complicated relationships and extraordinary lives. From the secretive world surrounding her father and Bugsy Siegel to the deeply personal territory of Gaslighting Greta, Smiley’s work transforms difficult experiences into stories of survival, discovery, and ultimately reclaiming one’s voice.

Luellen Smiley is an author whose life has given her an unusual perspective on secrecy, manipulation, family loyalty, betrayal, and survival—and she uses that perspective as the raw material for her nonfiction storytelling.

Out of Control


This week is on control, and losing it. You hear that phrase often enough, “she has control issues.” I’m not sure what that means. I don’t understand how a society of rules and regulations that delivers more commands every day is expected to produce a society without control issues. I lost control of my life and so I am getting in touch with “out of control.”
Bohemian living was always in my dreams, having been raised in a perfectly pressed pinafore and seated on fragile furniture. I am not really very gypsy like when it comes to home. Once upon a time I lived in a suitcase, but I have since been corrupted by the joy of controlling all the things that come into the house and find a place there.

Once faced with this alarming epiphany I vowed to give up control and accept the disorder and disruption. What I’ve rediscovered is that without a lot of stuff to organize the mind is free to think. The house chores are minimal, leaving more time to create and effect important things. Narcissism is sacrificed and replaced with more visceral reflections.

Once I place myself inside the double yellow line of society, I feel those controls closing in on me. Losing control is a replenishment of youthful spirit. It’s free and painless. Try it, take off the leash and run free.

Two days later I was in a hotel, preparing for a reunion, a day of shopping, and luxuries of a woman on the road, when the news broke.. How did you feel when you heard the news. John and I went silent, and drove two hours in more conscientious silence.

LouLou

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