Goodbye Sheldon Adelson, the mega-finance from Trump and Netanyahu
In Spain he was known for having embodied a second version of Bienvenido Míster Marshall, although much more frustrating and depressing than Berlanga's immortal film. The American Jew, Sheldon Adelson, who died of lymphoma at the age of 87, got many Spaniards and many people in Madrid excited about his Eurovegas project, an enormous complex of casinos, hotels and leisure centers that should be set up on the grounds of Alcorcón, turning this town in Madrid into a reissue of Las Vegas or Macao.
That dream, which was to create more than 100,000 direct and indirect jobs and a gigantic economic activity equivalent to 10% of the GDP of the Community of Madrid, was never realized. Among other reasons, because it had many traps; the main one being to convert that supposed paradise into an off-shore territory where the same laws that oblige all Spaniards, from labor laws to tax laws, did not apply, including such strident exceptions as the permission to smoke in the entire complex, both in closed and open areas.
When he had almost duped a good part of the Spanish authorities and had made hundreds of thousands of young people conceive multiple fantasies, Adelson abruptly woke them up. He also demanded substantial investment in infrastructure for access and consolidation of his complex by the Spaniards. His financial contribution was revealed to be at least minimal, and the Anglo-Saxon investors he had also promised to bring with him to such a gigantic project vanished. As in Berlanga's great work, Sheldon and the dreams passed by, leaving once again the feeling of frustration and bad luck that so often accompanies the Spanish.
There were, however, many reasons to believe him. In 2012 Sheldon Adelson was a multi-millionaire, whose donations to the U.S. Republican Party were already legendary. He was one of the major donors to the George W. Bush campaign, which eventually won the presidency from Democrat Al Gore by only half a thousand votes in Florida after an endless recount. Worse was his investment of $100 million in Mitt Romney to prevent Barack Obama's victory in 2012. Not so in 2016, when after some hesitation over the Republican candidates he decided to give tens of millions of dollars to Donald Trump's electoral campaign, in which he saw the best incarnation of his own ideas.
Born in the poor area of Dorchester in 1933, this son of a Lithuanian cab driver and Welsh seamstress, to whom his "religion [Jewish], education and poverty closed many doors, decided to open them not only through business but above all through the purchase or launch of media, "that would change the opinion about me.
After creating dozens of businesses that had made him a millionaire before he turned thirty, Adelson focused on expos and casinos by creating his big company, Las Vegas Sands Company, the biggest giant in the gaming industry. His fortune, estimated at $36 billion, became the twentieth largest in the world by 2018.
But beyond roulette and other games of chance, Sheldon Adelson has exerted considerable influence on the politics of both the United States and Israel. His large donations and support for Donald Trump and the Republican candidates for the 2018 mid-term elections have accentuated the GOP's drift to the extreme right.
The same could be said of his strong support for Benjamin Netanyahu and all his initiatives. The two met when Netanyahu was Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. Adelson supported him politically and financially to become head of the Israeli government in 1996. That support, which he reinforced in 2007 by launching the Israel Hayom newspaper in 2007, was so blatantly partisan that Netayanhu's allies like Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett called him the "new Pravda. In the Israeli Supreme Court, it was even shown that the prime minister gave orders directly to the newspaper's editor.
Adelson was never ashamed to put his money and media at the service of such causes as the multiplication of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the transfer of the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, or the withdrawal of the United States from the nuclear agreement signed with Iran. With respect to Teheran, the multimillionaire was especially fixated because "an atomic bomb would annihilate that infamous theocratic regime". Surely, this unrest has been heated up since a cyber-attack against its casinos in 2014, supposedly launched by Iranian hijackers, caused 40 million dollars in losses.
He never hid the radical nature of his opinions with arguments such as "I don't think the Bible says anything about democracy ... so if Israel stops being a democratic state, is anything wrong? This, then, is his legacy. He leaves behind a widow, Miriam Adelson, who lives in Israel, and who is already the country's greatest fortune. And four sons, who aspire to prolong and obviously honor the memory of their father.