Author and Research

Bill Friedman is author of the sensational “30 Illegal Years To The Strip”, winner of the prestigious Kirkus Review Star Honor. He wrote the award-winning, Depression era, true-crime “All Against The Law”. He wrote the groundbreaking business research work “Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition”, published by the University of Nevada Reno’s Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming. He is also author of the seminal book for succeeding in the casino business, “Casino Management”.

He taught Casino Management for UNLV’s College of Hotel Administration for a decade. This was the first university or college level course about this subject in the world. Today UNLV offers a masters degree in casino management. 

While writing and teaching, Bill was also the leading after-lunch and after-dinner speaker for Las Vegas convention groups. About once a week, he told groups of 50 to 5,000 people intriguing historical inside stories about the Nevada casino industry, or he taught them how to play the table games. Bill’s three endeavors provided a satisfactory income and allowed him five days a week to continue his historical research on organized crime and the Nevada gambling industry (described in the next section).

Bill Friedman then became the only person who has ever managed two Las Vegas Strip casinos simultaneously, even though many companies have owned multiple casinos. He was president of the Castaways Hotel and Casino (now the site of the Mirage Hotel and Casino) and the Silver Slipper Casino in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip for the Howard Hughes empire, which was the world’s largest privately-owned company. He quickly transformed them from long-term losers into top profit makers. After thirteen years his highly-successful operations were sold and closed because of Hughes’ death, since Nevada law requires that all assets be sold when the deceased has multiple heirs.

Bill Friedman is president of the Friedman Management Group. The firm specializes in solving casino marketing, design, and operations problems on a worldwide basis. He has consulted for forty years to casinos throughout the United States, and in England, Monaco, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Asia, Canada, several Caribbean Islands, and South America.

However, since leaving Hughes’ Summa Corporation, Bill’s consulting and writing pursuits still gave him more than half of each year to devote full time to his historical odyssey, exploring the unique casino pioneers’ intriguing lives, struggles, and achievements. Now it is time for him to tell their astonishing stories.