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Casino In Saipan Island

CASINO: The Saipan casino, operated by Imperial Pacific International, is shown on Nov. Dontana Keraskes/The Guam Daily Post Federal prosecutors are using the Racketeering Influenced. The casino, which is located on an island with almost no modern tourist infrastructure and is more than three hours’ flight from any major city, was turning over more per-table bets at its peak. The lush mountainous island of Saipan, controlled by the United States since the end of World War Two, approved a casino in 2014, after which Chinese investment skyrocketed. Imperial Pacific has. Having said all that, casino hotels in Saipan are a good choice: tons of visitors were highly impressed with their hotel. That's why it's no surprise guests return again and again, and the locals will treat you like family. In Saipan, you won't have a problem finding fun things to do during your downtime. Coskun, whose company is the management operator of Club C, an electronic gaming parlor at Kanoa Resort in Saipan’s Susupe tourist district, about 16 kilometers (10 miles) south of Imperial.

When you mix the H-2B (foreign worker) program with the crooked politics of casinos along with the wayward ways of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a U.S. territory just north of Guam, you get quite a noxious stew.

But that's not our lede, which is: 'Imperial Pacific Casino Forces Turkish H-2B Workers to Eat Chinese Food.'

The H-2B employers, who had promised the Turks their own kind of food, were also charged with not paying overtime, not paying them at all recently, and denying them pay stubs. These construction workers have sued on these counts and others, according to an article in the Marianas Variety, the hard-charging local daily newspaper.

Meanwhile, although the Imperial Pacific, on the main CNMI island of Saipan, appears to be failing financially, just like an earlier casino on the nearby island of Tinian, the Department of Homeland Security, via the EB-5 program, is facilitating the funding of yet a third casino, again on Tinian, whose population is about 6,000.

That's not the extent of the DHS support of the casinos in these islands, routinely managed by Chinese Mainland operators, it also (with the State Department) runs a CNMI-and-Guam-only conditional parole (CP) program for the Chinese that facilitates the arrival of the customers of the Imperial Pacific. A Chinese national wanting to come to the rest of the U.S. needs a visa, but not if he wants to visit Guam or the CNMI.

Not only does the CP program ease the travel of the casinos' customers, it also was used to bring illegal alien workers to the construction site. Other workers there were on the federal H-2B program, and a local one called CW-1.

But there's more DHS involvement: Although the island of Tinian is literally within sight of the main island in the group, Saipan, which has a port of entry, little Tinian has an international port of entry of its own, all through the courtesy of DHS. Can one fly from, say, Toronto to Martha's Vineyard? No. You would have to change planes in Boston. But one can fly from the Chinese Mainland directly to Tinian and go through a tiny DHS (Customs) operations there.

Bloomberg Businessweek, in an excellent piece of investigative journalism nearly two years ago, headlined its expose: 'A Chinese Casino Has Conquered a Piece of America: Construction workers maimed and killed. Millions paid to the Governor's family. An impossibly lucrative gambling operation. And all on U.S. soil.'

Since that was written, the casino has either fallen on hard times, or at least it says it has when pressed to pay contractors' bills and local taxes. The Bloomberg account dealt only with the Imperial Pacific, not the other two casinos in the islands.

Why DHS should put its stamp of approval on EB-5 moneys for one casino, and foreign workers for two of them in the Marianas (which is the most Third-Worldish of our territories) is hard to fathom. Given the background of casinos, generally, and of the CNMI government in the recent past (one of its recent governors was impeached for fraud by the usually complacent legislature) and with the islands' decades-long foreign worker scandals, you might think that DHS would be careful, but it was not. Why bring in workers from Turkey, for example, when there are literally billions of workers in the well-populated landscape between Ankara and CNMI, i.e., in all of Asia?

I must admit, however, the detail of promising the Turkish workers Turkish food, and then delivering Chinese, would not have been in my crystal ball.

Why Casinos in These Islands?

A little background is in order.

The Marianas (total population 57,000) consists of three resource-starved but populated islands, and a dozen ones with no or very few people. For centuries, they were under the thumb of the Spanish crown, then they were a German colony for 15 years, then a Japanese colony from 1914 through World War II (which saw a lot of fighting on Saipan), then a U.S.-managed U.N. mandate, and more recently (at the islanders' choice) a largely self-governing U.S. territory. The main island is Saipan, the location of the Imperial Pacific; the other two populated islands are Tinian and Rota.

Since the islands have little to offer economically, the local government (run by the indigenous population, the Chamorros) are eager to expand their economy from a tourism base — its one advantage is that it has the 'closest warm beach to Tokyo'. Some 20 years ago, before China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), and when the U.S. immigration law was not yet extended to the islands, it hosted a number of Chinese-owned garment-making sweatshops, with the work being done by badly exploited Chinese women. There is no point in making clothes in CNMI now that China is in the WTO.

Hence the attraction of casinos to CNMI, but these are not the Las Vegas kind, designed to provide entertainment as well as gambling. While the glitz is there, the economic driver of the CNMI casinos is different, and that is what some critics consider money laundering. The players arrive with large amounts of alien money, buy chips with the cash, join in a game in which there are few gains and few losses, and later convert the chips into U.S. money. Bloomberg writes that when the casino was new it handled 'more than $2 billion a month in VIP bets'.

Problems Caused by the Casinos

According to the Bloomberg article, the labor and on-site work-safety practice were deplorable:

Imperial Pacific International Holdings Ltd. [and its contractors] .. was building a gargantuan casino with a crew of hundreds of Chinese, scores of them working illegally on tourist visas. So many laborers were getting hurt that [some physicians at the hospital] began keeping an unofficial spreadsheet, separate from standard hospital records: a grim catalogue of broken bones, lacerations, puncture wounds, dislocated limbs, and eyes penetrated by flying metal.

The account tells of a workman who had been fatally injured being brought to the hospital without his work clothes, in an effort to pass him off as a careless tourist; and, in another case, a Chinese construction worker with a broken back being rushed not to the hospital, but to a plane to carry him back to China.

As in many other parts of the world, Chinese-run construction projects are often staffed by Chinese workers rather than local ones. In this case, in addition to the illegal aliens, there were some H-2B workers (the Turks, for example) and many other non-local workers, mostly Chinese and Filipinos, who work in the loosely administered CW-1 program.

The reference in the Bloomberg headline to 'millions paid [by Imperial Pacific, or its allies] to the governor's family' has nothing to do with the impeached governor (who was an old Jack Abramoff chum, Benigno Fitial), but to the family of Ralph Torres, the current governor, also a Republican. Since local law prevents the actual sale of land to anyone but a member of the native-born population, there is a trade in 99-year leases. In one of a series of Torres-family-linked transactions, Bloomberg reported:

[T]he largest, worth about $4 million, has been a windfall for a man named Serafin Camacho. The governor is first cousin to Camacho's wife, Lillian, and godfather to his adult son, Joel who's a member of the Saipan zoning board, which will rule on Imperial Pacific's future development. .. [T]he deals paid out immediately, even though the lease for one doesn't begin until 2042. [Emphasis added.]

Meanwhile the FBI has raided both the governor's office and the casino, looking for evidence. How often does a U.S. reader hear of a governor's office being raided by the FBI?

Imperial Pacific's Money Problems

The finances of

Casino Saipan Island