In 2007, Sheldon Adelson opened the Venetian Macao, with the world’s largest casino. U.S. authorities are investigating his company’s compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Photograph by Matthew Niederhauser.
In the late summer of 2007, a fifty-year-old former barber named Siu Yun Ping began making regular visits from his village, in Hong Kong, to the city of Macau, the only Chinese territory where it is legal to gamble in a casino. Macau sits on a horn of rocky coastline, where the Pearl River washes into the South China Sea. It’s about a third the size of Manhattan, covering a tropical peninsula and a pair of islands that look, on a map, like crumbs flaking off the mainland. Chairman Mao banned gambling in China long ago, but it endures in Macau because of a wrinkle of history: the city was a Portuguese colony for nearly five hundred years, and when it returned to Chinese control, in 1999, it was entitled to retain some of the flamboyantly libertine traditions that led W. H. Auden to christen it “a weed from Catholic Europe.” The infusion of China’s new riches triggered an unprecedented surge of construction, and by 2006 Macau’s casino revenues had surpassed those of Las Vegas, until then the world’s largest gambling town. Today, the quantity of money passing through Macau exceeds that of Las Vegas five times over.
Siu Yun Ping—or Brother Ping, as friends called him—had known little good fortune. He grew up in the tin-roofed hut of a squatters’ settlement on the mudflats of rural Hong Kong. The year he was born, a fatal flood swept through the neighborhood; subsequent years brought drought, then typhoons. “It was as though the gods wished to destroy us by driving us mad,” a local official recalled in his memoirs. Siu had five siblings, and his education ended in primary school. When he wasn’t cutting hair, he found employment as a tailor and a construction worker. Gambling was technically illegal in Hong Kong, but, as in many Chinese communities, it was a low-key fixture of life, and, by the age of nine, he was pushing his way into the crowd to watch local card games. At thirteen, he was playing for small stakes, and an underground gambling den hired him to hang around and keep an eye on the players’ hands. “I’m good at observing people’s movements,” he told me recently. “Whenever I saw someone cheating, I told the boss.”
As an adult, he continued to play cards, though with little success. He was an unglamorous presence—trim and wiry, with plump cheeks, bushy hair, and the fast, watchful eyes of a man accustomed to looking out for himself. He married at nineteen, had three children, divorced, and married again. Around his home village, Fuk Hing, which means Celebrating Fortune, he was also known by a nickname that he did not much care for: Lang Tou Ping, or Inveterate Gambler Ping.
While working as a barber, he befriended a skinny local teen-ager named Wong Kam-ming. Wong had grown up in the same district, one of the poorest in Hong Kong, and had also dropped out of school to find work. They occasionally met for supper at a café where Wong worked for his mother. Siu was trying to become a small-town developer, building and selling houses among the paddy fields near his village, and Wong opened his own restaurant. They didn’t see each other often, but Siu said that they were “like brothers.” They became especially close in recent years, when Wong began working on the side in Macau, as a “junket agent,” recruiting gamblers, giving them lines of credit, and earning commissions on how much they bet. One of the people he recruited was Siu.
Once or twice a week, Siu boarded the public ferry for an hour-long trip across the rolling gray waters of the Pearl River estuary. Seventy thousand people turned up each day to try their luck, more than half of them from mainland China. He had no illusions about whether his habit was in his favor. “Out of every ten people who gamble, maybe three will win,” Siu said. “And when those three keep on gambling only one will win.” He played baccarat, the Chinese gamblers’ favorite. (It offers slightly better odds than the alternatives, and is easy to master.) The punto banco style, favored in Macau, involves no skill; the result is determined as soon as the cards are dealt.
In August of 2007, within weeks of beginning his regular trips, Siu hit a hot streak. Some days, he won thousands of dollars. Others, he took home hundreds of thousands. With Wong’s recommendation, he was invited into opulent V.I.P. rooms, which are open only to the biggest bettors, and he became a regular on the high rollers’ helicopter trips across the water. The more he played, the more Wong earned in commissions and tips. As winter approached, Siu’s success set in motion a chain of events that eventually reached Las Vegas and showed why Macau is a place where it’s easy to get in over your head, whether you’re a former barber in Hong Kong or one of the richest men in America.
Gambling towns are shrines to self-invention. In the eighteen-sixties, Monaco was a tiny backwater in financial distress after losing most of its land to France; then it built a casino, and became one of the world’s wealthiest places. Las Vegas was a desert outpost battered by sandstorms and flash floods—a land that the “Lord had forgotten,” in the view of nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries, who abandoned it—before it grew into the city that now attracts more people each year than Mecca. Hal Rothman, the late historian of the American West, wrote that Las Vegas posed the same question to every visitor: “What do you want to be, and what will you pay to be it?”
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