Snap Fact #295 - President Obama Has Been Thoroughly Vetted while Governor Romney Hides Under a Shroud of Mystery – Part 2

The second Federal investigation of Adelson, run by the US Attorney’s Los Angeles office is probing allegations about the Las Vegas Sands handling of money received several years ago from a Mexican businessman later accused of drug trafficking and a former California executive subsequently convicted of taking illegal kickbacks. The investigation is examining the Sands’ failure to report millions of dollars of possibly laundered money transferred to its casinos by these two big-time gamblers. 

Since 1985, casinos have been subject to the same regulations as banks to prevent money laundering, whereby illegal gains were moved into legitimate accounts in an effort to hide them. Large cash transactions had to be reported, and the rules were further tightened in 2003 with the requirement that casinos file suspicious-activity reports—long a duty of banks—when casinos suspect transference of large sums of illicit cash into legitimate accounts. the Justice Department and Treasury has become increasingly concerned that compliance standards in the gambling industry are too lax, running the risk that casinos could be used both for money laundering and terrorism financing. If the prosecution succeeds in making its case, casinos could wind up becoming more like banks in knowing where customers are getting their money; a negative result for casino magnate Adelson could complicate the Las Vegas Sands’ relationship with regulators and make it harder for Adelson’s company to expand into new markets.

Adelson’s history vis-à-vis unions is quite clear. Sheldon Adelson and his pal Newt Gingrich supported a Nevada conservative legislative effort to ban unions from collecting dues from workers paychecks. In 1999, Adelson closed one casino, the Sands, and completed work on a new one, the Venetian, “. . . stiffing so many contractors that there were at one time 366 liens against the property. …”Then Adelson launched an anti-union crusade against the Culinary Workers who’d been laid off from his closed hotel, and who’d presumed they’d be considered for work at the new Venetian. Adelson refused to rehire them and tried to have them arrested when the Culinary Workers staged a demonstration on the public sidewalk out front right before the grand opening of the Venetian, in 1999. “. . .The Culinary Workers argued before the National Labor Relations Board that Adelson's attempts to keep them from demonstrating violated federal labor law. 

Adelson's lawyers countered that their client’s First Amendment rights were being violated – because his threats of arrests were an instance of "petitioning the government." The union won the right to protest; Adelson refused to comply with the settlement, copies of which the union passed out on that very same sidewalk. That was "fraudulent use of the seal of a government agency," the Venetian argued, further claiming that union workers had "impersonated" NLRB officials, and that the volunteer labor activists had been coerced. The great civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz got involved – on Adelson's side. "The Venetian has no property rights to the sidewalk," a federal appeals judge told them in 2007. Unmoved, Adelson tried, without success, to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, Adelson told the Wall Street Journal, radical Islam and the right to more easily join a union were the two most "fundamental threats to society."

Adelson is bankrolling GOP candidates for office to the tune of $35 in this election cycle and has vowed to spend $100 million to get Romney elected. After Romney announced Rep. Paul Ryan as his VP running mate, Adelson held a closed door fund-raiser at his Las Vegas Venetian Hotel & Casino, a fundraiser that was closed to the Media.

Romney has thus shown he has no ethical compass, that he so desperately wants to win the Presidency that he’s willing to sell his soul to whomever can help him “buy” the election no matter how tainted they might be. Newsweek’s Daily Beast has reported that while Romney has claimed to have “cleaned up the Olympics,” Romney’s connections to tainted former 2002 International Olympic Committee (IOC) figures, like disgraced contractor Sead Dizdarevic and David Simmons as well as members of Simmons family and the latter’s business associates has resulted in more than a million dollars in campaign contributions to candidate Romney. They like super-rich donors Sheldon Adelson, and industrialists David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch, all have their own hidden agendas and will one day call in all their favors. Such is the character of Mitt Romney!