Sheldon Adelson Goes All In
It was around 10:30 p.m. when Steve Jacobs rolled down the gravel driveway. The air was warm for early January, even for Florida. Yellow boat lights bobbed on St. Augustine’s harbor, and the scent of star jasmine hung on the breeze. Jacobs stepped onto his porch and found the door still locked. It had only been a few days since he had come home to find it mysteriously ajar.
When Jacobs sat down to work, however, he noticed his crate of files was missing. He headed to the kitchen, opened the top of his coffee maker, and looked inside. The hard drive he’d stashed there was gone too.
A police officer soon arrived, checked the doors, dusted for fingerprints. He carefully wrapped the coffee maker in a plastic bag and said he would forward it to the FBI.
Jacobs had his suspicions as to why his house had been burgled. For five years he’d been locked in a protracted legal battle with one of the wealthiest men on Earth. Jacobs had filed a wrongful-termination case, accusing his former boss of ordering him to perform “illegal activities.” Could the burglary have been the desperate act of some yes-man or fixer, or even the gangsters he’d encountered while working in China? “I don’t know who is behind it,” Jacobs testified in a subsequent legal proceeding, admitting he had no facts to suggest it was his old employer. “I know who might have a benefit or interest in understanding what information I may have had.”
It’s a long way from a burglary in northeastern Florida to the battle for the White House, but there may be a connection: Jacobs’ tale, and the documents his lawsuit has brought to light—some of which were on the hard drive in the coffee maker—provide a rare window into the business dealings of Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and political megadonor who could have a bigger role in selecting the 2016 GOP nominee than millions of Republican voters.
Over the past five years, I’ve sought to gain a fuller view of this complicated figure in American politics. I’ve written several major investigative pieces about Adelson, interviewing scores of casino executives and law enforcement officials and amassing thousands of pages of documents, including troves of Adelson’s legal transcripts and videotaped interviews. It has been a challenging process. Adelson has a track record of threatening to sue journalists. He sued one for describing him as “foul-mouthed.” He sued a columnist from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, driving him into bankruptcy over a few ill-chosen words. He once went after my reporting with a retraction demand but dropped it after my editors refused to make any changes to the story.
Adelson has used his fortune to reshape right-wing politics in both America and Israel, establishing himself as a GOP king-maker in the post-Citizens United era. In December, he backed a secretive $140 million purchase of the Review-Journal, putting Nevada’s largest paper in the hands of its richest resident and a fixture of its biggest industry, and increasing his influence on Nevada’s early presidential caucuses. And now, as the 2016 campaign swings into high gear, Adelson faces a long-standing Justice Department probe that could generate embarrassing headlines for the mogul and the candidates he backs.
All this is why Jacobs’ case, due to go to trial in June, is so significant: The protracted litigation has illuminated just how Adelson built one of the world’s largest fortunes through his casinos in Macau—a Chinese territory rife with corruption where, Jacobs’ lawsuit alleges, Adelson not only tolerated, but sometimes even encouraged, illegal and unethical acts. In turn, Adelson has denied these accusations, describing Jacobs as a disgruntled ex-employee who was fired for insubordination and failure to properly address some of the issues raised in his own lawsuit.
During the last presidential election, Adelson spent nearly $100 million directly (and reportedly another $50 million in undisclosed dark money) trying to thwart Barack
