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Billions: The Politics of Influence in the United States, China and Israel Peter Dale Scott and Connie Bruck
Peter Dale Scott Connie Bruck’s account of billionaire Sheldon Adelson using his millions to refashion the politics of In many cases, billionaires have used their control of media to solidify their influence in politics. This was the strategy in Canada of Conrad Black, for a time (before his conviction on fraud charges) "the third biggest newspaper magnate in the world." [1] Americans will think immediately of the startling career of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. In Australia in 1975 Murdoch’s newspaper supported the Governor-General's strange dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, by exercise of a royal prerogative last used by King William IV of England in 1834. Then in
From an American perspective, it is hard to think of anyone surpassing the influence of Murdoch. But according to the 2008 Forbes 400, Murdoch, with a net worth of $8.3 billion, is only the 109th-richest person in the world. Sheldon Adelson, with a net worth of $26 billion, is the twelfth richest in the world, and the third richest in the United States. It is possible to see a rough pattern in all these developments. In the 1970s wealthy Americans mounted, with the aid of neocons and a great deal of right-wing foundation money, what Irving Kristol (William’s father) called an “intellectual counterrevolution;” and successfully challenged the prevalent liberalism of the corporate welfare state. [3] Beginning with the breaking of union power in the PATCO air controllers’ strike of 1981, the Reagan era saw the income disparity between the world’s richest and poorest, after years of moderate reduction, begin radically to increase, both within nations and globally. Recently it has been estimated that the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world nearly equals the annual income of the poorer half of the earth’s population, or more than 2.5 billion people. [4]
From the days of the Rothschilds in the 19th century, the Zionist movement and Where Adelson may prove more dangerous to the feeble peace process launched at Annapolis is in America. Adelson is not the only influential American Jew (even if he is the richest) to have re-positioned himself to the right of AIPAC, after AIPAC endorsed a congressional letter requesting increased aid for the Palestinian Authority. A new Coordinating Council on Jerusalem, aided by Christian theocons and figures such as G. Gordon Liddy, has emerged to block any concessions on Jerusalem. [5] Many in the same coalition can be counted on to back Adelson in his fanciful notion that an attack on Iran would be beneficial to the security of Israel. Is there no remedy to this global drift towards permanent war-mindedness? The answer surely will depend on whether new checks can be established to the global dominance of power and politics by personal wealth.
[1] BBC News, "Conrad Black: Where did it all go wrong?" February 27, 2004 [2] With his acquisition of the Asian giant Star TV in Hong Kong, and more recently of the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch is working to establish himself as the most powerful media figure in the world. [3] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of [4] Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium: Theirs or Ours? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), introduction; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 251. Singer’s statistics about wealth are taken from the 1998 Human Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press), which put the wealth of the 225 richest people in 1997 at more than $1 trillion, nearly equaling the annual income of 47 percent of the world’s poorest people. [5] Gregory Levey, “The right wing's Jerusalem gambit,” Salon, December 13, 2007.
The Brass Ring: Multibillionaire Sheldon Adelson’s relentless quest for global influence Connie Bruck Last October, Sheldon Adelson, the gaming multibillionaire, accompanied a group of Republican donors to the White House to meet with George W. Bush. They wanted to talk to the President about Israel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. Most had seen Bush as a reliable friend of Israel, and one who had not pressured Israel to pursue the peace process. Adelson, who is seventy-four, owns two of Las Vegas’s giant casino resorts, the Venetian and the Palazzo, and is the third-richest person in the United States, according to Forbes. He is fiercely opposed to a two-state solution; and he had contributed so generously to Bush’s reëlection campaign that he qualified as a Bush Pioneer. A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President’s, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.” (The White House denies this account.) Perhaps this exchange contributed to a growing resolve on Adelson’s part to try to force the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, out of office. Adelson and Olmert had been friendly since the nineteen-nineties, when Olmert was a member of the hard-line Likud Party. Olmert became Prime Minister in January, 2006, following Ariel Sharon’s stroke. He, like Sharon, came to recognize the inexorability of Jewish-Arab demographic trends. Olmert declared that a two-state solution was the only way of preserving Israel as a democratic state with a Jewish majority, and he said that he was ready to negotiate with the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Adelson saw Olmert’s actions as a betrayal of principle. He had long wanted to see the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu returned as Prime Minister, but a revived peace process gave that goal new urgency. Adelson opposed both Olmert and the peace conference, which was held in In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency news service, Adelson was even more disparaging about Olmert’s motivation. Olmert has faced several corruption investigations, all focussed on the period before he became Prime Minister; Adelson suggested that Olmert was trying to divert public attention from them, and was making concessions to the Palestinians in order “to stay out of jail.” (The most recent investigation of Olmert, which became public in early May, seems to have increased Adelson’s chances of achieving his objective. Olmert has admitted accepting donations, mostly in cash, from an American businessman for his election campaigns since the nineteen-nineties, but he insisted that he did not take any money for his personal use, and denied allegations that he had accepted bribes. He has said that he will resign if he is indicted.) In early November, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, who is widely respected in Historically, most mainstream American Jewish organizations don’t publicly oppose the government of
Adelson has long preferred a low profile in many of his political activities. But one of his maneuvers did appear in the press. He has been a generous donor to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the dominant lobby of American Jewry regarding U.S. policy toward Israel. Since the nineties, Adelson has helped underwrite many congressional trips to Israel, sponsored by an AIPAC educational affiliate. (Adelson pays only for Republican members.) Last year, he contributed funds for a lavish new office building in Washington, D.C., for the organization. In November, shortly before the summit, he learned that AIPAC was supporting a congressional letter, signed by more than a hundred and thirty members of the House of Representatives, that urged the Bush Administration to increase economic aid to the Palestinians, an initiative that the government of AIPAC is not accustomed to being attacked publicly from the right; its critics generally charge that its conservative policies toward When Adelson was merely rich, he wrote checks for causes that he favored and for politicians whom he supported. Occasionally, he demanded to be heard. But he did not expect to play a significant role in U.S. foreign policy, or in Israel’s strategic decisions, or in the fate of a sitting Israeli Prime Minister. That was before he acquired many billions of dollars. (He has assets of twenty-six billion dollars, according to a Forbes list published in March.) His political expenditures and his expectations have increased proportionately. Not long after Bush’s encounter with Adelson last October, an Israeli government representative said that Bush, describing it to another Israeli official, had remarked wryly, “I had this crazy Jewish billionaire, yelling at me.” (The Israeli official does not recall the conversation; the White House said that it had no comment.) Gambling on In July, 2001, Adelson met with a Vice-Premier of China, Qian Qichen, in the historic Purple Light Pavilion, in Zhongnanhai, where foreign dignitaries are often received. Adelson was impressed, recalling later in trial testimony that it was “a very regal looking environment.” He was accompanied by Bill Weidner, the president of his company, Las Vegas Sands, and Richard Suen, a Hong Kong businessman with connections to top Chinese officials, who was a friend of Adelson’s brother Lenny. Suen had helped arrange the meeting, after asking Adelson the previous summer whether he might be interested in obtaining a gaming license in Macao. According to Suen, Adelson told him that such a license would be like getting “the brass ring,” and described himself as “a man with a grand vision and a big pair of brass monkeys,” who “would like to leave a visible footprint in history.” In the 2001 meeting, Qian, who was well briefed on Adelson, pointed out that during the Second World War China had accepted more than twenty thousand Jewish refugees in Then, unexpectedly, Qian introduced the subject of casinos. He asked how many hotel rooms Adelson might build in Macao. “I don’t know,” Adelson, who recalled the meeting in his trial testimony, responded. “How many you want me to build?” “Well, how many can you?” “I said, ‘Well, that all depends how many people can come there.’ ” (China’s 1.3 billion nationals need a special permit to go to Macao, so China controls the flow of visitors.) “He said, ‘How many do you want?’ And I said, ‘Wow.’ Of course, I didn’t say, ‘Wow,’ right in front of him, but—I mean, when I left there I said to Bill . . . ‘Did you hear what I heard? . . . Do you think there’s a possibility . . . that he can open the gates to Macao?’ ” In May, 2004, the first gamblers entered the Sands Macao. Its construction costs were two hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and Adelson made back his initial investment in a year. In December, 2004, Adelson took Las Vegas Sands public (according to Forbes, he owns sixty-nine per cent of the stock) and became a multibillionaire, overnight. The following year, Macao drew 10.5 million mainland Chinese visitors, a hundred and forty-seven per cent more than three years earlier—reflecting an easing of travel restrictions and an increase in the number of newly wealthy Chinese. By the end of 2006, Macao had become the top gambling center in the world, with gaming revenues exceeding $6.9 billion, a quarter of a billion dollars more than those on the Las Vegas Strip. In 2007, revenues climbed to $10.3 billion. That year, Adelson opened the $2.4-billion Venetian Macao—with canals and stripe-shirted gondoliers, as well as an extensive shopping mall and a five-hundred-and-forty-six-thousand-square-foot casino, which is the largest in the world. Since the Sands Macao opened, his personal wealth has multiplied more than fourteen times, and, according to the Times, in the two years after his company went public he earned roughly a million dollars an hour.
The 40-storey $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort Hotel in Macau opened on August 28, 2007 Now Las Vegas Sands plans to create “the Las Vegas Strip of Asia” on Cotai—an area of reclaimed land between two small islands, connected by bridges to Macao’s peninsula—spending an additional ten billion dollars to build a dozen new hotels, with twenty thousand rooms, and adjacent casinos. The hotels will include some of the world’s most famous brands, including the Four Seasons; all the casinos will be owned and operated by Las Vegas Sands. At a groundbreaking ceremony, in March, 2007, Adelson said that many members of Congress criticize China for its human-rights record, but he added that he liked the way the Chinese run their country. “People seem to be living a good life in China,” he said. “Look at the incredible progress China has made. How can someone say they’re doing the wrong thing?” He added that those who don’t approve of the way China is governed need not go to the country. “I don’t think the U.S. should be the policeman of the whole world,” he said. Suen has yet to profit from the role he played, and in 2004 he filed a lawsuit against Adelson and his company in Clark County District Court, in On the morning of April 17, 2008, Adelson arrived at the Testimony in the Suen case proposes an answer to a subject of enduring conjecture in In July, 2001, after arriving in
Weidner, in his deposition, described the relationship between DeLay—“a very religious guy”—and Adelson. “The link between Sheldon Adelson and right-wing religious Christians is the commonality of a strong Israel,” he said. “So it just happens to be Sheldon has taken Tom DeLay to Israel and he’s a friend.” DeLay told Adelson that he supported the resolution because of his concern about China’s record on human rights but added that he would be discussing the legislative agenda shortly. “Sheldon folds his cell phone up and says to the mayor of Beijing, ‘I’m going to do my best,’ ” Weidner said. “About three hours later DeLay calls and he tells Sheldon, ‘You’re in luck,’ ” he continued, “ ‘because we’ve got a military-spending bill. . . . We’re not going to be able to move the bill, so you tell your mayor that he can be assured that this bill will never see the light of day.’ So Sheldon goes and he goes to the mayor and he says, ‘The bill will never see the light of day, Mr. Mayor. Don’t worry about it.’ ” Weidner also instructed the Sands’s lobbyists in Washington, Patton Boggs, to suggest to the Chinese Embassy that Adelson and Las Vegas Sands were involved in the process that stalled the bill. (According to DeLay’s spokeswoman, DeLay does not recall the conversation and had no role in blocking the bill. Representative Lantos died last February.) In their trial testimony, both Adelson and Weidner portrayed the bill’s demise as having resulted from the press of other legislation, rather than as a deliberate move by DeLay to help his benefactor. Six days after Adelson’s conversation with DeLay, Lantos called for a vote on the resolution, saying, “I am asking the Speaker and the majority leader no longer to bottle up our legislation and to allow the representatives of the American people to speak their minds on this issue. . . . Mr. Speaker, allow us a vote.” Three days later, the International Olympics Committee voted in China’s favor.
The only other American casino magnate to win a license in For MGM Mirage, the opportunity to enter When I asked MGM Mirage’s chairman and chief executive officer, J. Terence Lanni, about Adelson’s visit to Kerkorian, he said that Adelson had not offered a true partnership. “But we wouldn’t have done it even if there were a possibility of a partnership, because they’re not good partnership material,” he said. After Kerkorian’s refusal, Las Vegas Sands executives flew to “Sheldon is a very determined person,” Lanni said. “When he wants something, it’s a fixation, it’s 24/7. What he did here was his right to do,” Lanni continued, adding, “I wouldn’t do it.” A Corned-Beef Soirée “In my sixty-three years in business, in over fifty different businesses, I’ve broken the mold and changed the status quo,” Adelson said one evening in late March to about three hundred dinner guests, gathered in a lavish ballroom at the Venetian in Las Vegas to see him and his wife presented with an award for corporate citizenship by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. (The singer Wayne Newton was also honored.) Adelson, whose countenance often suggests that he is spoiling for a fight, takes pride in being an outsider, who has suffered rejection and ridicule but has avenged every slight, many times over. Vindication is sweet, if never quite sufficient. As he recently commented during a conference call with stock analysts, “They always derided, they always demonized our convention strategy, and look who’s laughing last.” Adelson’s father, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a cabdriver in He had an epiphany of sorts when he was in the Army. He said that in the waning days of the McCarthy era there were a number of appeals-board hearings of scientists who had had their clearances revoked, and he took down their testimony. “The scientists had been invited to a ‘soirée,’ ” he continued, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “You know, these wine-and-celery affairs, wine-and-cheese affairs—and me, I wanted hot dogs and hamburgers and pastrami sandwiches.” The crowd chuckled appreciatively. “Little did they know that these were Communist-infiltrated cells. . . . But every one of them had the same story,” he said. “They went to soirées, and the conversation consisted of why they were here on earth. And I said to myself, ‘These guys are . . . the greatest scientists in history, and they’re asking themselves, Why are they here on earth? . . . This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of. There have been countless billions of people that have lived since the Neanderthal man, and not one person has ever found out why they’re here on earth, with any degree of certainty—don’t they know that?’ ” Still, he tried to put himself in their place. He imagined himself at a “corned-beef soirée,” trying to figure out why he was here on earth. First, he thought it was to feel good, but then he decided that that was too selfish. What about helping others? “If I make other people feel good, I feel good!” He added, “I literally, mentally, went like”—he paused, brushing his hands together in a dismissive gesture—“it’s over with! I don’t have to think about that issue ever again in my life.” After Adelson came out of the Army, he and his brother Lenny packaged toiletries to be distributed by hotels and started a business called De-Ice-It, which sold a chemical spray to help clear frozen windshields. Adelson became a mortgage broker; he sold ads for financial trade publications and advised companies looking for financing; he invested in real estate, and ran a tour business. (“My father used to say . . . ‘Sheldon, you’re like that horse stuff—you’re all over the place,’ ” Adelson told investors at a recent conference.) Some of his ventures were successful—he has said that in his mid-thirties he had a net worth of about five million dollars—but he lost a fortune twice. Jason Chudnofsky, a business investor, recalled a meeting, in the mid-eighties, at the kitchen table in Adelson’s home in a Boston suburb, where he was living with his first wife, Sandra. “I remember sitting with him,” Chudnofsky said. “He had a T-shirt on and was eating Chinese food out of a carton. He said, ‘Work with me, Jason, and we’re going to be dealing with ministers!’ I said, ‘What church?’ He said, ‘No, not church! Ministers of countries!’ I was skeptical, knowing his past history.” Chudnofsky continued, “Sheldon had lost a lot of money.” Comdex broke the cycle of success and failure in Adelson’s business career. In 1979, noting the growing personal-computer business, he launched an independent trade show in Las Vegas, to bring together the industry. Comdex was owned by what later became known as the Interface Group, a company that produced conferences and expositions around the world. Chudnofsky, who became the president and C.O.O. of Interface in 1988, concluded that Adelson had not only an enormous appetite for risk and a keen intellect but also the instincts of a street fighter—which gave him an edge over many of his more educated peers. He did not shy away from courtroom battles. “Since he was a young businessman, Sheldon’s attitude has been: Spend millions on defense and never settle,” Chudnofsky said. Adelson thought big. He would demand of his executives, “Why scratch like a chicken when you can roar like a lion?” He was a micromanager before the word had become a cliché. And he was not a boss for the fainthearted. Once, when a secretary made a couple of errors in a letter she was typing, Adelson sat down and showed her how it should be done—at ninety words a minute. Another Interface executive, Dave Kaminer, said, “There were people who feared him. They would just shudder when Sheldon walked through.” In the late nineteen-eighties, one of his closest friends from childhood, Alan Rice, was the show director for a During this period, Adelson remarked to Kaminer that he had finally realized what he was: an entrepreneur. “He said that before he heard the word he’d always thought he was a floater with a short attention span,” Kaminer recalled. Adelson spotted a new opportunity: Las Vegas. The city had focussed on high rollers and entertainment, but, Adelson thought, why not lure more business travellers with conventions and corporate meetings, and fill the hotels on weekdays? In 1989, Adelson bought the old Sands Hotel from Kerkorian for a hundred and twenty-eight million dollars, and established a new company, Las Vegas Sands. He built the country’s largest exhibition center next to the hotel. The local establishment mocked him, but as conventions flocked to Las Vegas he was proved right. Adelson, who separated from Sandra in 1988, met Miriam Ochshorn on a blind date the following year. Miriam, an Israeli internist, was at Rockefeller University as a guest investigator on an exchange program, and was living with her two young daughters in a New York apartment. Miriam’s specialty was the treatment of drug addiction. Sandra Adelson had three children, whom Sheldon had adopted when they were young. Their two sons, Mitchell and Gary, both had substance-abuse problems, and during the eighties Adelson had helped to establish drug-treatment centers. Adelson was still living in Boston, but he and Miriam began spending a great deal of time in Las Vegas. In mid-November, 1993, during the annual Las Vegas Comdex show, Adelson met with Masayoshi Son, a software distributor from At the time, Adelson had three partners in Interface, and they were eager to sell, having entertained offers for several years. One of the partners, Irwin Chafetz, had a mantra: “Nothing is forever.” Now, as an incentive to persuade Adelson to sell, they agreed to relinquish their interests in Las Vegas Sands. At a meeting in mid-January, 1995, Son made an offer, and the next month Comdex was sold to SoftBank for more than eight hundred million dollars. Adelson, with a controlling stake in the company, reportedly earned five hundred and ten million dollars from the sale.
Shortly before the eventful meeting between Son and Adelson in November, 1994, Adelson had made a proposal to his three adult children. In 1989, he had arranged for each of them—Mitchell, Gary, and his daughter, Shelley—to receive 2,941.24 shares of stock in Interface, in trusts; now he broached the possibility of buying the shares back. In a discussion with Mitchell on October 20, 1994, Adelson alluded to the risks of stockownership; he also said that he had long been trying to sell Interface but had not received any appropriate offers, and he did not foresee selling the company in the near future. Adelson believed that his sons could not support themselves or their families (he had been supporting them, either directly or by furnishing assets that provided their support), and that the transaction would assure them a steady stream of income and a later lump sum. Adelson asked Mitchell to convey the proposal to Gary and Shelley. On November 10th—days before the meeting in which Son told Adelson that he wanted to buy Comdex—the three children signed documents agreeing to sell their shares to their father, at a price based in part on a valuation of the entire company of four hundred and thirty million dollars, half of what it sold for several months later. The children received just under $5.3 million for their shares from Adelson. In September, 1997, Adelson’s sons sued their father, alleging that he had defrauded them by not divulging material information, in order to induce them to sell their stock for less than its fair value. (Adelson’s daughter, who was married to a company executive, did not join the suit.) In April, 2001, the sons lost in a trial in Massachusetts Superior Court. In the Findings of Fact, Associate Justice Hiller B. Zobel wrote, “The evidence during the 14-day trial depicted, like something from the playwright Arthur Miller, a harsh, demanding, unfeeling, successful businessman frustrated in his inability to actuate his self-indulgent, substance-abusing, over-pampered, and (as he believes) ungrateful sons.” In the Conclusions of Law, the judge wrote, “Defendant Adelson, although perhaps lacking paternal kindliness and, indeed, cordiality generally, did not mislead, cheat, or defraud Plaintiffs.” In a separate memorandum, Justice Zobel denied a motion that Adelson had made to tax his sons with deposition costs. Mitchell, who pursued the case in appellate court, lost there, too, in 2004. (In September, 2005, Mitchell, who was married and had three sons, died unexpectedly at the age of forty-eight. Miriam Adelson recently told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he died of a drug overdose.)
In 1996, Adelson demolished the old Sands hotel and began building the Venetian. Instead of small rooms with no amenities and all-you-can-eat buffets, it would have four thousand rooms, of seven hundred square feet each, with minibars, fax machines, and telephones equipped for conference calls. It would offer world-class restaurants, a shopping mall with luxury boutiques, and the world’s largest casino. Since Adelson was building this mega-resort at a time when Las Vegas was suffering from a glut of rooms and many operators were cutting prices, his competitors felt threatened. Adelson, typically, was consumed with things large and small: the precise replication of the Campanile di San Marco and the Like all major When Adelson learned that the Denver-based National Jewish Medical and Adelson, like other members of his family, had been a Democrat. But, as his wealth grew, he began to favor tax-averse Republican economic policies. He argued to an associate recently, “Why is it fair that I should be paying a higher percentage of taxes than anyone else?” Three years ago, at an event in Washington, D.C., celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Adelson, who was being honored that evening, told the audience about the time he had spent with William Bush, the brother of George H. W. Bush, during the 1988 election. “He explained to me what Republicanism was all about . . . so I got to learn about it and I switched immediately!” Adelson said. But it was only after he went to war against the union that he became so partisan. He began donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National State Election Committee. Testifying before the Nevada state ethics commission in 1998, Shelley Berkley, who is now a Democratic congresswoman for Nevada, and who had worked for Adelson in the nineties as his vice-president of legal and governmental affairs, said that Adelson had told her that “old Democrats were with the union and he wanted to break the back of the union, consequently he had to break the back of the Democrats.” Adelson fired Berkley in 1997, just months before she planned to begin a run for her first term in Congress. In a September, 1998, letter to the Review-Journal, Adelson wrote, “She violated attorney/client privilege and after two warnings, I decided to fire her. . . . Shelley Berkley attacks me in order to draw attention away from her own ethical lapses.” Berkley published a letter in the paper a week later, in response, and she explained her firing differently. “My relationship with him began to sour the moment I urged him to hold jobs open at the Venetian for former Sands workers. The more I encouraged cooperation with the workers, the more I incurred Mr. Adelson’s wrath,” Berkley wrote. “Over time, I observed Mr. Adelson plot vendettas against anyone whom he believed stood in his way. However minuscule the perceived affront, he was certain to go ballistic, using his money and position to bully any ‘opponent’—great or small—into submission. . . . He has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party to support his handpicked candidate by attacking me on TV.” She went on, “I have unique personal knowledge of how Mr. Adelson seeks to dominate politics and public policy through the raw power of money. Shortly before I was fired from the Sands by Mr. Adelson in 1997, he made me an offer. It was a bizarre proposition, but it was simple and it was direct. He told me if I would switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party he would provide all the campaign funding I would need to run for Congress.” Berkley won her first race by only three percentage points. In 2006, she won a fifth term with sixty-five per cent of the vote, and today is a popular representative with a seemingly safe district; but Adelson has continued to try to defeat her.
His Father’s Shoes However much influence Adelson’s wealth has brought him in this country in the last few years, it is modest compared with his sway in According to two people who know Adelson well, Miriam influenced his political views on
Adelson began spending a great deal of time in Adelson’s dreams of gaming in
Michael Steinhardt is a former hedge-fund manager and the co-founding chairman of In the Israeli media world, Israel Hayom is referred to as Bibi-ton, because many believe that it serves as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, whose nickname is Bibi, and who has long received extraordinarily negative press coverage in The editor of Israel Hayom, Amos Regev, is a Netanyahu supporter, and he recruited several well-regarded journalists. One was Dan Margalit, formerly of Ma’ariv. Margalit was for many years one of Olmert’s closest friends but broke with him over his handling of the 2006 Lebanon war. Well before the current corruption investigation of Olmert, Israel Hayom was filled with anti-Olmert articles. Its specialty is vitriolic headlines, such as “THE ASS-COVERING OF THE GOVERNMENT.” (Israel Hayom would not comment for this article.) Last January, Nahum Barnea—a political columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, who is one of In early January, Yoram Bonen, a Tel Aviv lawyer, wrote a letter on behalf of Israel Hayom to Prime Minister Olmert. Bonen complained that Israel Hayom reporters were being discriminated against in various ways by Olmert’s office. Olmert’s media adviser, Yaakov Galanti, labelled the claims “ridiculous.” In a written response, he also said that even the definition of Israel Hayom as a newspaper was wrong; the phrase “printed material” would be more suitable. Galanti wrote, “The Prime Minister has, on more than one opportunity, had occasion to meet with the publisher of this material who, for some reason, did not conceal his political views or the political aims of his printed material—not to mention the fact that this same publisher meddles in the Israeli political scene, meeting with coalition members and trying to persuade them to quit the [government].” In late December, it was reported in the Israeli press that Adelson had met with two ministers in Olmert’s coalition government—Avigdor Liberman, of the right-wing Israel Beytenu Party, and Eli Yishai, of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party—to try to persuade them to leave the coalition, a move that would likely bring down the Olmert government. In February, pamphlets were delivered to the synagogues attended by Shas voters throughout Israel, urging them to tell Yishai to leave the government. A spokesman for Shas said that the pamphlets were distributed by One Jerusalem, which is funded in part by Adelson. (One Jerusalem denies involvement.) Liberman left the government in January. He said that he did not discuss his departure with Adelson and that he left following Annapolis, “when the government began negotiating with the Palestinians regarding core issues.” Yishai remains, though he threatens to walk out if Olmert negotiates with the Palestinians about Jerusalem. Israel Hayom seems to be thriving. A survey published in late January showed that it was gaining readers at the expense of paid-for publications. It is seeking to challenge Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest daily, which calls itself “the paper of the country,” both by competing directly and by forming an alliance with Ha’aretz, using Ha’aretz’s printing and distribution systems. In April, the Israeli press reported that Adelson was once again negotiating with Nimrodi to buy Ma’ariv. Someone close to the Mozes family, which has owned Yedioth since Israel’s independence, suggested that, if Adelson succeeds in buying Ma’ariv, Yedioth might have to go public, in order to have sufficient funds to compete against Adelson. Adelson is also funding, with a $4.5-million grant, a think tank, the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, at the right-leaning If Adelson were spending money in Sheldon and Miriam Adelson have also donated thirty million dollars a year, for the last two years, to During the celebration of After Adelson addressed the conference, Nahum Barnea wrote in his column in Yedioth Ahronoth, “I saw a gambling tycoon from Adelson is a Jew who loves In The March on Lately, Adelson’s interest in newspapers seems to have moved beyond Adelson would hardly be the first businessman to want to expand his political influence in this country by owning a newspaper. What makes his case seem more anomalous is the fact that in recent years Adelson’s relationship with the press has been distinguished mainly by a marked readiness to sue. In 2005, the London Daily Mail published an article that described Adelson as, among other things, “the ruthless casino baron who rules Las Vegas.” Adelson sued. Last March, the Daily Mail apologized to Adelson for serious errors in the piece, and Adelson won legal costs and substantial damages. (He donated the damages to a hospital.) The outcome of the lawsuits he has filed in this country has been more mixed. In a column in April, 2006, the business editor of the Las Vegas Sun, Jeff Simpson, referring to a bid by Las Vegas Sands to build a project in Singapore, estimated the company’s odds of winning at 8 to 1. Simpson wrote, “The company’s lawsuit-happy history and sorry Adelson filed a suit in December, 2005, against John L. Smith, a veteran reporter whose column is one of the most widely read in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Earlier that year, Smith had published “Sharks in the Desert,” a book about Las Vegas moguls. Adelson charged that Smith; his publisher, Barricade Books; and Lyle Stuart, the owner of Barricade, had libelled him in a couple of pages in the book. “Smith deceptively manipulates language, quotations, and sources in order to concoct the smear that Adelson had dealings with the Boston Mob when Adelson was in the vending machine business. Smith’s claims are baseless,” the lawsuit said. “Adelson, a pillar of the community known for his philanthropic endeavors, is not, and has never been affiliated with organized crime.” Last October, on the eve of trial, Smith filed for bankruptcy, which caused the case to be stayed. (Barricade Books also filed for bankruptcy; Lyle Stuart died last year.) An article about the case and Smith’s bankruptcy filing appeared in the Review-Journal on October 12, 2007. Smith explained that, after Adelson sued, Barricade inserted an errata sheet into unsold copies of the book, correcting errors that had led to the lawsuit. (The errata sheet said, in part, “No evidence exists that Adelson’s early vending machine business activity was ever targeted by the Patriarca crime family or the Winter Hill Gang.”) Smith noted, “I had agreed to publish in my column, which is read by far more people than ever read or will read the book, the most dramatic correction of my career. But whatever I agreed to do, they would then ask for more.” In the same article, Adelson’s attorney, Martin Singer, was quoted as saying, “We engaged in settlement negotiations with Mr. Smith in good faith. At the start of the negotiations we asked for $1 and an apology. Separate and apart from that we offered to establish a $200,000 medical fund for Mr. Smith’s daughter whose condition Mr. Adelson learned about during the case. Mr. Smith turned down the trust and would not pay the dollar.” (Smith’s daughter, Amelia, now twelve, was given a diagnosis of a brain tumor three and a half years ago, and she has had multiple surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy; her treatment is ongoing.) In the Review-Journal article, Smith denied what Singer said about the dollar and an apology. “Mr. Adelson wanted to enter a judgment against me, which would have been the same thing as a decision that I had committed constitutional malice,” Smith said. “This was not true, and I refused to agree to it.” He added that he could not ethically accept the offer of the medical fund, which, he told me, was conditioned on his keeping it secret, even from his boss. In the article, the editor of the Review-Journal, Thomas Mitchell, pointing to litigation against both the Sun and Smith, said of Adelson, “This whole series of events is nothing more nor less than trying to coerce everyone in journalism to not write anything he doesn’t like.” The Review-Journal published a response from Adelson to what he said were “unjustified malicious assaults” by Smith (in his book) and Mitchell (in the Review-Journal article). He described the book’s errors at length and reiterated, “All I wanted was an apology, a retraction and $1.” He mentioned the two-hundred-thousand-dollar medical and educational fund. He also said, referring to Smith, “I had nothing to do with his bankruptcy.” Adelson has filed a complaint in the bankruptcy case, to try to prevent any potential debt to him from being discharged, and to lift the stay in the libel case. Adelson is demanding at least fifteen million dollars in damages. Adelson has not been shy about his new wealth. According to a guest at a reception in Washington a few years ago, Adelson remarked to President Bush, “You know, I am the richest Jew in the world.” He also introduced himself that way to a former Israeli official recently. The investment banker Ken Moelis said that when he saw Adelson not long ago he was surprised to hear him refer to himself as “Sheldon Adelson III.” “I said, ‘I never realized your father was Sheldon Adelson II,’ ” Moelis recalled. “And he said, ‘He wasn’t! But I’m the third-richest American!’ ” Adelson has said that he is planning how he will become No. 1, bypassing Warren Buffett, the current No. 2, and Bill Gates. (Gaming is not immune to the struggling economy: Las Vegas Sands lost $11.2 million in the first quarter of 2008, and its stock is trading at about half what it was in September, 2007.) Adelson seems to enjoy talking about his planes, particularly his new Boeing 767, and he keeps models of them on display in his office at the Venetian. He sometimes uses the planes to make a generous gesture; he loaned one to his friend Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, when Foxman had to fly cross-country on short notice, and he provided a plane to the sick daughter of a friend, to cheer her up. For Memorial Day weekend, he sent a plane to bring forty wounded Iraqi vets from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, to Las Vegas, and hosted them in the Venetian suites that are ordinarily reserved for high rollers. He and Miriam own houses in Malibu, Tel Aviv, and Boston; and two in the exclusive Summerlin neighborhood of Las Vegas—one is a residence, the other is used for entertaining. Last February, he hosted a fund-raiser for President Bush at his home in Summerlin. (Bush stayed at the Venetian.) The Adelsons seem not to take their power for granted. Recently, Miriam told an associate, “I had a CD on Islamic jihad. I brought it to the White House and told the chief of staff, ‘I would like the President to see this.’ It really is amazing that we have this influence.” (The White House declined to comment.) Last December, Bush named Adelson to the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations to the U.S. Trade Representative. The representative, Susan Schwab, paid a visit to Adelson at the Venetian to discuss his appointment. Adelson’s interest in the position is not purely academic. Discussing his appointment with the Associated Press, Adelson said that he hopes to influence China to ease controls on its yuan. If that currency’s value were to increase against the dollar, it would mean that Chinese gamblers could spend more, both in Las Vegas and in Macao. “The floating of the yuan would be like a grand slam home run, World Series, Super Bowl, and N.B.A. championship game all packed in one for us,” Adelson declared, adding, “We’re the largest investor of any kind in the history of China.” In early August, during the Olympic Games, Las Vegas Sands will launch the Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise, in Beijing, which seems positioned to wield substantial influence. If you were an American businessman coming to A doctor who treated his peripheral neuropathy now works with the Adelson Medical Research Foundation. “The two problems are money and the willingness of scientists to collaborate,” Adelson told the guests at the Woodrow Wilson International Center awards dinner, in March. “We provide the money, they provide the collaboration. . . . We have over one hundred scientists from dozens of institutions collaborating together.” He mentioned research into neuro-degenerative diseases, ovarian cancer, lymphoma, brain cancer, and melanoma. He described the effort as “this businessman’s legacy in life.” As Adelson began to focus on the 2008 Presidential election, he apparently decided that his recent megabillionaire status would allow him to play a more prominent role than he had in the past. In early 2007, at a meeting in Florida of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Adelson and many of his allies resolved to create Freedom’s Watch. As a nonprofit 501(C)(4), the organization can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from wealthy individuals without any disclosure, if it can argue that it is promoting an issue, not a candidate. Some conservatives have heralded Adelson as their answer to George Soros, the financier who has donated large sums to the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, and there were press reports that Adelson might spend two hundred million dollars on the 2008 elections. Last summer, Freedom’s Watch spent fifteen million dollars on a nationwide ad campaign supporting the troop surge in Iraq, and in the fall it held a conference on radical Islam and Iran. But then Freedom’s Watch seemed to recede, and, in April, articles in Mother Jones and the Times suggested that the organization had been so plagued by infighting, and by micromanaging on the part of its prime benefactor, Adelson—who since its inception had reportedly contributed some thirty million dollars—that it might not be a player in this fall’s elections, after all. (The problems at Freedom’s Watch are apparently not unique. One Republican consultant, after talking to members of a political organization that had received Adelson funding, said that he decided not to seek it for his group. “I don’t want him telling me what to do every minute,” the consultant told me.) In late April, however, Freedom’s Watch reappeared, running ads against Democrats in special elections. And in its latest offensive, over Iraq-war funding, the organization has been targeting vulnerable Democrats—along with Representative Shelley Berkley, who holds one of the safest seats in the Nevada congressional delegation. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee seems to be taking Freedom’s Watch seriously. Last month, in special elections for congressional seats in Louisiana and Mississippi, the D.C.C.C. aired ads on Christian radio stations which linked the Republican candidates with Sheldon Adelson. In Mississippi, one ad asked why the Republican candidate Greg Davis was accepting support from “the world’s No. 1 casino czar and one of atheist China’s top American business partners.” It referred to Adelson’s Macao enterprises as investments “in a country that steals our jobs, persecutes Christians, uses forced labor, and forces women to have abortions.” The Democrats won in both contests. Adelson has also continued to support the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has assumed an aggressive posture in the Presidential elections. Even before Senator Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the R.J.C. had been attacking him, trying to deepen the anxiety that some Jewish voters feel about his commitment to Israel. (A disclosure: my husband, the former U.S. congressman Mel Levine, a Democrat, serves as a Middle East foreign-policy adviser to the Obama campaign.) In late March, Senator John McCain held a fund-raiser in
On the morning of May 24th, after a six-week trial, the jury in the Suen case in Clark County District Court returned a verdict against Sheldon Adelson and his company, of $43.8 million. Adelson’s lawyer, Rusty Hardin, said they would appeal. Meanwhile, another trial awaits the Sands, in Las Vegas in December; three co-plaintiffs, who say they served as middlemen in securing the Sands’s Macao license, claim that they are owed five per cent of its Macao operations, and are suing for at least four hundred and fifty million dollars. (Two other cases have been filed by plaintiffs with similar allegations; one has been dismissed but is on appeal, and the other, which was filed in Tel Aviv, is awaiting a verdict. Las Vegas Sands says that the three suits are without merit.) In the Suen case, the jury’s foreman said that the jurors decided in the first hour of deliberations that the plaintiff was owed money for having helped Adelson obtain the Macao license, and they spent the next nine hours trying to figure out what would be a fair sum. Suen had sued for a hundred million dollars; some jurors wanted to give him close to that, some much less, and they had compromised in the middle. Adelson was a practiced witness. On the stand, he did not lash out, and only rarely tried to bully Suen’s attorney, John O’Malley. He smiled genially in the direction of the jurors, noting that he had once been a court reporter and referring to his obedience to his wife (“Just like when my wife tells me to shut up, I shut up”). He was expansive in describing his climb out of poverty and his variegated business career. But under questioning by O’Malley about his claim to be a man of his word, for whom a handshake seals a deal, Adelson glowered, and launched into a recurrent refrain. “I know there’s a perception in life that people who become financially successful do so by climbing up the broken backs of people whose backs they break, but . . . with the values that I grew up with, there’s just no way that I—that any deal can be broken. . . . I never climbed up on . . . anybody’s broken back,” Adelson said. “I’ve earned every single thing. I came from poverty and now I’m considered one of the biggest philanthropists. . . . You know, business is such that if somebody does something wrong once, they get a reputation and people don’t want to deal with them. But everybody wants to deal with me.” Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet and writer. He is the author of the forthcoming book (reissued and much enlarged) The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. It can be pre-ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press. Click here to visit Scott’s website. Connie Bruck is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Connie Bruck’s article appeared in The New Yorker on June 30, 2008. Click here to access it online. Posted at
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