LAS VEGAS — Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson looked relaxed. His arm was slung over the back of the courtroom witness chair with the cozy demeanor of a guest on an afternoon talk show. He was dressed impeccably in a gray business suit, blue shirt and red-and-white tie, but the look on his face was purely personal, a grandfather telling a story.
He talked about his impoverished Boston childhood, his parents fresh off the latest immigrant boat. “I could have been a rags to riches story,” he said, smiling, congenially facing the jury. “But my parents couldn’t afford the rags.” Jurors smiled unconsciously.
Moments later, guided by the soft questioning of his attorney, Adelson, 79, hit them with another one-liner that would have made Henny Youngman proud: “I came from the other side of the tracks. In fact, I came from so far on the other side, I didn’t know the tracks existed.”
For two days last week, one of the world’s richest men had been an adverse witness, a man on the defensive, cross-examined by a pacing lawyer representing a former gaming consultant who says that Adelson, chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. casino empire, owes him $328 million in a breach of contract.
Adelson, a stalwart Republican and defender of Israel who, with his wife, donated nearly $100 million to GOP candidates in last year’s elections, had been summoned to testify. His appearance drew onlookers to the courtroom eager for a glimpse of a reclusive tycoon whose worth reportedly exceeds $26 billion.
What greeted them was no Perry Mason courtroom scene, no nail-biting drama. This was a nuts-and-bolts civil litigation case in which the clock moved so slowly at times it seemed to go backward.
But it was also an affair marked by occasional humor from an unlikely source: Adelson himself.