PARADISE ISLAND, Bahamas — On a Friday in mid-October, legendary South African casino mogul Solomon Kerzner buried his 42-year-old son and handpicked successor, Howard “Butch” Kerzner, in New York. His son, the chief executive officer of Kerzner International Ltd., had been killed two days earlier in a helicopter crash while surveying sites for a new luxury resort in the Dominican Republic.

The day after the funeral, Kerzner, 71, boarded his private jet and flew halfway around the world to Singapore, where the company was bidding against two rivals for an important casino project. Kerzner’s presence was meant to assure Singapore officials that the sudden death of his son would not affect the firm’s ability to deliver big projects.

Shortly after returning from Singapore to his London home, Kerzner felt faint while running on his treadmill. Following an angiogram the next day, Nov. 2, he underwent triple bypass heart surgery, sending him into weeks of convalescence.

Then on Dec. 8, still more bad news arrived. At 4:15 a.m., Kerzner was awakened by a phone call in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. The Singapore government had rejected the Kerzner proposal, which featured a futuristic design by architect Frank Gehry. A project that was crucial to the company’s future suddenly vanished.

Most succession dramas involve the sudden death of a company patriarch, not the successor. The elder Kerzner now faces the prospect of coming back to fulfill his company’s growing global ambitions, just as it must deal with new private-equity investors who expect healthy returns. He returns to the helm after a lifetime in the fast lane, a jet-setting lifestyle that took its toll in the form of four marriages, a 1983 heart attack and an alcohol rehabilitation stint at the Betty Ford Clinic two years ago.

Kerzner says he was extremely close to Butch and they would often speak on the phone two or three times a day. “Before [Butch’s death], the Kerzners were going to continue running things and there was no time frame for the family not to be involved,” Kerzner says in his tidy corner office, deep inside the sprawling Atlantis resort complex here. “But I’m 71 and I won’t be doing this for another 30 or 40 years.”

Now Kerzner International is stuck with the same dilemma it faced a decade ago: succeeding the legendary founder. Instead of a young, 42-year-old CEO who had been carefully prepared for the job over many years, the company will be led by Kerzner and Paul O’Neil, 61, a board member and former top executive who was also lured out of retirement after Butch’s death.

Kerzner says he and O’Neil will continue to run the company “for the foreseeable future,” and he has not formulated a succession plan.

But pressure is building on the company. Many in the industry see the company’s failure to win the Singapore license as an immediate consequence of Butch Kerzner’s death. Long in his father’s shadow, Butch had shepherded the Singapore deal from the start and was seen as the key contact by officials in Singapore, who did little to explain their decision in its aftermath.

“I believe that if Butch were alive, they would have won Singapore,” says gambling titan Steve Wynn, a close friend of the elder Kerzner.

Kerzner declines to speculate on the impact of Butch’s death on losing the Singapore project. “Bidding on those projects is always a roll of the dice,” he says.

With an eye for luxury and a swashbuckling style, Solomon Kerzner carved out a career that reads like a history of the modern hotel and casino industries. Over 40 years, he courted controversy, lured the wealthy and helped expand and reinvent the global gambling landscape with projects such as the Sun City resort in South Africa, the aquatic-themed Atlantis complex in the Bahamas and the Native American-owned Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut.

Born outside Johannesburg in 1935 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Kerzner had a hardscrabble childhood that led him to boxing. But instead of pursuing the sport professionally, he obtained a degree in accounting. By 26, he had entered the hotel business and in 1964 opened his first luxury hotel in South Africa using money invested by his accounting clients. His son Butch was also born that January.

In 1979, Kerzner created Sun City — the world’s first modern casino-resort, in the heart of the apartheid-era black homeland of Bophuthatswana. Technically not considered a part of South Africa, the location allowed Kerzner to operate a gambling casino and screen X-rated movies, activities that were illegal at the time in white-governed South Africa. Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis and Bono famously refused to perform at Sun City, but the resort was a commercial success and would be the inspiration, years later, for other megaresorts. Both Donald Trump and Wynn have cited Kerzner as influences in their own casino developments in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, N.J.

In mid-1987, Kerzner left South Africa under a cloud of suspicion and resettled in London. He was charged by a prosecutor in the black homeland of Transkei of bribing the governor of that state for casino rights. The governor served a nine-year prison sentence for accepting payment from Kerzner. Kerzner later admitted paying the money but claimed he was extorted. He spent years and millions of dollars in an eventually successful effort to get the charges dropped.

Kerzner later sold most of his interest in his South African hotel empire and began looking for new markets. His company bought a run-down hotel here in the Bahamas and rebuilt it as the lavish Atlantis resort, themed around the concept of the lost underwater city. The resort, which included a vast aquarium integrated into its public spaces and a big water slide disguised as a Mayan-style temple, was an immediate hit. Kerzner also struck a deal with the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut to build what became one of the first Native American megacasinos.

Both the Bahamas and Mohegan deals were spearheaded by Butch Kerzner, who joined the company in 1992 when he was 28. Unlike his father, whose taste for the fast life would be breathlessly chronicled in the world media for decades, Butch lived a quieter life, leaving South Africa at age 18 for Stanford University in California. He graduated from Stanford in 1986 and embarked on an investment-banking career, working at CS First Boston, then joining Lazard Freres & Co. in New York after receiving a Stanford MBA.

In the early 1990s, when Lazard brought Kerzner the opportunity to buy the derelict resort that became the Atlantis, Kerzner, unfamiliar with U.S. banking practices, suggested that his son help him review the deal as his banker. The elder Kerzner says he wasn’t thinking in dynastic terms, but his son soon left Lazard to join him at the company on the finance side.

Butch Kerzner at first seemed awed at times by his father, operating more like a “financial analyst” than a top executive, says one person close to Butch. “At the time, Sol was running the whole show and Butch was like a helper, a supporting cast member,” says a close acquaintance of both men. While Sol spent his free time carousing, friends and family say, Butch relaxed by running, boating and doing other outdoor activities.

Gradually, Butch began applying his financial skills to the hotel and gambling business — sometimes when his father didn’t see the point. Len Wolman, chairman and chief executive of lodging concern Waterford Group, of Waterford, Conn., first brought the Mohegan Sun deal to Sol Kerzner. “He wasn’t interested and said it was too complicated given all of the regulatory agencies involved,” Wolman recalled.

But Butch Kerzner, more familiar with the U.S. regulatory market, was intrigued. He eventually persuaded his father to sign on. In 1995, the company agreed to build and manage the casino in Uncasville, Conn., for the tribe. Today, Mohegan Sun is one of the most lucrative casinos in the country. While Kerzner International no longer manages the facility, the company still receives 2.5 percent of gross revenue through 2014. In 2005, that amounted to about $38.8 million.

Kerzner began to see more potential for his son. “As he learned the business and really ran the financial side of things while learning everything from marketing to operations, it soon became apparent to me that he was going to run the whole show,” says Kerzner. By 1996, Butch, 32, had been promoted to president.

The elder Kerzner still remained the face of the company. He presided over the opening of Mohegan Sun, even though Butch engineered most of the deal. Butch Kerzner also stumbled. When the company’s stock traded as low as $16 a share in 2000, Butch persuaded his father to try to take the company private for $24 a share — a move that was soundly rejected by Ron Baron, a major investor. “I was dramatically opposed to that deal. It was bad for my shareholders and funds,” says Baron. The Kerzners withdrew the offer. Following the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Kerzner casino and resort properties, like the rest of the lodging industry, suffered a slump in business.

Butch Kerzner’s confidence grew over the following years. In 2004, he entered the company into a partnership with Waterford and Starwood Capital Group Global LLC that would spend about $464 million to acquire the U.S. operations of Wembley PLC. The assets included the Lincoln Park dog track and slots parlor in Lincoln, R.I., and others in Colorado. Wolman, who was involved in the venture, says Kerzner agreed to let Butch handle the entire deal — also agreeing to Butch’s request that he refrain from even visiting the old facilities.

The company that acquired Lincoln Park, BLB Investors, is currently completing a major renovation and expansion of the gambling and entertainment complex.

Butch also befriended members of the royal family of Dubai, who became large investors in the company as well as several Kerzner projects and awarded the Kerzners a key piece of land in Dubai for a second Atlantis resort scheduled for completion in late 2008.

In 2004, Kerzner named Butch CEO, ceding him day-to-day control. “It was perfect in my mind — Butch was running the show and I’d do as much as I’d like,” says Kerzner.

The company launched a $1-billion expansion at the flagship Atlantis resort in the Bahamas and began construction in Dubai. The company’s One&Only luxury hotel brand was reaping the benefits of high-spending travelers.

In January 2006, with the company’s shares trading in the high $60s, Butch Kerzner proposed a second attempt at a family-led buyout, this time backed by several private-equity firms. It would increase the family’s stake to 25 percent from about 11 percent. In September, the deal was approved by shareholders for $81 a share in cash, despite grumblings from some corners on Wall Street that the family had underpaid for the company.

The deal had barely closed when Butch was killed, along with the two pilots and another passenger in the helicopter crash. Kerzner had little time to grieve, flying to Singapore the day after the funeral.

“To bury his boy and get on the damn airplane for 20 hours, holy moly,” says Wynn.

None of Kerzner’s other children are expected to figure into his succession plans, according to a company spokeswoman.

Daughter Chantal, 29, runs the boutique-store operation at the One&Only brand and lives in London. Andrea, 47, jointly runs the family funds with Sol in New York and participates in philanthropic projects in Africa. Beverly, 46, splits her time between New York and a small village in India and isn’t involved in the company. Brandon, 32, lives in South Africa and helps oversee the family estate.

Kerzner International will likely bid on Britain’s “super-casino” project announced last month for Manchester, England. Kerzner also says he’s interested in pursuing a project in Las Vegas.

Company officials say Kerzner hasn’t been slowed by his heart surgery, and several investors say they are confident in the company under Kerzner’s leadership. “With all that’s happened ... Sol is definitely holding it together,” says Baron, who remains a Kerzner International investor. Still, after so many years of dominating his company, Kerzner finds himself in the unusual position of being compared to his late son.

“People are still tremendously loyal to Butch at this company,” says O’Neil.

“Not a day goes by where folks don’t stop and wonder what Butch would have done in a certain situation.”