On November 27,staff working for the most colourful man in international gambling were led out of his Macau office handcuffed and wearing black hoods.

On the same day,in a Macau street,photographers snapped Alvin Chau being escorted by authorities to the same location:interrogation rooms at police headquarters. For Chau,the striking images that quickly went viral captured the mightiest of falls.

Three years ago,the entrepreneur with slicked-back hair and anactor girlfriend was successfully demanding Melbourne’s Crown casino provide his high-roller travel businessaccess to Crown’s private jets,aspecial gaming salon at its Southbank casino and exclusive access to Mariah Carey concerts and the Australian Open. Sydney’s The Star Entertainment casino firm wasjust as eager to woo Chau to access his contact list of Chinese high rollers.

Chinese and Macau authorities reportedly charged Chau a fortnight ago over his allegedly illegal Asian gambling operations,as the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping move (where politically convenient) to remove the corrupt and increase state control of private capital.

But the full story of Chau and his gambling junket operation,Suncity,is also a tale of financial and organised crime in Australia,and the work of a mostly hidden federal agency,the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Three years ago,as Chau reached the height of his powers in Australia,the commission began squeezing his empire. The arrest of Chau in Australia was never deemed likely,but ACIC hoped to displace Chau’s multibillion-dollar operations from Sydney and Melbourne and make him vulnerable to arrest offshore.

With Chau now in a Macau holding cell and Suncity a shadow of its former self in Australia,it appears the secret strategy has worked.

The risk outsourcer

Alvin Chau’s life has always been shrouded in intrigue. Accordingto media reports,the 47-year-old got his break as a 20-something disciple of Macau organised crime bossWan “Broken Tooth” Kuok-koi. The Triad leader reportedly encouraged a friend to bankroll Chau’s initial business venture,a “junket” enterprise focused on luring Chinese high rollers from the mainland to glittering casinos in Macau. By the late 2000s,almost every major Macau casino had a Suncity high-roller room where Chau’s clients could gamble huge amounts in luxury settings,away from the prying eyes of mainland authorities.

“Before I was 30 years old,I was nothing. After 30 years old,I began to have some thoughts and goals,” Chau said of the growth of his gaming empire in a Hong Kong media interview in 2017.

One of those goals was to make it big in Australia. Chau’s offering to Crown,Star and Australia’s other big casino company,SkyCity,was simple:he would bring them China’s biggest gamblers,the “whales”,in return for a small cut paid by the casinos of every dollar they bet.

The Australian casino firms loved this business model because it involved outsourcing most of the risk associated with luring Chinese mainland gamblers to Australia in seeming defiance of Beijing’s strict anti-gambling laws.

Chau also helped these Australia-bound punters to sidestep Chinese government bans on taking more than a few thousand dollars out of the country. He came up with schemes to provide them credit in Australia,while also arranging to collect the debts they incurred in Australian casinos. Chau would settle his clients’ losses with Crown and Star and then chase the debt by means that (asthe Bergin commission of inquiry in NSW later discovered) have been linked to stories of violence and stand-over tactics,but which Crown and Star preferred to know little about.

Chau’s Australian business flourished between 2012 and 2019,helping to earn him enough capital to finance action movies in Hong Kong and major casino projects in Russia and Asia. Chau’s operation also gave him the ear of the Chinese Communist Party elite who didn’t mind a punt and who,Australian authorities suspected,may also have wanted to quietly move large amounts of money to Australia.

As Chau’s international gaming operation grew,though,so did the rumours that it involved dirty money.

Crime,casinos and communists

In late 2012,the Australian Federal Police arrested a Sydney man and charged him with laundering suspected drug funds. When federal detectives examined his financial dealings,they uncovered a $403,000 deposit into a gaming account at The Star Sydney. A report written by an overseas enforcement agency reveals that when detectives quizzed the man,he indicated these funds were bound for Suncity.

As organised crime detectives in Sydney and Melbourne uncovered similar examples,the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission began doing its own work.

ACIC exists to feed high-grade intelligence to state and federal agencies. It’s headed by a former senior federal police officer,Mike Phelan,and is guided by board members who include AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw,ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess and the heads of state and territory policing agencies. These directors all had a different interest in Suncity. Not only did early ACIC intelligence suggest it was facilitating the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars from China to Australia,but there were indications some of these funds were proceeds of crime,including drug money or profits unlawfully pocketed by Communist Party elite.

Anti-money-laundering agency Austrac,which also has a representative on the ACIC board,warned last year in a heavily redacted report that high-roller operations were also suspected of fundingforeign interference operations.

By 2017,according to official sources in state and federal agencies – who requested anonymity because they are not authorised to speak publicly – ACIC had drawn a direct line between Chau and a Hong Kong crime boss,Cheng Ting Kong. Cheng was investing in many of Chau and Suncity’s corporate subsidiaries via offshore companies.

According to ACIC,Cheng is a senior figure in the powerful Chinese organised crime gang,the 14K Triad.

Official sources not authorised to comment publicly say ACIC investigations into Cheng allege he is involved in “orchestrating large-scale money-laundering activity in Australia and the sourcing and distribution of heroin both in Hong Kong and overseas”.

In 2017,ACIC’s chief Phelan informed his board of police and spy chiefs that it had listed Cheng as an “Australian priority organisation target”,a designation reserved for those posing the greatest organised crime threat to Australia.

ACIC watched with alarm as Cheng and Chau bought and expanded Victoria’s Eliza Park Horse Stud,which breeds champion racehorses for wealthy owners. It was promptly renamed Sun Stud. In September,corporate filings reveal that Chau offloaded his last Sun Stud holding to Cheng via a British Virgin Islands company.

Last week,the director of operations at Sun Stud,David Grant,described allegations that Chau part-owned Sun Stud as a “long bow”. He conceded Cheng was still involved but insisted he was “squeaky clean”. He hung up the phone when questioned about Chau and Cheng’s triad links.

The accountant

Several of Chau’s companies in Australia,including the Suncity Group,had a former PricewaterhouseCoopers partner,Stanley Brogan,as a director. Under Australian corporate law,international businesses need an Australian resident director to oversee their corporate and tax obligations,and Brogan appears to have fulfilled that role. Corporate filings show he remains listed as a director of at least two Suncity Australian companies.

Brogan refused to answer questions fromThe Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald about what,if anything,he knew about Chau’s criminal links. But the accountant,who retired from PwC in 1995 and is paid a yearly partners’ fee by the giant consulting firm,appears to have contracted PwC to provide Suncity a corporate address and tax services. It is not suggested that Brogan was personally involved in any wrongdoing or criminal activity,only that he is involved with Suncity.

In a statement,PwC confirmed it paid Brogan an “annual entitlement”,which was given to all former senior partners. It also confirmed that until March 2020,it had “performed some small routine annual tax work for this[the Suncity] group of companies”.

Over a year earlier,ACIC had added Chau’s junket business – the Suncity firm dealing with Crown and The Star and which was generating billions of dollars in high-roller turnover – to its Australian priority target list.

The Macau-headquartered and Chau-owned “Suncity Gaming” had,according to intelligence briefings ACIC provided NSW and Victorian police,“significant capabilities to facilitate large-scale money laundering between Australia and China”. ACIC also believed that Chau had “close links with Chinese triads”.

‘Maximum pressure’

With the listing of Suncity as a priority target,ACIC devised a plan to drive Chau and his company from Australia. In early 2019,it advised the federal government todeny him an Australian visa,thwarting Chau’s plans to visit his booming junket operations at Crown and Star or check on his other business interests:the Victorian horse stud,an upmarket restaurant called Sun Kitchen overlooking Albert Park Lake and a computer software services firm linked to Chau’s online casino operations.

Then ACIC turned the screws. Throughout 2019 – as Chau’s associates,employees and rival high-roller businesses drove wealthy gamblers in limousines to Star and Crown,prepared to board flights,or sat back relaxing in their Melbourne and Sydney apartments – they were confronted by ACIC officers.

ACIC has the power to direct people to attend compulsory questioning in hearing chambers or face jail. Once inside the hearing chambers,those who receive summonses have another choice:tell the truth on oath about Suncity or,once again,face jail. Sources have confirmed that during this time,ACIC was able to develop an unprecedented overview of Suncity’s operations,including how it had helped suspected Chinese criminals move huge sums to and from Australia. The intensity of ACIC’s pressure had another impact,too.

By 2020,Chau decided to shut down most of his Australian empire.

“It got too hard for him to operate here,” says one policing source. “The game was up.”

That same year,ACIC removed Suncity from its Australian priority target list,informing its policing partners that “Suncity significantly reduced their presence in Australia following targeting activities taken by law enforcement”.

ACIC wouldn’t comment on its Suncity and Chau investigations. But in a statement,ACIC chief Phelan confirmed his agency was increasingly using its compulsory interrogation powers to disrupt criminal operations and had also jailed three unnamed individuals who had failed to answer questions at secret hearings. Phelan also revealed the federal government had last week appointed three new “examiners” to join its team of ACIC hearing room interrogators.

“Coercive examinations are one of the tools we use to exert maximum pressure on all levels of the criminal enterprise,” he said.

As it looked into Suncity operatives behind closed doors,ACIC also provided information about the company to the state commissions of inquiry into Crown Resorts that,along with media exposés,led to the overhaul of Crown and Australia’s gambling industry.

The public reporting of Chau’s activities in Australia at the NSW Bergin inquiry and at the Finkelstein royal commission in Victoria placed Chinese authorities in a bind.

For years,the Chinese Communist Party had allowed Chau to build his junket empire,even though it appeared to conflict with the party’s anti-gambling edicts. Chau had even been appointed to a prestigious CCP committee,a seemingly quiet endorsement of his operations.

But having been effectively called out as an organised crime enabler in Australia,the clock was ticking on Chau.

On November 28,Macau police remanded him in custody to face trial for alleged criminal association,illegal gambling,money laundering and running an illegal online gambling operation in the Philippines.

And on December 1,the Suncity high-roller travel business ceased its casino operations in Macau,the place where it all began.

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