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.
Deborahah
How’s your mother? How are you doing in Atlanta? Bring me up to date.
My spirit is in remission, so done with Santa Fe!
Everyone is leaving, or left.
No man in my life, but my house is rented to Opera musicians all summer, and they’re all darlings. We’ll be having some
jolly times, they love to cook and want to perform on the porch for the public. Rudy is in San Diego and coming back in July for a visit.
into the lane of a demon woman and full of hellish fire. It is the line that divides those that still care from those that just, whatever.
Never thought I’d be a don’t care, no dreamer, no hope woman but I am there. What is God telling me? What is the message?
Why am I meeting pitiful people? Do they reflect me?
Do they mimic me? Do breasts mean everything?
Was my youth my only charm?
Why are men blocking instead of buying me drinks?
Why do they prick, instead of prune?
Only when they are detonated with insults do they respond.
Is the strong female driven Hollywood character emblazoning every commercial, film, ad, and song
Stolen the testosterone?
I am going to look for the eighties woman I was. She was
full of laughter, confidence, romance and aspiration.
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