Sheldon Adelson

An investigation by the University of California, ProPublica and PBS FRONTLINE found Adelson may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act when he instructed a top executive to give $700,000 to a Macau legislator who aided his company’s efforts there. Officials are also probing possible ties between Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, and Chinese organized crime. He has given tens of millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other Republican causes, and has spoken of spending upwards of $100 million to defeat President Obama in the next election.

Stephen Engelberg talking:

Sheldon Adelson, who has a casino in Las Vegas and decides to go where the real money is, which turns out to be Macau. It’s a peninsula right on the edge of China. Macau, like Hong Kong, is a place that used to be another colony. You know, it was a Portuguese colony, becomes part of China. In the mainland China, gambling is illegal. Not only is gambling illegal, but you can’t collect gambling debt, so there are no casinos in China. The Chinese go to Macau to gamble. And when I say “go,” I mean in large numbers. The handle of gambling for Las Vegas is $8 billion a year, Macau $32 billion a year.

So, about—you know, in about 2001 or so, the Chinese opened up to American companies coming in. Adelson is among the very first to seize this opportunity, even though, in fact, Macau is a notoriously difficult place to do business. The gambling has historically involved Chinese organized crime. That’s how the gamblers get from the mainland to Macau. So you have to kind of deal with that. The politics is very tricky. But he got a gaming license and set to work building casinos. And everything was going swimmingly until the fall of 2008, when the American economy collapsed. And, by the way, the Chinese suddenly cut off visas to Macau, significantly sort of scaled them back.

So, suddenly, all the money he borrowed to build this magnificent sort of casino empire in Macau, you know, is a huge debt, can’t pay it, and they need to raise money. And in order to do that, they need some favorable decisions from the local officials, local authorities in Macau, and they have a very bad relationship with those people. And so, they hire as outside counsel a man named Leonel Alves, local lawyer, who also happens to be in the legislature, also happens to be a member of what’s called the executive council, which advises the chief executive of Macau. And over the next few months, the things that are standing in their way start to disappear. They want to sell some apartment buildings separately. The government has said they can’t do that. Suddenly, after Mr. Alves is hired, a couple months later they’re allowed to. They don’t actually sell them. They’re still fighting to sell them individually. But it was a big sort of, you know, boost to their cash position.

Second thing was they wanted a ferry concession to deliver the gamblers right to their doorstep. And the courts in Macau—there are courts—have been saying, “We’re going to take this concession away from you. We’re going to give it to somebody else.” The chief executive suddenly intervened at the last minute, right before the final court ruling, and said, “No, Sands keeps it. Court ruling over. Everything moot. You guys win.” That was crucial, because they were trying to raise two-and-a-half billion dollars on the Hong Kong stock market in an IPO, and they had said, if they didn’t keep this concession, they might not raise the money. So what happens? IPO goes off. They raise the two-and-a-half billion. Company is saved. By the way, Sheldon Adelson, at that point, flat on his back, having put a billion of his own money to save his own company, company takes off like a rocket. He now has $25 billion. No man in America, no American taxpayer, has made more money during the Obama administration than Sheldon Adelson.

the main consequence right now is that he’s kind of made his bed. It’s going swimmingly, from an economic viewpoint. But now the American investigators, both in the state of Nevada, who are looking at ties to organized crime, and the federal government, in terms of his relationship with Alves and others—Leonel Alves, the legislator—there’s going to be an accounting as to how they achieved this great success. And we’ll see. I mean, these investigations result in all kinds of outcomes—typically, you know, large fines, sometimes jail terms for people involved.

Here’s one thing that’s different in this thing. Sheldon Adelson is the chief stockholder of this company. It’s a Fortune 500 company. But in this case, his hands are on everything. This is not like he insulated himself from the dealings on—he and Alves were on the phone together. The decision to pay him, according to emails we reviewed, was ordered directly by him. So this is a rare moment.

No one’s contesting them. They are internal communications. And what it shows is that there was a huge fight inside this company. The general counsel of this Fortune 500 company felt that employing this gentleman was inappropriate, should be stopped. Adelson disagreed. The general counsel quit. And the gentleman, Leonel Alves, remains on the payroll right now of Las Vegas Sands as its outside counsel in Macau.

we have heard nothing directly from him. In court, what he has said, because there’s an ongoing fight between one of the executives who quit, a man named Steven Jacobs, who was president of the Macau operation, and the company, he has repeatedly said publicly that this is a disgruntled—these are disgruntled employees, there’s no truth to it. He takes a very sort of vigorous—he’s vigorously responded to several of the things that have been said about him in this court case, just disputing what’s being said.

Peter Stone talking:

he was the leading supporter of Newt Gingrich’s effort, the outside group that was backing Gingrich. He had longstanding ties to Gingrich and was hoping he would get the nomination. When Gingrich withdrew, he threw his support, initially, reluctantly, to Romney. He felt that Romney was not as decisive as Gingrich and might not be quite as good on certain issues of particular importance to Adelson. Number one on his agenda is strong support for the Israeli government, and particularly the conservative wing of Israeli political parties. He has close ties to Netanyahu, and he is generally considered a hawk on Middle East issues. He opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Gingrich had been, you know, far more outspoken. Romney is strong on these issues, too. And, you know, he is now backing Romney.

His overriding concern is to defeat President Obama. He thinks Obama is weak on Israeli issues, Middle East issues. He also has publicly castigated him for his economic policies, described them, I think, to Forbes as socialist-style economic policies, which he’s worried about, you know, continuing for another four years. So he’s dedicated to defeating Obama. He’s also throwing a lot of money, tens of millions of dollars, into other groups, outside groups, that are playing big in trying to help Republicans win the Senate and keep the House. I reported in Huffington Post a few weeks ago that he has given an estimated $70 million or committed estimated $70 million thus far this cycle. We know about $30 million of that is public at this stage. I learned that he has given at least $10 million to a Karl Rove group that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, Crossroads GPS, and pledged another $10 million for Rove’s operation. Likewise, he has given $10 million recently to a Koch entity, one of the groups backed by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. So, he is definitely committed to helping get Obama out of the White House and trying to help Republicans make major gains in the fall in the congressional front.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Yes. That is a great deal of money. And again, we need a level playing field, and we need to go back to the realization that Teddy Roosevelt had, that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and that corporations are not people.

He and his wife Miriam recently donated an additional $13 million to Taglit-Birthright Israel, which sends young Jews on free trips to Israel. he has criticized AIPAC. And the group that he is much more aligned with these days is the Republican Jewish Coalition, which takes a harder line on some issues than AIPAC does. So, he is definitely interested in doing all he can to support those groups, which are really the most conservative backers of the Netanyahu government.

For many years, Adelson also was a supporter of an AIPAC affiliate, which I reported on in 2008, that took numerous members of Congress on trips to Israel. This started in the early 1990s. And the AIPAC affiliate brought over dozens of members of Congress for fact-finding and educational trips to Israel. So he’s put a lot of money into different efforts to basically educate Americans about, you know, his side of the story on Israel. And owns the largest daily free newspaper in Israel, is that right? And also supported the Clarion Fund, which put out the anti-Muslim film, The Third Jihad.

he owns and started a few years ago the largest free daily in Israel. He has, you know, definitely been very active. He makes no bones about it. And I think he was even quoted at one point. MSNBC had a segment a few months ago where they found an old comment of Adelson’s that, in effect, said he would have preferred his son have served in the Israeli armed forces to the U.S. armed forces. So, he is quite vehement in his views on, you know, the importance of the Israeli state and concerned that it’s not getting enough support from Americans.

-— source democracynow.org

Stephen Engelberg, managing editor of ProPublica since its inception in 2008. He recently co-authored an article with Matt Isaacs and Lowell Bergman on casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor in the 2012 election. It’s called “Inside the Investigation of Leading Republican Money Man Sheldon Adelson.” The story was co-published with PBS FRONTLINE and the Investigative Reporting Program of the University of California.

Peter Stone, freelancer with the Huffington Post and other publications. He spent two decades covering money and politics for the National Journal and the Center for Public Integrity. He’s been reporting on Sheldon Adelson since 2008.