Sheldon Adelson, casino mogul, dies

LAS VEGAS — Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire mogul, Republican megadonor and power broker who built a casino empire spanning from Las Vegas to China and became a singular force in domestic and international politics, has died after a long illness.

Adelson died at 87 from complications related to treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Las Vegas Sands announced Tuesday.

He was the son of Jewish immigrants raised in a Boston tenement who became one of the world’s richest men. The chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands brought singing gondoliers to the Vegas Strip and foresaw the same potential in Asia. Forbes ranked him No. 19 in the U.S., worth an estimated $29.8 billion.

“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.

Blunt yet secretive, the squatly-built Adelson resembled an old-fashioned political boss. He became one of the nation’s most influential GOP donors by setting records for individual contributions.

In 2012, Politico called him “the dominant pioneer of the super PAC era.”

Adelson hosted the party’s top strategists and candidates at his modest office wedged among the casinos of the Las Vegas Strip. He helped ensure that uncritical support of Israel became a pillar of the GOP platform, never more visibly than when the Trump administration relocated the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018.

When asked at a gambling conference what he hoped his legacy would be, Adelson said it wasn’t his glitzy casinos or hotels but his impact in Israel.