One name the Clintons cannot be happy to see back in the news is Ng Lap Seng. Ng being the mega-rich Chinese national who used a proxy to pour more than $1 million into the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton-Gore campaign back in 1996. Scandal was joined by embarrassment when it turned out that Ng had been favored with 10 visits to the White House, including an elevator ride with Hillary Clinton. His proxy went to prison, but Ng escaped criminal charges. He continued the life of a billionaire real estate developer in Macau with ties to the upper levels of the Chinese government and possibly its intelligence services.
Ng Lap Seng with Bill Clinton in Washington.
Ng is said to have started life in dire poverty and to have bribed a Chinese cop to slip into Macau. He started out there selling scavenged cloth to garment factories and became what The Washington Post would call “a literal rags-to-riches story.” His holdings grew to include the Fortuna Hotel, where the Communist Party partied, a massage-table dance-karaoke spot for the Chinese military and supposedly Triad gangsters. “Attractive and attentive hostesses from China, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma, together with erotic girls from Europe and Russia, certainly offer you an exciting and unforgettable evening with friends or business associates,” the Fortuna’s literature boasts.
Maybe Ng figured all that Stateside fuss about the Clintons was forgotten when he made a series of brief trips to New York with suitcases of cash on a total of 10 occasions between July 12, 2013, and July 5 of this year. The amounts ranged from $200,000 to $900,000, for a total in excess of $4.5 million. Ng may also have assumed that the feds could not prove otherwise when told them said the money was variously intended for gambling, acquiring real estate, and purchasing art and antiques. The FBI set to work. “In truth and in fact the more than $4.5 million in cash was not principally used for or intended to be used for these purposes,” the FBI concluded in the resulting criminal complaint filed last month.
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