US regulators are sounding alarm bells over Macau’s triads, but analysts say casinos around the world have always attracted organized crime, not just in the Asian gambling hub.
The spotlight fell on Macau when New Jersey’s gaming watchdog released a previously confidential report that alleged gambling tycoon Stanley Ho (何鴻燊) 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,” Ho’s Shun Tak Holdings conglomerate said in a statement.
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 business ties with Ho’s daughter Pansy (何超瓊) — after deeming her “unsuitable” because of her business relationship with her father — or risk losing its state 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 the US states of Illinois, Michigan and Mississippi after they said they would also examine MGM Mirage’s Macau business partner.
Macau’s reputation for organized crime activity reached a climax in the late 1990s when triad leader Wan Kuok-koi (尹國駒), 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 saw the murder rate soar.
“There are few overt displays of violence anymore,” said Steve Vickers, Hong Kong’s former senior superintendent of police and now head of the International Risk consultancy. “It’s been largely contained ... Macau is certainly not as ‘Wild West’ as it once was.”
“We have never seen any evidence linking the listed gaming companies with triads,” said Aaron Fischer, a gaming analyst at Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA.
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,” said Vickers, who spent much of his police career infiltrating triads in Hong Kong and Macau. “That has historically been the case in Macau and will always be the case.”
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