Thread: The biggest single donor in political history backed all loosers

Sheldon Adelson


Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg News

Updated: Nov. 8, 2012

Sheldon Adelson, one of the world’s richest men, became the single biggest political contributor in history during the 2012 elections.

Mr. Adelson donated more than $60 million. But of the eight candidates he supported, none won. That included the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who was battered by negative ads financed by Mr. Adelson during the primary before Mr. Adelson switched to become a supporter.

In public, Mr. Adelson did not seem overly concerned about the paltry returns on his investment. “Paying bills,” Mr. Adelson said on election night when asked by a Norwegian reporter how he thought his donations had been spent. “That’s how you spend money. Either that or become a Jewish husband — you spend a lot of money.”

By some estimates worth as much as $25 billion, Mr. Adelson presides over a global empire of casinos, hotels and convention centers whose centerpiece is the Venetian in Las Vegas, an exuberant monument to excess.

While Mr. Adelson’s activism in Israel has been very high-profile, he had been much more private about his political efforts in the United States. That changed in early 2012, when Mr. Adelson and his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, moved to the forefront in a new trend of the super-rich giving larger than ever support to candidates.

Big Gingrich Supporter, Wooed by Romney
During the Republican primaries, Mr. Adelson stood out for his willingness to spend money on super PACs, which must register with the election commission and disclose details of their contributions and spending. The Adelson family almost single-handedly bankrolled Winning Our Future, a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich during the primaries, giving the group more than $20 million.
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Background
Mr. Adelson has kept a low profile nationally, but people in Las Vegas know him as a querulous figure who has existed in a near-constant state of embattlement since building the Venetian in the late 1990s. He filed claims and counterclaims against scores of contractors who worked on that project, and over the years he has started legal fights with the local A.C.L.U., the Culinary Workers, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and even the power company, which he thought should pay the cost of removing utility poles from the Venetian site.

Longtime friends and associates said his hard exterior was rooted in his days growing up in a rough-and-tumble section of Boston, where his father drove a cab.

After high school, Mr. Adelson had stints working as a mortgage banker, running a business packaging toiletries for hotels and operating a charter travel company. But he hit the jackpot with a computer trade show, Comdex, which he started in Las Vegas in 1979. Comdex became the signature annual event for the computer industry, attracting more than 200,000 visitors at its peak.

In 1988, Mr. Adelson and his partners bought the historic Sands Hotel and Casino and built a convention center to accommodate their thriving trade show. Eight years later, after they sold Comdex for $862 million, Mr. Adelson used his profits on a risky new venture: tearing down the aging Sands and spending $1.5 billion to develop the Venetian, the lavish hotel and casino, which opened in 1999.

With the Venetian, Mr. Adelson broke the basic rules of casino design by building a facility that was geared toward conventions rather than centered on the casino. Where the old way was to motivate guests to spend time on the casino floor by offering few amenities in the room, the Venetian parted from Las Vegas tradition, installing minibars and fax machines in each guest room.

Mr. Adelson’s plans were met with skepticism, if not scorn. But by 2008 the Venetian was the Strip’s second most profitable casino hotel, behind only the Bellagio, said Robert A. LaFleur, an industry analyst with the Susquehanna Financial Group, and that is with only a third of its revenue coming from its gambling floor.

He then turned his attention to Asia. China in 1999 reclaimed the former Portuguese colony of Macao, and a few years later ended a casino monopoly that had existed for many years. Mr. Adelson’s company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, bid for one of the licenses offered by the Chinese and won, leading to the opening of the $240 million Macao Sands in 2004.

Potential Liabilities
The question of what motivated Mr. Adelson’s singular generosity toward the former House speaker emerged front and center during the primaries. People who know him say his affinity for Mr. Gingrich stems from a devotion to Israel as well as loyalty to a friend. A fervent Zionist who opposes any territorial compromise to make way for a Palestinian state, Mr. Adelson has long been enamored of Mr. Gingrich’s full-throated defense of Israel.

But for any recipient of his largesse, Mr. Adelson comes with potential liabilities. His empire is founded on casinos, which could upset some social conservatives. That he operates in China could rankle isolationist voters, while some of his views on Israel are hawkish by mainstream Republican standards.

The Justice Department is also investigating accusations by a former casino executive that Mr. Adelson’s operations in Macao may have violated federal laws banning corrupt payments to foreign officials. In addition, a Chinese businessman accused Mr. Adelson of reneging on an agreement to share profits from the Macao project. In March 2012, Asian American Enterprises, which is controlled by the businessman, Shi Sheng Hao, who also goes by the name Marshall Hao, filed suit against Las Vegas Sands, alleging breach of contract and seeking compensation of 3 billion patacas, or more than $375 million.

And when Mr. Adelson needed something done in China, he often turned to his company’s “chief Beijing representative,” a mysterious businessman named Yang Saixin. Mr. Yang arranged meetings for Mr. Adelson with senior Chinese officials, acted as a frontman on several ambitious projects for Las Vegas Sands and intervened on the Sands’s behalf with Chinese regulators.

But today, Mr. Yang, along with tens of millions of dollars in payments the Sands made through him in China, is a focus of a wide-ranging federal investigation into potential bribery of foreign officials and other matters in China and Macau, according to people with knowledge of the inquiries.

Mr. Adelson has a reputation for irascibility and has left a trail of angry former business associates. Even his two sons sued him at one point, accusing him of cheating them, though they lost. He filed a libel suit against a Las Vegas newspaper columnist, John L. Smith, who eventually had to declare bankruptcy, and he waged a bitter court battle with a former employee whom he accused of spreading lies about him.

Sheldon Adelson News - The New York Times

GOP donors question million dollar loss

NBCNews.com - ‎29 minutes ago‎
NewsNation | Aired on November 08, 2012.

GOP donors question million dollar loss. Politico reports that Republican strategist Karl Rove is calling top donors to explain their nearly $400 million lost Tuesday night.

VIDEO @
GOP donors question million dollar loss - Video on NBCNews.com

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. . . Adelson, who contributed $20 million to Mitt Romney’s super PAC "Restore Our Future," $15 million to Newt Gingrich’s super PAC – which for all intents and purposes kept the disgraced former House Speaker in the presidential primary race and handed the nomination to Romney -- and about $50 million to nonprofit Republican fronts such as Rove’s Crossroads GPS. . .

Adelson also claimed that he was "basically a social liberal," and that his views differed sharply from the Republican Party on a number of issues:

"Number one, I’m supporting stem-cell research." As exemplified by the new Adelson medical research foundation that is funding some stem-cell based science.

"I’m pro choice," he pointed out. . .

On immigration: "I’m pro-Dream Act . . .

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