Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming February 2015 16 starts and stops at both the federal and state levels have resulted in all of three regulated markets. At the same time, as an individual who’s amassed one of the world’s great fortunes from gambling, his skeptics are legion. But at 81—he professes never to have used a computer—his crusade is an impassioned one. And backed by a net worth ranked by Forbes at No. 8 globally, it has divided the US casino industry and touched off a war of words and dollars that is rattling the power alleys in Washington. “When I started to imagine what would happen with legalized Internet gaming, it scared the heck out of me, because of what’s it’s going to do to our society,” he told Nevada TV journalist and political commentator Jon Ralston. That was last February, a few weeks before a prohibition bill crafted by his lawyers would make its way to Congress in the form of the “Restoration of America’s Wire Act,” courtesy of two recipients of the Republican mega-donor’s legendary largesse, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah. The act specifically extends to the Internet a longstanding ban on the interstate transmission via phone lines of any wagering information or information assisting in the placing of any bet or wager, including in Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware, the states where Web gambling is legal. The phone ban dates back to the early 1960s and Bobby Kennedy’s war on organized crime. It is known popularly as the Wire Act, and under the administration of President George W. Bush it would be broadly interpreted to sanction a war on Web gambling. Then things changed in a big way in December 2011, when the Obama Justice Department responded to an inquiry by several state lotteries with a memorandum stating its opinion that the act applies only to sports betting, a view also supported by some federal court rulings. That’s when Mr Adelson took up his jihad. As he would later complain to Mr Ralston: “Can you know your Mr Adelson’s War I t had to be galling for Sheldon Adelson, who has vowed to spend “whatever it takes” to outlaw Web gambling in the United States, to have his US$15 billion casino company come under Internet assault not once last year, but twice. In February, a cyber-attack apparently launched by vigilantes angry over his nuke Iran remarks, crippled Las Vegas Sands’ systems, virtually shutting the company down for two days and wreaking damage reported in the tens of millions of dollars. A few months later, the company learned that a slew of unknown registrants behind something like 35 Web sites in China, where LVS derives most of its earnings, were freely, and illegally, using the company’s logos and casino images to promote their gambling services—an embarrassment, to be sure, hardly comparable to that epic malware invasion, yet it may have been the more bitter sting. Because Mr Adelson hates Internet gambling. He considers it a danger to families, to children especially, a plague on society. It is a moral issue of overriding concern. He is far from alone in this view. Years of lobbying and legislative Feature In Focus The billionaire casino magnate has seen the evil, and it’s Internet gambling. He is determined to crush its head. So far, he hasn’t succeeded. But certainly he’s got the money. And now he may have himself a Congress