He also came to be a leading financial backer of the Republican Party. Public records show that Adelson, his wife Miriam and his corporation had contributed a combined $695,000 to Republican candidates and committees over the 12-year span before he pulled DeLay out of a Fourth of July barbecue in 2001 with a cellphone call from Beijing.
A few facts related to the still-murky affair are undisputed. One is that the Sands' 20-year concession to operate casinos in Macao is a gold mine. The company's two Macao resorts -- the Sands Macao, opened in 2004, and the Venetian Macao, opened last year -- have generated nearly $4 billion in casino revenue to date. Sands is planning to spend $12 billion to open six more Macao resorts.
Another is that a 2001 congressional resolution opposing the Beijing Olympic bid vanished from the House of Representatives agenda days before the International Olympic Committee was scheduled to vote on the site of the 2008 Summer Games. That happened shortly after Adelson called DeLay to inquire about the measure.
Finally, it is clear that Las Vegas Sands took credit with the Chinese leadership for killing the resolution -- instructing its Washington lobbyists to "suggest that we were involved in the process," a high-ranking Sands executive said in court.
Suen's Los Angeles-based attorney, John O'Malley of Fulbright & Jaworski, contends that the move, or at least the Chinese perception, provided Adelson and Sands with a nearly bottomless reserve of "guanxi," a sort of personal networking built around an exchange of favors.
The keystone of the relationship was a trip to Beijing that Suen arranged for Adelson and his top lieutenant, Sands President William P. Weidner, in July 2001.
At the time, Macao's reputation was that of "a seedy backwater of a gambling den," Adelson recalled from the stand. "Prostitution infested, crime infested . . . everything wrong that would never happen in a state like Nevada, ever."
The Chinese leadership was pondering how to clean up its new possession. During an audience with Vice Premier Qian Qichen, Adelson and Weidner learned that the regime hoped to develop Macao into a major Southeast Asian entertainment and business destination. Officials were even willing to set aside their traditional antipathy to gambling to achieve that goal.
