In this regular feature in IAG to celebrate 17 years covering the Asian gaming and leisure industry, we look back at our cover story from exactly 10 years ago, “Crime Scene”, to rediscover what was making the news in August 2012!
One constant ever since Macau was handed back to China in 1999 has been the SAR’s standing as one of the safest places in Asia. That may come as a surprise to those who still hold the antiquated view that casinos equal crime, given Macau’s standing as the casino capital of the world, yet the numbers around violent crime don’t lie: in the past decade, Macau has averaged just 2.1 homicides per year with no more than 4 homicides in any single year (2012).
This, of course, wasn’t always the case. As detailed in the cover story of Inside Asian Gaming’s August 2012 edition, titled “Crime Scene: Shades of a violent past”, Macau in the years prior to the handover was a city gripped by gangland violence as triads waged open warfare – lured by the riches that awaited the winner within the high-stakes gambling rooms of Stanley Ho’s Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau (STDM) which at that time held the monopoly on casino gambling.
As IAG reported, there had been 21 gang-related murders in 1996 and another 20 in 1997, prompting General Manuel Monge – in an effort to allay the fears of the tourists – to quip, “Our triad gunmen are excellent marksmen” who “would not miss their targets and hit innocent bystanders.”
By 1999, the year of the handover, the number of annual homicides in Macau had grown to 42, but as Chinese rule grew closer it became clear that a new age of reckoning was upon us. A year earlier, in 1998, authorities arrested the leader of the 14K triad Wan Kuok Koi, better known as “Broken Tooth”, after a bomb exploded under the car of Judiciary Police director Antonio Marques Baptista.
Although he would not ultimately be charged with the bombing, he nevertheless later spent 15 years in prison on charges of loansharking, money-laundering and being a member of a criminal organization, among others – charges notably similar to those currently facing former Suncity Group CEO Alvin Chau following his arrest in November 2021.
Also attracting headlines in the months before the handover was the arrest and execution by firing squad of Hong Kong gangster Ye Cheng Jian, or “Cunning Kin,” following sentencing by the Provincial High People’s Court of Guangdong for a string of murders and robberies.
These instances, IAG mused at the time, drew a clear line in the sand that China would not tolerate such criminal activity.
The handover and subsequent liberalization of Macau’s gaming industry in 2001 – which saw triad-linked junkets moved into private VIP rooms within Macau’s glitzy new casinos on the proviso that they steer clear of trouble – ultimately saw violent crime rates tumble. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of reported homicides fell to between three and nine each year, and they’ve fallen even further since with two or fewer homicides in eight of the past 10 years.
Now, with the VIP industry having been shaken to its knees, it seems the days of triads ruling the streets of Macau are further away than ever.
