Bennett Michael Lifter, who built one of Sunny Isle Beach's signature '60s hotels and lobbied tirelessly for casino gambling -- believing it would transform Miami Beach into the world's premier vacation spot -- died Sunday, just shy of his 84th birthday on Oct. 6.

He'd been going to the office daily before leaving Aventura in May for heart-disease treatment in Houston, said son Aaron Lifter, a University of Miami student who helps run Lifter Enterprises.

The firm's one-time crown jewels were the Marco Polo Hotel and Waikiki Resort Motel, but Lifter also developed large residential/commercial tracts near what's now Land Shark Stadium and in the Golden Glades area, including the Lake Lucerne and Cloverleaf Gardens rental projects.

He once was the leading builder of single-family homes in Miami-Dade County -- mostly affordable housing -- and a mortgage broker.

In 1936, the Lifter family moved from Atlantic City to Miami Beach, where Bennett's father, Daniel, partnered with Eden Roc owner Morris Lansburgh in the Versailles, Sans Souci, Sherry Frontenac, Flamingo, Gulfstream, and Deauville hotels.

A University of Miami Law School graduate and decorated World War II combat veteran, Bennett Lifter followed his father's lead after briefly practicing law in the early 1950s.

Together, they planned the Waikiki, at 188th Street and Collins Avenue, in 1953, and the Marco Polo, in 1968, on what was then one of the last major oceanfront properties in North Beach.

They envisioned a 10-story, 400-room hotel at 192nd Street and Collins Avenue -- costing $4.5 million.

A charter member of the old Dade County Planning Advisory Board in 1959, Lifter evolved into ``the biggest hotelman in Sunny Isles,'' according to a 1979 Miami Herald story.

Rose Rice, who handled Lifter's advertising for 28 years, said he ``wanted to attract people who loved a good time, enjoyed the weather and the beaches.''

Expanded to 519 rooms before Lifter sold out to a condo developer in 1994, for $11 million, the Marco Polo once boasted a theater and Vegas-style acts in the Swingers Lounge.

A vocal foe of bed-tax hikes -- and anything else that hurt tourism -- Lifter poured a small fortune into three pro-gambling campaigns in the 1970s, '80s and '90s.

In 1994, he told the newspaper: ``I'm tired of seeing our hotels and our tourism industry running down. . . . We have done nothing to fend off competition with other towns where casinos are becoming a way of life.''

That year he also railed against Aventura's incorporation, which he felt would ``only create another level of taxes and bureaucracy.''

Lifter was ``almost insanely passionate about gambling,'' said Joann Biondi, to whom he gave an arts grant for the book Miami Beach Memories (Insiders' Guide, 2007). ``He felt it would be the salvation of Miami Beach. Years later, after he sold the hotels and had nothing to gain from it, he was still a really big advocate of it.''

In the book, the Philadelphia-born Lifter marvels at the area's metamorphosis from ``offbeat little enclave'' to ``one of the trendiest neighborhoods in America,'' in an essay entitled Son of the Beach.

``When I lived in South Beach, I was almost embarrassed to admit it. . . . It was where people without much money came to settle and build new lives.''

Biondi recalls that Lifter ``always had a twinkle when he talked about Miami Beach, which to him was the most magical place on Earth. The Jewish kids whose parents owned hotels and restaurants were in heaven there.''