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Hong Kong. United States casino regulators have warned operators against dealing with Macau’s triads, but analysts say gaming houses around the world have always attracted organized crime, not just in the Asian gambling hub.

The spotlight fell on the former Portuguese colony when New Jersey’s gaming watchdog released a previously confidential report that alleged gambling tycoon Stanley Ho has links with Macau’s criminal underworld.

The report noted that “numerous governmental and regulatory agencies have referenced Stanley Ho’s associations with criminal enterprises, including permitting organized crime to operate and thrive within his casinos.”

The tycoon, who controlled Macau’s gaming sector for four decades until it opened to foreign competition in 2002, rejected those claims.

“There is absolutely no foundation in any suggestion that he is associated with organized crime or triads,” a spokesman of Ho’s Shun Tak Holdings said.

Reports about mafia families operating in Las Vegas and Atlantic City had long dogged those gambling centers too, a senior police officer in Hong Kong said.

“It’s part of the whole industry — it always has been,” the spokesman said. “And it’s not just in Macau. Look at Las Vegas.”

Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau has publicly rejected suggestions that triads are still running amok in the only city in China that allows casino gambling.

The New Jersey report told Las Vegas-based MGM Mirage to cut its ties with Ho’s daughter Pansy — after deeming her “unsuitable” because of her business relationship with her father — or risk losing its gaming license.

MGM Mirage rejected the report’s findings and said it would instead sell a 50 percent stake in an Atlantic City casino-resort and quit New Jersey so it could keep its casino-hotel in Macau, which has leapfrogged Las Vegas in gaming revenue.

Now, the casino operator appears headed for another possible confrontation with gaming regulators in Illinois, Michigan and Mississippi after they said they would also examine MGM Mirage’s Macau business partner.

Macau’s reputation for organized crime reached a climax in the late 1990s when triad leader Wan Kuok-koi, known as “Broken Tooth Koi,” kept an iron grip on a large chunk of the city’s underworld. As a bloody power struggle raged between rival crime groups, frightened residents in the city of half a million saw the murder rate soar.

Portuguese authorities vowed to clamp down after a string of killings and firebombings, arresting Broken Tooth and several of his top lieutenants in 1998 ahead of the handover to Chinese rule the following year. The crime kingpin was jailed for 15 years.

“There are few overt displays of violence anymore,” said Steve Vickers, a former senior superintendent of the Hong Kong police and now head of consultant company International Risk. “It’s been largely contained. The landscape has also changed with new casinos and new foreign players. Macau is certainly not as Wild West as it once was.”

United States operator Las Vegas Sands recently dismissed a news report that said a triad member who allegedly plotted to murder a Macau casino dealer had at one stage run a high-roller gaming room at Sands Macau.

Last week, a former VIP gambling room manager at Ho’s Casino Lisboa pleaded guilty to laundering $50 million from a horse-race betting operation through Hong Kong bank accounts.

US regulators have now focused their attention on the city’s so-called junket operators, who are paid a commission by casinos to bring high rollers into those VIP gambling rooms.

Collecting unpaid gambling debts is illegal in mainland China, which means even above-board junket operators sometimes turn to unsavory characters as a way of collecting the money instead of going to courts, analysts said.

Vickers described the New Jersey report as “overly simplistic and poorly researched.”

“On the darker peripheries of the gambling business there are illegal activities such as loan sharking, prostitution and other activities,” he said “That has historically been the case in Macau and will always be the case.”

 

Agence France-Presse