Tribute to a bad man

The Friends of Israel Defense Forces expressed their sorrow thusly: “Today we lost a beloved friend, dear partner, and true Zionist. His generous and unending support for the soldiers of Israel, and his commitment to the strength of the Jewish State and its people, have touched the lives of people all around the world and will live on in our hearts forever. The passing of Sheldon Adelson is a tremendous loss, to us personally, and to the entire Jewish nation. Baruch Dayan HaEmet.” (Adelson and his wife had adopted three Israel Defense Forces brigades as part of the FIDF Adopt-A-Brigade program.

Famously known as the son of a cabbie, Adelson got his start as a paper boy at age 12, soon moving on to the vending-machine business (a foretaste of things to come?). He dropped out of the City College of New York to serve in the Army during the Korean War, a decision he later regretted, saying it was “unfortunate” that he wore the American uniform, rather than that of Israel. He pursued many business ventures, some successful, some not. The decisive event of his life was his purchase of the COMDEX trade show in 1979, establishing a symbiosis with the convention business that would persist until the very end. Seeking a platform for COMDEX and its ilk, Adelson bought the venerable Sands resort in 1989, putting his faith and money on that then-disrespected Las Vegas Strip customer, the conventioneer. He created the best convention facility in town, Sands Expo Center, and doubled down in the late Nineties, demolishing the Sands to create The Venetian (which had one of the most troubled openings of any casino not named The Aladdin) and subsequently cloning it as The Palazzo. Among his innovations was the institutionalization of the in-room minibar, something without which a Vegas resort room is now unthinkable.

Simultaneously, Adelson was looking for new horizons. He was quick to see the potential of Macao and, when the country’s gaming monopoly was relaxed, persuaded the government to give him one of the first casino concessions, which he made viable by dumping acres of landfill into the Pearl River delta to create the Cotai Strip. (“Asia’s Las Vegas” he tried to trademark it, although it was Las Vegas that soon become America’s Macao.) Although Adelson’s rupture with government-chosen partner Galaxy Entertainment meant he would have five competitors instead of two (if things didn’t go Sheldon’s way they were apt not to go at all), his mammoth casinos—the largest in the world—and his focus on the mass-market player ensured that Sands China would be the dominant force in the region, pushing aside doddering Stanley Ho and his antediluvian Sociedade de Jogos de Macau empire.

It was an accomplishment of sufficient magnitude to persuade the government of Singapore to grant Sands half of a duopoly, which resulted in the creation of the most visually stunning casino-resort in the world, Marina Bay Sands, rendered iconic by Crazy Rich Asians. (Scuttlebutt has it that Adelson wanted to dump another big-ass Venetian on the waterfront but Singapore authorities insisted on something more forward-looking.) Adelson was less successful in expanding the Sands brand nationally. His Pennsylvania casino, Sands Bethlehem, was a sucess d’estime on which Adelson blew hot and cold, ultimately selling to an Alabama Native American tribe. Repeated efforts to breach the Florida market were rebuffed. The mogul’s death leaves overtures to New York City and Texas orphaned.

Wall Street has yet to weigh in on life after Sheldon but, given that his family controls a majority of LVS shares, we expect little or no change in corporate priorities. The only possible difference is that now-CEO Rob Goldstein has been openly skeptical of the Japan market, whereas Sheldon Adelson had first dove in, then evacuated, then mulled re-entry. The Texas legislative push is already in train and Sands would be derelict in its duties to its shareholders if it didn’t pursue a megaresort in the Five Boroughs. The Texas initiative is an uphill fight but Sands has committed to spending as much as $3 billion on a destination property. Would Adelson have done it? Would it have created thousands of jobs? Would he have paid high taxes? Yes, yes and yes.

Speaking of jobs, Sands’ Las Vegas employees are in Adelson’s debt for sticking by them even through the worst economic depths of the pandemic, when there was no revenue and other companies were furloughing workers by the thousands. Not Adelson. (His company was also the first one to promulgate strict anti-Covid policies at a time when other Strip magnates were in denial.) For that, Nevada‘s gaming community should give Adelson a vote of thanks.

But there was a dark side to the man. He was vindictive and reflexively litigious. An undying enemy of the First Amendment, he persecuted local journalists Jeff Simpson and John L. Smith, sending the first to an early grave and the latter into financial ruin. His paranoia and sense of entitlement frequently found a convenient target in the Las Vegas Convention Center, which he famously accused of “a conspiracy to steal money from me!” Adelson’s vendetta against journalism culminated in the secretive 2015 purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal (soon denuded of veteran reporters like Smith and Howard Stutz), which was predictably fulsome in today’s obsequies, including a weepy, front-page sendoff from widow Dr. Miriam Adelson. (The Adelsons also used the paper’s front page to tout the opening of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, a pet cause.) The paper also gave no fewer than three editorial-page endorsements to the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R), to no avail. He purportedly had personal veto power over the content of his Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, which parroted Benjamin Netanyahu‘s political views to the extent of being nicknamed “The Voice of Bibi.”

Adelson liked to claim to be “socially liberal,” supposedly pro-choice and pro-immigration. Yet he blindly showered money upon politicians who were diehard opponents of those very things, exposing Adelson as either a hypocrite or (much less likely) a naif. Although he and Dr. Adelson paid lip service to helping drug addicts, both were hardcore supporters of the War on Drugs, fighting tooth and nail even against medicinal marijuana. During the one-term presidency of Donald Trump, Adelson enjoyed hot-line access to the Oval Office. Could it be more than coincidence that he stepped down the day after Trump’s failed coup d’etat or that he died soon afterward? If Adelson had a sense of shame—and there is no evidence of this—he would have been mortified to find himself essentially in bed with neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites, Trump’s “very fine people.”

While one does not expect Adelson’s heirs to retreat from the politics, the GOP will be in mourning after losing its chief rainmaker, ironically the emperor of one of their bete-noir issues, gambling. To give Adelson his due, his political largesse took the stigma off casino money, to the point that it is now a non-issue in national politics. Thanks for that. Heck, Trump even engaged in the extraordinary quid pro quo of promoting Adelson’s Nipponese aspirations to a purportedly “stunned” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, even if it came to nothing. “I’m against very wealthy people attempting to or influencing elections,” Adelson told Forbes without irony. “But as long as it’s doable I’m going to do it.”

In other international affairs, Adelson loved to stir unrest, whether it was by moving the U.S. embassy out of Tel Aviv or advocating nuclear genocide against Iran. In retaliation, Iranian hackers penetrated and disabled Sands’ computer systems. The security failure was compounded by Adelson’s Luddite tendencies, which manifested themselves in a severely outmanned crisis-response team. If then-President Michael Leven hadn’t had the initiative to take LVS offline, Lord only knows how much worse the damage might have been.

Speaking of blinkered vision, Adelson’s death now leaves the disenfranchised Steve Wynn standing alone against Internet casinos. Sheldon’s insistence that online play was inherently detrimental while brick-and-mortar casinos were inherently Good For You wasn’t so absurd that Congress didn’t have to waste its time debating it, although Adelson got nowhere. Now, having unilaterally surrendered the online-gambling and sports-betting fields to others, the mogul must be held to account for the disservice he did to LVS shareholders, a breach of fiduciary duty perhaps. As for Adelson’s ingrained enmity to labor unions, it encompassed victories (Venelazzo) and defeats (Sands Bethlehem). His Vegas employees enjoyed some of the best pay and benefits in town, and Adelson was quick to declare dealers’ tips hands-off when Steve Wynn has busy confiscating them at Wynncore. But without his archenemesis the Culinary Union sticking up for the rank and file at competing properties, one would have to acknowledge that enlightened self-interest played a role in Adelson’s generosity.

There’s the Sheldon Adelson legacy for you. His death leaves the potential sale of Venelazzo hanging (not to mention completion of the MSG Sphere). For these sake of its employees, we hope that if there is a new owner, he or she emulates the better angels of Adelson’s nature and ignores the worse ones.