Stanley Ho, who built Macao’s gambling industry, dies at 98

Hong Kong, May 26

Casino tycoon Stanley Ho, whose enterprise empire dominated the Portuguese playing enclave of Macao for many years, has died in Hong Kong at age 98.

Considered the daddy of contemporary playing in China, Ho’s lengthy and eventful life tracked the ebb and movement of southern China’s fortunes. After a swashbuckling begin as a kerosene dealer, he ended up as Macau’s richest particular person, a lavish spender and debonair ballroom dancer.

A household assertion mentioned he died peacefully in his sleep, however didn’t give a reason behind dying.

Tall, good-looking and of combined Chinese and European heritage, Ho fathered 17 kids with 4 ladies, an prolonged household that engaged in high-profile squabbles over his legacy throughout his later years.

Ho had stakes in companies operating every little thing from the ferries and helicopters connecting Hong Kong and Macao to shops, accommodations, Macao’s airport and its horse-racing tracks.

But he mentioned he prevented the playing ground.

“I don’t gamble at all. I don’t have the patience,” Ho informed The Associated Press in a uncommon interview in 2001. “Don’t expect to make money in gambling. It’s a house game. It’s for the house.”

Ho was born on November 25, 1921, into the Hotung household, one in all Hong Kong’s wealthiest and strongest.

When he was 13, his father deserted the household after being worn out by a inventory market crash through the Great Depression.

Ho’s research at Hong Kong University had been interrupted by World War II. Fluent in English and Chinese, he was working as a phone operator for British forces when the colony fell to Japan. He boarded a ship for impartial Macao, becoming a member of refugees from mainland China within the dying fishing port.

“I had to throw away my uniform and run to Macao as a refugee,” Ho mentioned within the 2001 interview.

During the battle, Ho mentioned he ran night-time smuggling and buying and selling journeys up the Pearl River Delta, on one event surviving a pirate assault.

Eventually, he secured a four-decade monopoly on casinos in Macao, utilizing that house benefit to construct an empire that also dominated the business for years after the native gaming market opened to international firms in 2002.

“Macao treated me so well. I went there with 10 dollars in my pocket and became a millionaire before the age of 20,” Ho mentioned.

In 1948, Ho married Clementina Leitao, daughter of a distinguished lawyer in Macao with ties to Portugal and to Macao excessive society, connections which will have helped him win the on line casino monopoly in 1962.

About the identical time, Ho married Lucina Laam underneath a Qing dynasty code permitting males to take a number of wives that Hong Kong outlawed in 1971.

Ho fathered kids with two different ladies, Ina Chan and Angela Leong, whom he additionally known as his “wives.” Ho reportedly met Chan, a nurse, when she was employed to look after Leitao, who died in 2004.

He met Leong, a dancer and former ballroom dancing teacher, by means of his love of the tango and the cha-cha.

Portugal transferred management of its colony Macao to China in 1999 and Ho’s monopoly resulted in 2002. That introduced in international rivals, together with Las Vegas Sands Corp, Wynn Resorts Ltd and MGM Resorts International, spurring a constructing increase that reworked the sleepy, seedy former colonial outpost right into a glitzy playing powerhouse frequented by high-rolling mainland Chinese.

The new gamers introduced slick choices to compete with SJM’s practically two dozen no-frills casinos, however Ho’s group waited years to construct its personal lavish megaresort.

SJM’s market share in Macao dropped to 14 per cent in 2019 from the greater than 30 per cent share it held a decade earlier.

Ho shrugged off allegations of ties to organised crime, resembling a 2010 report by the New Jersey gaming fee that accused him of letting Chinese felony gangs, or triads, prosper inside his casinos through the 1990s.

Ho often made information with extravagant gestures resembling paying $8.9 million in 2007 for a bronze horse head looted by French troops from China’s imperial palace 150 years earlier so he might donate it to a Chinese museum. He additionally twice bid a document $330,000 for truffles at charity auctions.

In 2009, Ho had mind surgical procedure after reportedly falling at house. He spent seven months within the hospital and was hardly ever seen in public afterward, normally in a wheelchair.

Ho is survived by three of his wives and 16 kids — his eldest son, Robert, died in a automotive crash in Portugal in 1981.

Daughter Pansy is co-chair of rival MGM’s Macao on line casino enterprise. His son Lawrence runs one other competitor, Melco. Another daughter, Josie, is an actress and singer.

In 2011, a really public feud erupted over management of his multibillion-dollar stake in Macao on line casino operator SJM Holdings Ltd.

Ho disputed a supposed switch of his total stake to 5 of his kids and one in all his wives, calling it a “robbery” opposite to his need to divide the fortune equally amongst varied relations.

The dispute finally was settled after a number of lawsuits, and Ho transferred most of his SJM shares to relations, whereas formally remaining chairman till he retired at age 96. He had left the identical job at his Hong Kong conglomerate Shun Tak Holdings only a yr earlier.

Ho was low key and quiet spoken in particular person, however pleased with his function in reworking Macao from a decaying backwater deluged with refugees into the glittering vacation spot is it at this time.

“In those days, the Portuguese said Stanley Ho was a dreamer. I have fulfilled all my promises,” Ho mentioned in 2001. “I feel rather proud in having succeeded.” AP