EXTRACT FROM "MIDWEEK" 16.1.75:
Gambling in Hong
!
Kong is run by the police largely for the police. There are...or there were when I left somewhere in the region of a hundred casinos right throughout the colony, each casino paying off about twenty-thousand dollars a day to the local police station district headquarters, colony headquarters, everybody gets paid.
MANGOLD:
Jack Cater acknowledges this relationship too.
CATER:
I've been told and this is a police estimate themselves that gambling for example that corruption within the police force that forty per cent of it comes as a result of illegal gambling. So very obviously there is considerable involvement in this.
MANGOLD:
So organised is police corruption in gambling that even new recruits have to be got at immediately to keep the system working. John Heslop, to-day an inspector with the Royal Hong Kong police Marine Division, had only just left police training school last August before being posted to the island of Chang Chow (phon.) He hadn't been there a few days before his own superiors showed him what his part in the system would be.
HESLOP:
An approach was made to me by my senior officer. The approach was made in a small cafe on the Chang Chow waterfront and he roughly told me the situation in Chang Chow...
MANGOLD:
HESLOP:
Which was what?
That gambling took place on the island under police control. He told me roughly how it was done, who collected the money and the general set-up of the island.
And the rank of the man who was making the approach to you was
...an inspector. My senior officer on the island.
MANGOLD:
HESLOP:
MANGOLD:
Was he the senior officer?
...
HESLOP:
He was the senior officer. There was just two inspectors on the island..(YES)..him and myself.
MANGOLD:
So in other words, he was the policeman in charge of the island. (YEP)........... right, and what happened next?
HESLOP:
Well the next day I was in my office actually in the police station and the detective sergeant came up to me then and he took me across, he said right we'll go across to your bungalow, we went across to my bungalow and he filled me in a little bit more, a very general conversation and he then gave me a small white envelope and I opened the envelope and two-thousand dollars, five-hundred dollar notes..
MANGOLD:
Did you ask him what is was for?
HES LOP:
Yea. Not at that time. I went and had a beer, I think I needed time to think and collect myself and when I came back I asked him where the money came from and he told me it came from small gambling, so various ••• BBH
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