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.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
Don’t Go Broke. After the War Buy More War Bonds – NARA – 534094 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Eat less, drink more, and write. I know that’s bad advise. It’s mine. We have to own how we absorb the tumbles and falls. We all have them. I mean, there is no answer, no universal answer, or political party, that will bring you to that point.
You just have to find the path that you belong on.Mine is all about gambling.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
WEEKS BEFORE RUDY’S, insultingly witty and honest mother passed away, she looked at me over the rim of a Lemon Drop at the Ripe Tomato in San Juan Capistrano her unfading brown eyes acutely aimed at me.
“You’re too emotional ; it’s going to be your ruin.”
“It’s passion Harriett, and part of my character.”
“It will do you no good. You have to listen to me. I’m 97!”
Harriett learned early on how to wear pearls and refuse pointless suffering.
I write this after a wakened sense of transformation. I didn’t have to go far, or pay any money for this mud bath. It was after reading an email from my former almost engaged to man.( me never!) and the concentrate of my last standing hope for truth between us was treated as a formality.
So my emotions have been replaced with a cooler temper for both love and sensitivity. That’s okay, the real danger is in developing into a cynic; tossing out jazzy lines about, how a man can destroy your life, and all of that. There’s a Middle Aged group of women “men suffrages’’, that live in Santa Fe. Sometimes I see myself in that group, chanting, doing yoga, going to lectures, out to lunch.
What percolated this epiphany? I’ve never been emotionally damaged by a man. There have been sorrowful break-ups, but when we split up, all eight of the men became close friends over the years.
My gal posse offer advise; light a match to his love letters, treat yourself to all therelaxation rituals, and spa treatments, take a trip to visit them and indulge in friendship, and joining Match.com. You see, everyone knows your voice, and even if your thousands of miles away, friends can hear despair.
It’s all very similar to “A Book of Common Prayer .” Witty Joan Didion , the ways she says, something I am paraphrasing, “I’m not calling at a bad time am I Charlotte? You’re not in the middle of a nervous breakdown or anything? “
I wonder if you lie to yourself it gives you an edge on how to lie without conscience. Seems to be in vogue or something. That is the fault-line innocence and adulthood. Once you cross that line you know it. I’ve always been told I was a late bloomer in everything!
I’m on my way out the door; I rented the house for twelve days. The big white Suburban just drove up. A wide shouldered, grinning forty something just got out of the car. I see a woman, then the two teenagers, and a dog! They didn’t tell me about the dog, but it’s a little limply Cocker Spaniel, so I wave,
“Hi, come in I’ll show you around.”
To be continued. Hariett and I pictured in 2004 at a San Diego Opera Gala.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I moved in with my Dad when I was thirteen years old. My mother had just passed away, and I arrived with innocence and untrained cooking skills. Mom was an Irish Catholic meatloaf and corn-beef cook. Dad was a Russian Orthodox raised moderate vegetarian, and decided to hire a chef to teach me how to cook.
I came home from school one day, and found Caesar in the kitchen. He was a stand-in for Paulie in the Godfather, only he had curly black hair, and apple red cheeks. Caesar was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and an apron that fell short of fitting him. Dad instructed Cesar to teach me how to make salads, baked fish, and spaghetti with oil and garlic. Everyday after school, Caesar was in the kitchen preparing dinner for us, and I stood beside him, observing his chubby knuckled fingers, slice and chop vegetables. We started with what Dad ordered; a meal in a salad, and later coined it Farmer’s Chop Suey. The salad was not just prepared, it was a decorated masterpiece when he finished. During the preparation, I noticed beads of sweat on Caesar’s face, and a jittery nervousness, surfaced just before my father arrived home, “What do you think? Will Dad approve?” He asked. I assured him Dad would love the salad. Cesar and I became pals, and waited anxiously for Dad’s arrival. He wasn’t all that agreeable. Fastidiousness and perfection are common traits amongst gangsters. Usually, Dad remarked there wasn’t enough garlic, or there were too many croutons, and Caesar would swiftly correct the complaint.
After Cesar went home, Dad would talk to me about food, and how everything starts in the stomach, and how the vegetables have to be scrubbed, and the seeds removed. Three or four times a week Dad dined out, and he didn’t order salads. He frequented Italian restaurants, and his favorite was Bouillabaisse, with a side of pasta. I never saw him enjoy any food as much as Borsch with sour cream, and smoked white fish. That was his favorite childhood meal. His father was a Orthodox Butcher, a very scared skill that requires a thorough understanding of Kosher preparation.
About six months had passed, and I came home one day and Cesar wasn’t there. Instead I found my father in a rage. I asked about Cesar and he told me it was none of my business, and to start preparing dinner. After my first salad preparation, Dad applauded my presentation, and assured me everything he was teaching me would serve me later on in life. He explained he had to be harsh and demanding, because he wanted me to be able to take care of myself properly.
I developed into a moderate vegetarian and have used that salad as a blueprint for most of my meals. Now I create a variety of salads, and a lot more ingredients: like white beans, garbanzos, walnuts, tuna, or shrimp, artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes etc. My friends call me a free-style cook because I only use recipes when I’m making soups or stews.
I was very fortunate to grow up with a father who spent hours teaching me what I would need to know in life. This is something you won’t read or see in a film about growing up with gangsters.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
Geronimo and fellow Apache Indian prisoners on their way to Florida by train (Photo credit: State Library and Archives of Florida)
I go to the market, and buy six items.” Do you want a bag?” he asks? “No I’ll juggle them on my head.” At the bar at Geronimo, ‘ Do you live here,” from the man sitting next to me. Gibberish weather, and wine conversation, then I ask what his wife does, he turns his back and talks to the woman on the other side of him. Another night at Geronimo, a man ( high dollar Texan) buys me dinner because he thinks I’m so different.. We decide to go dancing at El Farol. I meet up with two humorous gay fellas on the porch, and while having a cigarette, the man exits and leaves without a word. At La Po, the waitress asks me, why I am staying here. I tell her because my house is rented. ” Oh, do you still own it?” she says. The front page of Pasatiempo event guide is a story, ” Are you paying too much for pot?”
A man walks up to my porch, ” Are you open?” “No, but come in” I say and he walks around and tells me he dreamth about my red room, as the office of his character in his screenplay.
Wells Fargo is my favorite. As soon as you walk in, a bank hostess, sings, “Welcome to Wells Fargo” and then I wait 20 minutes for a teller. After that, I spend another twenty minutes watching what the clerk is doing because they always put my business income in my personal account. La de da, if you want to live like it’s all a joke, move to Santa Fe. It will transform your rigidness into a loosely tied knot of learning how to adapt, as if you were in another country.
The plumber who is amiable fun-loving man, whose name is Tim gives me a ride to Wells Fargo so I can pay him cash. Tim lived here all his life, but he’s having trouble finding a pen, and a calendar to mark the next payment date, and then we pass Wells Fargo, and he says, is this it? I say Tim, it’s been here a long time, and he says, I got so many jobs I don’t know what’s newer than 1960.
The streets are narrow and filled with pot holes, so when a delivery truck can’t find a parking space, they pull up on the sidewalk, and over the years, the sidewalks have bubbles, cracks, and are worn down. It requires tightrope talent, and if you wear stacked heels, you’ll never make it to the corner. My heel got stuck between two bricks and I had a hellava time breaking free.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
It is time to turn my life upside down, instead of moving furniture, my neurosis of constant change, it is interior change that I must make. Henry Miller says, ” Words by the way, can carry you into action, carry you into thought, instead of the other way around.”
Adventure, dreams, and escapism have guided me and maybe you, and now ( as a sudden rain storm begins) it is sketching what is necessary, unavoidable, and maybe even tedious.
Henry Miller, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1940 Jan. 22 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
posición en el baile flamenco. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The throw of the dice this week lands on the un-said and underscored vignettes that pass through us. Those moments which make us turn away from screens, cameras, and cell phones, to observe life around us. Writers do this habitually, like addicts. It is our drug to examine what we feel no one else is seeing, feeling or thinking. These were last week’s vignettes.
I am outdoors on the patio of La Posada Resort. The cotton wood leaves on the trees, are dancing in setting sun light. At the far end of the dining patio, the lawn is staged, and the grass is covered with folding chairs. On stage, under a white billowing tent, teenage Flamenco dancers’ switchblade their black and coral skirts, as the pillow soft breeze brushes my face. I’m smiling without envy, a massive leap, because for most of my life, when I see professional dancers, I’m scolding myself, for not following through with my passion for dancing. Tonight, it is gone. My joy erupts to the surface. The dancers are the same age I was when I began training.
Their painted cheeks and darkened eyes are highlighted by the sunlight; they look like paintings that have come to life. The music is burning through centuries of Spanish history, through blood and battles, and the eruption of their passion for dance.
We have a convention of insurance salesman, dressed in Eddie Bauer, and the ladies in Jones of New York, seated like birds with their wings clipped. The men are standing in huddles, roaring laughter at inside jokes. Three dancers break from tradition and are now dancing to Billy Jean, striking their poses and facing our table. the leader, whom the others bashfully imitate, plays to us, and I want to tell her, don’t stop dancing, don’t give it up.
Seated in front of me is a couple in their late sixties. Transparent by dress and manner, they look farm-bred Midwestern. He wears a hard-working no fluff or formality expression, and his wife, probably is his high-school sweetheart. She appears painfully restrained-but she covers this up with a contented smile. The husband is staring at me, his lips are scornful, his eyes like that of a disbelieving police officer, or judge. I’m behind sunglasses, absorbing them through my mental lens, as if we were having a conversation. I imagine him on a tractor, and his wife behind a white worn picket fence picking fruits and vegetables. We’re separated by the cultural divide, but I want to ask the farmer how his life has changed, how the economy impacted his crops, his dreams. What did he dream about when he was a boy? Maybe dreams were a luxury he could not afford.
Beneath a black lake of stars, the breeze whips my hair, Rudy smiles at me, without a word I know what he’s thinking. The evening volumnized when the band kicked into sixties soul, and the insurance salesman are now dancing with the insurance saleswoman, and their wings are unclipped.
We left, crossing through the festivities to our porch, where the music resonated. Rudy turned on the blue lights.
“Don’t turn them on; they attract the moths.”
“I tell you what I’ll do and what I won’t do.”
“They’ll eat your eyeballs when you’re sleeping.”
“What! Where did you come up with that?”
“Don’t know. Look whose coming out to complain about the music?” Then we see our neighbor, stomping across the lawn in his red T-Shirt and Beret. Professor J, demands to voice his rights at every opportunity. I’ve seen him argue with a Police Officer in the middle of the street, at one in the morning. “You have an obligation to police Santa Fe that is your job!” He shouted at the officer for thirty minutes.
The night closes, like a play from the summer of 2012. Doesn’t sound like the summer of 1971, when we met on the streets, and just hung out, listening to radios, and watching people. I think living next to a hotel, has kept me closer to street life. I could do without the delivery trucks at six in the morning and the crashing bottles in the dumpster. It’s not unbearable any longer because La Posada is nowLa Familia.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
