Gambling in American History

Africa, the world’s largest continent, with 20 percent of the land mass of the world, includes more than fifty nation states. Almost all permit some gambling activities, lotteries, and racing, and about half allow casino gambling. Casinos in the various regions of Africa differ considerably. In the northern African Muslim countries there are limited numbers of casinos: two in Morocco, one in Tunisia, and fourteen in Egypt. Local residents of Egypt may not enter the country’s casinos, as they are specifically designed to attract foreign currency from tourists and foreign businessmen. The casinos are in major hotels; they require identification for entrance and impose dress codes. Egypt is one of the few African jurisdictions where casinos are lucrative investments.
The other area of Africa where casino gambling is attracting considerable interest is South Africa. Prior to the establishment of full democracy, the government of the Union of South Africa had a firm ban on casino gambling. That all changed in 1993 and 1994. A newly elected congress passed an act establishing lotteries and gambling. In 1996, a National Gambling Act was passed. The act created a board that was empowered to draw up rules for the creation of forty new casinos. Licensing began in 1999. Prior to the new eras of multiracial democracy, casinos had been permitted in the segregated areas known as “homelands.” The Sun City casino organization had been instrumental in establishing several casinos in the four areas that have now been integrated into South Africa under the new constitution.
East Africa has casinos that also seek to market to tourists. For instance, in Zambia there are seven casinos, with two at Victoria Falls. The other casinos are in international hotels. Kenya has twelve casinos in the capital city area of Nairobi and another nine in the coastal resort of Mombasa, all of which are quite small. There are also casinos on the tourist islands of Seychelles, Reunion, Madagascar, and Mauritius, as well as in Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Uganda. Without tourism, the casinos could not be profitable, as local populations are extremely poor.
Such is also the case with the properties in West Africa, which are found in countries such as Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Niger, and Nigeria. Senegal, Zaire, Togo, Senegal, and Sierra Leone have also had casinos, although one has to wonder how gambling activities can proceed within the atmosphere of national, political, and economic disintegration that is all too often present in some of these countries.
Casinos in very poor countries have trouble developing markets. Their ability to recruit casino staff is limited by workforce deficiencies, coupled with national rules demanding that locals be hired. These would often be locals with political connections that precluded their being properly trained or supervised and making it unthinkable that they could be disciplined if they violated the trust that must go with casino jobs. Where there are workforces in place, casino operators find that it is necessary to pay workers every day, as they might not return to work for several weeks if they received a large labor payment. A shocking sight witnessed by more than one European casino owner has been a group of local residents coming to a casino and pooling their wealth so that they could make a single pull on a slot machine handle. In Togo, the national government was so poor that it could not provide sufficient coinage to use in the operation of the slot machines. Most of the African countries between the northern Muslim region and the new South Africa state are in desperate need of economic development, but casino gambling is simply not the tool they need to establish economies that can participate in the global economy. <

During the 1990s, Sheldon Adelson became one of the leading entrepreneurs in the gambling industry as the primary developer and owner of the Venetian Casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip.
Adelson was born in 1933 in Boston, the son of a cab driver. He worked hard and studied hard as a youth. He received a bachelor’s degree in real estate and corporate finance from the City University of New York. After a period of service in the United States Army, Adelson set upon a plan to make himself fabulously rich. He succeeded more than one time.  As a venture capitalist in the 1960s, he acquired scores of companies, only to see his budding financial empire fall as the stock market took a plunge in 1969. He came back by developing a series of trade shows, the most important of which was COMDEX, the leading computer dealers’ exposition, and by the 1980s, the leading annual convention in Las Vegas each year. The success of the show led to other ventures such as developing airlines. That success also focused his attention upon Las Vegas. The convention was a gold mine for Adelson, but even Las Vegas did not have enough convention space. He privately built a facility next to the Las Vegas Convention Center and gave it to the county, realizing that his revenues from his big show would cover his capital costs in a few years. But he wanted more – his own convention center.

The Venetian Casino owned by Sheldon Adelson is the first two-billion-dollar casino property anywhere.
In the late 1980s, Sheldon Adelson was able to finance the purchase of the Sands Casino Hotel from its owner, Kirk Kerkorian. In 1989, it was licensed by the Nevada Gaming Commission, and Adelson became a casino magnate. Actually he was just holding on to the property waiting for something bigger. In 1993, he built the Sands Exposition Center, a one-million-square-foot convention facility on the Sands property. But he was still waiting for something bigger. His chance to “do something” with the Sands came in 1995 when he was able to sell the COMDEX show and sixteen other trade shows for $860 million. The next year he imploded (blew up) the Sands, and he devoted his new resources to the construction of the Venetian Hotel. The Venetian opened in April 1999 with a 113,000-square-foot casino, a shopping mall set alongside canals with gondolas, and 500,000 feet of new convention space. The hotel’s thirty-three-story tower and 3,000 rooms featured luxuries not found elsewhere. The basic room was over 700 square feet, making it the largest standard room for a hotel anywhere. The total square footage of the rooms actually exceeded that of the MGM Grand, with its 5,009 rooms. The facility had a first-phase price tag of $1.5 billion “plus.” The “plus” was the result of the fact that others paid the price. Adelson leased all the space for shops and restaurants, keeping only the casino, hotel, and meeting areas under his financial control. As the new century began, the revenues for the casino were meeting all expectations and then some, and Adelson was planning a phase-two construction of a museum and a new casino and hotel tower with 3,036 rooms adjacent to the Venetian.