Las Vegas Sands founder and CEO Adelson dies

LAS VEGAS (AP) – Sheldon Adelson, founder, chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, has died at the age of 87 from complications related to the treatment of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the casino company said Tuesday.

Once the third richest man in the world, Adelson brought singing gondoliers to the Las Vegas Strip and went all-in-betting that Asia would have a bigger jackpot than Sin City.

He was the son of Jewish immigrants, raised with two siblings in a Boston apartment building who became one of the richest men in the world in the latter half of his life. The chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation brought singing gondoliers to the Las Vegas Strip, rightly predicting that Asia would be an even bigger market. In 2018, it was ranked 15th in the United States by Forbes, with an estimated value of $ 35.5 billion.

“If you do things differently, success will follow you like a shadow,” he said in 2014 during an interview with the Las Vegas gambling industry.

The stocky Adelson resembled an old-fashioned political boss and was different from most American Jews, who for decades supported the Democrats by a wide margin. Adelson was considered the most influential GOP donor in the country in the last few years of his life, and at times set records for individual contributions during a given election cycle.

In 2012 Politico called him “the dominant pioneer of the Super PAC era”.

Adelson regularly received the party’s best strategists and most ambitious candidates in his humble office wedged between the casinos on the Strip. Throughout that time, he helped ensure that uncritical support for Israel became a pillar of the GOP platform that never became more visible than in 2018, when the Trump administration moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The seditious move had been stubbornly rejected by the Palestinians and had long been a priority for Adelson, who had even offered to pay for it, and for the Republican Jewish Coalition, of which he was the main sponsor. Adelson and his wife Miriam were the focus of the ceremony in Jerusalem.

When asked at a gambling conference what he hoped for his legacy, Adelson said it wasn’t his glitzy casinos or hotels, but his influence in Israel. He donated $ 25 million, a record amount for a private individual, to the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. He founded a think tank in Jerusalem. He was closely associated with the conservative Likud party and funded a widespread free daily newspaper called “Israel Hayom” or “Israel Today”, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported so much that some Israelis called it “Bibi-ton”.

In the US, Adelson helped plan congressional trips to Israel, helped build a new headquarters for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby group, and was later a top supporter of the Israeli-American Council, whose conferences have attracted leading Republicans ( Vice President Mike Pence) and the Democrats (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi). He sponsored “birthright” trips to Israel for young Jewish adults who were criticized by some participants for being intolerant of opposing views.

His bond with Israel was lifelong and so deep that he once said he wished he had served in an Israeli rather than an American military service.

Adelson was a late bloomer in business and politics. He didn’t become a casino owner or Republican until he was middle-aged. In the 1990s and beyond, his fortune soared and his involvement in politics intensified. He was a supporter of President George W. Bush and supported Republican Rudolph Giuliani in the 2008 presidential election before turning to future candidate John McCain, who lost to Barack Obama.

His influence grew significantly in 2010 after the Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United, lifted many restrictions on individual campaign contributions. He and his wife spent more than $ 90 million in the 2012 election, funding presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and later Mitt Romney, who also lost to Obama.

“I am against very wealthy people who try to make elections or influence them,” he told Forbes magazine in 2012. “But as long as it is feasible, I’ll do it.”

Adelson slowly came to Trump, who had said during the election campaign that he would be “neutral” in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Trump even poked fun at his initial predilection for Florida Senator Marco Rubio and tweeted in 2015, “Sheldon Adelson wants to give Rubio big bucks because he feels like he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree! “Adelson eventually backed Trump but remained hesitant for much of 2016. He gave more than $ 20 million in the final weeks of the campaign after reporting that he would contribute $ 100 million , and was more generous in congressional elections.

But after Trump’s surprise victory, the new president spoke to Adelson many times and expressed his tough views on the Middle East. He cut funding for Palestinian refugees and withdrew from the Obama administration’s nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem despite previous governments – Democrats and Republicans – avoiding doing so because it directly challenged the Palestinian view that the ancient city should be part of a peace deal.

In turn, Adelson helped Trump financially, including $ 5 million for his inauguration, and supported him through his media stakes. In late 2015, Adelson secretly bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal – the newspaper’s own reporters announced he was the new owner – and soon voiced concerns that it was enforcing his own views. Some long-time employees went in protest.

As a sign of the Adelsons’ influence on Trump, Miriam Adelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.

Adelson, who contributed more than $ 100 million to the outside of 2018 elections, had extraordinary power among Republicans, although he did not always agree with them. In a 2012 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he described himself as “basically a social liberal”, advocating abortion and supporting immigrant rights. He cited taxes and differences vis-à-vis Israel as the main reasons for leaving the Democratic Party.

So great was his influence in Nevada that even the most prominent Democrat in the state, Senator Harry Reid, was reluctant to hire him. In a 2014 interview with MSNBC, the then Senate majority leader made a distinction between Adelson and fellow GOP billionaire donors Charles and David Koch. Reid had sharply criticized the Koch brothers for being callous and greedy while also saying that he respected Adelson because he was “not interested in making money,” a widely questioned opinion.

He had previously told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that despite their political differences, he remained friends with Adelson.

“Sheldon Adelson and I are still meeting and talking. He has a problem, I’m trying to help him, ”said Reid.

Adelson was married twice. He and his first wife Sandra divorced in 1988. Three years later he married Miriam Farbstein-Ochshorn, an Israel-born doctor whom he met on a blind date and who many believe deepened his commitment to Israel. Their honeymoon in Venice inspired Adelson to demolish the historic Sands Hotel-Casino, once a popular hangout for Frank Sinatra and others, and replace it with two massive complexes: The Venetian and The Palazzo, one of the tallest buildings in the city.

Sheldon Adelson adopted his first wife’s three children and had two children with his second wife. Among numerous philanthropic projects, he and Miriam Adelson were particularly committed to the research and treatment of substance abuse, a personal concern of Sheldon Adelson. His son Mitchell from his first marriage died of an overdose in 2005. (Sheldon Adelson spent millions on government efforts to legalize marijuana).

Sheldon Garry Adelson was born in 1933 in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. His father was a taxi driver, his mother the manager of a knitting mill. A born entrepreneur, he sold newspapers at the age of 12 and ran a vending machine business at 16. After dropping out of City College of New York and serving in the Army, he tried to start dozens of businesses, from toiletries to windshield defrosting.

Adelson, who said he loathed email, began building his fortune with a technology fair and partnered with COMDEX in 1979 before selling his stake for more than $ 800 million in 1995.

When he bought the Sands Hotel in 1989, he thought that meeting rooms, not just gambling, would make money. It did. He built a convention hall to keep his hotel rooms full on weekdays and others soon followed the business model. Meanwhile, his efforts to recreate the Strip in Macau, the only Chinese province that allowed gambling, allowed exponential.

When faced with water and marshland, Adelson directed his company to build land where there was none and piled sand to create the Cotai Peninsula. Soon his income in Macau exceeded his holdings in Las Vegas. He later expanded his business to Singapore, where his Marina Bay Sands hotel and infinity pool were featured in the hit movie “Crazy Rich Asians,” and had pushed for a casino to be opened in Japan.

His Macau business also resulted in a long-standing wrongful termination lawsuit filed by a former head of Sands China Ltd. Adelson often collided with attorneys when appearing on the witness stand in a Clark County courtroom.

The Sands China lawsuit was one of dozen Adelson was involved in suing a Wall Street Journal reporter for calling him a “lazy mouth” (the parties made up their minds, the words lasted), being sued for fraud by his sons from his first marriage ran out of money (he won).

A long-standing feud with fellow casino tycoon Steve Wynn turned to friendship when Wynn joined Adelson’s efforts to end online gambling. Critics said Adelson tried to stifle competition. Adelson countered that there was no way to ensure that children and teenagers would not play, saying he was “not in favor of exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Trump’s election would once again be useful to Adelson. During the Obama administration, the Justice Department said that online gambling that did not involve sporting events would not violate the Wire Act, a federal law of 1961. In a legal opinion published in early 2019, the ministry reversed itself and decided that the law applies to all forms of gambling.