CNMI: A Chinese Casino Has Conquered a Piece of America
Dr. Marty Rohringer was ending a graveyard shift at the lone hospital on Saipan, the exceptionally remote U.S. island, when four Chinese men arrived with a body.
The figure they had with them—a middle-aged man, also Chinese, naked but for his underwear—was unresponsive, and had clearly suffered severe trauma. As an orderly lifted him onto a gurney, the four men indicated in broken English that he had fallen from a hotel-room balcony.
Rohringer began to evaluate the man under the ER’s harsh fluorescent lights. His skin was pallid and turning blue, and it was obvious that he could not be revived. One of the men who’d arrived with the body started to mime chest compressions: Was there really nothing to be done? Rohringer pronounced the man dead just before 8 a.m. on March 22, 2017. Already, the medical staff suspected that the story of his fall was a lie.
The hospital had been inundated with patients from a construction site a few blocks away on this speck of rock among the Northern Mariana Islands, in the deepest part of the Pacific. To get a sense of Saipan’s isolation from the Lower 48, imagine flying from Denver to Honolulu. Then fly that far again. Then go farther still. Saipan (population 48,000) is nevertheless American soil, with U.S. dollars, U.S. mail, and U.S. laws. But the place has seemed less and less like America since 2014, when a Chinese casino operator arrived and—with near-total impunity—turned Saipan into a back door to the U.S. financial system.
At a temporary storefront, the company, Imperial Pacific International Holdings Ltd., was somehow handling more than $2 billion a month in VIP bets. And at the construction site, it was building a gargantuan casino with a crew of hundreds of Chinese, scores of them working illegally on tourist visas. So many laborers were getting hurt that Rohringer’s colleagues began keeping an unofficial spreadsheet, separate from standard hospital records: a grim catalog of broken bones, lacerations, puncture wounds, dislocated limbs, and eyes penetrated by flying metal. The dead man Rohringer saw was not, of course, a tourist who’d stumbled over a railing—he was a builder named Hu Yuanyou, and he’d plummeted from a scaffold. His colleagues hadn’t called 911; instead, they’d pulled the work clothes off his broken body in a clumsy attempt to obscure his identity. The less that outsiders learned about the casino, the better.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-15/a-chinese-company-has-conquered-a-piece-of-america
‘Piece was politically motivated’
Both Gov. Ralph DLG Torres and Imperial Pacific International (CNMI) LLC have belied the allegations raised in a Bloomberg article about the casino industry in the CNMI, with the governor describing them as blatantly false. The casino operator assured that it obeys all laws and regulations of the CNMI and the United States.
In a statement on Friday, Torres denied any illegal activity with IPI and that allegations contained in the story are from the perspective of an “off-island writer from London with limited exposure to our people, culture, history, and beauty of the CNMI.”
In a separate statement on Sunday, IPI said it repudiates all allegations of wrongdoing cited in the article.
According to the Bloomberg Businessweek piece published on Feb. 15, 2018, titled, “A Chinese Casino Has Conquered a Piece of America,” it said, among other things, that “in the first eight months of 2017, according to the regulators’ records, Imperial Pacific paid Torres Brothers $126,000.” One transaction, according to the article, said a relative of the governor received a payoff of $4 million at one time.
Read more: https://www.saipantribune.com/index.php/piece-politically-motivated/
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