policing agencies. They were there to make professional contacts, to pad their résumés – there for an education in French wine – until their real bosses called them home. Eaton was an Interpol employee, so he had a stake. But there was something more. “Always remember what you’re doing this for,” he would routinely tell those in his charge. “What you’re trying to do is help the police officer in the field.”
One night, Eaton was leaving work, making his way around the command center to shake hands with each person on duty, as was his custom. Word arrived of a South American prison break. When Eaton learned that one of the escapees had shot and killed a cop, he hung up his coat. He slumped in a chair, identifying with the victim.
He phoned one of his underlings, whose expertise he required in order to dispatch the Interpol notices that would aid in the search for the suspects. The employee said that she was home, and that she would come to office once she had finished her dinner. “The only reason you have food on your table is because of these police officers,” Eaton told her. “Get your ass in here. Now.” Eaton’s professional behavior left no doubt that he was operational, not political, and come what may.
When his passion was inflamed, Eaton’s voice would boom. His words would come out in a high-vocabulary jumble, and it might be hard to understand him, especially if you weren’t a native English speaker, which was true of many at Interpol. Although his arguments were often correct, the bluntness of his debating style derailed him from a path to the top jobs in Interpol’s highly political environment.
Often over the years, he and Ron Noble differed. Yet they retained mutual respect. One night over dinner in 2008, Noble told Eaton: “You might be the only person who is more loyal to Interpol than to me.”
Eaton “aspired to leadership at Interpol,” but he was not obtuse. Such a determined cop, such a disinclined politician. His fundamental political flaw was what made him operationally effective. He was unforgiving. But he was not perfect.
He had had a liaison with a Frenchwoman he had met in Lyon. In secret, there was a daughter. Eaton’s marriage to his second wife, Kathie, ended – though, he says, not acrimoniously. The two remain in cordial contact today. “My wife was a good housekeeper,” he says. “She kept the house. She deserved it.”
Approaching sixty, Eaton’s career had stalled, advancement at Interpol closed off to him. His personal life was an open question. But unlike many others of his age, he was not unduly discouraged by the future. He believed he had more to do. He had energy. He was an expert in not only the way that international organized crime operated, but also the way that international police did its business – and how it might cooperate more effectively in combating global conspiracy. Eaton had acquired the knowledge and skills that come to only the adept, energetic, well-placed international policeman. All he needed was a place to apply them.
HONG KONG, PRESENT DAY
Hong Kong’s Wooloomooloo Steakhouse attracts a busy lunchtime crowd. On the thirty-first floor of the Hennessy building, the restaurant overlooks Victoria Harbor, toward Kowloon and mainland China and all of the money that has transformed global sports betting.
Patrick Jay works his way through a cut of meat. Jay is the head of the sportsbook at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. This may be the most profitable sportsbook in the world, though such rankings are impossible to calculate, given the nature of the business. Jay explains that the Hong Kong Jockey Club handles roughly $6.5 billion in betting on football per year. From its entire gambling portfolio, the book takes $1 billion in profit annually. The Hong Kong Jockey Club is the largest taxpayer in Hong Kong, representing 8 percent of the local budget.
Jay is a tall, large-boned man, with the gregarious and happily ravenous manner of someone whose strategic decisions have guided him to a windfall. He projects the attitude of that rare animal, the winning gambler. Jay is one of an expanding cast of Englishmen come east. They carry expertise in the traditional, respected, English way of making a book – at shops like Ladbrokes and William Hill – and they now apply these business principles to Asia, where their experienced hand is welcomed. The Asian market has grown exponentially in the last decade. Jay estimates that the market represented about $100 billion at the turn of the millennium. Today, he says, Asian gamblers wager $1 trillion on sports per year. “The numbers are absolutely unfathomable to everybody,” Jay says. “People back in the U.K. don’t believe it. If you show them financial numbers, they say, ‘You’re making this up. You got Enron to do your accounting for you.’ ” It is not only the size and growth of the Chinese economy that has attracted so many in Western gaming. Nor would adventure be a sufficient motive for someone as oriented to business as Jay to relocate this far from home. It is habit most of all that draws people in Jay’s line – Chinese habit, the role that gambling plays in Asian cultures, the well-documented acquaintance with risk. This, as much as Asian economic dynamism, is the guarantor of continued growth in the gambling business. Jay’s research tells him that in Hong Kong, locals allocate upward of two and a half times more of their disposable income for gambling than do people in the United Kingdom. “Asia is not the center of the universe,” Jay says. “Asia is the universe.”
Jay’s sportsbook is located at, unsurprisingly, a racetrack. It is public, open, legal. And it is categorized in the minority. Throughout nearly all of Asia, the most active gambling continent, gambling is illegal. It is illegal to bet on sports on mainland China, for this activity is antithetical to the precepts of the communist state. The Muslim religion does not permit gambling for Indonesia’s 250 million people. This doesn’t mean that legal statutes prevent gambling. On the contrary, illegal, unregulated bookies in China, Indonesia, and all across Asia predominate. Jay claims that the illegal betting market is ten times larger than the legal market. Of the $1 trillion total, he says that $900 billion is wagered in the dark, administered by the criminal entities that finance, regulate, and enforce a parallel industry.
At Wooloomooloo, lunch draws to a close, and Patrick Jay readies to make a demonstrative point. “Look around the restaurant,” he says. “What do you see?” There are tables full of what appear to be businessmen in the midst of congenial lunch meetings. There are a few romantic couples sharing their little moments. At other tables, friends speak loudly with one another, then laugh. It is the usual steakhouse crowd, but for one missing element. “No booze,” Jay says. He’s right. Plates of steaks and potatoes cover the tabletops, but no single glass of beer or whiskey accompanies them. “These people don’t spend their money on alcohol. They gamble.”
China’s market reforms of the late twentieth century incited one of the most remarkable periods of localized economic growth that the world has ever experienced. Throughout the 1990s, the Chinese economy grew at a rate of roughly 10 percent per year. In rapid fashion, this swelling generated both great personal wealth for some individuals and general liquidity in Chinese society.
While this miraculous event was unfolding, so was an episode of even greater global significance and revelation. During this period, the Internet was growing from a computer engineer’s curiosity into the world’s primary means of commerce and communication. At the moment that many millions of Chinese people all of a sudden possessed disposable income, there was a new place to play with it. When these fortunate Chinese considered how they might float their new wealth for the enjoyment and risk that had long been a central part of their culture, they were presented with a growing number of gambling options online.
The emergence of the Internet not only precipitated the growth of online betting sites, but also improved options for the gambler. Before the Internet, the corner-store bookie, such as Ladbrokes, had little incentive to
