KVIG Informative

The company that once answered to Chicago mob bosses on the Las Vegas Strip later filed its finances with the Securities and Exchange Commission and listed its stock on a public exchange. The land underneath it took even longer to go legitimate. Nevada’s tourism authority didn’t land a buyer for the empty lot until 2024, nearly a decade after bulldozers leveled the building.

The site at the Strip’s north end opened in 1952 as the Casa Blanca Hotel, a $3.5 million resort built by William Bischoff, according to UNLV Special Collections. Bischoff received a gaming license that year but withdrew his application in 1953, handing operations to Miami investor Samuel Cohen. Cohen had also withdrawn by early 1955, and a new group of investors, including Harpo and Gummo Marx, reopened the property as the Riviera on April 20, 1955, according to the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, known as the Mob Museum, in Las Vegas.

The Riviera was bankrupt within three months, according to UNLV Special Collections, and control passed to managers from the Flamingo, including Gus Greenbaum. Greenbaum had taken over management of the Flamingo after Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was shot to death in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1947, and he stayed on as manager after the Flamingo itself sold for $9 million in 1954, according to the Mob Museum.

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The Chicago Outfit first demanded Greenbaum take over the Riviera, and he initially refused before agreeing to the job, according to the Mob Museum. Nevada’s Tax Commission approved his plan to serve as the Riviera’s managing director in September 1955. By 1958 he had become the hotel’s president and held about 22,000 shares of its stock, the museum’s research states.

Greenbaum and his wife, Bess, were killed on the night of Dec. 2, 1958, at their home at 1115 W. Monte Vista Road in Phoenix, across from Encanto Park; police found their bodies the next morning. Bess Greenbaum was struck in the head, bound at the wrists and had her throat cut with a butcher knife from the couple’s own kitchen. Gus Greenbaum was struck twice in the skull and his throat was cut with the same knife, according to the Mob Museum’s research. Phoenix police considered a suspect but found no evidence linking him to the killings, and the case remains unsolved, with no arrests ever made.

Riviera vice president Ben Goffstein became president after the Greenbaums’ deaths, according to UNLV Special Collections. The hotel changed hands repeatedly in the decades that followed and its operating company, Riviera Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 1991. A reorganization plan took effect June 30, 1993, and a newly incorporated Nevada company, Riviera Holdings Corporation, took over ownership through a subsidiary, Riviera Operating Corporation, according to the company’s own 1997 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Riviera Holdings Corporation’s common stock began trading on the American Stock Exchange on May 13, 1996, after previously being quoted on the NASDAQ Bulletin Board, the company’s SEC filing states. A hotel-casino once run at the direction of Chicago mob bosses had become a publicly traded company, its financials filed annually with federal regulators instead of hidden from them.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority voted Feb. 20, 2015, to buy the Riviera’s 26-acre site for $182.5 million, according to Riviera Holdings Corporation’s own press release filed with the SEC that month. The hotel closed to the public on May 3, 2015, and the Convention and Visitors Authority imploded its two towers in June and August 2016 to clear the land for a planned expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center, according to UNLV Special Collections.

The cleared 26 acres didn’t move quickly. A 10-acre slice of the old Riviera footprint sat as vacant Strip frontage for years after the implosion before the Convention and Visitors Authority voted on June 11, 2024, to split it between two buyers: a partnership of developers Brett Torino and Paul Kanavos for $12.5 million, and Fontainebleau Development, owner of the neighboring Strip resort, for $112.5 million. A casino once run by a man murdered for reasons nobody was ever charged with is now priced, surveyed and sold off in parcels by a public authority’s board vote — the same transparency Nevada spent seven decades building specifically because men like Greenbaum once operated without it.