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.
I know what she means…..and only people of like minds could ever get it. The rest of the World are all followers, for better or for worse…..we chart our own course. Better to be an original than a copy.
Morning comes after two cups of French Press. I sit here at the desk, peeking out the glass door to the shady side of the street. I do not know where I will be living, what I will be doing, or who I will be doing it with next month. Uncertainly, I move in and out of situations and get swept up in my ideas and fantasies. I buy and sell, make and remake, move-in, move-out, leave homes, careers, friends and relationships. I move out of comfort
art nouveau dome of light (Photo credit: e³°°°)
and into uncertainty because it feels more like home moving than staying in one place.
I have to put the words on the paper and look at it to make it real.
Raising a family, sprouting barriers and responsibilities might have changed me, but I didn’t. I’m unchanged in some ways, still running through the hallways of the hotels, gardens, and neighborhoods. Do you know what I mean?
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