US regulators are sounding alarm bells over Macau’s triads but analysts say casinos around the world have always attracted organised 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,” Ho’s Shun Tak Holdings conglomerate said in a statement to AFP.

Reports about mafia families operating in Las Vegas and Atlantic City have long dogged those gambling centres too, a senior police officer in Hong Kong pointed out.

“It’s part of the whole industry — it always has been,” said the officer, who asked not to be identified. “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 business ties with Ho’s daughter Pansy — after deeming her “unsuitable” because of her business relationship with her father — or risk losing its state gaming licence.

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 organised crime activity 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, who later received a 15-year jail sentence, was reportedly arrested while watching an American gangster film.

“There are few overt displays of violence anymore,” Steve Vickers, Hong Kong’s former senior superintendent of police and now head of the International Risk consultancy, told AFP.

“It’s been largely contained. The landscape has also changed quite considerably with new casinos and new (foreign) players. Macau is certainly not as ‘Wild West’ as it once was.”

US 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 flagship Casino Lisboa pleaded guilty to laundering about 50 million US dollars from an illegal horse-race betting operation through Hong Kong bank accounts, local media reported.

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.

Mainland Chinese punters account for at least 75 percent of Macau’s gaming revenue. But they are restricted in terms of how much money they can bring into the city so junket operators extend them loans.

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

But even if many accept this as a reality of doing business in Macau, listed casino firms, including Ho’s Macau unit SJM Holdings, keep their distance from the murkier end of the industry, they said.

“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.”

Thanks To : GOOGLE

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