Posted on: November 8, 2024, 01:03h.
Last updated on: November 8, 2024, 01:22h.
In January, Shelley Berkley will become the next mayor of Las Vegas, following her victory over Victoria Seaman this week. What many people who weren’t in town 25 years ago probably don’t realize is the role she played in a scandal involving the wealthiest casino owner in the history of the Las Vegas Strip.
Shelley & Sheldon
In 1989, Berkley — who served in the Nevada Assembly from 1982-84 — landed a gig as the VP of government and legal affairs for Sheldon Adelson, who had just purchased the Sands Hotel and Casino for $110 million.
Why would Adelson hire a former state legislator as his corporate attorney?
To outsiders, her job was handling liability issues and contract negotiations. But any attorney could have done those things. The real reason Berkley was hired was to dispense political advice.
Adelson would demolish the Sands seven years later, and he sought to understand local politics so he could push through all the permits necessary for that demolition, and for the construction of his Venetian Las Vegas in the Sands’ place.
Berkley wrote memos and made phone calls to her employer suggesting how he could pocket elected officials via campaign contributions, secret job offers and under-the-table business deals.
One memo she wrote in 1996 advised Adelson to consider bribing local judges.
Gaming the System
Judges “tend to help those who have helped them,” Berkley wrote, although she didn’t name any who helped her. “If we want to be able to continue contacting the judges when we need to, I strongly urge that we donate to the judges that I recommend.”
Berkley also advised Adelson, in a recorded conversation in May 1997, to hire the uncle of Erin Kenny to work at the Venetian. Kenny was the Clark County Commissioner who, 10 years later, would be sentenced to 30 months in prison for her role in the federal corruption investigation known as Operation G-Sting.
“Well, why don’t we help her out and get her vote?” Berkley said of Kenny on tape.
Most egregiously, Berkley advised Adelson to give Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates what she wanted — a concession for her business, the frozen daiquiri bar Fat Tuesday, at the Venetian — in exchange for securing her vote for the casino resort’s building permits.
House Seat of Cards
Berkley, a progressive, was fired by the conservative Adelson in 1997 when she vocally opposed his successful efforts to open the Venetian as a non-union shop. (Adelson claimed she was fired for violating attorney/client privilege.)
Next on her career path was running for the House seat vacated by John Ensign when he announced his unsuccessful 1998 bid for US Senate against Harry Reid. It was during Berkley’s campaign that some of her advice to Adelson leaked to the news media.
It seems that someone — someone who wasn’t Berkley — recorded their conversations.
The audio was never played publicly, but Berkeley admitted that the remarks were hers when confronted by reporters with a transcript.
“I couldn’t deny it, they were my words,” Berkley told Las Vegas reporter Steve Friess at the time. “It went on forever … What I was saying on the tape was so horrifically damaging and sounded so bad.”
For his part, Adelson claimed to have been enraged by Berkley’s advice, and there is no evidence that he ever followed any of it.
“I was shocked that my legal government affairs person was telling me the way to succeed in business in Las Vegas is to break the law,” he wrote in a letter published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal during the waning days of Berkley’s Congressional campaign.
No Consequences
The FBI, US Attorney’s office, and local DA Stewart Bell all chose not to investigate Berkley, Kenny or any of the corrupt judges Berkley alluded to.
“It’s not a a crime for people to believe that by making contributions to persons in authority that they can curry favor,” Bell told the Associated Press.
However, a Nevada Commission on Ethics did investigate Atkinson Gates for influence peddling. And it found that Berkley’s taped comments conflicted with the sworn testimony she gave the panel in January 1998. (When the panel asked Berkley if Atkinson Gates had ever requested her to pressure Adelson to grant her the Fat Tuesday’s concession, the future Las Vegas mayor replied: “She did not.”)
Still, in the end, Berkley emerged unscathed. She won her seat in the US House of Representatives, where she served seven terms from 1999 to 2013.
“Vegas didn’t seem to mind,” wrote reporter Jeff Burbank in his 2005 book, “Las Vegas Babylon,” “and the FBI and the local authorities were either asleep, didn’t care or decided the tape and memo couldn’t be used as evidence.”
Fat Tuesday eventually opened at the Venetian — but not until 2023.
