Manne wrote:
Chinese police smashed an illegal gambling gang that hoped to score big from the World Cup, with the alleged ringleader "Dark Brother" accused over dealings worth $14.7 billion, a newspaper said on Tuesday.
The gang accused of running a sophisticated and secretive online betting network since 2006, was broken up from June 7, days before the start of the World Cup, according to the Guangzhou Daily, the official newspaper of the capital of China's southern province of Guangdong. Many of the wagers were placed there.
China's scandal-plagued soccer team failed to qualify for the World Cup, but that has not dampened the enthusiasm of Chinese fans. Quite a few have wagered on matches, despite the ruling Communist Party's ban on gambling. The government allows only small wagers through state-run sports "lotteries."
"Off the field, the enthusiasm of ordinary fans to take part in football gambling has been growing and the talons of gambling gangs extend across the country and soccer betting is rampant," said the Chinese-language daily.
Police arrested the gang leader, a Hong Kong man going by the nickname "Dark Brother," when he was leaving a cocaine-fueled nightclub party in the early hours of June 7 in Shenzhen, a city neighboring Hong Kong, it said.
"The case of the gambling gang involves accumulated sums of over 100 billion yuan ($14.7 billion)," said the report, citing police claims. It did not explain the bases for that estimate, leaving it unclear how much was won back by gamblers.
"The black hand behind this massive gambling racket was a gambling baron who hid in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong area," it said.
"Dark Brother" and his subordinates ran a tightly organized network across southern and eastern China that took bets through the Internet. The report said the gang leader's surname was Li.
Another leader in the gang was a woman who went by the nickname "Old Cat," the report said. She helped run the operation from an ordinary-looking apartment, where she lived with her child, it said.
Neighbors said they had no idea. "She was the ringleader of a gambling gang? I never saw that," a neighborhood management official told the paper.
The gang made its money by taking a share of the ante that gamblers wagered on matches, the report said.
Join:
2008/08/08
Messages:
158
