Feature
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.
Imperial Pacific’s casino under construction in Garapan, on the island of Saipan.
Photographer: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos for Bloomberg Businessweek
Dr. Marty Rohringer was ending a graveyard shift at the lone hospital on Saipan, the exceptionally remote U.S. island, when four Chinese men arrived with a body.
The figure they had with them—a middle-aged man, also Chinese, naked but for his underwear—was unresponsive, and had clearly suffered severe trauma. As an orderly lifted him onto a gurney, the four men indicated in broken English that he had fallen from a hotel-room balcony.