Are We Going To Let Organzied Crime Figure Sheldon Adelson Eat American Democracy?

Vegas and Macau organized crime figure Sheldon Adelson is now the biggest single contributor to Mitt Romney's presidential bid, the biggest single contributor to the Republican efforts to take over the government and the biggest single contributor to any Member of Congress... in history. He dropped $5 million on both Boehner and Cantor, an unprecedented amount of money and a clear attempt to buy congressional influence... and something barely mentioned in the national media. On top of that Adelson has lured House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon into his web with lots of freebies at the Venetian Hotel, where McKeon secretly gambles, secretly loses hundreds of thousands of dollars (notes he owes Adelson) and holds fundraisers for himself that are not legally accounted for.

Last week PBS looked into Adelson's crime connections, not to the American Mafia, but to the Chinese triads that work with Adelson and the Beijing faux-Communist regime to run gambling and prostitution operations in southern China. And ironically, it isn't the massive sums of money Adelson has been bribing American politicians with that has him staring at a possible prison sentence-- but the massive amounts of money he's been bribing Chinese officials with. Adelson is the largest foreign investor in China. And his town, Macau, is now the single biggest gambling center in the entire world-- with over $33.5 billion in annual revenue, quadruple that of Las Vegas.

Early in his Chinese adventure, the boorish Adelson had thoroughly offended Chinese officials by acting the role of wild pig he gets away in Vegas and DC. China, however, put the squeeze on him and nearly drove him into bankruptcy. He hired a high-priced fixer, Leonel Alves, a prominent, if incredibly sleazy, Macau legislator, who was given a $37,500 monthly retainer (later increased to $125,000/month) and then started billing Adelson extravagant amounts of unaccounted for "expenses."

A blatant $700,000 bribe to Alves, has Adelson facing probably charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which bars American companies from paying foreign officials to “affect or influence any act or decision” for business gain. Alves handled Adelson’s frayed relations with officials in Macau and mainland China and requested a $300 million bribe for "someone high ranking in Beijing" to make Adelson's problems disappear. According to the PBS report, soon after Alves said he would apply what he termed “pressure” on local planning officials, the company prevailed on a key request, gaining permission to sell off billions of dollars of its real estate holdings in Macau. But that wasn't all that Alves was doing for Adelson in China. PBS managed to acquire reams of documents and e-mails that should cook Adleson's goose-- unless Romney wins the election and ends the investigation.

The documents shed new light on an issue separate from Alves’ work: the company’s difficulties in avoiding contact with Chinese organized crime figures as it built its casino business in Macau.

Nevada law bars licensed casino operators from associating with members of organized crime. State investigators are now assessing whether Las Vegas Sands complied with that rule in its Macau operations, people familiar with the inquiry said.

William Weidner, president of Las Vegas Sands from 1995 to 2009, said he understood from the beginning that opening casinos in Macau meant dealing with “junkets”-- companies that arrange gambling trips for high rollers.

Gambling is illegal in mainland China, as is the transfer of large sums of money to Macau. The junkets solve those problems, providing billions of dollars in credit to gamblers. When necessary, they collect gambling debts, a critical function since China’s courts are not permitted to force losers to pay up.

Weidner said junkets are a natural result of China’s controls on the movement of money out of the country, channeling as much as $3 billion a month from the mainland to Macau.

“To Westerners, the junkets mean money laundering equated with organized crime or drugs,” he said. “In China where money is controlled, it’s part of doing business.”

Weidner resigned from the company after a bitter dispute with Adelson.

Nevada officials are now poring over records of transactions between junkets, Las Vegas Sands and other casinos licensed by the state, people familiar with the inquiry say. Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman.

Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show.

Cheung did not respond to requests for comment.

Another document says that a Las Vegas Sands subsidiary did business with Charles Heung, a well-known Hong Kong film producer who was identified as an office holder in the Sun Yee On triad in the same 1992 Senate report. Heung, who has repeatedly denied any involvement in organized crime, did not return phone calls.

Allegations about the company’s dealings with Alves as well as its purported ties to organized crime are prominently mentioned in a 2010 lawsuit filed by Steven Jacobs, former CEO of Sands China.

In the suit, Jacobs contends he was fired after multiple disputes with Adelson, which included the continued employment of Alves and the company’s dealings with junkets.

...At least one prominent Republican has expressed concern about the source of Adelson’s campaign contributions. “Much of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau,” Sen. John McCain noted in an interview last month with the PBS NewsHour.

“Maybe in a roundabout way, foreign money is coming into an American political campaign,” said McCain, an Arizona Republican.

The questions raised by McCain and others have not prevented Adelson, the self-made son of a Boston cabdriver, from emerging as a powerful political figure in both Israel and the United States. A longtime backer of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel, Adelson created a free daily newspaper, now Israel’s largest, that supports the policies of Netanyahu’s Likud Party.

This is the man who's attempting to buy both the presidency and the Congress for weak shills whose careers have always been about sucking up to the rich and powerful. When American economic growth was strongest, vampires like Adelson couldn't exist. Adleson is the posterchild for why high income taxes in the many millions have to revert to rates from when Eisenhower was president and America was thriving and growing. America won't survive as a democracy if it comes under the thumb of Organized Crime... or China.