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.
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Now….let Bob Dylan’s voice be your guide:
“May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundations
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,.
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.”
Gripping and suspenseful, in a sense without a secret. What will she learn? What will it resolve? Will she find love? I kinda want to take a day off to find out!
One week ago I published my first and not the last book. It is in the past, and yet not. Instead of checking PM, tweets, facebook, emails and text a few times a day, your voices on the digital wire are a continuum of exultation. A writer doesn’t accept their work until those reviews come in. An enormous hug and kiss to all of you who have expressed approval.
Just know that every time one of you writes about my book, I think of when we met, the memories we made, and the immortality of what I remember. As I said on the acknowledgment page in the book, without you I wouldn’t have walked through the archway to my ancestry.
There is a mystical rainbow over this book. For the first time, my father’s relatives are learning about their abashed cousin, uncle, grandfather, and friend. I feel the river of change taking me into the current. It will be my ride because I am ready to steer on my own.
remember. As I said on the acknowledgment page in the book, without you I wouldn’t have walked through the archway to my ancestry.
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