CASINOS are sleazy places, but it is still unusual to find a billionaire gambling boss sitting in his private suite, surrounded by advisers and bodyguards, trying to settle a dispute using the language of pimps and hookers.

“Listen, you guys have been jerking around with me,” said Sheldon Adelson, 74. “You offer me money [to make me go away]? This is like a pimp stud waving his penis at a hooker and saying: ‘See this! I am threatening you with this’. As if money is going to threaten me.”

It was 3pm in Macao and there were just hours to go before Adelson would smash a bottle of champagne on a gondola to mark the grand opening of his latest hotel and casino, the £1 billion Venetian Macao. But he was distracted by a bitter dispute – a libel action against a newspaper – 5,000 miles away.

Talking pimps and hookers to settle a dispute is an unconventional way of doing business, but Adelson is an unconventional operator. He has spent a lifetime doing things his way and it has made him the richest gambling magnate in history and the sixth-richest man in the world, worth £13.5 billion.

He may be 74, but he still loves it. Two weeks ago he opened the Venetian Macao – dismissed by one rival gaming boss as “the stupidest idea I ever heard”. The hotel in the former Portuguese colony that reverted to China in 1999 features replicas of the Doge’s Palace, the Campanile Tower and has indoor canals where Chinese gondoliers serenade grannies as they are steered to clothing retailer Gap. It is the first of 15 he is building.

At £6 billion, the development – which will have 20,000 rooms, 3,000 gaming tables, and 20,000 slot machines – is the largest gambling and tourism project in history. It will make Adelson the biggest single private investor in China. “I’m not building a resort. I’m building a city – Asia’s Las Vegas,” he told the 70,000 people at the opening party.

And he is not stopping there. He is investing a further £2 billion to persuade the clean-living citizens of Singapore that cold beer and hot girls is what they really want. The Marina Bay Sands, the city state’s first casino resort, opens in 2009. It will be followed, he hopes, by a network of resorts in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and India.

In Vegas he is spending £1 billion opening a second hotel-casino. The 3,000-room Palazzo, next to his Venetian on the Strip, opens in December. He plans to build a third hotel nearby, with up to 5,000 rooms and 1,000 condominiums.

The total bill for the expansion of his Las Vegas Sands group will exceed £10 billion and, if things go his way across Asia, could reach £22 billion. It is the biggest wager anyone has taken on showgirls, sequins and seven-card stud – and even the diminutive, wheelchair-bound Adelson seems a little surprised.

“I’m blown away,” he said. “I’m a short guy. You’d think I would dream up short things.”

Adelson dismisses claims his huge bet could turn into a bust with all the bravado his £13.5 billion fortune allows. “A bet? No, no. It’s a surety. This is the best business idea I’ve ever had. Do people eat? Do people drink? Do Asians and Americans gamble? Does a bear poop in the woods?”

When the Macao development – on the Cotai Strip, a man-made ribbon of land linking Macao’s two islands, Taipa and Coloane, which the Chinese government has leased to Adelson for 99 years – is finished in 2010, he predicts his group will pull in almost £4 billion a year from gambling in Macao and £1 billion in room revenue.

Eating and drinking should generate another £500m, giving him 60% of the entire Macao gambling and tourism market. He estimates he will recoup his £6 billion investment “just from operations in three to five years once the development is complete”.

He insists the Venetian in Las Vegas is already running at almost 100% occupancy year-round, thanks to the booming convention business. He predicts it will be the same at the Palazzo. “We are building a Palazzo that will be much better than either the Wynn [run by his arch-rival Steve Wynn] or the Bellagio [created by Wynn], so we think we will run at 100% with that.”

Next year the firm’s Vegas gaming revenue will rise from £200m a year to almost £500m, he said. Room revenue, entertainment and restaurant and bar income will push turnover towards £1 billion for the first time.

If Adelson is right, he will, by his 80th birthday, be worth more than £20 billion, catapulting him into the top five in the global rich list. It would be the ultimate rags-to-riches story.

Adelson grew up poor in the Dorchester neighbourhood of Boston, the son of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. His father was a cab driver and his mother ran a sewing shop. “We didn’t even have money for ice-cream sundaes or comic books and all the Irish boys from south Boston used to beat up all the Jewish kids,” he said.

He hawked newspapers at the age of 12, borrowing £100 from his uncle to lease two city corners. After military service, he moved to New York, dropped out of college and sold ads for financial trade publications, before returning to Boston to run his own tour firm.

By the mid1980s he had moved into the convention and expo business, building the computer industry’s premier trade show, Comdex. He rented floor space at 15 cents a square foot, then leased it to exhibitors for up to $40 a square foot. “I’m not in business to make money for the other guy. I’m in business to make money for myself,” he said at the time.

Adelson’s move into the hotel-casino business game in 1989. He bought the old Sands hotel, home of the Rat Pack, for £64m. He then built the largest privately owned convention centre in America on the site, with 1.2m sq ft of floor space. Old Vegas hands were dubious, but he filled the hotel and convention centre, single-handedly establishing the Vegas convention market. The former Sin City is now America’s No 1 convention venue.

After selling Comdex and 16 smaller shows to Japan’s Soft-bank for £431m in cash – pocketing £255m himself – he razed the Sands in 1996 and built the £750m Venetian on the site, tailoring it to business travellers and convention visitors.

Again, Las Vegas’s old guard laughed, but he filled the 4,000 rooms – and did it with the highest average daily room rate on the Strip. In 2004 he took the Sands group public, raking in almost £500m.

When Adelson went nonunion in Vegas, his detractors said he would never get away with it. His operations were picketed, swastikas were daubed on hoardings and someone broke into his home and scrawled “Dead Jew” on his bathroom mirror. But, again, he got his way.

He hasn’t had a death threat in years but still has bodyguards, mainly to protect his sons, aged eight and ten, from the marriage to his second wife, Miriam.

His family were in Macao last week to watch him take his biggest gamble yet. Diana Ross sang Ain’t No Mountain High Enough as Adelson cut the tape at the Venetian. When he left the party and headed to the airport, the question many were asking was: Will his “best business idea ever” be his last? After all, he will be almost 80 when it is finished.

“Retire?” he laughed. “For what? Everything I want to do in retirement I am doing today.”

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