Ian Hamilton - The disciple of Las Vegas

“That was my mother. She’s hysterical. Uncle Tommy phoned our house and she made the mistake of answering. He bullied her into putting my father on the phone. My mother said my father didn’t talk to him — he just listened, and then he started to shake. Our doctor’s on his way. I need to get home.”

Ava took a taxi back to the Pan Pacific Hotel. She tried to focus on the Mohneida, but Tommy Ordonez kept wedging his way into her thoughts. It was three o’clock in the afternoon in Vancouver. That meant he had phoned his brother at six in the morning in Manila. Did he ever sleep?

When she got to her room, she sat slumped at the desk. It had already been a long day. She thought about calling Uncle with the information about Philip Chew, but it was too early for that. Then she tried to construct a conversation she might have with Ashton, assuming he’d take her call. When she couldn’t find one that didn’t result in his hanging up on her, she gave up and began to research the Mohneida online.

Ava knew her Canadian history, and the story of the Mohneida was the story of most North American First Nations bands. They were a small tribe, an adjunct of the great Mohawk nation. Their home territory was in the middle of the Thousand Islands, on the St. Lawrence River about two hundred kilometres west of Montreal. Like the lands of the Mohawks near Montreal and Cornwall, their territory straddled the American and Canadian borders — a geographic quirk that gave them dual citizenship. It was an isolated region, which had kept them out of most wars, and until the European settlers began to spread across North America, their isolation had protected them from disease and the addictions that afflicted many of the larger tribes. Eventually European influences began to erode their traditional lifestyle, which was rooted in fishing and hunting. As the twentieth century advanced, the Mohneida — like so many other First Nations peoples across North America — were decimated by alcoholism, drug addiction, and all the violence and poverty that went with them. Then Ronald Francis landed in their midst.

According to Maclean’s magazine, Francis had been born on the reserve. His father, an alcoholic, died when he was two and his mother moved to the city of Kingston. Francis was incredibly bright; he attended Queen’s University, one of Canada’s finest post-secondary institutions, and graduated with a degree in social work. He was hired by the Department of Indian Affairs, who assigned him to the Mohneida reserve. It took Francis six months to realize that social work wasn’t what his people needed. They needed jobs — sources of income other than government handouts — and some sense of purpose. He resigned his post and set out to help his people achieve economic independence, using their dual citizenship and treaty rights that exempted the band from paying duties or taxes on either side of the border.

Francis didn’t invent this new economy. Some of the bands upriver were already exploiting their duty-free, tax-free status by buying cartons of cigarettes, worth forty dollars on the open market, for five dollars each, then selling them in the general marketplace for twenty dollars. The same kind of profit margins were being made on another tax- and duty-laden product: liquor. However, while it was legal for the bands to buy these products, it was not legal for them to export them. Police on both sides of the border were trying to enforce the law, but the St. Lawrence River offered too many crossing points, and the Thousand Islands area, with its maze of channels, was particularly difficult to patrol.

Within three years of beginning their new enterprises, the various bands along the river were supplying an estimated thirty percent of all the cigarettes sold in the province, and only a slightly smaller percentage of liquor. When the Ontario Provincial Police went public with a list of the worst offenders, the Mohneida were at the top, and Ronald Francis was named as the man behind it all.

The federal and provincial governments were losing tens of millions of dollars in tax revenues and duties, so they came down hard on the cigarette companies. The supply line began to dry up. By then Francis — now chief of the Mohneida — had prudently stashed away much of the profits and was looking for ways to diversify. The band opened a water-bottling plant and then built a cigarette factory, manufacturing and selling their own brand at well below normal prices. And they were considering building a casino.

Just as they were exempt from taxes and duties, First Nations weren’t bound by provincial and federal laws when it came to what they did on tribal land. Using this protected status, many bands across the country had partnered with investors and built casinos. Ronald Francis wanted one for the Mohneida and had worked hard to achieve it. Ava read story after story about investors from Asia and the Middle East making the trek to Cooper Island, but ultimately none of them would invest. The problem was that the island was too isolated. Bridges would have to be built from both the American and Canadian shores, and the cost was prohibitive. No matter how Francis spun it, the population base wasn’t large enough to justify that kind of expenditure.

It was around the same time that online gambling was introduced to the world market. Within months there were countless websites dedicated to blackjack, roulette, and Texas hold’em poker. It was an unregulated market, one that had appeared virtually out of nowhere and then spread like a virus. The American government banned the sites outright, forcing any U.S.-based operations to move offshore.

Ronald Francis watched all this happening from Cooper Island and saw an opportunity. If it was legal for the Mohneida to build a casino on their land, then it had to be legal for them to host online gambling sites. He brought in some consultants, former senior executives of the Nevada Gaming Commission, with the initial idea of running his own site, but they pointed out a potentially more secure and profitable route for him to take. They recommended that he provide a home for the websites that had been forced offshore and were struggling to establish credibility. So Francis set up the Cooper Island Gaming Commission, which registered, licensed, and regulated online sites.

Initially the Gaming Commission had issued more than twenty permits, and now it was estimated that sixty percent of the world’s online gaming was run on the Cooper Island servers. Ava was impressed with Francis’s business acumen. Turning a tiny island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River into what was in reality a global business leader had been a definite feat.

She found the Cooper Island Gaming Commission’s website and read the list of gambling sites they administered. As expected, The River was one of them. Then she read their self-proclaimed mandate. The commission was dedicated, it said, to ensuring that online gambling was secure and fair and that all participants would be fully paid.

Ava turned back to some of the newspaper articles she’d been reading; in one of them she found a recent photo of Ronald Francis. He was standing outside, his right hand pointing at the Cooper Island Gaming Commission’s offices. His face was large and round, with thin lips and small, dark eyes. His most striking characteristic was his long black hair, which hung in a braid halfway down his back, secured with a clasp decorated with a feather. He was wearing jeans and a plaid cowboy shirt.

It was now late afternoon, and just after 7 a.m. in Hong Kong. Uncle would be up now, drinking tea and working his way through the two or three Chinese newspapers he read every morning. She knew she should call him and confirm the fact and the details of Philip Chew’s theft. But the matter of The River was still hanging in the air. It was one thing to tell Uncle she had found out how and why Philip Chew had stolen more than fifty million dollars, but it was another to state with any certainty that Chew had been cheated and that it was still possible to recover all or part of the money. She decided to hold off calling until she had reviewed Jack Maynard’s data and, if it held up, until she had a chance to formulate a plan for approaching the Mohneida or The River.