He's a man who liked to make people sweat. But if there was $800,000 or more, he'd touch down and gamble. "If they told him that they had $300,000, Packer kept flying. "He liked to fly over Darwin and call down to the casino there, asking how much money they had in their cage," remembers the casino executive. But that never stopped him from toying with the managers and owners of local gambling halls. With extreme wealth and a craving for chest-thumping action, Packer quickly found himself frustrated by the modest betting limits offered in Aussie casinos. "That's where my family started from: 10-bob on a race course."īy 1974, when Packer officially took control of his family's print- and broadcast-media empire, Consolidated Press Holdings, he was already regarded as one of the richest men in Australia. "He bought a ticket to Sydney and went into the newspaper industry and did quite well," Packer would grossly understate. Years later, Packer enjoyed telling people that his grandfather, Robert Clyde Packer, went to the races in the Tasmanian city of Hobart, found $10 on the ground, bet it on a 10-to-1 long-shot, and the horse won in glorious fashion. It may have been the right thing to do, but it failed to douse the burgeoning player's enthusiasm for high-wire propositions and his respect for gamblers with the guts to risk it all. After young Kerry found himself with $10,000 of gambling debts, his father, Frank, a multimillionaire many times over, tried teaching his son a lesson by making him sell his car to pay off the tab. Having beaten polio as a boy, the pugnacious Packer grew up with an ingrained hunger for wagering.
KERRY PACKER PARKINSON INTERVIEW DRIVERS
That Kerry Packer, a brilliant entrepreneur, an astute stock market investor (he managed to liquidate his Wall Street holdings just prior to the big crash of 1987) and one of the world's great tokers (after experiencing a close brush with death in 1990, he tipped his lifesaving ambulance drivers and EMS workers a million dollars each), would eventually find his way to Vegas almost seemed inevitable. After all, following one of the Aussie billionaire's eight-figure wins, a gaming corporation's quarterly numbers sometimes ended up in the toilet. But because he gambled for so much money-and had a tendency to quit while he was ahead, garnering the reputation on the Strip for being a "hit and run player"-the timing of Packer's passing brought some relief: he did not die on the heels of a big Vegas score, which would have suddenly been unrecoupable by the casinos. Fitting for one with enough cash to roll as high as the moon, Packer wagered at the largest stakes the casinos would allow.
Gambling was Kerry Packer's passion in the way that other men of great means develop big-budget obsessions with yacht racing or art collecting. To quote the Vegas casino executive, who considered the business baron a friend, "Packer needed something to do with his days and nights. As one former Vegas casino executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, conservatively estimates, during the last 15 or so years, the wildly swinging Packer had blithely endured a net loss of more than $20 million on the Strip.Īdditionally, it is believed that he dropped many more millions to the casino operators in London, largely because he spent extended periods there, taking several suites at the Savoy Hotel.
He loved nothing more than being in action for sums of money that few people could conceptualize. No doubt, as the 68-year-old mogul expired on December 26, 2005, the casino industry mourned the death of a man, but also the passing of Las Vegas's splashiest player. "I'm running out of petrol and I'm ready to die," he told his doctor before drawing his last breath. He was at home in Australia, lying in bed suffering from a weak heart and kidney ailments. Sixteen years and many outrageous nights later, Packer found himself in a far more precarious situation.
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