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Inside Gaming Column: What Will Adelson Do with $5 Billion?

What is Sheldon Adelson up to? Wall Streeters tell us Adelson, who owns the Sands Expo and Convention Center and The Venetian, could come up with $5 billion to finance pretty much anything he wants -- far more than he needs to build the Palazzo, or Phase II of The Venetian. We hear his executives are discussing a blend of stock, bond and private financing with investment bankers that should be enough to knock the socks off competitors. Now the questions are, will he just build or buy, and will he focus on Las Vegas or diversify beyond Macau?

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Homeowners in the Las Vegas Country Club want to know what's up. A few say cars are rolling up to ask if they're interested in selling. Some owners fear the country club could go the way of Desert Inn Estates, which is now the development site for Wynn Las Vegas and a Tom Fazio-designed golf course. The question becomes whether the Las Vegas Country Club is a good site for another megaresort. We'd guess it's a little far off the Strip, even though condos there might sell like hotcakes.

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Another question worrying insiders here is what might Colony Capital, which owns Resorts International in Atlantic City and now the Las Vegas Hilton, be up to. While known as a quality operator for Resorts, it bought Harveys Casino Resorts in Northern Nevada in 1999 and spun it off a year later. All the heat over the possible sale of the Las Vegas Country Club has some insiders wondering whether the Las Vegas Hilton will be another spinoff and whether Colony could even be a front for an even bigger player with its sights set high.

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A search seems to be on for a "leak" in MGM Mirage or Mandalay Resort Group. Word is top managers at both companies are concerned about information from so-called "unnamed sources" during negotiations over their proposed $7.9 billion merger. Both The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press regularly quoted such insider sources, sometimes accurately, sometimes not. Our problem is named sources were available to discuss most of the unsourced info. We prefer naming names.

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Ratings are in the basement and sinking fast for "The Casino," starring Golden Nugget operators Tom Breitling and Tim Poster. Once said to be Fox's great hope for the summer lineup, ratings are so bad that the network may pull the program fast. Programming Insider, an advertising industry trade publication, calls the series one of the two big disappointments of the summer, along with "North Shore." Overnights have sunk for the program from 5.6 million viewers for its debut to fewer than 5 million viewers just three weeks later.

The Inside Gaming column is compiled by Gaming Wire Editor Rod Smith. You can contact him by phone at (702) 477-3893, fax (702) 387-5243 or e-mail at rsmith@reviewjournal.com.

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