Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | August 2012 4 Cover Story A s much as the world has changed for Macau in the last decade, it doesn’t take a lot for those who were here in the bad old days at the turn of the century to recall what it was like when colonial rule, such as it was after 400 years, had disintegrated, and China had yet to assume sovereignty, and open warfare raged among the infamous triads for control of a city rich in vice, the big prize being the lucrative high-stakes gambling rooms of Stanley Ho’s Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau , which held the monopoly on casinos in the only place in China where casinos were legal. Twenty gang-related murders were reported in 1997, 21 the year before. The violence was so widespread that in an effort to allay the fears of the tourists, General Manuel Monge, under-secretary for security for the Portuguese government at the time, famously quipped that“our triad gunmen are excellent marksmen” who “would not miss their targets and hit innocent bystanders.” Which proved all too true, as those who attempted to enforce the law were not spared. Victims linked to triad assassins included a customs officer, a gambling inspector and General Monge’s own driver. On1stMay 1998, abombexplodedunder the car of Antonio Marques Baptista, director of the Policía Judiciára . The city had descended into something close to anarchy. Now and then, whenever the general’s droll words are exhumed, usually it’s as an epitaph on the last days of a dying order, before the arrival of the listed gaming corporations from America and their big- box resorts aimed at families, shoppers and conventioneers. That was not the case recently, when in the midst of a rare flurry of mayhem— three murders and a savage assault in the space of a month—they appeared in a New York Times story on the beating of 65-year- old Ng Man Sun, also known as Ng Wai and more popularly as “Street Market Wai,” a casino boss, junket operator and VIP room promoter who came up in Hong Kong’s rough-and-tumble Mong Kok District and holds a controlling stake in the Greek Mythology Casino out on Taipa island, not far from the glittering new Cotai Strip. Mr Ng was set upon on 24th June by a group of armed men in a restaurant in the New Century Hotel, where his casino is located, and worked over so roughly he had to be hospitalized. A couple of weeks later, in an unrelated crime, two mainland men in their 30s were Roughed up—Ng Man Sun Crime Scene Macau receives a discomfiting reminder of its violent past r i i ti r i r f it i l t t