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As classy as it is controversial, Casino du Liban has had to weather decades of disasters. Hugh Macleod reports on efforts to re-establish the venue as an international hot spot
PHOTOGRAPHY TANYA TRABOULSI
It was Ramses II who kicked things off, 13 centuries before Christ. And on through history they came – from Nebuchadnezzar to Hannibal, the Mamluks to General Allenby – the peoples and armies that have tramped through Lebanon over the ages all ended up at one place: funnelled down by the impassably steep green mountains north of Beirut toward the blue Mediterranean waters of the Bay of Jounieh and a place known as the “Valley of Thieves”.
“There would be bandits waiting here and every convoy would have to pay some tax before they would let it pass,” says Elias Nimer, elderly guardian of the ancient stone bridge built by the Romans to help their carriages along the coastal plain.
Today, visitors travelling along Lebanon’s coastal highway must once again divert their vehicles down toward the valley, after the main road bridge north of Jounieh was destroyed last summer. And there, high above the traffic, stands a rather more elegant means of losing money to a stranger: the Casino du Liban, the Middle East’s oldest, largest and only officially dedicated facility for gambling.
Our short history lesson has put Dr Khater Abi Habib, Chairman of the Casino, in a nostalgic mood. “Geography,” he muses, “does indeed have a profound ability to re-present itself in human affairs.”
But while geography was repeating itself, the extra traffic on the road was spoiling the tranquil atmosphere around the Casino. So management decided a little historical intervention of its own was in order. “The Casino decided we would pay the US$3m for the reconstruction of the bridge ourselves,” says Abi Habib. “The extra traffic was making the atmosphere a little murky.”
Such no-nonsense resilience in the face of adversity has carried the Casino through decades of the sort of unrest that might have sunk most other entertainment enterprises. Opened in 1959, the multi-million dollar casino, a modernist take on the classic French casinos of Monte Carlo, was the brain-child of then President Camille Chamoun, who saw its construction as a way to harness Lebanon’s burgeoning gambling industry to the benefit of the state.
Under its founding contract, Casino du Liban has a monopoly on all gambling in Lebanon in return for turning over what today amounts to 40 percent of its winnings each night, before costs and overheads, to the government’s coffers. It also pays corporate tax on its net profits.
From its inception, the Casino was controversial. Critics saw it as a symbol of the pro-Christian policies of President Chamoun, favouring his own Maronite community – which make up the huge majority of Jounieh’s residents – over Lebanon’s Muslims.
With gambling believed sinful in Islam, many Lebanese Muslims at the time resented what they saw as a symbol of corrupt Christian decadence.
Nevertheless, during the 1960s and early ’70s the Casino revelled in what’s now viewed as something of a golden era, along the way gaining a reputation as one of the world’s most prestigious gambling and entertainment spots. The rich and famous from East and West – “Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Omar Sharif, the Shah of Iran, Albert de Monaco, to name a few,” recalls the Casino’s PR manager Reine Richa – flocked to see lavish cabarets and musical extravaganzas, many laid on by live-in French-American producer Charlie Henchis.
“The place used to thrive on foreigners,” says Joseph Massaad, a long-serving cash desk manager at the Casino.
Then came 1975 and the start of Lebanon’s ruinous 15-year-long civil war. “We would open one day and then have to shut the next,” says Massaad. Somehow the venue stayed open throughout most of the war, finding a new home-grown clientele in the wealthy Christians of east Beirut who fled north to Jounieh to escape the horrors of war.
The Casino finally closed in 1989 after its front façade was damaged by shell fire. But just seven years later a US$50m reconstruction and refurbishment programme was completed, with 60 gaming tables across three rooms for Black Jack, Casino Stud Poker, Punto Banco and American Roulette. More than 300 fizzing slot machines, a favourite of elderly Christian grandmothers, were also added. In 1998, the renovation of the Salle des Ambassadeurs, where 620 people can sit and watch shows, and the huge Theatre du Liban, a 1,050-seat theatre – the largest in the country – was completed.
Not only is the entertainment a crucial part of what Abi Habib describes as the company’s “founding social contract”, it’s also one of the reasons the place has remained a viable business. “While we are very conscious of what goes on in Lebanon we try to behave as if nothing untoward is happening, and we are always trying to put on the best shows we can,” says Abi Habib.
“If we were a purely commercial company and had to cancel shows we might go bust. But there is an ideological dimension to what we do as a mainstay of tourism in the country and so we can afford to carry these losses.”
At times, the losses have been spectacular. A troupe from the world-renowned Canadian performance spectacular Cirque du Soleil arrived on the eve of last summer’s month-long bombardment that decimated the vital tourism season and left the clowns and acrobats less than eager to strut their stuff. Several huge containers full of trapezes, tents and juggling equipment were duly shipped back once Beirut airport re-opened.
“We lost our best season to the war and then our second best season, autumn, was marred by political assassination and a deep sense of crisis. And since December we have had an impending political crisis,” says Abi Habib.
Much of this year’s summer entertainment has had to be postponed, including magician and escapologist Gino, a kind of Lebanese David Copperfield. The only forthcoming event scheduled for the summer is dance show, “Merci Paris”, due to begin mid-July.
Persistent allegations of massive embezzlement during the 1990s by Syrian intelligence agents and their Lebanese counterparts – Joe Faddoul, a Lebanese financial consultant, put the figure at US$50m a year – have also cast a black cloud over the operation.
Remarkably, however, the Casino continues to be profitable: last year it distributed a dividend of some $20 per share to its 1,000-plus shareholders, the largest of whom is the government’s Central Bank and Finance Ministry, owning 48 percent of Intra Investment Company, which owns the controlling stake in the Casino.
Despite the losses this year, Abi Habib, a respected financier brought into the Casino last April to smarten up management, predicts the company will again turn a profit. Indeed, the Casino’s share price has risen steadily since Syria withdrew its troops from Lebanon in 2005.
Through it all, the gamblers have kept the business alive, even in the darkest of days. “Three hours after the Israeli jets destroyed the road bridge just a few hundred meters away we had swept up the glass and we had gamblers back at the tables,” says Abi Habib. “The Lebanese are fairly resilient, and gamblers are a special breed.”
A tournament of “No-limit Texas Hold’em Poker” took place in the last week of June, bringing together 144 players from Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf. My own brief flutter during a recent trip to the Casino ended all too soon: US$100 lost to fast-paced US$17 minimum-bet Black Jack in barely 10 minutes.
Little does that compare, however, to the mighty record of Younis Hamze, former governor of Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. After making millions doing business in South America, the father of five returned to Lebanon at the end of the Civil War to govern over the land his Ottoman ancestors had bequeathed him. A first failed bet of US$500 in 1993 quickly escalated to US$5,000.
“I realised I was becoming an addict when I would drive from the Casino at dawn to go to work in the Bekaa,” says Hamze. His chronic gambling had already lost him his family when on New Year’s Eve 1997 Hamze lost US$180,000 in one night, prompting a heart attack. “I didn’t get the message,” says the self-confessed former addict. “Instead I sold my US$1m holiday villa for US$300,000 and kept on gambling. In 2000 I had another heart attack and I finally understood the message from God that I should change my life.”
Today, after losing nearly all his US$5m fortune in a seven-year gambling blitz, Hamze is reunited with his family and has rebuilt his business successfully. “I would warn people about playing too much poker and roulette. It can ruin your life,” he says, before adding conspiratorially: “But if people do go to the Casino you should tell them: Keep betting on the aces!”
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