The local news headlines have been hogged by the death of Lim Goh Tong, the gambling boss, championing how great a Chinese he had been but neglecting to highlight the huge number of people who have committed suicide when they lost all their belongings including the shirt on their back, at the ever popular casinos belonging to him.
Families have been destroyed, marriages have broken up, parents and children have despised each other, and the gambling industry established by Lim has spawned a vast network of evil destruction especially for the Chinese community that includes illegal money lending, physical abuses of borrowers, wives and children sold into prostitution to repay debts, women losing their morals just to try their luck one more time, parents killing each other to grab insurance money needed to fuel the gambling addiction, homes destroyed, houses and business premises splayed with paint, bullets posted to debtors as warning threats, valuables pawned, education forsaken, lives lost, relationships broken and the list just goes on and on.
How do I know all these? Personal experiences. My own relatives have lost everything that they have lived for, and their addiction to "Uncle Lim's" gambling dens had been like a heroin-addicted user hunting for another fix, and willing to live a life of crime just to fuel their habits.
So, in my humble opinion, Lim is not my hero. Is he yours?
In the above photograph which I clipped, it shows the 21-story Sands Casino Hotel being demolished in Atlantic City, New Jersey on October 18, 2007. During the good heydays, the Sands Casino had hosted celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. It was reduced to thousands of tons of rubble on Thursday evening in the latest effort to remake the seaside gambling town.
Can this happen the Lim's casino? Do you wish it to happen, like a terminator searching to destroy the termites' nest?
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