Hotel king adds a jewel to his crown

LAS VEGAS -- The third-wealthiest man in America is days away from the Friday debut of his splashy Palazzo Resort-Hotel-Casino, the first new hotel on the Las Vegas Strip in three years. His company's stock has seen an epic slide, and a national economic slowdown may dent even this stalwart resort destination.

And yet, Sheldon Adelson moves around his expansive office saying he's unconcerned.

It's his competitors on The Strip who ought to be worried about the opening of the posh, 50-story Palazzo."We will cannibalize them," says Adelson, the 74-year-old CEO and majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands. "We're going to take customers from other hotels."

A fragile, pale man who walks with a cane, Adelson is slowed by a rare nerve disorder in his legs known as plexitis. But in a two-hour interview here last week in connection with the Palazzo, Adelson exuded ambition and confidence.

You'd have to have plenty of both to see through the construction of the $1.9 billion, 3,000-room hotel-casino. With the attached 4,000-room Venetian and Sands Expo and Convention Center, the Palazzo will be part of a 19-million-square-foot edifice that Las Vegas Sands says is the largest hotel-convention complex under one roof in the world.

Outspoken from the start

Adelson has been a well-known and controversial figure in Las Vegas. In the 1980s, he owned the nation's biggest computer trade show, Comdex, bringing thousands of conventioneers to flood the city's rooms and casinos during an otherwise dead pre-Thanksgiving week in November. City leaders were grateful, but Adelson was the one cleaning up. He would rent space from the city convention center for the equivalent of $100 a cubicle and then lease it to exhibitors for sometimes 50 times that.