Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson dies at 87
Sheldon Adelson, who rose from a modest start as the son of an immigrant taxi driver in Dorchester to become a billionaire Republican power broker with a casino empire and influence on international politics, has died. He was 87.
Adelson died Monday night from complications related to treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Las Vegas Sands announced Tuesday. The company announced last week that Adelson had stepped away from his role as CEO and chairman to resume treatments for the cancer, which he first announced in 2019.
In business, Adelson transformed a landmark Las Vegas casino that was once a hangout of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack into a towering Italian-inspired complex, trailblazed a trend of turning business conventions into a lucrative industry and left his mark on some of Asia’s most cosmopolitan cities.
“If you do things differently, success will follow you like a shadow,” he said during a 2014 talk to the gambling industry in Las Vegas.
In politics, Adelson was a record-breaking campaign donor who had the ear of domestic and international leaders, including President Trump. His advocacy redefined U.S. relations with Israel during the Trump administration and bolstered ties that U.S. politicians and American Jewish teenagers had to the country.
Adelson, the son of Jewish immigrants, once said at a gambling conference that he hoped his legacy would not be his glitzy casinos or hotels but his impact in Israel, where he had a deep and lifelong attachment.
In his modest office wedged among the casinos of the Las Vegas Strip, Adelson hosted top Republican Party strategists and candidates and helped ensure that uncritical support of Israel became a pillar of the GOP platform. That was never more visible than when the Trump administration relocated the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018.
The inflammatory move had been adamantly opposed by Palestinians and was long a priority for Adelson, who sat front and center at the ceremony in Jerusalem with his wife, Miriam.
More recently, he reportedly purchased the U.S. ambassador’s official residence near Tel Aviv for $67 million in a maneuver that appeared aimed at preventing the embassy from relocating back to Tel Aviv after Trump leaves office. Just weeks ago, Adelson provided a private plane for Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. intelligence analyst who spent 30 years in prison for spying for Israel, to move to Israel after his parole ended.
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 small businesses.
Adelson began to amass his fortune with a technology trade show, starting computer convention COMDEX in 1979 before selling his stake in 1995 for more than $800 million.
When he bought the Sands Hotel in 1989, he built a convention hall to keep his hotel rooms full on weekdays, a move copied by other resort owners. When he expanded his business to Macao, the only place in China where casino gambling is legal, Adelson directed his company to build land where there wasn’t any, piling sand up to create a Peninsula. Soon his Macao revenue outstripped that of his Las Vegas holdings. He later expanded to Singapore, where his Marina Bay Sands hotel and its infinity pool became a signature of the skyline.