James Packer’s ‘Mr Fix-it’ John Alexander steps up to the plate at Crown Resorts
THE new top dog at James Packer’s flagship Crown Resorts casino business, John Alexander, is not afraid to bear his teeth, as his numerous corporate adversaries have discovered over the years.
NSW
Don't miss out on the headlines from NSW. Followed categories will be added to My News.
JAMES Packer is inside his Bondi beachfront apartment, nursing the black eye from a punch up the day before with Channel 9 boss David Gyngell.
Spilling across the footpath is the phalanx of journalists, photographers and camera crews assigned to cover the sensational story of the street fight between the billionaire and his bestie, caught on camera and splashed across the globe.
Packer needs confidante John Alexander.
But there’s a glitch: Alexander is an intensely private person who avoids encounters with the media.
But run the gauntlet Alexander did, striding purposefully past the cameras wearing a characteristically dashing pinstriped suit and a nonchalant “nothing-to-see-here” grin.
Alexander, 65, was considered a brilliant journalist and editor in his early career. But as with most of the encounters he has had with the media, when he or those close to him are the story, he said nothing.
In a rare interview with The Saturday Telegraph, Alexander would not comment on his discussions inside the apartment that day, but left no doubt that when Packer presents him a challenge, he’ll rise to the occasion.
Perhaps the only surprise in the announcement this week that Crown Resorts boss Rowen Craigie would stand aside to make way for Alexander was that it didn’t happen sooner.
In January, Packer signalled as much, when Alexander was elevated from his board seat at Crown to executive chairman, pushing another key operative aside in former chairman Rob Rankin.
“He asked me just before Christmas,” Alexander says of the meetings he had with Packer at his Ellerstina polo resort in Argentina.
“He wanted to make some changes … I was happy to accept the challenge. There was nothing leading up to it.”
Job-sharing with a CEO, or as media commentator Mark Day puts it, “sitting there, twiddling his thumbs”, was never going to wash for Alexander.
“I think a separate CEO, if I was going to be hands-on, was going to be unnecessary,” Alexander says.
The changes end a tumultuous year for Crown’s majority shareholder Packer.
He split with fiancee Mariah Carey, cut loose ambitions to create a Las Vegas gambling resort, sold down Crown’s Macau shareholding and grappled with the detention in China of 15 Crown employees under investigation for gambling crimes.
Alexander has a decade of history with the company and takes over at a time when VIP revenues have copped a 45 per cent hit as Chinese whales flee after the gambling crackdown.
He will also be charged with making a reality Packer’s ambition of building a casino in Sydney, the $2 billion resort at Barangaroo.
For Day, there’s one reason Packer has “sooled” on to Crown the man who was dubbed “Doctor Death” and the “Black Prince” in his time as the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.
“James has let him loose for one reason and that’s cut, cut, cut,” Day says.
It seems the prospect has lifted the spirits of investors, who on Thursday not only cheered a healthy special dividend but backed the future under Alexander, delivering shares their highest gain in four months.
“A strong focus on costs and a slimmer management structure,” created at least part of the positivity, Alexander says. His plan is simple: “reduce waste, duplication and unnecessary discretionary spending”.
For the Packers, cutting costs was something Alexander did with exceeding success at the magazine empire PBL.
But it didn’t go down so well at Channel 9, where he angered executives such as Peter Meakin, who coined him a “24-carat c...”.
Alexander’s biggest deal for the young Packer was selling the family out of magazines at peak value. It was a tough call to begin the exit in 2006 from the magazine empire built by Packer’s father Kerry, who had died the previous year.
But it meant a $5.6 billion payday, giving young Packer the means to build his own empire of casinos. No nonsense, straight shooter, crackerjack editor, fastidious, cultured, refined, successful, strange beast. Alexander can divide opinion.
“He is a very cold, calculating character. Those who are close to him are full of praise,” Day says.
“He is a very fastidious person, including taking his own pillow when he travels,” one former media executive says.
His media career began with a Sunday column about collectables, such as stamps.
He has devoted a substantial part of his extensive wealth to his own collections, of art and rare first edition books.
“I was forced to write about stamps for a brief part of my career and people made the mistake of thinking I collect them,” Alexander says.
He is exceedingly neat and tidy, groomed and polished. He is married to Italian photographer Alice Pagliano and the pair enjoy a refined life in the luxury penthouse Del Rio in Elizabeth Bay, where they have lived since the late 1990s.
He also loves gardens and has acreage at Robertson in the Southern Highlands.
But Packer may have ensured he won’t be tending the roses any time soon.
Aussie America’s Cup women ready to rock in semis chase in big breeze
It’s all on the line for the Australian team at the women’s America’s Cup later tonight with a spot in the semi-finals there for the taking. How the Aussies are faring in Barcelona.
The special letter that inspired Jeff Fenech to greatness
Johnny Lewis opens up on his relationship with the Marrickville Mauler, widely regarded as the nation’s greatest ever boxer, and his early life on the mean streets of Sydney’s inner west.