Age of Ambition (14 page)

Macau was proving to be especially attractive to corrupt Chinese officials. It played a recurring role in the downfall of Party cadres, who headed to Macau with public funds and returned empty-handed. There was the pair of Party officials named Zhang and Zhang, from Chongqing, who lost more than $12 million at the casinos in 2004. A former Party chief in Jiangsu lost $18 million. A bureaucrat from Chongqing stood out not for scale but for speed: he managed to lose a quarter of a million dollars in just forty-eight hours. So many officials were arrested for squandering public funds in Macau that, by 2009, scholars calculated how much the average official might lose at the gambling tables before getting caught: $3.3 million.

To find untapped millionaires, the junket agents took to scouring the business press, looking for new faces. A thirty-nine-year-old junket agent told me, “Nowadays, in Macau, if a person doesn't gamble at least a few hundred thousand dollars, then he isn't even a real customer.” What happens if a customer doesn't pay up? “We go to the city where he is and call him up. Then, if necessary, we wait there for a couple of days. Just to put some pressure on him.”

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A few weeks after Siu Yun Ping's house was set on fire, a group of young men were summoned to a meeting in a parking lot on the outskirts of Hong Kong. The meeting had been called by See Wah-lun, a midlevel captain in one of China's most famous triads, the Wo Hop To.

The triad captain was a thickset man of thirty. He told his men about a plan to extort Siu. As one of them later described it in court, “A boss wanted a man to return some money.” The boss was Cheung Chi-tai, a gang leader who was well known to Hong Kong police and U.S. authorities. In the words of a Hong Kong judge, Verina Bokhary, Cheung could “have a say in things” in a VIP room at the Sands Macao, one of the places where Siu had made his baccarat fortune. Once he was suspected of cheating, Cheung's men tried to claw back his winnings.

See Wah-lun unveiled a straightforward plot: they would send Siu a message by ambushing his friend Wong, pinning his car between two others, and then hustling him over to a nearby village, where they had supplied a secluded, run-down building with gloves, hoods, knives, and extendable police batons. The plan was to break Wong's legs and hands. But then See called his guys back: the plan was being upgraded to murder, to guarantee that Siu would know they were serious and would hand over his winnings.

But when See Wah-lun gave his gang the assignment, his men balked. One of the recruits asked, “Do we have to be that serious?”

See was taken aback. “The boss tells you to do it, are you not going to do it?” he said.

Another of the chosen assassins complained that he was supposed to be a guest at a wedding that evening. A third, Lau Ming-yee, didn't like being asked to do the job gratis. “If you are not going to pay someone, then how would that someone help you?” he said later.

Lau was especially uncomfortable because he was acquainted with the intended victim; in his mid-twenties and the son of farmers, Lau had worked as a teahouse delivery boy, crisscrossing the neighborhood in his gold-painted Toyota. He occasionally dropped off food at Wong's village. “Everyone was shocked by the idea of killing anybody, never mind somebody some of us knew,” Lau said.

When See outlined Lau's role in the murder, Lau hesitated. The boss was incensed. “What the fuck do you have to think about?” he said.

Under pressure, Lau capitulated; he told the boss he would help out with the murder. But his heart wasn't in it. He had joined the Wo Hop To as a teenager, a small-time soldier under See's command, and it wasn't much of a living. Over the years, he'd worked at a newsstand and an Internet café. He had a girlfriend now, she was pregnant, and he had enough trouble trying to find five-hundred-plus dollars to repair a truck he had hit with his Toyota.

For the hitman Lau Ming-yee, everything about this job stank, and in the predawn hours on the day of the planned attack, he phoned a cop he knew and offered a tip. The two met near a local shrine called the Temple Under a Big Tree, and Lau told him everything—about the murder plot, about the God of Gambling, about the safe house and the hoods and knives. Later, in court, Lau explained, “I am the father of a child and I want to be a responsible man.” He had gamed out his options. A plea bargain might mean jail time, but he calculated that he would be out before it mattered—“before my child understands everything.”

Within hours, the police arrested five men. They went to trial that fall, and Lau testified against them. They maintained their innocence, but all were convicted of conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm and acting as members of a triad. See, the ringleader, was sentenced on additional charges of conspiring to commit murder and recruiting others to carry it out. The five men were sentenced to jail for up to fourteen years. (Lau received immunity for his cooperation.) During the investigation, police also briefly detained Cheung Chi-tai, the triad leader, but he didn't spend long in custody. According to John Haynes, See's defense attorney, Cheung “called his lawyer and refused to answer any questions, and as a result he escaped being charged with anything.” At sentencing, Haynes lamented that the “small potatoes” were going to jail while the “big boss … now sits comfortably, free from any charges, in Macau.”

Siu and his friend Wong testified at the trial, and they were asked to estimate how much Siu had amassed during his five-month winning streak. It was a complicated question, because high rollers in Macau often make side bets many times larger than the chips on the table. (In a side bet, a player and a junket agent secretly agree that every hundred-dollar chip is worth a thousand or ten thousand, and then they settle their wins and losses in private.) In total, Siu the barber estimated that he had won the equivalent of thirteen million U.S. dollars. Wong put the figure far higher: at seventy-seven million dollars.

The notion that a former barber had won as much as seventy-seven million dollars, and outlasted the mobsters charged with getting it back, attracted the attention of members of the Hong Kong press. For a while they pursued the God of Gamblers as a minor curiosity, though he declined interviews. A year after the trial, the Hong Kong magazine
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published an article alleging that Siu had cheated by finding a way to manipulate the system. The article claimed that he had paid off an underling who recorded players' ups and downs, in order to boost his wins and minimize his losses. The casino hadn't detected the fraud, the magazine surmised, because many of Siu's wagers were “side bets” off the books, and besides, the junkets hadn't dreamt that a no-name gambler might take the extraordinary risk of trying to buy off a staff member. Siu never responded to the article. In any case, local reporters discovered, he had disappeared.

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The God of Gamblers vanished from the local crime pages. Then, in the fall of 2010, a former executive at the Sands Macao, Steve Jacobs, filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit that made a range of accusations against Sheldon Adelson. Jacobs said that he and Adelson had discussed the God of Gamblers case, and the allegation that triads were involved with Sands casinos; over Jacobs's objections, he said, Adelson still sought to “aggressively grow the junket business.” Jacobs's suit also accused the Sands of hiring a Macau legislator in a way that could put the casino at risk of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars companies from bribing foreign officials. The casino company denied all the accusations and said that Jacobs was the one who had failed to distance the company from the triad boss.

But the U.S. government took notice of the suit: the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched investigations of the Sands for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Adelson vehemently denied any wrongdoing. “When the smoke clears, I am absolutely—not one hundred percent but one thousand percent—positive that there won't be any fire below it,” he said. “They want to get all my e-mails. I don't have a computer. And I don't use e-mails. I'm not an e-mail type of person.”

Adelson and his peers were discovering that doing business on the frontier of China's boom was risky in ways they had not anticipated. They were discovering just how much their fortunes now hinged on the behavior of others—of Communist Party cadres, Chinese triads, and even a barber with a dream of beating the house. The files of the God of Gamblers case could be read as a string of accidents: Siu's run at the baccarat table; Wong's luck to be assigned an assassin with a conscience; Adelson's misfortune that reporters covered an obscure murder plot involving his casino. But viewed another way, the tale depended as little on luck as a casino does. It was, rather, about the fierce collision of self-interests, a fable of China in its own Gilded Age.

In its excesses, its plots, its moral flexibility, Macau opened a window on the anxious new era in the People's Republic. In China, in the days of nearly universal poverty, there had been hardly anything to steal, and little reason to consider the moral pressures exerted by the prospect of sudden fortune. But China's combination of new wealth and opaque government was proving to be almost perfectly engineered for abuse.

By 2007, when Siu Yun-Ping hit his streak in Macau, the China scholar Minxin Pei noted that nearly half of all Chinese provinces had sent their chief of transportation to jail. Pei calculated that corruption of one kind or another was costing China 3 percent of its gross domestic product—more than the national budget for education.

For the Chinese government, Macau's roguish success posed a dilemma: how much should it be allowed to continue? China could have brought Macau's boom to an end by fiat—citizens needed a special permit to go to the city, and China opened and closed the flow of visitors at will—but cracking down on Macau posed political problems. Macau was a place where China's winners—those who built bare-handed fortunes, the members of the new Middle-Income Stratum—could go to indulge in the gains of their prosperity. So long as they didn't concern themselves with the state's inner workings, the state did not overly concern itself with theirs. On a flight between Macau and Beijing, I sat beside a former military officer who now owned real estate and a string of factories. He told me that he visited Macau once a month “to let off steam” and he spent much of that particular flight scrutinizing his latest acquisition: a twelve-thousand-dollar Vertu cell phone, encased in alligator skin and equipped with a button that connected him to a full-time concierge.

For the moment, the leaders of Macau, like their brethren in Beijing, saw no reason to change. When I contacted Manuel Joaquim das Neves, Macau's top casino regulator, he said, “Macau is not Las Vegas,” and it took me a moment to realize that he was invoking Vegas as a standard of prim moral constraint. “Macau has attracted more than twenty billion dollars in foreign investment in the casino industry alone,” he went on. “In short, the public interest has been well served.” It was a point of view consistent with the way the Party talked about its success in China: “Development is the only hard truth,” Deng had said, and for many people, that view was correct.

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Four years after Siu hit his hot streak, I got word through a friend in Hong Kong that he might be back in his old neighborhood, not far from the dismantled squatters' camps where he grew up. He was said to have worked out a deal for protection from another triad, the Wo Shing Wo. I took the train out to look for him. His neighborhood lay in a lush river delta framed by green hills on the horizon. The summer heat had broken, and construction seemed to be under way everywhere, as old villages were being converted into enclaves of villas and cul-de-sacs with names such as the Prestige, Sky Blue, and Full Silver Garden.

I found Siu at a construction site near a scrap metal yard, surrounded by marshy fields of water chestnuts and lilies, crosshatched by footpaths. He was in the real estate business, as he'd always wanted to be, and was building fourteen houses whose modern design, heavy on stainless steel and black granite, would have looked at home in Sacramento or Atlanta. When it was finished, the complex would be called the Pinnacle. Siu was wearing a droopy yellow golf shirt, jeans, and muddy sneakers. He seemed subdued, and his voice was raspy. He was barely distinguishable from his crew—tanned, bony middle-aged men from across the Chinese countryside. I arrived around quitting time to find one of them naked, giving himself a bird bath from a bucket of soapy water. When I introduced myself, Siu did not look overjoyed. But I explained that I'd been interested in him for a long time, I'd retraced his path, and I was curious, most of all, about why he took the risks he did. He agreed to talk to me. We settled into folding chairs beside a line of drying laundry and gazed out over the unfinished houses.

I asked where he had gone when he was on the run, and he smiled. “All over China,” he said. “I drove by myself. Sometimes I stayed in five-star hotels, and sometimes I stayed in tiny places. I liked Inner Mongolia the best. After a while, I went up to the mountains of Jiangxi and stayed there for eight months. When it began to snow, I nearly froze. I went down from the mountains and came home.”

I asked if he had cheated at baccarat. “The reporters just listened to rumors from people who wanted their money back,” he said. “Everybody says I was playing tricks at the table. It's not true. I wasn't. When I gambled, there must have been ten people with their eyes on me at any time. How am I supposed to play tricks?”

His denial left open a range of possibilities for manipulating the game. A lawyer for one of the defendants suggested to me that Siu might have been recruited as a minor player in a larger con, and then realized he could turn the caper toward his own benefit. It occurred to me that, if this was true, it meant Siu had allowed everyone else to project their ambitions on to him, before his own desire to get rich prevailed. But, the lawyer, added, “There is so much cheating going on. How can you ever know the truth?”