Inside the Adelson verdict; Wackiness in Illinois

Early news reports held that yesterday’s $70 million judicial beat-down of Las Vegas Sands was unanimous. Not so, it turns out. At least one juror felt that Macao schmoozer Richard Suen had neither demonstrated the existence of a contract with Sheldon Adelson‘s company nor any business acumen and another would have awarded him squat. Not that the jury room was overflowing with sympathy for Sands: At least seven jurors wanted to levy a $125 million judgment against the mogul. It was haggled down to $70 million in order to obtain the requisite three-fourths majority. The flaring tempers in the jury room make the trial itself look like a tea party and doubtless will be the grounds for Sands’ next appeal. Evidently the company never even intended or contemplated settling with Suen the first time around. It certainlydidn’t put aside a plug nickel for that contingency.

Were Adelson and his wife not majority shareholders, Sands would have surely paid something by now to be rid of Suen, as it did in “a separate but similarly themed case” four years ago. But the legal bills and the penalties continue to pile up, siphoning away cash. Combative by nature, Adelson also has terrible judgment in hair products: What’s with that dark, woolly pelt atop his noggin? Mohair? Somebody must have told him it looks good. They lied, Sheldon.

Chicagoans are coming around to the notion of casinos in the Windy City, a new poll shows. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) may not have 4,000 slots in the bag yet but he’s thinking aggressively about where to deploy them, particularly in club-like “airsinos” at O’Hare International Airport and Midway Airport. The notion seems exotic to most of us but Emanuel says it is commonplace overseas. He — and mayors of other lakeside cities — could also have an unspecified number of gambling vessels plying the waters of Lake Michigan. This surrealistic loophole is buried on page 332 of the 524-page bill. Take the thousands of slot machines being awarded, divvy them up between enough vessels and you’d have a veritable casino regatta out there on the lakefront. Nobody’s saying who came up with this daffy way of turning five new casinos (plus racinos) into an infinite number of floating gambling halls but fingers are pointed at Waukegan’s Rep. Terry Link (D), always a reliable source of legislative mischief when casino expansion is afoot.

Not even booming casino numbers from March have put Steve Wynn in a more optimistic mood. Dr. Wynn’s diagnosis for Nevada’s casino health remains grave. But if he’s waiting for the freeloaders at the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and like-minded organizations to accept their responsibility and pay even the smallest of gross-receipts taxes, instead of dumping it all off on gaming and mining, he’d better not wait by the phone.

If you’d been wondering about the flatness of casino play by Nevadans in March, Station Casinos has a few theories … like increased Social Security payroll taxes, for starters. Sounds plausible to me. Station CFO Marc Falcone reported “meaningfully” improved results for the company, in which case its competitors would have to have been taking a beating. Station reported two full years of cash-flow growth, despite a 1Q13 that saw it swing from a $9 million profit last year to a $142 million one this year.