Kirk Kerkorian obituary

The American billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who has died aged 98, made his money in the risky, impetuous business style that John Maynard Keynes called the “casino” economy. In Kerkorian’s case this was done literally - by building three vast hotel-casinos in Las Vegas. His interests also extended to airlines, film studios and motor manufacturers. Earlier in his career, wartime Britain had benefited from his fascination with aeroplanes and readiness to take a gamble.

He never made speeches, rarely attended board meetings and was often not even a board member of companies he bought and sold. Critics accused him of ruining the MGM film studio, and in his early days he had more than a nodding acquaintance with Las Vegas underworld figures.

Yet he might have been remembered for his daring as a flier alone. At the start of 1942, he heard that RAF Ferry Command, later RAF Transport Command, was paying pilots $1,000 a trip to fly Canadian-built Mosquito bombers from Labrador to Scotland. As Kerkorian told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1999, “They were paying money I couldn’t believe.” The fee was so big because only one in four flights made it. The Mosquito’s fuel tanks lasted for 1,400 miles, but it was 2,200 miles to Scotland.

There were two possible routes, each perilous. The roundabout way was via Greenland and Iceland, but ice could have a devastating effect on the plane’s wings. The alternative went straight across the Atlantic on an airflow called the Iceland Wave that blew Mosquitos along at jet speeds, but was not constant. If it flagged in midflight, plane and pilot were doomed.

This happened on one flight in June 1944, with the reserve tank showing empty. Kerkorian prepared to ditch, but on dropping low through the clouds saw the lights of Prestwick ahead, and executed a perfect landing.

He delivered 33 planes for the RAF and logged thousands of hours flying to four continents. The resulting pay-off enabled him to pay $5,000 on his first visit to Las Vegas in 1945 for a single-engine Cessna aircraft. He used it to train pilots and for charter work, regularly transporting a Los Angeles scrap metal dealer to Las Vegas. In 1947 he bought a small charter business in Los Angeles, and from there his business empire began to flourish.

Kerkor Kerkorian was the youngest of four children of Lily and Ahron, impoverished Armenian immigrants, in Fresno, in California’s central valley. His father’s small farm collapsed in the 1921-22 recession and the family moved to Los Angeles. Kirk, still speaking little English, started earning money at the age of nine.

Constantly in trouble, he was sent to a reform school and frequently had to defend himself in fights. His first career was as a boxer: he won most of his bouts, but then started working for a building contractor who flew aeroplanes as a hobby. In exchange for lessons, he did manual work for free.

His charter plane business grew into Trans International Airlines which, in 1968, he sold to the Transamerica Corporation conglomerate for around $100m. By this time he was gambling spectacularly at the Vegas tables. He was also dealing in property there, and in 1967 bought the old Flamingo hotel, formerly owned by the gangster Bugsy Siegel. Kerkorian celebrated the Transamerica deal by building the International hotel-casino, then the world’s biggest and the first designed for conventions, making Kerkorian the father of the Vegas mega-resort business. He used the Flamingo to train the staff needed for it.

However, in 1970 he was caught in an organised crime investigation. In a taped 1961 telephone call he had promised to mail a $21,300 cheque to Charlie “the Blade” Tourine, an enforcer with the Genovese crime family. Kerkorian disclaimed any knowledge of crime connections, but Forbes magazine printed further allegations. Kerkorian abandoned his personal gambling, but by this time his fascination for deal-making had turned his attention to Hollywood.

In his 36-year relationship with MGM from 1969 onwards, he bought and sold it three times. He added United Artists in 1981, but gained a reputaton as an asset stripper by selling off a third of the back lot, even auctioning Judy Garland’s shoes from the Wizard of Oz for $7,500 each. Eventually he sold MGM/UA to a consortium led by Sony in 2005.

Another Hollywood venture proved to be a rare missed opportunity. In 1978 he bought 5.5% of Columbia, but because of antitrust rules had to agree not to increase his share above a quarter. When Columbia bought him out in 1981, he made a profit of around $70m, though would have made more when Coca-Cola acquired Columbia the following year.

Back in Las Vegas, he built the MGM Grand hotel, another record in size when it opened in 1973, but it burned seven years later in a fire that killed 85 people. Kerkorian reopened it and sold it in 1985, since when it has been known as Bally’s. He then built another monster, again the world’s largest at the time of its opening in 1993, and again called the MGM Grand, in an emerald-green Wizard of Oz style.

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Kerkorian began investing in the American car maker Chrysler in 1990 and become its third largest shareholder, but was vilified for attempted asset-stripping when he made an unsuccessful takeover bid in 1995. When, in 1998, it was acquired by Daimler-Benz, Kerkorian emerged with $5bn, triple his original investment. An attempt to get General Motors to change its strategy by taking a 9.9% stake in 2005 came to nothing, and among various setbacks in the financial crisis of 2008, Kerkorian lost around $600m on disposing of a stake in the Ford Motor Co.

In 2000, Kerkorian took over the Mirage Resorts gambling empire in Las Vegas run by the city’s foremost owner, Steve Wynn. Four years later he once more demonstrated his thirst for making acquisitions, when his MGM Mirage company absorbed the Mandalay Resort Group, giving the new corporate combine almost half the gambling business on the Las Vegas Strip. MGM Mirage now owned 36,000 rooms, 22,000 slot machines, and 1,000 tables.

In 2009 he reduced his shareholding in what had become MGM Resorts International from 54% to a single largest stake of 37%, and in 2011 stepped down from its board. Forbes magazine estimated his personal wealth to be around $4bn.

Kerkorian married Hilda Schmidt in 1942, and they divorced in 1951. With his second wife, Jean Maree Hardy, a dancer and choreographer, whom he married in 1954, he had two daughters, Tracy and Linda. That marriage ended in divorce in 1984, and his third marriage, to a former tennis professional, Lisa Bonder, lasted for 28 days in 1998. Earlier that year she had given birth to a daughter, for whom she claimed $320,000 a month of child support. A paternity test showed that Kerkorian was not the father, and a settlement was reached in 2010.

He is survived by his two daughters and three grandchildren.

Kirk (Kerkor) Kerkorian, entrepreneur and aviator, born 6 June 1917; died 15 June 2015