(Sheldon Adelson) Tech trade show paved way for casinos and wealth

Sheldon Garry Adelson was born in 1933, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.

His father was a taxi driver, his mother the manager of a knitting store.

A natural entrepreneur, he was selling newspapers by age 12 and running a vending machine business at 16. After dropping out of City College of New York and serving in the army, he attempted to start dozens of businesses, from toiletries to de-icing windshields.

Adelson, who said he disdained email, began to amass his fortune with a technology trade show, starting computer convention COMDEX in 1979 with partners before selling his stake in 1995 for more than US$800 million.

When he bought the Sands Hotel in 1989, he was thinking convention space, not just gambling, would make money. It did.

He built a convention hall to keep his hotel rooms full on weekdays and others soon followed the business model.

Meanwhile, his effort to replicate the Strip in Macao, the only place in China where casino gambling is legal.

When faced with water and marsh land, Adelson directed his company to build land where there wasn’t any, piling sand up to create the Cotai Peninsula.

Soon his Macao revenue outstripped that of his Las Vegas holdings. He later expanded his business to Singapore, where his Marina Bay Sands hotel and its infinity pool were featured in the hit film “Crazy Rich Asians,” and had been pressing to open a casino in Japan.

His Macao business also spawned a long-running wrongful termination lawsuit brought by a former chief of Sands China Ltd. who accused Adelson and the company of firing him for exposing a host of misdeeds. Adelson often clashed with attorneys while appearing on a Clark County courtroom’s witness stand.

The Sands China lawsuit was among dozens involving Adelson, whose cases included his suing a Wall Street Journal reporter for calling him “foul-mouthed” (the parties settled, the words remained) to being sued by his sons from his first marriage for cheating them out of money (he won).

A long-running feud with fellow casino tycoon Steve Wynn turned to friendship when Wynn joined Adelson’s effort to end online gambling. Critics said Adelson was trying to stifle competition. Adelson countered that there was no way to ensure children and teenagers wouldn’t gamble and said he was “not in favor of it exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Donald Trump’s election would again prove useful to Adelson. During the Obama administration, the Justice Department said online gambling that does not involve sporting events would not violate the Wire Act, a 1961 federal statute. In a legal opinion that became public early in 2019, the department reversed itself and decided the statute applies to any form of gambling.-AP