Pubdate: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 Source: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) Copyright: 2000 The Sydney Morning Herald Contact: GPO Box 3771, Sydney NSW 2001 Fax: +61-(0)2-9282 3492 Website: http://www.smh.com.au/ Forum: http://forums.fairfax.com.au/ Author: Richard Basham COUNTRY CLUBS FOR HIGH-ROLLING CROOKS? YOU CAN BET ON IT To pretend casinos are wholesome is to strike a deal with the devil, writes Richard Basham. There is one nasty little secret that every casino needs to keep mum: when you open one, bad people show up. They are honey pots to criminals. Recognising that gambling is a ready source of revenue, governments have increasingly moved into the business. They have used their moral authority to peddle the message that their casinos are somehow wholesome. Unfortunately, greed is a difficult thing to sanitise and governments which pretend otherwise have struck a Faustian bargain with the devil. Australia lives in a region notorious for its love of gambling. Asian governments, however, have mostly been extremely reluctant to accept legalised casinos. Their fear is that this will make already serious gambling and organised-crime problems unmanageable, as they have in Macau. When Sydney's Star City opened it targeted Asian gamblers. It felt there was a huge market of punters waiting in countries to our north and it knew there were large numbers of Asian-Australians who could be enticed to gamble. High rollers were recruited from Asia and casino buses were put on the Cabramatta-Darling Harbour run. The recruitment drives worked: most of the casino patrons were Asian. In August 1997, I was asked by casino surveillance authorities to help look into suspicious activity at the casino by people with known triad connections. The Heraldhad just revealed that Korean gangs had been running money-lending rackets out of the casino and scenes of gang enforcers beating a kneeling woman had been broadcast on television. When I walked into the high-roller rooms I knew immediately I had entered a country club for crooks, a place for successful drug dealers and other criminals to do deals and launder money. They had money and they were welcome. Behind the scenes, the surveillance team trained its cameras on individual gamblers, matched faces to passport photos and records which showed some of these high rollers gambling tens of millions of dollars at the casino, some with one-day buy-ins of chips exceeding a million dollars. Although the video surveillance tapes were routinely recorded over after 10 days or so, they contained a good deal of suspicious activity. As someone who had worked extensively with the NSW Police, I was excited to discover this potential gold mine for police intelligence. My dictum had come true: the Government had opened a casino and bad people had shown up. Clearly, these were people to watch, build cases against and, eventually, arrest. And before their arrests, while they gambled and laundered money at their club, they would at least enrich the Government coffers through their losses. The Herald's revelations shocked the Government. Its well-intentioned casino had attracted criminal rackets! The Premier made it clear he expected changes, and the Minister for Gaming suggested the Police Commissioner Peter Ryan should use his powers to exclude undesirables from the casino. Ryan obligingly cobbled together a list of hookers, drug dealers and others to ban. Somewhat strangely, the list included a number of people who rarely, if ever, gambled at the casino and omitted some major heroin dealers who did. It didn't make much difference, however, as news of the bans quickly spread, putting everyone on notice that their activities were being observed. Now, in 2000, the Faustian pact has reached the point where one of the few public servants in NSW who still dares to articulate an independent opinion is crucified for it. In a display of great indignation, the Premier has dispatched someone honest enough to admit what casinos are all about and moral enough to think that we should be taxing crooks, rather than just exploiting the weakness of ordinary working men and women to enrich the State's coffers. Dr Richard Basham, a specialist in Asian crime, is currently in San Francisco on sabbatical leave from the University of Sydney. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea