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.
DANCE and, MUSIC AGAINST THE NORDIC BLAST OF WINTER
FROM THE JOURNAL 2025
SUN, a goose-bumpy joy and celebration. That’s what I love about my education here: the first class you must take is weather management. I’ve destroyed dozens of artistic bric a brac by leaving them on the farm table on the porch, forgot to shop for groceries when a storm was approaching, and ran out of salt. I drove through town, taking photos at the red lights; the scenery is like Little Women, dressed differently but still rather swarthy in their determination to survive. Now some men, probably like the fourth or tenth generation, bear the strength by wearing a T-shirt or shorts. The other day, after a snowstorm, I noticed a man crossing the street in shorts, a long white beard, and working boots. That’s an EXACT badass around here.
Beguine the Beguine is on the record player, and I’m swinging around the music room, elated with the energy that forced me to dance, turn off the mind entirely. Total bliss. Dance has been with me since as far back as I can remember, the answer to a mood change, without drugs or alcohol.
