By Steve Friess, Photographs: Tomas Muscionico

t the time, it must have seemed like quite the event. Two-year-old Bradley Stone stood beside his parents as well as leading members of the relatively obscure Marriott family as they cut the ribbon to open their first hotel, a 365-room motor lodge in Arlington, Virgina.

Stone's father was the first general manager of that first Marriott, and Stone's family was the modest Twin Bridges Motor Lodge's first guest that week in 1957.

A half-century later—sometime next year—Stone will stand on two continents with his own wife and four children to greet two of the most ambitious hospitality efforts in history: the debut of the $2.3 billion Venetian Macao in the one-time Portuguese colony of Macau on China's southeastern coast and the $1.6 billion Palazzo adjacent to the original Venetian in Las Vegas. For each of those 3,000-room properties, there will be far more than a mere ribbon-cutting; each event will include fireworks, bands, celebrities on a red carpet, and a rapt throng of media, patrons and investors exploring every corner.

"These are major, almost national, if not international, events," marvels Stone, 51, executive vice president of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, a.k.a. chairman Sheldon Adelson's second lieutenant. "Las Vegas is so high-profile, and Macau is becoming equally so in its part of the world. It's something that nobody back then could ever have conceived of."

And yet in many ways what's there now was conceived by Stone, Adelson and LVSC president and chief operating officer William Weidner over the course of a dizzying decade, ever since Adelson brought in Weidner and Stone to help him redevelop a choice bit of real estate he'd acquired on the Strip. That plot, where the venerable old Sands Hotel and Casino stood, gave way to the Venetian, a property that became as synonymous with Las Vegas as neon and Elvis.

Weidner and Adelson were largely big-picture guys, the dealmakers, and while they've had their hands in almost everything along the way, these buildings—the two Venetians, the Palazzo, the Sands Macao, which was the first American casino in Asia when it opened two years ago—are dusted with Stone's fingerprints from top to bottom ...

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