So picture this: February 22, 1956, the Riviera showroom, and Orson Welles — the man who made Citizen Kane at twenty-five, the man Hollywood still calls the best director who ever worked there even when it can’t stand him — is standing under the lights in a tuxedo, doing a magic act. Not a cameo, not a favor, not an ironic bit. A full nightclub magic act, mixed in with mind reading, hypnosis, and chunks of Shakespeare recited straight to a room full of gamblers who came in off the casino floor. Near the end of the show he makes a prediction — the question and the answer that’ll turn up on The $64,000 Question, a full three weeks before the episode airs — writes it down, seals it in an envelope, and hands it to armed guards from the county sheriff’s office, who walk it downtown and lock it in a safe deposit box like it’s evidence in a trial. The next morning, the Reno Gazette-Journal runs the whole thing straight, “boy wonder” and all, like Las Vegas hadn’t already made stranger things than this look normal.
He needed the money, plainly, and by 1956 that was nothing new for him. Welles had spent most of the decade since Citizen Kane bouncing between Hollywood, Europe, and whatever paid the bills — his relationship with the studios had gone sour years earlier, and a man who’d once been handed unlimited creative control at twenty-five was, by his forties, taking whatever work kept the lights on. The immediate trigger was a King Lear at New York’s City Center that landed badly — bad reviews, a run that didn’t work, the kind of flop that makes a genius’s finances look exactly as precarious as anyone else’s. Vegas paid better than Broadway ever had, and the Riviera paid him $45,000 for three weeks of nightclub work, no film crew, no studio interference, just him, a stage, and an audience that wanted to be fooled. Biographer Simon Callow later called the act “an eclectic mix of magic, mind reading and Shakespeare,” which undersells how strange it must have actually looked — the same man who’d terrified the country with War of the Worlds sixteen years earlier now sawing assistants in half, working mentalism bits with an assistant named Phyllis Lines, and doing a broom-balancing routine he liked so much he brought it back a few years later on I Love Lucy, walking Lucille Ball through it step by step on camera. He mixed real sleight-of-hand with actual hypnosis demonstrations and then, without any apparent sense of tonal whiplash, dropped into full Shakespearean recitation for a room that had walked in off a casino floor expecting cocktails and a floor show, not verse. The run went well enough that the Riviera extended it two extra days past the original three weeks. Welles never played Las Vegas again. He didn’t need to. He’d gotten exactly what he came for.
What he probably didn’t know, or didn’t say much about if he did, is that the building he was standing in had already buried one of its own entertainment directors, and would bury the man running the whole hotel three years later.
Start with how the Riviera got there in the first place, because none of it was clean. The project began life as something called the “Casa Blanca,” pitched by a group of Miami Beach businessmen who applied for a Nevada gaming license back in December 1952. It should have been a straightforward deal — resort hotels were going up all over the Strip by then — except the initial 40-percent partner, a man named William “Lefty Clark” Bischoff, had to be dropped after the Kefauver Committee’s organized-crime hearings put his mob ties on the record. Two more investors, a Miami contractor and a Hollywood producer, backed out for the same reason. A third, Samuel Cohen, made it further before getting identified as part of Miami’s S&G gambling syndicate and getting removed too. By the time a cleaned-up ownership group of eight partners — including, improbably, Harpo and Gummo Marx — got its license approved in September 1953, the project had already gone through more mob-adjacent investors than most casinos manage in a lifetime.
It opened anyway, on April 20, 1955: $8.5 million, nine stories, 291 rooms, the first true skyscraper Las Vegas had ever seen, tallest building in the whole valley until the Fremont went up a year later. Liberace headlined opening night for a record $50,000 a week. Joan Crawford worked the gala like she owned the place. On paper, it looked like the classiest thing the Strip had built yet.
Underneath the paper, it was already in trouble. A Chicago Outfit fixer named Sidney Korshak had his hands on the operation almost from the start, suspected by law enforcement of skimming revenue out from under a Miami ownership group that had no real idea how to run a casino. Korshak wasn’t some anonymous mob accountant, either — he was already, by 1955, one of the most quietly powerful men in the country, a labor lawyer whose word could start or stop a Teamsters strike, settle a studio dispute, or make a Las Vegas casino problem disappear, all without ever holding an official title anywhere or ever once being convicted of anything. He’d spend the next three decades as exactly that kind of invisible hand across Hollywood, Las Vegas, and organized labor, and the Riviera was one of his earliest Nevada footholds. Between Korshak’s skimming and the owners’ inexperience, the Riviera was bleeding money within months — $1.4 million owed on construction, another $800,000 to trade creditors, the whole thing teetering toward bankruptcy before its first anniversary. Chicago boss Tony Accardo decided he knew who could fix it: Gus Greenbaum, the man who’d already turned the Flamingo profitable after somebody else’s murder cleared the way for him there. Greenbaum had retired. He said no. Then his sister-in-law was found smothered to death in her Phoenix home. Greenbaum said yes, gathered his old Flamingo team, and took over the Riviera in 1955.
One of the people Greenbaum brought in was a man going by the name William Nelson, hired as the Riviera’s entertainment director — the exact job that would have overseen booking a nightclub act like Orson Welles’s. William Nelson was an alias. His real name was Willie Bioff, a Hollywood labor racketeer who’d spent years extorting the movie studios through a mob-controlled union before doing federal prison time and reinventing himself in Phoenix under a new identity, cozy enough with the city’s political class to count Barry Goldwater among his acquaintances. On November 4, 1955, Bioff climbed into his pickup truck outside his Phoenix home, turned the key, and triggered a bomb wired underneath the driver’s seat. He died instantly. His wife watched it happen from the kitchen window. “He turned to wave,” she said afterward. “He always waved. I waved back.” Investigators couldn’t immediately even determine what kind of explosive had been used, only that it had been placed by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
That was November. Orson Welles opened at the Riviera in February, three months later, in a building where the job of deciding what went on that stage had just changed hands via car bomb. Whoever actually signed off on booking him — Greenbaum himself, most likely, given how tightly he’d taken control of the operation — was running the entertainment side of a hotel that had already proven, in the plainest way imaginable, what happened to people who crossed the wrong men in that building. None of that made it into the Reno Gazette-Journal’s review. It wouldn’t have. Nobody wrote “the last entertainment director here was murdered three months ago” into a nightclub write-up, even when it was true, even when everybody in town who mattered already knew it.
Greenbaum himself didn’t get much more time than Bioff had. By 1958 he’d built up real equity in the place — something like 22,000 shares worth $370,000, on top of a separate stake he still held in the Flamingo — but he’d also developed a heroin habit and a gambling problem that ate into the casino’s own money, skimming from the till to feed both. Tony Accardo and his enforcer Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik had tolerated a lot from Greenbaum over the years. They didn’t tolerate that. When word came down through mob fixer Johnny Rosselli that Greenbaum needed to sell his shares and get out of town, Greenbaum refused in almost exactly the terms you’d expect from a man who’d already rebuilt one dying casino and turned around a second: “I don’t want to leave. This goddamn town is in my blood. I can’t leave.” On the night of December 2, 1958, Greenbaum and his wife Bess were murdered in their Phoenix home — the same city, almost the same circumstances as Bioff three years earlier. Mobster Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno later said Meyer Lansky himself ordered it, on the theory that Greenbaum’s addictions had made him too erratic and too expensive to keep alive. Nobody was ever charged. Ben Goffstein took over as president after him, and the Riviera kept right on running, because in this particular business, it always did.
So that’s the room Orson Welles walked into for three weeks in February 1956 — a hotel financed by men the Kefauver Committee had already flagged, taken over at gunpoint-adjacent pressure by a Chicago boss, staffed by an entertainment director who’d be dead within the year of hiring him, and run by a managing director who’d be murdered himself before the decade was out. Welles did his Shakespeare, did his hypnosis, sealed his prediction, collected his $45,000, and left town having, as far as anyone can tell, never once mentioned any of it. He’d come for the money. He got the money. Whatever he understood about the men signing his checks stayed exactly as private as everything else about him usually did.
Here’s the part that would probably bother a director as obsessed with legacy as Welles was, if he’d lived to see it: none of this — not the Kefauver hearings, not Bioff’s car bomb, not Greenbaum’s murder, not even Welles’s own strange little detour into hypnotism and card tricks — is what the Riviera actually ended up famous for. That distinction belongs to a topless revue called Crazy Girls, which opened at the hotel in September 1987 and ran there for twenty-eight straight years, longer than any other topless show in Las Vegas history, produced by a promoter named Norbert Aleman who understood exactly what kind of eternal engine he’d built. In 1994, an advertising photograph of the dancers turned to show the camera their backsides, captioned “No Ifs, Ands or …”, and the image did well enough that three years later, for the show’s tenth anniversary, the Riviera commissioned an actual bronze statue of it — six feet tall, eleven feet wide, over 1,500 pounds, seven showgirls cast in metal, installed right at the hotel’s entrance. It became one of the single most photographed and most touched objects on the entire Strip, tourists rubbing it for luck the same way people rub a saint’s foot outside a cathedral, until eventually the joke was that more people had touched the Crazy Girls statue than had ever heard of Gus Greenbaum at all.
The Riviera closed for good in 2015. Its two towers came down in separate implosions the following year — the Monaco Tower first, on June 14, 2016, and the last of the property finished off that August, sixty-one years and change after Liberace opened the place for $50,000 a week. The show and its statue outlived the building itself, moving over to Planet Hollywood — until Caesars Entertainment shut the show down there in 2021 as part of a round of low-capacity venue closures, and the statue itself got rolled out through the glass doors and driven off to an undisclosed warehouse with no promise it would ever go back on display anywhere. It sat there for four years. Circa’s owner, Derek Stevens, eventually tracked it down and bought it, and in June 2025 the statue got its own small ceremony moving it into the rooftop Legacy Club at Circa downtown, where it stands today, still getting rubbed for luck by people who have no idea what building it used to stand in front of, or how close it came to just staying in a warehouse for good.
Which is really the whole shape of the story. A hotel gets built on mob money nobody could quite launder out of the paperwork, buries two of its own top men in murders three years apart, hosts the most celebrated director in American film history doing hypnotism tricks in between those killings — and gets remembered, in the end, for none of it. Not the genius. Not the bodies. A bronze statue of seven backsides outlived all of them, and it’s still standing.