FIRST PERSON
ANTHONY CABOT PLEADS THE CASE FOR THE FUTURE OF CASINO GAMBLING
Introduction I spent a career inside the legal and regulatory machinery of the casino industry – advising clients, drafting policy, and watching as global gaming markets expanded with breathtaking speed. But over time, it became clear that something darker was unfolding beneath the surface. Junket operations, once sold as harmless intermediaries, had become financial conduits for transnational crime. They weren’t just bending the rules – they were redesigning the game. In this article I outline how casino gambling reached this point, how it pulled itself back from the brink and how we can all contribute to preserving it for the future. Random lapses or a broader pattern? While researching my latest book, Casino Redux , I unearthed evidence to document that evolution. Unlike Nicholas Pileggi’s portrait of the American Mafia, this story doesn’t center on a single city or a single set of actors. It follows the rise of the Chinese Triads as they embedded themselves in casinos from Sydney to Vancouver, from Macau to the Golden Triangle. These weren’t, for the most part, old-world gangsters with visible scars and whispered threats. They were discreet, digitally fluent, and globally networked – operating with the cooperation, or the willful blindness, of people who should have known better. Why write it now, in retirement? Because I could finally say what needed to be said. Because this industry – licensed by the public, protected by law – remains too often shielded by silence and technicality. And because if the next generation of gaming lawyers, regulators, and executives is to inherit something worth preserving, they must first understand what was allowed to grow in plain sight.
My research took me beyond the velvet ropes of VIP baccarat rooms to expose a calculated system: a transnational criminal infrastructure designed to launder money and evade currency controls. These weren’t random lapses. They followed a pattern – systematic, intentional, and global in scope. At a Vancouver casino, street-level couriers hauled hockey bags stuffed with drug cash into casinos, where Chinese high rollers exchanged the dirty money into clean chips. In Sydney, Crown Resorts funneled funds through bank accounts disguised as legitimate investments but used in laundering schemes like “cuckoo smurfing.” And in the Golden Triangle, casino resorts functioned not just as gambling halls, but as fronts – processing centers for trafficking networks dealing in narcotics, humans, and endangered wildlife – sustained not only by criminal syndicates, but by compromised officials. The geography changes. The playbook does not: cash-stuffed duffels in Vancouver, forged accounts in Sydney, trafficking fronts in Southeast Asia. Each is a node in a single, coordinated system – profitable, protected, and criminal. Junkets began as recruitment tools for high-stakes players. They evolved into unregulated banking systems, tailor-made for organized crime. Born in Macau, these operations spread across Australasia, North America, and Europe, embedding themselves in brick-and-mortar casinos and digital platforms alike. What unfolded was not a scattering of bad actors or occasional enforcement lapses. It was a fully entrenched criminal infrastructure, reinforced by political complicity. Billions in illicit funds flowed through casinos that, on paper, appeared compliant – but in practice, had become essential staging posts in the laundering pipelines.
PAGE 23
IMGL MAGAZINE | JUNE 2025
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker