Writer’s Friends Doubt That Mob Is Tied to Her Death

She grew up among gangsters and drug dealers, extortionists and killers.

These were the people who cared for Susan Berman in her childhood, who made her world seem a fairy tale. They arranged for Elvis and Liberace to sing at her birthdays; they taught her how to count in casinos.

In adulthood, Berman mined her early life for material: writing books, producing documentaries and developing movie scripts that focused on the lavish, hedonistic and deadly development of Las Vegas during the booming days of the 1940s and ‘50s.

She knew the subject better than most. Her father, David Berman, was one of the kingpins of the Las Vegas Mafia then. A partner to notorious mobsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, Berman was a syndicate strongman whose reputation was forged through moxie and brutality.

Thought by some to be the engineer of one of the first kidnappings for ransom in New York during the 1920s, David Berman was no stranger to murder. He was once described as a man “so tough he could kill a man with one hand tied behind his back.”

So when police found the body of 55-year-old Susan Berman in her Benedict Canyon home Dec. 24, the questions naturally began. The person who shot her once in the head apparently hadn’t used force to get in or taken anything.

Who killed Susan Berman, a woman who lived alone and had, by all accounts, no known enemies? Was it someone she had angered through her focus on the Mafia?

“Nobody knows right now,” said Brad Roberts, the LAPD detective leading the investigation. Police have no idea of a motive and no suspects so far, he said, but he called any connection between the murder and the mob “a real shot in the dark.” Still, Roberts said he is investigating every possibility.

“There are so many questions,” said Berman’s manager, Nyle Brenner, who added that Berman had recently been working on a project about the women of Las Vegas and was trying to develop a television project on the city’s underworld.

“She always used to refer to this old mob saying that you ‘never want to die in an unfortunate way.’ Of course the irony is she ends up dying in an unfortunate way,” he said.

But Brenner said he doesn’t believe she was killed because of her old connection to the mob or her work, because the people she had known and written about are dead.

Her closest friends and family agreed.

“Whoever committed this deliberate act of violence, maybe they did it this way to make it look suspicious, to keep people guessing at some silly notion” of mob connections, said Deni Marcus, one of Berman’s cousins. “And whoever did this killed a bright, peaceful woman who lived an incredible life.”

When Berman was a girl, growing up around such stars as Elvis, Dean Martin and Liberace, her father owned one of Las Vegas’ prime destination spots, the Flamingo Hotel. A huge painting of her, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, hung above the reception desk.

Berman wrote that she did not figure out her father’s mob ties until she grew up, and that he did everything he could to shield her from the dark side of it. He told her he didn’t carry keys to the house because the doors were always left open. She learned later that mob men never carried keys because if they were kidnapped their families could be terrorized.

Berman was orphaned by the age of 13. Her father died on an operating table in 1957, in an incident that some have suggested was ordered by David Berman because he knew he was close to being killed by rivals. A year later, her mother died. Around that time one of her father’s partners, Gus Greenbaum, and his wife were decapitated in a mob hit.

Susan Berman went to live with an uncle, who shuttled her to various West Coast boarding schools. She then went to UCLA and to graduate school at UC Berkeley, where she studied journalism.

During a time of campus protest and disdain of things bourgeois and materialistic, Berman boldly drove a white Mercedes and talked about her lavish years in Las Vegas, according to a former classmate who is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

Berman’s professional career took her to various cities, including San Francisco and New York. After writing “Easy Street,” a successful book about growing up in the mob, she came to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, eager to cash in on interest in the book from movie studios.

In Los Angeles, where she would write more books and produce an acclaimed documentary about Las Vegas’ history, she developed a close circle of friends and enjoyed time spent alone writing, friends said.

“She was a bit eccentric, that was part of her charm,” said Sareb Kaufman, who has considered Berman his mother since she briefly dated his father about 13 years ago. The two saw each other at least once a week, for dinner or movies, he said. Kaufman called Berman a strong woman who nevertheless had complicated fears and lived cautiously. Among them was a fear of heights.

Berman, he said, could not go past the ground floor of a building without someone she trusted nearby.

“You just ask yourself,” he said of the slaying, “why and how?”

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Times researcher John Jackson contributed to this story.