If that was the day Virginia Hill left childhood behind, it took a few more years for her exterior to catch up. And whatever happens to you when you fight back cannot be worse than what happens to you if you don’t. He fell to the floor, howling in pain, and the little girl learned something that would serve her well in years to come: Scratch a bully and you’ll find a coward. When he advanced on his 8-year-old daughter, Virginia grabbed a skillet full of bacon grease off of the stove and slammed it into her father’s chest. One night, Mack staggered home, drunk, slurring insults and shaking fists. Her father, Mack Hill, was an alcoholic ex-horse trader who took out his disappointments on the members of his family - except one. She was a timid, ginger-haired child who’d scrounge pennies to buy other children candy. Virginia was the seventh of 10 children in the kind of white trash family that peaks at Faulkner and taps out at Jerry Springer. She was born in August 1916 in Bessemer, a busted-out Alabama boomtown. Virginia remained untouchable - until the fallout from her 1951 testimony before the Kefauver Committee made her the most glamorous figure to ever appear on a “Wanted” poster. No appeal for help ever went unanswered,” Lee Mortimer wrote in Chicago Confidential. Yet she was also known for her kindness: “She was likable, friendly, sympathetic and genuinely big-hearted. Cold-blooded mob murderers feared her sharp tongue. She could disarm hair-trigger muscle without raising a hand, and get more information from a man with a word and a wink than brass-knuckled goons could beat out of him. Her life was a mix of glamourous spotlights and violent backrooms. She transported stolen property, fixed racetrack odds, negotiated deals, laundered money, paid bribes - all under the guise of a “Georgia oil heiress” or “Manhattan glamour girl,” as The New York Journal-American variously called her. Virginia was a backwoods waif who became a gossip-column celebrity, and the only woman who sat at the table with the Mafia, moving between the Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles outfits for nearly two decades. It’s ironic that a woman who maintained her independence in the male-dominated world of the Mafia is known as a “girlfriend of.” It’s even more ironic that she’s best-remembered in a town she hated by a casino that wasn’t actually named after her.

Whenever the name “Virginia Hill” surfaces, it’s always quickly followed those of Bugsy Siegel and the Flamingo. Virginia Hill’s savvy and sophistication made her more than a pretty mob moll

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