Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Since reverting to China in 1999, Macau, an hour away from Hong Kong by ferry, has flourished as one of the world's wealthiest cities. The territory's economy has soared in recent years -- much of the wealth generated by the enclave's casinos.
Indeed, the former Portuguese colony

has become a playground for China's nouveau riche. And the gleaming neon red lights of the Sands Macau casino are the first sights a visitor takes in as the ferry approaches Macau.

The link between Macau's gambling industry and organized crime may be an open secret, but it

has come under increasing scrutiny lately. Within the last two weeks, MGM Mirage said it would give up its holdings in New Jersey in response to pressure from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. The state agency had said that Pansy Ho, MGM Mirage's partner in Macau

and the daughter of casino tycoon Stanley Ho, was an "unsuitable" associate, an assertion stemming from the agency's belief that her father has links to organized crime.

The involvement of the triads in Macau's casinos is centered on the murky and highly profitable junket

business. The VIP sector brought in $9.9 billion last year, two-thirds of the enclave's total gambling revenues.

Macau has about 187 licensed junket operators, said Manuel Joaquim das Neves, director of Macau's Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau.
The junkets are crucial

because they ensure the flow of capital by extending credit to gamblers, often millions of dollars on a visit. They assume responsibility for collecting on their loans -- at times indelicately, authorities say.

When known crime figures applied directly for contracts,

blocking them was easy, Grove says. But if legitimate professionals submit applications and then sub-contract the work to the triads, detecting such ties was more difficult if not impossible

Cheung Chi-tai's ties to Sands Macau came through such a multi-tiered arrangement. His

solely owned company, Jumbo Boom Holdings, provided capital for another firm, now called Neptune Group, to acquire a stake in Hou Wan, a junket operator. Hou Wan was entitled to profits from Sands Macau's Chengdu VIP room.

Cheung owned more than 8 percent of Neptune Group in 2008, according to public filings with the Hong Kong stock exchange. That made him a substantial shareholder when the call for the dealer's murder went out.

Niglio said Neptune wasn't a junket itself but invests in VIP junkets that operate at the Sands Macau, the Venetian Macau and Galaxy Entertainment's StarWorld casinos. He said Neptune now had a 20 percent stake in Hou Wan, a junket operator that runs around 20 VIP tables at the.

Sands Macau. In Neptune's public filings three years ago, Cheung was described as a "merchant in Hong Kong" whose company "generally does not engage in underwriting business and has no underwriting experience as at the date of this announcement."
While Niglio described Neptune

merely as an "investor" in junkets, trial testimony placed Cheung inside the casino's private room.

According to testimony by Siu Yun-ping, aka the "God of Gambling", who won about HK$100 million ($12.9 million) between August 2007 and January 2008 at various casinos, Cheung

was "the person in charge" of the Chengdu Hall, one of the VIP rooms that Siu frequented.

A triad member turned informant named Lau Ming-yee testified that he, and the five men who would be convicted of engaging in triad activities, referred to Cheung as "the boss."

The judge in last year's murder-for-hire case, Madame Verina Bokhary, said in passing sentence that, "I bear in mind of course that, behind the scenes, there is a person or are persons even more blameworthy than any of them."
In the summaries of the trial called "particulars of

offense" the judge identified Cheung by his Cantonese nickname, "Tsang Pau," or "explosive money maker."

Asked specifically about whether Macau will strip the license from a casino operator if the regulators discover that it is hiring a junket operator with links to organized

crime, Neves said: "It's separate. In principle, it doesn't affect the concessionaires."

Unlike Las Vegas, where casinos tend to have direct relationships with their VIP customers, Macau's casinos rely on junket operators to bring them the majority of their high rollers, who

might easily lose US$1 million in an evening.

Most VIP gambling in Macau is leveraged: gamblers usually bet more than their cash on hand. This is particularly true of mainland Chinese high-rollers who, because of Beijing's strict capital controls, are limited to carrying the

equivalent of US$5,000 in renminbi per trip when they leave China. Macau's six publicly listed casino operators lend to only a small minority of their patrons, according to company filings. That is because collection of gambling debt is illegal in China and Macau forbids casinos

from writing off their bad or uncollectible debts.

That issue was front and center in the official report released by New Jersey gaming regulators in mid-March regarding MGM Mirage's partnership with Pansy Ho. Regulators cited the junket influence within her father's VIP rooms

as a prime concern. "The VIP rooms in (Stanley Ho's) casinos provided organized crime the entry into the Macau gaming market that it had previously lacked," the report said.

William Weidner, the former president of Sands, in a deposition for an unrelated Nevada court case in

2007, cited Galaxy's intent to run the VIP rooms in the traditional Macau style as one of the reasons for the split.
"These guys want to do VIP rooms the way they ... do them in Macau where the ... triad guys run them because they're the only ones that can grant and collect

credit in mainland China, and they smuggle the renminbi across the border," he said. "I can't do that business. That's the way they want to do it, so I can't do it."

While triads remain active in Hong Kong, the gangs have burrowed deeper into mainland China including cities like Chongqing and retain a strong imprint in Macau. The triads are believed to have originated as a rebel grouping in the early Qing Dynasty formed to help overthrow the

Even if crime groups are involved in the junket business, he says, with the casinos making so much money, the government reaping huge taxes, and the citizens of Macau enjoying full employment, there is scant political will to remove them.
"No one wants to crash the party," he

uscc.gov/sites/default/…’s%20Domestic%20Stability.pdf

A federal appeals court in New York has upheld the bribery conviction of the former chairman of a think tank funded by a Chinese energy company linked to Hunter Biden.
The three-judge panel on Tuesday affirmed the December 2018 conviction of Patrick Ho Chi-ping, 70, a former

Hong Kong government official, for violations involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for trying to bribe high-ranking officials in Chad and Uganda.
The bribes were made to secure oil rights and in pursuit of lucrative businesses deals on behalf of the Chinese energy behemoth

CEFC, which funded a think tank that touted a “special consultative status” with the United Nations and an office in Manhattan.

In 2019, FSG signed contracts to support China's One Belt and One Road initiative, including building a series of bases in China's Xinjiang, where the internment camps of ethnic Uyghurs attracted widespread allegations of human rights abuse.[2][19] Chinese Communist Party

officials in Xinjiang reported that FSG's work would enhance the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.[19] FSG's CEO, Dongyi Hua, was the key driver in investing the re-education camps.

In 1990, Prince secured an internship in the White House under George H.W. Bush,[11] but soon left to intern for California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, President Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter.

Early in Rohrabacher's congressional career in 1990 or 1991, KGB agent and deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg Vladimir Putin and two other Russians entered Rohrabacher's congressional office in Washington D.C. who subsequently became close friends according to Rohrabacher during a

2013 interview with KPCC.

A representative for Prince declined to comment on Prince’s decision to attend Rohrabacher’s inaugural event.
And photos from the inaugural ball show businessman Bijan Kian, the one-time business partner of former national security adviser Michael

Flynn who was on Trump’s transition team, floating among the party guests. Their former firm’s lobbying activity has also been part of the Mueller investigation.

"While styled as some sort of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agent Registration Act, in actuality it describes a conspiracy to have a 'friendship dinner' at Bistro Bis with a group of Americans and Russians to discuss foreign relations between the two countries."
It remains

unclear how his repeated contacts with alleged Russian operatives will play in his Southern California congressional district, where he was first elected in 1988. The GOP incumbent – who is seeking a 16th term in Congress – is facing a tough re-election bid in the 2018 midterm.

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