A confidential report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), cited on GlobalNews.com, indicates that a businessman “connected to Asian organized crime” was allowed by a British Columbia government employee to buy part of a B.C. Lottery Corp. casino. That same government employee was later hired in a B.C. casino, the report alleges.
The unsavory charge, as well as reports of sex trafficking and additional government corruption, emerges as the province’s gaming industry is still recovering from allegations of widespread money laundering in industries including casinos, car sales and real estate.
The report was filed in January 2009 by the RCMP’s anti-illegal gaming unit. It contained allegations that women with gambling debts in Asia were trafficked to B.C. and forced into sex work, and that children in B.C. had been thrown in the trunk of a car and warned at gunpoint that their father owed $300,000, the website reported.
The report argued that the RCMP’s anti-illegal gaming unit (IIGET) should target the drug cartels using B.C. Lottery Corp. casinos in combination with illegal casinos, to launder money. At the time, the IIGET was funded by B.C. Lottery Corp., and was only permitted to target illegal casinos.
But three months later, instead of following the report’s recommendations, B.C.’s government defunded and disbanded the illegal gaming unit.
Former Crown prosecutor Sandy Garossino told Global News the report is “is shocking to the conscience” and points to “the appearance of corruption in the regulatory system.”
“I always believed in this report we would finally find this kind of detail, and it is so important it is finally coming to light,” Garossino said.
B.C. government documents claim the decision was based on funding pressures in the B.C. Lottery Corp. and that IIGET was ineffective.
The report stressed that money laundering between legal and illegal casinos was an integrity concern for B.C.’s government. It said that organized crime infiltrated legitimate gaming venues to launder money.
“Illegal and legal gaming share the same issues, such as loan-sharking, extortions, assaults, kidnappings and murders,” the report says. “And illegal and legal gaming have been interlinked when, in some cases, casino staff have directed patrons to loan sharks or to common gaming houses.”
These links between government facilities and underground casinos suggested that “corruption undermines the integrity of gaming in British Columbia,” the report said.
But in the case of one B.C. casino that is not identified in the report obtained by Global News, the organized crime connection was more fundamental and damaging to the integrity of gaming.
“More specific connections to Asian Organized Crime is/was through a subject, connected to Asian organized crime, who was allowed to buy into a casino,” the report said, pointing to an unidentified investor whose “casino business associates also have Asian Organized Crime connections.”
“The regulatory investigator, involved in the share transfer process, is alleged to have known about these connections when this subject originally bought into a casino,” the report said. “The regulatory investigator is now retired from the provincial government. However, he still appears to be involved in the legitimate gaming industry.”
