Butch Kerzner; Times (UK) obit (hotel magnate heir)
Hyfler/Rosner
The TimesOctober 13, 2006
Butch Kerzner
January 27, 1964 - October 11, 2006
Son and heir of the hotel and gambling magnate whose empire
spread from Africa to North America
BUTCH KERZNER was the son and heir of the South African
leisure magnate Sol Kerzner, who started his empire in 1960
with a small hotel in the East Coast resort city of Durban.
Kerzner Sr later bought the upmarket Beverly Hills Hotel at
Umhlanga Rocks, north of Durban, launching his Southern Suns
group in partnership with South African Breweries. By the
mid-Seventies Southern Suns owned 31 hotels around the
country and in Mauritius, a popular and easy-to-reach
holiday destination for wealthy South Africans.
In 1981 the group opened the hotel, gambling, entertainment
and golfing resort of Sun City in the "independent homeland"
of Bophutatswana. Situated close to the metropolis of
Johannesburg and Pretoria, "Sin City", or "Blackpool in
Africa" as some of its critics called it, drew huge crowds
of visitors to its casino and cinemas showing X-rated films,
both of which were illegal in apartheid South Africa.
Sun City also had a huge concert hall and featured
international stars such as Frank Sinatra and the rock group
Queen, who argued, a little disingenuously, that they weren't
breaking the international cultural boycott because they
weren't performing in South Africa itself.
Sol Kerzner later formed Sun International, with a number of
luxury resorts around the country, including another version
of Sun City - Wild Coast Sun in Transkei, aimed mostly at
residents of Durban and surrounding towns.
Howard Brett Kerzner, who was called Butch by his father
since he was a baby, was born in Durban in 1964 and at 18
went to California to study economics at Stanford
University, graduating in 1986.
He spent the next six years in America working in mergers
and acquisitions in New York, initially with First Boston
and then with Lazard Frères. He also obtained an MBA at
Stanford, where his teachers included the management
theorist and writer Jim Collins.
In 1992 Kerzner joined Sun International, which ten years
later was renamed Kerzner International, as corporate
development director. One of his first tasks was to finalise
the $125 million acquisition of Paradise Island in the
Bahamas, the company's first venture into the North American
market. It has since spent $1 billion on the restort, which
now has 2,300 rooms, a marina, the world's largest man-made
marine habitat and the largest casino and entertainment
centre in the Caribbean.
In an echo of his father's successful dealing with the
"homelands" in South Africa, Kerzner led negotiations with
the Mohegan native Americans that led to the building of the
$300 million Mohegan Sun gaming resort in Uncasville,
Connecticut. The tribe, formerly known as Mohicans, have a
majority stake in the 240-acre site, which opened in October
1996 and includes a 300,000-sq ft casino, a 1,200-room
luxury hotel and a 10,000-seat indoor arena.
The same year Butch Kerzner became president of the company,
which had also been listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
He became responsible for the expansion of Kerzner
International's group of luxury hotels, in particular the
development of its five resorts on Mauritius, including St
Géran, which Kerzner Sr had bought in 1975, and the One&Only
Royal Mirage Hotel in Dubai. The company's luxury subsiduary
recently expanded further with the launch of One&Only
Maldives at Reethi Rah.
In 2003 Kerzner International signed a deal with Anschutz
Entertainment Group, which owns the Millennium Dome, giving
it exclusive rights to operate a casino on the site in
Greenwich should a licence be granted. However the
Government recently signalled that it might require local
authorities with casino licences to give equal access to
domestic and overseas operators to run the business.
In January 2004 Kerzner succeeded his father as chief
executive and at the end of that year was made a director.
Recently Kerzner formed a joint venture with Nakheel LLC to
develop Atlantis, The Palm, in Dubai, which is due to be
completed in 2008 and will include a 1,500-room resort and
water theme park.
Last month the company went private in a $3.8 billion buyout
by a group of investors, led by Butch Kerzner and his
father.
Butch was surveying potential sites for development in the
Dominican Republic when the helicopter in which he was
travelling crashed, killing all four people on board.
Sol Kerzner was the pugnacious, hands-on entrepreneur who
perhaps exaggerated the poverty of his Russian immigrant
parents and was happiest in a hard hat supervising his
latest construction project. His son was a perfect partner
to the gruff father, more quietly spoken and happy to deal
with senior financiers. As the empire spread from its
impressive but fairly parochial Southern African roots,
Butch helped to give the business the corporate polish it
needed. Without Sol Kerzner, who married beauty queens and
models, and landed a helicopter on a desolate piece of veld
north of Pretoria and declared to his puzzled architects and
accountants "we'll build it [Sun City] here", there would
have been no business. Without his neater and more studious
son, it is doubtful that there would have been the worldwide
expansion that took the business to new heights.
Butch Kerzner is survived by his wife, Vanessa, and their
two children.
Butch Kerzner, chief executive of Kerzner International, was
born on January 27, 1964. He died on October 11, 2006, aged
42.