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 and contributed artifacts connected with her father’s history to the Las Vegas Mob Experience.
Smiley is now developing Gaslighting Greta, a work of psychological and emotional nonfiction centered on manipulation, betrayal, friendship, and the struggle to reclaim one’s identity. 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.
When I listen to Antonio Carlos Jobim, I dream of Brazil and of riding on a float at Mardi Gras, just once, in a feather hat, dressed like Rita Hayworth. Music evokes a writing mood, like jazz or blues writing; they are similar. When I listen to Sarah Vaughn or Nancy Wilson, it feels like a close female friend confiding in me and knowing I understand heartbreak.
When I sit at my desk and look at my mother’s photograph, I dream of the first lunch we had at Bullock’s Garden Room, watching the fashion show and discovering style. When I shovel snow, I dream of the coastal beaches: Del Mar, La Jolla, Santa Barbara, and Carmel. Commercials about travel dominate and fuel my craving for a flight. As my responsibilities here are unfinished, I will wait and daydream about the next voyage.
Daydreaming, unlike night dreaming, where we are flying, conquering, or battling some inner masked trauma, illuminates where we want to be, who we want to be, and if we take it seriously, how to get there. The medicine of daydreaming is unmatched by books, healthy food, vitamins, yoga, religion, or mind-altering experiences; it is the essence of who we are.
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.
