'Sell to the end', 'fight every battle', 'destroy the competition': Inside Crown's VIP boiler room

It was early February in 2015 when dozens of Crown Resorts employees were summoned to a sales meeting in Shanghai from all around Asia. They arrived on a Tuesday night and gathered on the Thursday inside the glittering 60-storey Shangri-La hotel tower in Shanghai’s Jing’an business district.

Each attendee had to come with a personal story about a successful sale they had made in the past 12 months. Who was the customer? What strategies did they employ to win them over? Why were they proud of that particular success?

Crown has been under the spotlight after a week of revelations.Credit: Joe Armao

But this was no ordinary sales team. The cohort of 40 staff here were the cogs in the casino giant's “international VIP” machine. Their job was to entice super-rich Chinese punters to come to its Australian venues armed with jaw-dropping amounts of cash.

And this was no ordinary sales meeting. Rather, it marked the beginning of a revamped, aggressive and risky marketing push into mainland China – one that would eventually lead to the arrest and jailing of many of the staff involved and spark turmoil for Crown and the global gaming industry for years to come.

A tranche of never-before-seen files from inside Crown Resorts’ high-roller business – obtained as part of an investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes – sheds new light on the lengths to which the casino giant went to turbo-charge its pipeline of high rollers, called “whales”, who are known for gambling tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a hand and sometimes millions of dollars an hour.

“Sell to the end”, “fight every battle” and “destroy the competition” were some of the rallying cries contained in a slide show presented to the sales force that day.

In the “All Hands” meeting, excerpts from the presentation reveal Crown sales staff were indoctrinated in high-pressure sales tactics and a Wolf of Wall Street-like boiler-room culture. The employees were promised big bonuses for luring top-end gamblers and tour agents with promises of fast-tracked visas, luxury gifts, private-jet flights and tens of millions of dollars in rebates, documents show.

“Our extreme focus this year needs to be to open up an even wider performance differential,” the staff were told. “Act on every opportunity, react with speed and urgency, and outwit, out-hustle our competition.”

A robust sales culture is not unusual in industries that deal with customers, whether it be financial services, retail or telcos. Crown's approach here suggests it is as ambitious as any other Australian company.

Being part of Crown and its casinos in Melbourne and Perth meant being “one of the best”, the presentation said, likening working at the company to working at some of the world’s most successful corporations – Goldman Sachs, General Electric, Microsoft, Apple.

Leading the “All-Hands” meeting in Shanghai was a man named Michael Chen. A Harvard-educated Taiwanese-American, Chen had been brought into the fold at Crown three years earlier, in 2012, from Las Vegas gambling giant Caesars. His brief was clear: amass a dedicated sales team on the mainland and ramp up Crown’s high-roller business.

Crown Resorts former president of international marketing Michael Chen.

It was around this time in China that president Xi Jinping was embarking on a large-scale corruption crackdown. Among its aims was targeting the illicit flow of capital through underground banks and casinos. And in the gambling mecca of Macau – the "Las Vegas of Asia" – the effects were being felt particularly hard.

An hour's ferry ride from Hong Kong, at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, Macau is a special administrative region of China and the only part of the country where gambling is lawful.

President Xi's anti-corruption, anti-extravagance campaign, according to gaming industry analysts at the time, began scaring off China's high rollers, who became hesitant to gamble big there at the risk of drawing attention.

The stream of revenue from high rollers in Macau dried up rapidly. Macau's gaming revenue fell 2.5 per cent in 2014, the first year-on-year decline for decades. The following year, the share prices of some of the biggest operators there – Wynn Macau, Galaxy Entertainment, Sands Macau – slipped to multi-year lows. Also affected by the slump was  Melco Crown Entertainment, a joint venture in Macau between Crown and Melco Resorts at the time.

Watching on, Crown, like many of the world’s casino giants, saw a golden opportunity – to step in to court the high-worth Chinese gamblers and bring them across to Australia instead.

Slides from a separate presentation given later in February detail how this goal was to be achieved in part by aggressively bolstering ties with so-called “junket” tour operators – agents who recruit cashed-up punters to come to casinos in Australia and around the world, extend them interest-free loans and collect the money they owe.

Some of these businesses are legitimate, but the investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes has found a number of junket partners of Crown and other casino companies are backed by suspected criminals and other persons of interest to law enforcement, embroiled in a list of allegations of drug running, sex trafficking and money laundering.

According to the slide show, at the top of a list of Crown's most desired“platform” junket operators, whom it was most eager to deal with, was Suncity, the biggest such company in Macau and a junket partner to other casinos in Australia including The Star.

Suncity has long denied criminal connections. Last year, however, it was black-banned by one of the world's largest bookmakers, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, due to connections of key company officials to an organised crime syndicate, the 14K triad society.

An intelligence report obtained by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes reveals that key Suncity executives were deemed to pose "tangible criminal as well as reputational risks" to the racing industry.

It also stated key Suncity staff were of interest to Australian authorities in relation to money-laundering activities. Suncity chief executive, Alvin Chau, has been blocked by the Department of Home Affairs from entering Australia.

Few casinos in the world took to Suncity as keenly as Crown. Inside Crown's Melbourne casino, in early 2014, Suncity was allowed to open its own high-roller room, just off the atrium VIP elevator lobby.

"It is a permanent salon and will remain so as long as the junket meets its minimum monthly turnover numbers," Mr Chen wrote in an email. "This is just one of a wide range of initiatives that we are working with Suncity on."

By this time 2014, the Australian domestic gaming market, for Crown Resorts and its competitors, was considered to be mature. Hopes for real growth in the casino industry hinged heavily on the ability to attract foreign high rollers. The growth in VIP program play across Crown's Australian operations was outstripping the main gaming floor. In 2010, VIP turnover accounted for $31 billion. By 2015, it would be $70 billion.

Crown’s corporate vision, according to the 2015 "All Hands' staff presentation in Shanghai, was to “become the dominant long-haul VIP gambling company”.

The international VIP sales team were ordered to “accelerate momentum” before the “window closes on folks avoiding Macau”.

“We must take advantage of any customer sentiment avoiding Macau,” the presentation said.

The aggressive sales drive went up another gear still the following month, in the lead-up to the end of the financial year.

In a staff email of March 2015, one senior Crown executive described the fourth quarter as “money-making time”.

“With 93 days left for financial year 2015, and if we take out the 26 weekend days, Easter holiday and Labour Day, there are actually only about 60 days left to chase for the $5b remaining target by 30 June,” the email said. “Sales are on of the most important forces in any organisation nowadays, and the competition will only get tougher.”

“We have TWO (2) weeks left in this financial year,” another staff email in June said. “If each sales team member brings in just one customer that does $40m in turnover, we will make it.

“Leave no stone unturned.”

Later that month, an email was circulated among Crown’s VIP staff listing a number of high-wealth Chinese entrepreneurs and financiers who “could be good targets for us”.

“New industry sectors of technology and finance are likely to be sources of wealth in the future,” the email said. “Open field hunting … all are available to the hungry salesperson.”

Amid a Federal Court class-action lawsuit by shareholders, a central question is whether Crown knowingly acted unlawfully in the Chinese legal “grey area” of what constitutes an illegal promotion. Crown, in a statement, denied any breach of Chinese law and said it refutes any suggestion it had knowingly exposed its staff to the risk of detention.

Four days after the “all-hands” meeting in Shanghai, in February 2015, leaked emails suggest Crown was aware that Chinese police were closing in, and that its staff could become a target.

“At this stage, it is critical that nobody overreacts to the news, while at the same time, we take precautions to ensure the safety and security of our staff,” said Mr Chen.

Crown had hired “one of the world’s best law firms and political consultants” to advise the company on the matter, according to the email, and Crown would be applying for Hong Kong and Singapore work permits for all of its Chinese staff who did not hold foreign passports.

“This is purely a precautionary measure that will allow you to say that you work out of an overseas location and are on business travel in China,” Mr Chen said. “I am re-circulating the guidelines and process we have in place that you should follow if you are ever requested by a government official for an interview.”

Crown's push into China and dealings with junkets has become the subject of state and federal investigations. The Morrison government launched an inquiry into the conduct of Commonwealth public servants amid revelations that Crown's Chinese staff were instructed to contact certain visa offices known to have softer vetting in order to fast- track applications for high rollers.

Australia's peak criminal intelligence agency, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, has revealed it is probing the infiltration of organised crime into Australian casinos through junket operators. And on Thursday Victorian Gaming Minister Marlene Kairouz instructed the state regulator to urgently examine the allegations concerning Crown's junket business ties and consider whether tougher laws are needed.

Crown Resorts' 11-person board this week launched an attack on an investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, saying in a widely circulated advertisement that it was "deceitful," "unbalanced" and "sensationalised.

Crown said it had "a comprehensive anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing program" and "robust process" for vetting junket operators through what the company said was a combination of probity, integrity and police checks.

It also pointed out that the company itself had never been "accused or charged of any offence by Chinese authorities".

Nineteen of its marketing, sales and administration staff based in China were, however, rounded up in late-night raids on October 13 and 14, 2016, held in custody and convicted of breaching mainland Chinese laws banning gambling and its promotion.

Crown whistleblower Jenny Jiang was one of them. She refused a $60,000 payment offer from Crown, which included a condition that she stay quiet. Speaking out for the first time to The Age, The Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, Jiang, who helped administer Crown's China business from 2011-2017, accused Crown's management of disregarding Chinese law and also the welfare of its Chinese employees in the push for every staff member to "meet more customers, get more business".

Ultimately, said Jiang, when Chinese law enforcement caught up with them and she was taken into detention, she felt Crown treated her like a "used napkin you throw in the trash can".

“Money is way more important than the staff,” she said.

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