ASIA & OCEANIA
Legacy secured the Godfather and King of Gambling passes
The tycoon officially retired from SJM Holdings in 2018 having founded the company more than half a century ago.
Stanley Ho Hung-sun’s family is one of the most influential and wealthiest in Hong Kong and Macau
Stanley Ho’s grandfather Ho Fook is the younger brother of Robert Ho Tung, the tycoon who secured the family’s foundation. Both have a younger maternal half-brother, Ho Kom-tong, who had 12 wives and more than 30 children, including an adopted daughter, Grace Ho Oi-yu, who was Bruce Lee’s mother. Bruce Lee was a cousin of Stanley Ho.
Stanley Ho was a keen dancer and well-known for his waltz, cha-cha and tango skills. In 1988, he met Angela Leong On-kei, then a dance instructor, at a private event at the Casino Lisboa. Stanley Ho’s fourth wife is now the managing director of SJM Holdings with a net worth of US$520m).
Nicknamed the ‘Godfather’ and the ‘King of Gambling’, Stanley Ho bore some resemblance to the young Vito Corleone in the Godfather Part II, as both started with an “import and export” business.
During the Second World War a young Stanley Ho smuggled food and luxury goods into China from Macau, then a Portuguese colony with neutrality between Hong Kong, Japan and China, and made his first fortune by the age of 24.
Stanley Ho had a penchant for luxury cars, with his favourite being Rolls-Royce. His 2003 Rolls-Royce Phantom cost HK$7m, while he also owns the “HK 1” registration plate which is said to be worth HK$100m.
Stanley Ho studied at Queen’s College in Hong Kong, but his academic results were very poor during the first two years, ranking himself as “the second last, if not the last.” But in the second term of his third year, he became the best student in the class motivated by a downturn in the family business. He retained his place as the number one student, and obtained a scholarship not only from Queen’s College every year, but also from the University of Hong Kong.
P26 NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE / MARKET DATA
Stanley Ho, the man who built the Macau casino industry, has died at the age of 98 at the Hong Kong Sanatorium Hospital. Mr. Ho founded SJM Holdings, valued at around US$6bn, and held a monopoly for casino gaming in Macau until 2002 when the enclave licensed five other operators to operate casinos.
Te origins of the gaming industry in Macau are underpinned by a single man, Stanley Ho, commonly known as Macau’s ‘underground governor’. Te ninety-eight year old retained the title of Macau’s richest man until his death, having enjoyed a four- decade long monopoly of Macau’s gaming industry that began in the 1960s and ended just after the turn of the millennium.
In the ’60s, gaming in Macau was introduced by the government to enable the struggling region to provide for itself as interest in Macau as a trading port had waned after the Second World War, leading to Macau becoming the only place where legal gambling could occur in China.
Stanley Ho had already gained notoriety during the war, smuggling goods and fuel into Mainland China from Macau from which he greatly profited, enabling him to build his business empire and make connections at every level of society, from government through to the underworld. So when the opportunity to tender for the gaming monopoly concession in Macau presented itself, Ho and his backers won the bid, offering Macau a future in the tourism industry as well as improved infrastructure.
Should a position of such power have been gifted to a man already linked to an underworld of crime and corruption in a communist country? Economic necessity drove the decision as much as any claims of corruption and criminality. However, that these would be the same claims repeated almost 50 years later
points to a precedent being set at the moment Ho was awarded his gaming monopoly.
Over the years his casinos were widely believed to be linked to organised crime syndicates, specifically the 14K and Sun Yee On triad societies. Te Ho family has always denied these accusations and they have never been proved. In 2010, after a long investigation, the New Jersey gaming authorities issued a report declaring a link between Stanley Ho and the triads and requiring that MGM Mirage Macau (a joint venture with Ho) divest its interest in an Atlantic City casino.
Te report declared that Stanley Ho Hung-sun was an associate of known and suspected triads who had permitted “organised crime to operate and thrive within his casinos”. It found that the private VIP gambling rooms Ho introduced to his casinos beginning in the 1980s “provided organised crime the entry into the Macau gaming market that it had previously lacked”.
Stanley Ho’s ability in business and entrepreneurialism is unquestionable. In attempting to boost gaming revenues and tourism, he launched ferry services that would bring people from Hong Kong and Mainland China to Macau on ‘TurboJet’ high-speed jetfoils at affordable prices. He also brought in helicopter services to transport the crucial high rollers to Macau, a main driver behind Macau’s storming success.
In 2001, Stanley Ho’s Monopoly was brought to an
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