The Godfather of Macau

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Though Mr. Stanley Ho has no criminal record, investigations by the states of New Jersey, Nevada, and Mississippi have concluded that Mr. Ho allows triad members free reign to conduct their business in his casinos. These businesses include money laundering, lone sharking, human trafficking, and of course, trafficking in drugs.

In an article published in the Macau Daily Times, the FBI is looking to make a deal with Stanley Ho. The Bureau is interested in his well documented ties in China, as well as his possible access to North Korean leaders. For decades Stanley Ho has controlled gambling in North Korea.

Through his Sociedade de Turismo Diversoes de Macau (STDM), he controls many hotels and much of the property development. Ho has a major stake in the new airport and its airline, Air Macau. His empire encompasses everything from the local jockey club, lottery and dog races, to the TV stations that promote them. And should punters somehow flee his casinos with change in their pockets, Ho still extracts a final cut. Most visitors come from Hong Kong on the world's largest fleet of high-speed ferries, run by Ho's Shun Tak Holdings, a Hong Kong listed company with market capitalization of over US$1 billion.

He learned Japanese during the war, and has been reported to have profited heavily during the Korean War. "Ho made his fortune as a gunrunner to North Korea," notes one old Asian hand.

After his father lost the family fortune in the stock market, Ho got his start during the Second World War with a trading company in Macau. “By the end of the war, I’d earned over a million dollars—having started with just ten,” he said later. He expanded into airlines, real estate, and shipping, and in 1962 he and associates took over Macau’s casinos, gaining a monopoly that lasted forty years and made him one of Asia’s richest men.

In his choice of business partners, he was non-judgmental; he ran horse racing under the Shah of Iran, a gaming boat under Ferdinand Marcos, and an island casino under Kim Jong Il.

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Yanggakdo International Hotel is the largest working hotel and the second tallest building in North Korea, after the Ryugyong Hotel. The hotel is located on Yanggak Island, two kilometres to the south-east of the centre of Pyongyang, the nation's capital. The structure was built between 1986 and 1992 by France’s Campenon Bernard Construction Company and opened in 1995.

The basement contains a bowling alley, a pool room, a swimming pool, a barber shop, a casino and a massage club run by a Chinese company with an exclusively female staff.

Hong Kong gambling mogul Stanley Ho's casino empire Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau (STDM) also does business there, having operated a casino in the basement of the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang since the mid-1990s.

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Born in 1921 to one of Hong Kong's most influential families, the Ho Tung clan, Mr. Ho skillfully navigated Macau's transition to Chinese rule and was appointed to China's highest political advisory body.

He curried favor through spending lavishly to repatriate national art treasures. Most famously, he spent $8.9 million in 2007 for a bronze horse head, part of a fountain destroyed by British and French troops in an 1860 imperial retreat.

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In 1995, Macau's casino magnate Stanley Ho posed for a photograph on the doorstep of the White House with Wong Sing-wa which had a partnership with Chen Kai Kit.

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His tens of millions of dollars of investment in horse racing in Iran during the reign of the Shah had to be written off after the revolution in 1979.

Ho was born in 1921 to a distinguished Eurasian family in Hong Kong. One of his grand uncles was the late Sir Robert Ho-tung, who as compradore of Jardine Matheson, was widely considered the richest man in Hong Kong in those days. Despite their European features, most members of the family long ago adopted the Chinese way of life. Sir Robert, for example, was always seen in public wearing the traditional Chinese gown for men.

In 1934, when Ho was 13 years old, his father was bankrupted by losses in share speculation and fled to Vietnam. Ho finished high school on a scholarship and went on to study at the University of Hong Kong.

At the outbreak of World War II, with the help of a relative, Ho found a job at a Japanese-owned import/export firm in Macau, which, as a colony of neutral Portugal, was not invaded by Japan.

The company was involved in barter trade, supplying machinery, parts and boats to the Japanese in return for food that was in great demand by the ballooning population of war refugees from neighbouring regions.

Ho quickly won the trust of his employers and was made a partner of the company a year later. Part of his new responsibility was to accompany the firm's ships carrying goods between Macau and the Japanese occupied territories in China. These were life-threatening missions because his ships had to pass through waters where pirates prowled.

On his second trip, Ho's ship was intercepted by a well-armed band of pirates. They shot some of Ho's crew in the chase and, after boarding the ship, they took all the goods, money and personal belongings of everyone on board, including the clothes they were wearing. Ho and his remaining crew were mostly naked when they returned to Macau.

While in Macau, Ho had learned to speak Japanese fluently enough for him to represent his company in negotiating with the Japanese navy for the exclusive right of passage of his company's ships. His success in those negotiations ensured for his company a near monopoly in the supply of essential food to Macau. For his efforts, his company paid him a bonus of one million patacas (US$126,000), making him one of the richest men in his new home two years after he arrived there with HK$10 (US$1.28) in his pocket.

Ho's company continued to prosper after the end of the War. Soon he began diversifying his business into real-estate investment in Hong Kong.

Winning the casino franchise

One day in early 1961, Ho received an unexpected visitor from Macau who was going to change his life forever. That visitor was his brother-in-law, Teddy Yip, a debonair Macau businessman with a high-profile passion for racing cars and beautiful women.

Yip came to offer Ho the partnership in a newly established company to bid for the casino franchise in Macau. Ho didn't need much persuasion from Yip. He was in.

At that time, wresting the franchise from the firm clutch of the influential Fu family in Macau was seen as impossible - except for the fact that the newly appointed Portuguese governor of Macau had let it be known that he did not feel the government was getting its fair share of the income from gambling.

Ho's company, which was later renamed STDM, won the bid with the highest offer plus undertakings to promote tourism in Macau by investing in new hotels and other infrastructure facilities.

The first thing Ho did after winning the casino franchise was to give the gambling business in Macau a new face. This meant starting from the basics. For example, croupiers in Macau's casinos were used to wearing whatever they liked on the job. Many of them wore singlets and sandals. Ho made them wear uniforms to work.

He also introduced many new games to the casinos. Some of these games, such as blackjack and baccarat, have become highly popular among gamblers from Hong Kong.

Traditional Chinese management style

In running the casinos, Ho's management style is decidedly traditional Chinese, sources close to him say. Most of his staff look upon him as their big brother who will take care of them.

Ho has not disappointed them. Once a disgruntled casino guard burst into Ho's office in the Lisboa, pointed a loaded gun at Ho's head and demanded money.

Ho persuaded his assailant to surrender to the police and promised to take care of his family while he was doing time. The guard did what he was told. Not only did Ho keep his promise, he also gave the man a concession to operate a convenience store in the Jai Alai Stadium after he was released from jail.

In the early 1960s, Ho began using hydrofoils to ferry gamblers from Hong Kong to Macau. These fast boats shortened the journey between the two territories from the three hours it took to travel by larger passenger ships to around 75 minutes. Now, even faster jetfoils have replaced hydrofoils as the main mode of transport, further reducing the journey time to about 50 minutes.

Shun Tak owns and operates a fleet of 18 jetfoils and two foilcats. Together they make an average of 141 trips a day between Hong Kong and Macau. They carry more than 10 million passengers a year, which represents a market share for Shun Tak in excess of 75%.

A mecca for gamblers

Opened in the early 1970s, the Hotel Lisboa has remained the largest hotel in Macau. Its two opulent gambling halls quickly became a mecca for gamblers from around the region. Since then, Ho has added five more hotels to his portfolio. They include the Sintra, Mandarin Oriental, Hyatt Regency Macau, Westin Resort and Bela Vista.

Ho says that he foresaw many years ago that there would be strong demand for first-class hotels in Macau to cater for the increasingly affluent visitors from Hong Kong. 'Now, I have six hotels; I am building a few more,' he says.

One of the first infrastructure projects undertaken by Ho after he won the casino franchise was to develop a new harbour near the commercial and hotel district of Macau. To do that, his engineers would have to find a way to prevent the harbour from silting up from the vast amount of mud brought down by a tributary of the Pearl River.'Most people thought it could not be done,' Ho recalls. 'But I did it, and the harbour is still there.'

Shaping Macau's role as a gateway

The gambling boss has also played a leading role in shaping Macau as the gateway to the neighbouring economic zones of China. In the late 1970s, it became clear that, to be a servicing centre, Macau would need to vastly upgrade its infrastructure facilities, including the building of an international airport.

Ho, together with STDM, took a one-third interest in Sociedade Internacional do Aeroporto de Macau, established in January 1989 for the building of the airport. The remaining shares were held equally by the Macau government and a company representing China's interests in Macau.

The ground-breaking ceremony, officiated by the then-governor of Macau, the head of the New China News Agency in Macau and Ho, was held in December that year. Little did Ho know at that time that he was stepping into a political minefield that would teach him a valuable lesson about bureaucratic intrigues in modern China.

It seemed that local government officials of Zhuhai, which was building its airport at the same time, did not welcome the competition from Macau.

Their complaints to Beijing about noise pollution interrupted progress on the Macau airport for nearly a year. At one stage, Zhuhai suspended the supply to Macau of much-needed sand for the construction of the airport.

Although these issues were eventually settled, the delay pushed the cost of the project to nine billion patacas from the original estimate of 3.5 billion patacas. Because the Chinese partner refused to put up additional capital, Ho had to increase his stake to more than 40%, making him the largest single shareholder in the airport company.

The airport, which was opened last year, can handle six million passengers and 160,000 tonnes of cargo a year.'The growth in business since opening has been in line with our projections,' says Antonio Rato, director of administration of Airport, the company which is contracted to manage the Macau facilities.

But the airport is not expected to turn a profit anytime soon. 'Airport is a long-term investment,' says Rato.

Nam Van Lakes development

In the more promising Nam Van Lakes development project, Ho was forced to yield a bigger share of the pie to Chinese interests. 'All I wanted was to see this project succeed because it's so important to the future of Macau,' says Ho.

The 13 billion pataca project calls for the development of a new city on 1.75 million square metres of reclaimed land that will increase the area of Macau proper by more than 20%.'More than 60,000 people are going to be living and working there,' says Jorge Pereira, financial manager of Nam Van Development Co, which owns the project. 'Nam Van is going to change the face of Macau.'

Initially, Ho controlled a 35% stake in Nam Van Development, making him the biggest single shareholder in the company. The remaining shares were held by numerous Chinese enterprises and Macau companies controlled by Chinese interests.

But on the day before the ground-breaking ceremony was scheduled to take place, the Chinese government issued a statement denouncing the Macau government for under-selling the development rights to Nam Van Development. Not surprisingly, no representative from China attended the ceremony on July 7, 1992.

The Macau government backed down and in the ensuing re-negotiation, Nam Van Development agreed to restructure and to make additional land available for public usage instead of paying a higher premium to the government. In the restructuring, companies controlled by Chinese interests increased their aggregate shareholding in Nam Van to a controlling 55%. Ho has kept his stake and remained chairman of the company.

If Ho is fazed by this, he is not showing it. 'At this point in my life, money is not everything,' he says.

Friends say that Ho has mellowed. 'He has lost many of the rough edges,' says one friend.

Although he has appointed two of his daughters to the board of Shun Tak, nobody has emerged as the heir-apparent of his gambling empire. 'I won't necessarily pass it on to my children,' he says. 'I want to give it to the right person.' But when?'I think I will retire in 1999,' says Ho. 'When Macau is returned to China, I think it is about time to retire.'

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Stanley Ho was born in 1921 to a distinguished Eurasian family in Hong Kong. One of his grand uncles was the late Sir Robert Ho-tung, who as compradore of Jardine Matheson, was widely considered the richest man in Hong Kong in those days.
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Sir Robert Ho-tung was known as "the grand old man of Hong Kong."

He was a Eurasian, born to a man of Dutch Jewish ancestry named Charles Henri Maurice Bosman, who had arrived in Hong Kong in 1859-ish in the employ of a Cornelius Koopmanschap, a coolie trader.

Koopmanschap, who had success importing Chinese to help build the Central Pacific Railroad, has been described as "one of the more intriguing characters of the Gilded Age." However, In 1867, the US Congress banned the coolie trade to the USA as being a form of slavery.

Charles Henri Maurice Bosman, who also happens to be Bruce Lee's great grandfather, was at some point the Dutch Consul. He was a director of the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company with James Whittall, the resident senior partner of Jardines at the time. Bosman ran marine insurance and Jardines were one of his clients.

He sold his assets and left Hong Kong some time between 1868 and 1873.

Sir Robert Ho Tung
Hotung went to Canton, where he worked as a clerk for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. In 1880, he returned to Hong Kong and joined Jardines as an assistant in the compradore department.

He also set up his own firm, Ho Tong & Company, which began to do business under its own steam, initially trading sugar. The did general trading and invested in military vessels and property. It had extensive investments in Shanghai, Qingdao and Manchuria, as well as Hong Kong and Macao. In 1928, he took over an ailing Hong Kong newspaper.

His bilingual skills and business acumen eventually propelled him to become Head Compradore, a position he held until his retirement in 1889.

By the age of 35, he was believed to be the richest man in Hong Kong.

Hotung financed revolutions, including the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen to establish the Republic of China. He was also a friend of reformers Kang You-wei and Chiang Kai-shek.

He knew members of the British royal family and government. In a tour of Europe in 1932, he also met French president Albert Lebrun and German president Paul von Hindenburg.

He was a cherished friend of Sir Thomas Jackson, the third Chief Manager of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

He died on 26 April 1956 in Hong Kong, aged 93.

Hotung's second son, Robert Ho Shai-lai (1906–1998), was a general under the Kuomintang regime. He renounced his British nationality and became a citizen of the Republic of China.

Ho Fook, a younger brother, succeeded his father as Head Compradore at Jardines in 1889. One of Ho Fook's grandsons is Stanley Ho, the casino and shipping magnate.

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January 31, 2000

Media reports quoting a 1999 intelligence report from Canada have linked Ho to an international crime syndicate, while politicians have alleged he illegally contributed to the campaign fund of US President Bill Clinton.

"The allegations are unsupported by any evidence and groundless," said Ho.

Ho, who holds the exclusive gaming franchise in Macau, has poured in $30 million, or 10 percent equity in BW. He owns 40 percent of the New World Hotel in Makati City, and has held on to P500 million worth of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) shares which he acquired way back in 1987.

From 1975 to 1986 he operated nine casinos in Manila, but eventually pulled out because he had a falling out with associates of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

"I made a lot of money then but received nothing. The money went to Marcos...he was very clever. I was promised 10 percent of revenues at the start, before
I had an argument with (Roberto) Benedicto," Ho told reporters.

Ho's decision to re-invest in the Philippines was influenced by the equally controversial businessman and presidential friend Dante Tan, who had invited him to invest in the on-line Bingo Filipino six months ago.

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Lui Che Woo was born in Jiangmen, China in August 9, 1929. He is Chairman of K. Wah Group, owner of Galaxy Entertainment Group.

As of November 2013, he is the second richest man in Asia. Then in January 2014, with a worth of US$21 billion, he was named the second richest man in Hong Kong

Lui is a pioneer in Hong Kong construction materials industry. In the 1960s, he embarked on property investments. In the 1980s, he set his sights on hotel development. In the 1990s, Lui expanded his business into Mainland China. In 2002, he ventured into Macau’s gaming business and is now one of the six gaming concessionaries in Macau where he aims at developing world class travel, leisure, shopping, meeting, convention, exhibition and entertainment facilities.

On May 2011, Galaxy Entertainment Group Limited opened the $2 billion Galaxy Macau casino and hotel in Macau

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Wan Kuok-koi, popularly known as Broken Tooth Koi, was, until his arrest, the leader of the Macau branch of the 14K Triad.

Wan had a tough childhood, growing up in the slums of Macau and fighting for his life on the street, before rising through the ranks of the 14K. His rise was accelerated by the arrival of another gangster, Ng Wai, whom he began to work for. As Wan's position in the 14K got higher, Wai asked him to 'eliminate' his boss, Mo-Ding Ping, an assignment which Wan accepted. This provoked a year-long turf war, finally coming to a close when Ping had to flee Macau to avoid a murder charge.

However, tension between the two gangsters grew as Wai grew wary of Wan's high-profile persona. Teaming up with rival triad group the Shui Fong, a vicious turf war broke out in 1996 and 1997.

In 1997 Wan briefly fled Macau to avoid two arrest warrants, one from a new anti-triad law enacted in Macau, and one for drug-trafficking from China. However in August a Portuguese judge cleared Wan of all charges, and unexpectedly retired and moved back to Portugal the very next day.

Wan then proceeded to attack Wai in public, putting up posters claiming he was a drug trafficker and declaring that anyone visiting Wai's casinos would become his enemy. Ultimately, Wan amassed enough power and influence and took over Wai's rackets completely. By this time he was earning $6 million a month from his legal gambling establishments.

In the autumn of 1997, Wan approached Hong Kong movie producer Henry Fong Ping to produce a film based on his life. The result was the 1998 movie Casino (aka Ho Kong Fung Wan) starring Simon Yam as Giant, a triad boss living the high life in the Macau underworld. Wan agreed to extensive research meetings to make the film as accurate as possible.

A week before opening night, as he watched his own movie Casino, Wan was arrested and charged with illegal gambling, loan-sharking, criminal association, and attempted murder of the chief of police. In November 1999, in a landmark trial, he was convicted and jailed, along with eight associates including his brother Wan Kuok-hung. Wan was sentenced to 15 years in prison. All assets of the nine were confiscated.

Wan was released from prison on 1 December 2012.