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.
London (Photo credit: @Doug88888)
Snowflakes, and charcoal sketched clouds soufflé the sky.
“Darling! Please shovel the front porch,” I say to no one as my hand lazily grips
the handle, carelessly moving the shovel.
I watch the street. There are suits
and skirts straddling terrorist chic back packs, and tiny children dressed in
wool coats with tied hats prance behind Mums, on their Saturday shop day.
SOME musicians are playing on
one corner on the other side of the street is the Symphony Hall, squared between a paste
up pattern of colorful ancient theaters, opening doors to restaurant windows lit with
candles, perfumed air, and smoky pubs pack and push blokes and chicks.
I
am in London.
In my home; in Santa Fe, New
Mexico a muscle of winter has squeezed the
noise of street life.
I chose between ribbons and bows sipping and sliding down Palace Avenue,
to eat Chocolate pumpkin cream in zippered toes, on the rug, next to the
fireplace.
Huggin and kissin the Prancers and Dancers of my gang
ITS HOLIDAY SEASON SO SWING, SING, ROCK, WAVE,
SMILE, GIVE
