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.