Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

way in the course of one sitting. Deke Castleman, in Whale Hunt in the Desert, reports Packer walking into Caesars Palace on the night of 31 March, 1992 and being $9 million ahead of the house by midnight. At that hour Caesars closed the book on its financial quarter, and what was petty cash to Packer was a 50 per cent hit to the casino’s first-quarter profits. By dawn, however, ‘Packer lost back the $9 million and then some’.

Back in London, in 1994, the new owners of Crockford’s received a windfall on their second day when KP dropped the equivalent of US$7 million. But far bigger adventures awaited back in Vegas the following year, when Packer had the dual satisfactions of belting the MGM Grand for six and being banned for life.

Reports of the wee-hours winning blitz, and the sums involved, have Packer simultaneously playing six hands at $75,000 per hand, or eight hands at $250,000. Whale Hunt in the Desert author Castleman has Packer eventually being allowed to play $500,000 a hand—and walking off in just a couple of hours with a $26 million haul.

Packer liked the feel of it, and returned for several more visits. But MGM International Resorts supremo Kirk Kerkorian, who’d got to know Packer over several dinners, put his foot down: Packer was banned from MGM’s casinos.

Castleman’s book reports that one of Kerkorian’s executives—a dedicated MGM ‘Packer handler’—was flown to England to break the news to Packer, who was playing polo. Packer sent his helicopter to bring the guy from Heathrow to his Fyning Hill estate. The executive came back to report that Packer had threatened to make him walk back to London; but that he had sensed in Packer a strange sort of satisfaction on Packer’s part.

Tales of Packer’s punting exploits in Australia and South-East Asia are few, but Nigel Dempster reported Packer swooping on Jupiter’s on the Queensland Gold Coast in 1998, distributing $300,000 in tips to four hostesses after an unspecified ‘lucky run’. There again, he was known to distribute similar-sized tips after a loss.

Packer may or may not have been in a generous mood when, in September 1999, a £11 million hit at Crockford’s blackjack tables over a three-week period supposedly set a new record for the biggest loss in UK casino history. (One suspects he was beating his own record, set at the Ritz a dozen years earlier.)

It may be significant that 1999 was also the year in which Packer effectively took out some gambling insurance, taking over Melbourne’s Crown Casino complex from his punting mate, Lloyd Williams. Packer later added Perth’s Burswood Casino (2004) and introduced to Australia the online betting exchange, Betfair (2005).

Meanwhile, in July 2000 Packer was again in Las Vegas, but luck—and his desire to fly under the radar—firmly deserted him. No longer welcome at the MGM Grand, he turned his attention to the lavish new Bellagio, which casino king Steve Wynn had opened 18 months earlier.

In three days at the baccarat tables, Packer managed to scorch through US$20 million, a sum that may have extended his record-holding status across the Atlantic.

But the story would go farther than that. Such was the mystique surrounding Kerry Packer that, when a small news item in a Las Vegas paper was picked up by The Australian newspaper on 30 August, more than a month later, all hell broke loose.

The newspaper’s LA correspondent Robert Lusetich wrote of Packer’s US$20 million hit, equating to A$34 million, and linked it with the London loss 10 months earlier.

On 31 August, erratic Labor politician Mark Latham stood up in the House of Representatives and opened a speech with the words: ‘I wish to reflect on the news that Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer, lost $34 million last month on a gambling spree in Las Vegas. I am sure that most Australians will feel uneasy about this sort of extravagance. Notions of public morality and justice are under threat when it is possible for one person to accumulate such extraordinary wealth and then use it in such an extraordinary way.’

Latham went on to add: ‘Surely those who have been fortunate enough to accumulate considerable wealth should use it in a socially responsible fashion. Blowing $34 million at a casino is not a very responsible thing to do.’

Packer fired back in the following day’s edition of The Australian, asserting that it was his money and, rare for him, revealing that he had only recently given a larger sum than that to a Sydney children’s hospital.

Prime Minister John Howard, who was certainly on friendlier terms with Packer than he was with Latham, surprisingly also stepped forward in his defence: ‘I thought the Latham attack was ludicrous … It is his money. He made the very legitimate point that he doesn’t gamble with his company’s money, and if you look at his corporate record that is right.’

Lost on Latham, of course, was the obvious fact that Packer’s $34 million was not actually ‘blown’ at all. Like water, or energy, it had merely changed form, in this case being redistributed to the casino, its employees, and to the people of Nevada via the state’s tax income.

The Kerry kerfuffle of September 2000 inevitably calmed down, but Packer wasn’t happy. A year later, in early September 2001, Packer returned to the Bellagio and demanded that his hotel minders sign confidentiality agreements. And the dealers got some inkling of his anger when he refused to tip them.

He then proceeded to lose even more. According to Norm Clarke of the Las Vegas Review Journal Packer was playing baccarat at up to $150,000 a hand, and occasionally took breaks to play blackjack and munch hot dogs at the sports book. Packer ended up losing a staggering US$29 million, or close to $50 million in Oz currency.

He wasn’t even meant to still be in Vegas. But the events of 11 September 2001, which grounded his plane for