Question of the Day - 22 December 2024

Actually, Alvin Chau was sentenced to 448 years in prison by the Macau Court of First Instance, but sentencing limits reduced his time to 18 years, of which he'll have served two in January (he was convicted in January 2023). 

Chau was (and probably still is from prison) one of the most prominent figures in Macau's multi-billion-dollar junket industry. The former chairman of Suncity Group, Chau was convicted on several charges, including illegal gambling operations, fraud, and criminal association.

As for who he is, a book could be written about him.

Alvin Chau Cheok-wa was born in Macau in May 1974; he'll be 51 next year. Little is known about his first 30 years and he's not talking; all he's said is, "Before I was thirty years old, I was nothing. After thirty years old, I began to have some thoughts and goals.”  

But he grew up in the midst of Macau’s turbulent and violent Triad wars and it's known that his involvement in the VIP-room trade began around age 20. During that era, "Broken Tooth" Wan was the Chinese version of the Godfather of organized crime in Macau, so it has to be assumed that Chau was one of Wan's 1,000 representatives on the street, hustling players for the Big Boss. Chau was reportedly on the exclusive list of Broken Tooth’s visitors when he served his own 12 years in prison, so it's not a stretch that Chau received Wan's blessing, not to mention $4 million in cash to start his own junket business, Suncity Group. From the start, Chau was also reportedly connected to Cheng Ting Kong, a suspected Hong Kong crime boss.

Over the next 25 years or so, Alvin Chau ascended to the rarified realm of billionaires, embodying a life of jaw-dropping extravagance. With a private jet for globe-trotting, a yacht fit for royalty, and a fleet of luxury cars, Chau epitomized the modern-day crown prince of Macau’s newfound prosperity. In addition, his public persona was designed to dazzle the masses. His virility was part of this curated image, with magazine spreads flaunting his chiseled physique and voguish tattoos. Even in the boardroom, he defied conventions, opting for leather pants over traditional suits. With a movie-star aura, photographers captured him on society pages, often in the company of a Malaysian-American model. Gossip columns chronicled his romantic escapades, detailing his simultaneous roles as husband and father to children by his wife and father to children by his mistresses.

As for business, at its height, Suncity and its subsidiaries were in charge of no fewer than 17 VIP rooms in casinos owned by all six of Macau’s licensed casino concessions. To put that into perspective, Chau controlled more than half of Macau’s lucrative junket market. He also operated online gambling sites, manipulating cryptocurrencies in the process, got involved in sports betting, and in a masterstroke, ran a side-bet operation out of his VIP rooms. This involved double booking the action at the casino table games, in which a gambler makes a $1,000 bet at baccarat, for example, and the junket operator books a second under-the-table bet of $2,000 on the same outcome. Macau prosecutors alleged that Chau's junket operators used a multiple as high as 25 times the original bet at the table, bypassing both the casino and the taxman in the process. 

But that was just a scratch on the surface of his business dealings and influence. He was a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference's Guangdong Provincial Committee, a powerful political position. He also had intricate and extensive dealings with North Korea, flouting international sanctions to deliver oil and other commodities to Kim Jong Un's regime. 

Chau's empire also branched into restaurants, concert promotions, event planning, travel, luxury retail, and of course, financial services — “overseas investment immigration planning,” round-the-clock trading in securities, forex, and commodities, international real estate, even Indonesian iron-ore mining. Suncity also ventured into movie production and for a time, Chau served as chair of the Macau Films & Television Productions and Culture Association. His production company produced action movies that fused patriotism with gambling and the Triads, including the From Vegas to Macau trilogy and Kung Fu Jungle.

The list of Chau's businesses, accomplishments, and high-ranking positions goes on and on and on.

At the same time, as part of the Chinese government's crackdown on casino-related corruption and unchecked money flowing out of the country, the long arm of the law was reaching out for Chau. He was finally arrested in November 2021; only a week later, Suncity closed all of its VIP rooms in Macau. 

The court found Chau guilty of running a vast illegal gambling network that spanned the globe: 229 counts of illegal gambling in licensed premises, 54 counts of major fraud, and one count of criminal association. 

He was convicted of pretty much everything and received 12 years for Triad activities, a year and a half for each of the 103 illegal side-betting charges, five years for each of the 54 counts of substantial fraud against the government and concessionaires, three years for each of three fraud attempts, and another two and a half for general illegal gambling. When all the individual sentences were tallied, Chau faced a staggering 448 years behind bars. The judge, constrained by local laws, reduced the total to 18 years. Oh, and Chau was fined a mere $831 million, to go to the Macau government for lost taxes.

All of Chau's appeals were rejected and if he serves out his full sentence, he'll emerge from Macau’s Central Prison, the same one where Broken Tooth Wan was incarcerated, when he's 67.