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Sunday, January 08, 2006
Ring uses bar as front for gambling
By Dante M. Fabian
ANGELES CITY -- A gambling syndicate composed of foreigners have reportedly engaged in their unscrupulous activity in the country, using a bar and disco club in the Balibago tourism district here as their front.
Sources said the horseracing bets are placed inside the club named Ministry of Music where the audience also watch the races through cable television installed inside the huge establishment located at the corner of A. Santos and Hennyfel streets.
The place, which opened only last month, is only a few hundred meters south of Fields Avenue, where girlie bars offer entertainment to adult tourists.
A bar owner here who requested anonymity added that the group is headed by a British man named "Bill" who, he said, is a member of the Angeles Clark Field Tourism Association (Acta) organized and presently headed by Filipino businessman Rey Pineda, its president.
An informant told Sun Star Pampanga that the disco club teems with people during the daytime, in time for the showing of horse races in Australia flashed locally via cable television.
A source from the Angeles City Police Office (Acpo) said the owners of the club are emboldened by their connections with very influential personalities in the city.
The policeman said operatives under Senior Superintendent Policarpio Segubre have raided the alleged gambling joint previously and took several persons in their custody.
He added that however, those people were released and are now bragging of their strong connections with the police officials and Mayor Carmelo "Tarzan" Lazatin.
Other investors in the tourism industry here are alarmed by the group's illegal activities saying that this would attract suspicions that Fields Avenue has become the center of illegal gambling and unscrupulous activities.
A bar owner expressed fear that their bars would become targets of surveillance and raids by law enforcement groups such as the National Bureau of Investigation and the Philippine National Police.
(January 7, 2006 issue)
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