Desperate housewife

As you’ve probably heard, Beso has become the first known casualty of CityCenter. Its Chapter 11 filing was smuggled out in the waning hours of last week’s news cycle. The Panglossian rhetoric of the initial dispatch tried to paint the development as the best of all possible worlds and Robin Leach immediately went into full spin-doctor mode. (What is it about Eva Longoria that makes Greenspun Media staffers want to go down on their kneepads?) Call me a rube but if your much-touted restaurant nightclub is losing $76K per month and owes MGM Resorts International/Dubai World $1.8 million, this does not sound like a cue to break out the bubbly.

Although much lauded in the past as an entrepreneur, the Desperate Housewives star and her advisers apparently failed to perform much due diligence, from whence — by their own admission — many subsequent problems arose. Beso’s Eve nightclub is one of the most poorly advertised in town and its location (tucked into the corner where Crystals and Aria meet) was about as low-visibility as you could get. (A time-stingy relationship by Longoria toward local media hasn’t helped.) Longoria promises to take “a more proactive, hands-on approach in the coming years with my Las Vegas businesses,” a New Year’s resolution she probably should have made 12 months sooner. As an unsecured creditor, the actress stands to lose $1.4 million of her own money, beyond whatever she owes CityCenter, so she’s paying a steep tuition for learning the Vegas nightclub biz.

According to reporter Oskar Garcia, Longoria “anticipated expanding her relationship with MGM Resorts.” That sounds an awful lot like code for Longoria bartering down her MGM-related debt by doing more promotion on behalf of CityCenter. (Exhibits A, B & C). MGM has already dabbled with “wrapping” Aria and I more than half expect it to be blazened with La Longoria’s form and visage in the near future. That’s what we call “urban beautification.”

How empty is Crystals? Sufficiently so that you can park a plane — a Cirrus SR22T, to be precise — in it. I got the press release on this last week and have been fairly gobsmacked ever since. Fortunately, Steve Friess has blogged it so I don’t have to.

Not an Oscar Goodman fan? Our crusty outgoing mayor will seem like a cuddly teddy bear if his successor is local polemicist George Harris. However, given Harris’ exceptional ability to offend people and his unpleasant affect, I’d rate his chances very low.