As predicted here, Sen. Harry Reid (D) stuck a knife in erstwhile allies Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International, embracing Sheldon Adelson 
instead. If Sheldon, who holds all the cards at this point, cedes to a carve-out for online poker, Reid will support some iteration of GOP-birthed Restore America’s Wire Act, banning online gambling. In a ludicrous statement, Reid rhetorically wrung his hands, saying, “I think it is hard to control for crime when you’ve got brick-and-mortar places, let alone something up in the sky someplace, and it is very bad for children.”
Reid sounds as absurd and technophobic as Adelson when he frets about the Internet being “something up in the sky someplace.” One might rejoin that if Internet gambling is outlawed, only outlaws will have Internet gambling. How much harder will it be to “control for crime” is RAWA passes and there’s no safe, regulated haven on the Web for U.S. gamblers? Reid also denied that he’s selling out his fellows to get Adelson’s support in 2016, which I’ll believe when pigs sprout wings and fly. Reid’s too canny not to make some Faustian pact with Adelson in return for selling out Nevada‘s future in the online-casino biz. (So far the state’s only had a fiddle with online poker but the real money’s in virtual casino games.)
* When Sheldon Adelson offhandedly advocated unilateral U.S. nuclear warfare on Iran last year, he probably should have anticipated some form of blowback. But it obviously never 
occurred to him that Iranian hackers would conduct massive cyber-sabotage on Las Vegas Sands‘ computer network, making off with colossal amounts of data (although their flawed strategy meant they never breached the riches of the Macao and Singapore databases). With the help of some Sands insiders, Bloomberg Businessweek has reconstructed the catastrophe and it reads like a thriller.
Although Sands spent $3 million-plus last year on Adelson’s personal security, data protection was a low-priority item: In 2012, Sands had five people tasked with securing its 25,000 computers. In this damning revelation one senses the Luddite mentality of Adelson filtering through to Sands’ corporate budget. Mistrustful of computers, Adelson was blindsided by their ability — when infiltrated — to sack and pillage his company. Sands Bethlehem was the first target of opportunity, due to its being “a minor outpost in the company’s empire,” and thus the most vulnerable. After rummaging around the innards of Sands Bethlehem for several days, the hackers found “the login credentials of a senior computer systems engineer who normally worked at company headquarters but whose password had been used in Bethlehem during a recent trip.” From there it was open season on Sands, resulting in $40 million worth of damage.
If there’s a hero in this it’s COO Michael Leven, who made the drastic but ultimately clutch decision to take Sands completely offline, while the company’s mainframe enabled the casinos to function as normal, so that customers were unaware of the chaos behind the scenes. Having had one near-death experience with hacker sabotage, I doubt Sands will allow itself to be so vulnerable again.
* Speaking of Leven, his successor has been named. No surprise, it’s President of Global Gaming Operations Rob Goldstein, a favored Sands exec whose resume at the company suggests he’s been groomed for the president’s job awhile now. “Goldstein is credited with developing the company’s global retail strategy and adding the dining, nightlife and entertainment concepts to the company’s properties,” reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Although Goldstein’s now the logical successor to the top job, I rather doubt that retirement or mortality figure into Sheldon Adelson’s thinking.
