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.
INTO DEL MAR OCEAN
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The sea is like rolled oil, and the breaking waves are the size of lake ripples. At this momentary recess of chaotic beach activity, all the heaviness of life rolls out with the waves. Observing the elan of beach life carousing, suntanning bodies already tanned leather, joggers and runners, bicyclists, fishermen, volleyball players, and the surfers.
That’s my garden of grace and glory. They are like ballet dancers, some of them, some seem to think they’re driving a car or motorcycle, but the longboarders, old school aged surfers, skim waves athletically and spiritually, one with the board like a musician with an instrument.
And the fisherman, the other clan, is worth watching because they are interlopers in Del Mar. They come alone, dressed in rubber boots, floppy, stained hats, and pocket vests, like longshoremen or train conductors, an aura antiquated in Del Mar history, when fishermen were in greater numbers than joggers, lifeguards, and beach parties.
