Duberman had never fully explained how he came up with the eight hundred thousand dollars for his one-third share, though he hinted at the answer in Fortune. I had friends. The kinds of friends that the Nevada Gaming Commission looked down on. But they were always decent to me. If I paid on time. Besides, what’s the casino business without a little gamble? So he began his march toward fortune.
He didn’t get far at first. The Sizzling Saloon’s blackjack tables were scorched with cigarette holes, its waitresses with stretch marks. After three years, his partners tired of the grind. They wanted to sell to the casino next door. Duberman refused. He bought them out instead.
Now I owned the place, but my friends owned me. Duberman had a streak of Donald Trump in him, a natural talent for self-promotion. He dropped Sizzling from the casino’s name, calling it simply The Saloon: Where the West Comes to Play. He promised to take any bet. He put up billboards around Reno showing himself wearing a ten-gallon hat and holding a revolver in each hand. Can You Out-Gun The Saloon-Keeper? Take Yer Best Shot!
The fact that the Saloon-Keeper was a Jew from Atlanta was part of the joke. And Reno laughed. Within three years, the casino was the city’s most profitable. Duberman branched out to Las Vegas, opening two more Saloons. They were miles from the Strip and catered to locals. They, too, were hits. He bought out his silent partners. Finally, I had the money to say good-bye to my old friends. Not cheap, but money well spent. He expanded to Iowa and Mississippi and took Saloon Gaming Inc. public. At thirty-seven, his fortune topped $100 million.
Then Saloon started to lose ground. Its casinos couldn’t compete with the eye-catching attractions that its bigger competitors offered. Its Western theme seemed dated and cheesy. Still, its customers were loyal. Duberman could have milked them for years. Instead, he changed Saloon’s name to 88 Gamma. He mortgaged his fortune to redesign his casinos with a sci-fi theme. He installed oxygen bars, shark tanks, brushed aluminum tables, huge flat-panel screens dangling above the casino floor. He wanted to attract young Asians, who were often heavy gamblers. He succeeded wildly. By 2001, he was a billionaire.
Then Duberman made his biggest bet yet, a $2 billion casino in Macao. The only other casino mogul to invest in Macao at the time was Sheldon Adelson, who like Duberman was an outsider in the gambling industry. MGM and other, more established companies avoided the territory. It had a reputation as a lawless place dominated by Chinese gangs called triads. But Adelson and Duberman saw opportunity. The big companies were afraid of the crime, the triads, the Chinese government, Duberman told Fortune. They were doing risk analysis, hiring consultants, blah blah blah. Me, I’m a simple guy. I didn’t get an MBA from Harvard. I had a simple theory. I said, wait a minute, you’re letting me build a casino across the border from a billion people who love gambling more than breathing? And who can’t do it legally anywhere else? Uhh, sounds okay to me.
It was. 88 Gamma Macao did not have an empty seat or slot machine for nine months after it opened. By then, Duberman had broken ground on an expansion that tripled its size. Two days before his fiftieth birthday, his fortune reached $10 billion, putting him in one of the world’s most elite clubs. It now topped almost $30 billion.
For a while, Duberman’s public profile grew with his fortune. He became the largest individual donor to Israel, a supporter of close ties between the United States and China. He gave cheeky interviews like the one with Fortune. But in the last couple of years, he had fallen almost silent, and cut back on his charitable spending.
Meanwhile, he had become the largest political donor in American history, putting up $196 million to help reelect the President. Investigative reporters had tried to tear down the veil of secrecy and expose why Duberman had spent so much. What Does Aaron Want? The most popular theory was that Duberman needed White House access to lobby for better relations between Washington and Beijing.
“He’s worried if we make China mad, they retaliate, close the border with Macao,” one analyst told The New Yorker. “His stock falls eighty percent overnight.” Salome had laughed out loud when she’d read the article. Them that know don’t tell, and them that tell don’t know…
She’d met Duberman while she was working for Daniel Raban. He was a right-wing member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, who had won a silver medal in the pole vault. The achievement made Raban an instant hero in a country short on successful Olympians. He was a perfect television politician, tall and handsome, with an adoring wife and three young sons. Off camera, reality was less appealing. Raban was infamous for sexually harassing his female staffers. Inevitably, Israeli political journalists called him the Pole.
He had hit on Salome more times than she could count, always unsuccessfully. She put up with his antics because he served on the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Every member of the committee could pick one aide to sit in on classified briefings from the Mossad and the IDF. Raban had chosen Salome, giving her access she would otherwise have needed decades to achieve.
Plus, though she disliked him personally, she agreed with his politics. He had won his Knesset seat with the slogan Peace Last! The Palestinians and the Arab states had to accept Israel’s right to exist before negotiations on a permanent peace deal could begin, he said. Give up trying to kill us, we’ll talk. Peace Last!
At the beginning of Raban’s second term in parliament, Duberman invited Raban to a private lunch at his villa in Jerusalem. The offer was not a surprise. Duberman visited Israel regularly and cultivated young right-wing politicians. Naturally, Salome came along. She served as Raban’s personal Wikipedia, memorizing the facts he couldn’t be bothered to learn.
Duberman recognized Raban as an empty suit by the time his waiters had cleared away their salads. He focused questions about Israeli’s strategy in the West Bank to Salome. He seemed genuinely interested in her answers. She liked him immediately. More than liked. He wore his brown hair slightly longer than was respectable for the chief executive of a major company. Though he was well past fifty, his eyes radiated enthusiasm and energy. His body was solid under his suit, his hands thick and powerful. Salome had never been attracted to older men, but she found it easy to imagine those hands around her. He was the most self-assured man she had ever met.
His mind was equally appealing. He understood a truth that many Israelis still disliked discussing aloud. In the last sixty years, the Jews had carved a modern state from the desert. Israel could boast a strong economy, with first-rate hospitals, universities, and highways. It had a powerful army, free elections and media. Meanwhile, its Arab neighbors plunged deeper into tyranny and filth every year. In Iraq, the Shia and Sunni blew each other up as fast as they could. In Egypt, the elite lived like pharaohs while tens of millions of their subjects barely survived. The Saudis married their cousins and stoned women to death for adultery. And in Gaza and Lebanon and Jordan, the Palestinians bred like rats in their pathetic refugee camps. Like if they made themselves miserable enough, Israel would have to accommodate them.
Anyone who looked at the situation rationally could reach only one conclusion. Israel couldn’t trust its Muslim neighbors. Not now, not ever. It would simply have to manage them, so that Jews could hold on to their birthright, the land they had settled three millennia before. The Bible was filled with myths. But the Zionist claim to Judea and Samaria was real. Jews had prayed on the Temple Mount a thousand years before Muhammad drew breath. When the Arabs drew maps that erased Israel, they weren’t just spitting at Jews today but at every Jew who had ever lived.