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.)

Sheldon Adelson’s Macao casinos have helped make him America’s third-richest man. Photograph by Mike Clark / AFP / Getty Images

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 Annapolis in late November. The Zionist Organization of America, to which Adelson is a major contributor, ran a full-page ad in the Times, headlined, “SECRETARY RICE: DON’T PROMOTE A STATE FOR PALESTINIANS WHILE THEIR 10 COMMANDMENTS PROMOTE TERRORISM AND ISRAEL’S DESTRUCTION.” The “10 Commandments” referred to the constitution of Fatah, Abbas’s party. “Osama Bin-Laden and Hamas would be proud of Abbas’ Fatah Constitution,” the ad stated. Two weeks before the start of the conference, a Washington, D.C., think tank that shares office space and several board members with the Republican Jewish Coalition—another organization to which Adelson makes significant contributions—circulated an article on its Listserve which asserted, “Olmert is now chasing peace with the Palestinians at all costs, in a desperate attempt to secure his place in world history.”

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 Washington, was scheduled to appear with Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, at the opening of the Saban Forum, an event in Jerusalem organized by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Adelson phoned the event’s chair, Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman, and asked him to contribute to a campaign that he was organizing against the Olmert government; Saban declined. Adelson then asked if he would sign an ad; again, Saban refused. Whereupon, Adelson accused him of funding anti-Israel research at the Saban Center. Saban was surprised, but suggested that when the center’s director, Martin Indyk, was next in Las Vegas he and Adelson could talk. Not long afterward, Indyk met with Adelson at his office at the Venetian, on the Las Vegas Strip. According to a person familiar with what happened at the meeting, Adelson berated Indyk for hosting “terrorists” like Fayyad, who he said was a founder of Fatah. Indyk is said to have replied that Fayyad was never involved in terrorism and was not a member of Fatah, and that Adelson’s problem was really with Olmert, because he dealt with Fayyad. Adelson stood his ground, and declared that the Olmert government was an illegitimate government and should be thrown out. (Indyk declined to comment on what he said was a private conversation. Saban confirmed his exchange with Adelson.)

Historically, most mainstream American Jewish organizations don’t publicly oppose the government of Israel, but in the weeks before and after the Annapolis conference a number of groups were strongly critical. Among them was One Jerusalem, founded in 2000 to protest any peace accord that would include Israeli concessions on Jerusalem. One Jerusalem has received contributions from Adelson. A week before the Annapolis conference, One Jerusalem’s chairman, Natan Sharansky—the former Russian dissident, who has moved to the right on the political spectrum since immigrating to Israel—announced a major campaign against any division of Jerusalem, and against the peace initiative. One Jerusalem referred to Annapolis as “the Munich Conference of the 21st century.” After Olmert asserted Israel’s right as a sovereign state to make decisions regarding its national security, One Jerusalem posted an article on its Web site, headlined, “OLMERT TO WORLD JEWRY: SHUT UP.” Later, as Olmert’s negotiations with Abbas continued, another piece announced, “OLMERT DECLARES WAR ON ISRAEL.”

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 Israel also supported. Adelson was furious.

AIPAC is not accustomed to being attacked publicly from the right; its critics generally charge that its conservative policies toward Israel favor the status quo over a peace accord. But AIPAC has traditionally insisted that it seeks to further a close American-Israeli relationship, whether the government of Israel is left, right, or center. In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Adelson said of AIPAC’s support of aid for the Palestinians, “I don’t continue to support organizations that help friends committing suicide just because they want to jump.” AIPAC has not made any policy shifts, and it is not clear whether Adelson will continue to contribute to the organization.

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 Macao

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.”

Macao had an enormous geographic advantage as a gaming destination. Gambling flourished in China until 1949, when the Communists took over and banned it as a capitalistic vice. But the Chinese remained avid gamblers, and gambling continued in Macao, a Portuguese colony an hour by ferry from Hong Kong. For nearly forty years, Stanley Ho, a controversial businessman, had enjoyed a gambling monopoly, but Macao was plagued by prostitution and violent crime, and dominated by triads, or Chinese mafia. In late 1999, soon after Macao was turned over to the People’s Republic of China as a special administrative region, rumors began to circulate that Ho’s monopoly was coming to an end; a limited number of new gaming licenses would be issued.

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 Shanghai. Adelson had been warned by Suen that Chinese officials find the subject of gaming distasteful, so he should not broach it. (As Suen wrote to Adelson, the Communists had banned gambling not only because it was against party principles but because “it has been a curse to my people way back in history like opium. It destroyed thousands of families from the bad old days to now.”) Adelson spoke, instead, about his experience in the hotel and convention business. In 1979, he had launched a computer trade show, Comdex (for Computer Dealers Exposition), and over the next decade it became one of the largest in the world. In 1989, he had bought Las Vegas’s old Sands Hotel, and built the biggest privately owned convention center in the country. And in 1997 he broke ground on the Venetian, to cater to a growing number of business travellers, among others. Qian told Adelson that he wanted to do much the same in Macao.

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?’ ”

“O.K., so I shrank. But you must admit I am brighter.” Facebook

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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.

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.