Shliach Tries to Make Peace Between Vegas Foes

Sheldon Adelson emerged this year as the Republican billionaire who kept Newt Gingrich’s flailing presidential campaign afloat and then vowed to spend “whatever it takes” to oust President Barack Obama.

In the city where his fortunes were first minted, however, Adelson’s involvement in elective politics has been defined by a different brutal and enduring drama: His 15-year quest to take down Shelley Berkley.

That battle climaxes on Election Day when either Berkley foils Adelson once again by defeating Nevada Sen. Dean Heller — or her political career ends amid a hail of attack ads funded by the Las Vegas Sands CEO.

Their path from confidants to mortal foes began in the mid-1990s when, as Adelson’s corporate lawyer, she vocally opposed his efforts to open the Venetian hotel-casino as a non-union shop. She also says he tried to force her to run for Congress as a Republican. He wrote in the local newspaper that she betrayed his attorney-client privileges and said he’d have to engage in corruption to get his project approved.

“I hate even talking about him because after all these years, it still upsets me terribly,” Berkley said. “We were very good friends, obviously, when I went to work for him.”

Berkley, a seven-term congresswoman from Las Vegas, wouldn’t need to run again until 2018 and she says reaching the Senate would be her crowning political achievement. So this round is likely Adelson’s last, best shot at thwarting her ambitions.

“It’s for all the marbles,” Berkley said, speaking broadly of her bid for the Senate.

She trailed Heller by eight points in last week’s Las Vegas Review-Journal poll, and her candidacy has been stung by a bipartisan House ethics investigation into charges she failed to disclose her nephrologist husband’s connection to a local dialysis clinic she fought in Congress to save.

Berkley said didn’t need to disclose because her husband’s occupation was well-known. She has tried to reframe the issue by casting herself as a selfless advocate for a crucial health care service in the state.

Nonetheless, the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to proceed with an investigation — even though one way or the other she won’t be a House member and will be beyond its jurisdiction after December.

The issue has weighed her down, and Berkley’s main hope for victory is she will be lifted by a significant statewide Democratic registration advantage and a legendary get-out-the-vote machine built by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

But Adelson, too, intends to be pivotal. The Karl Rove-run SuperPAC he supports, Crossroads GPS, has spent more than $4 million to beat her including $1.2 million this month, sums that go a long way in a state of just 1.2 million active registered voters. The Crossroads spending is about 60 percent of the $6.7 million spent by outside groups against Berkley, according to FEC records.

In addition, Las Vegas Sands executives and its corporate PAC combine to be, by a large margin, the largest group of direct donors to Heller’s campaign.

“It’s his No. 1 Senate priority this year and it has been since the beginning,” a former Las Vegas Sands executive told POLITICO on condition of anonymity.“There’s definitely personal animosity.”

That’s no surprise to Rabbi Shea Harlig, a friend of both who has tried repeatedly to broker a peace between two of the state’s most prominent Jewish figures.

“I think Shelley wants to make peace but Sheldon feels she wronged him many years ago and she denies both of those things,” said Harlig of the Chabad of Southern Nevada. “He feels he was betrayed by her.”

Adelson, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

Berkley, for her part, has been largely cloistered by her campaign since The New York Times last year broke the news of the dialysis scandal. Her handlers last week refused to even disclose to POLITICO her campaign schedule and whisked Berkley away as she tried to greet reporters while exiting a debate with Heller. (Previously, she was among the most accessible and frank of elected officials.)

Instead of an interview, the campaign provided this e-mailed statement: “Nevadans made up their minds on this issue when Shelley Berkley first ran for Congress in 1998. This election won’t be decided on events from nearly 15 years ago, but instead will be decided on who is fighting for Nevada’s middle-class, and the choice in this election couldn’t be clearer.”

Yet, in a previously unpublished interview in early 2011 before announcing her candidacy, Berkley did speak candidly and with some concern about the likelihood that Adelson would gun for her. The interview was with this reporter, while he was a freelance writer before joining POLITICO.

Adelson has never been specific in public about what Berkley said that made him feel so betrayed, and he rebuffed entreaties from Rabbi Harlig and others to make peace. The billionaire, who was not active in the 2010 race to defeat Reid, was approached by Reid emissaries after Berkley’s announcement for Senate to see if they could persuade him to be similarly passive this time.

Clearly, he refused.

“He thinks the only reason why she wants to make up with him is her political ambition,” said Harlig, who spoke to Adelson as recently as this summer. “I don’t believe that. I said, ‘What is it she needs to do that she can make it right?’ He really doesn’t give me an answer.”

The drama makes Jewish leaders especially heartsick. Adelson is among the biggest donors to Jewish and Israeli causes and Berkley has been one of the most hawkish Democratic supporters of Israel in the House.

Yet their schism on unions — and later on taxes, Obamacare and many other topics — has been insurmountable.