THE PROSECUTOR WHO STAYED: On a Remote American Island, a Texas Lawyer Watched China Buy What It Could Not Conquer

A Harvard-Educated Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Says Washington Shied Away From a Chinese Casino Corruption Probe in Saipan.

The unfinished Imperial Pacific casino complex, still dominating Saipan’s waterfront, became for Jim Kingman a monument to the island’s unresolved corruption and money-laundering questions.

SAIPAN – The irony was almost too neat, and Jim Kingman felt it land as he sat in the gleaming, barely used federal courthouse on Saipan in the summer of 2024 and watched the United States government close the book on Julian Assange.

They had come a very long way to do it. The head of the Justice Department’s national security division flew in that morning; by early afternoon the WikiLeaks founder had pleaded guilty to a single Espionage Act count over the disclosure of Bradley Manning’s classified files, been sentenced to time served, and was gone — three hours, beginning to end, the federal lawyers not bothering to feign curiosity about the island they had chosen as the stage.

Kingman, a Harvard Law School graduate who had spent years prosecuting fraud, financial crimes, and child exploitation in Texas before arriving in 2023 to lead the CNMI government’s anti-corruption task force, had grown skeptical — maybe that is too soft a word — about Washington’s national security lens on Saipan, and about the inroads of an adversary that made Assange look like a saint.

To be blunt, he felt like a man disabused of an earlier faith in justice. Absent any self-deprecation, he would tell friends that his appointment as the corruption investigator probing the island’s casino hotel amounted to little more than a patsy’s role.

So as the argument unfolded about how Assange’s leaked secrets had imperiled American national security, Kingman, who had prosecuted here and read the place far more closely than its visitors, sat thinking about the airport they had flown into that morning: a port of entry that by his account had gone twenty-five years without answering an audit, functioning all the while as a channel for cheap labor to feed the United States’ appetite for clothing.

The undermining of national security, he thought, was not the thing being adjudicated in this room. It was the room itself — the whole island, and Washington’s long, deliberate refusal to look at Beijing’s saturation of its every nook and cranny.

He was not the only person in that courtroom who understood the island for what it was.

Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, was there too, and only months earlier Kingman had attended a gathering on strategic competition in the Pacific where Rudd had spoken about Chinese operations of the kind the Australians had been confronting for years.

“Rudd definitely knows the game,” Kingman recalled, in an interview. He had sat in that courtroom half-wishing the visitors from Washington and Canberra would simply stay.

“I just want these people to stay here for just a couple days, because they’ll see it as fast as I do of what’s happening here.” None of it, he said, came to fruition. The plane left. The island went back to being what it had been: a piece of America well familiar to Beltway insiders from the days of Jack Abramoff’s influence — his efforts, exposed in media reports, to attack the lawmakers who sought to turn over the rocks and examine the unsavory face of coerced Chinese labor. From the casino to the labor cases still grinding through the courts over abuse on the sprawling hotel project, it was, for Kingman, a place Washington still refuses to examine.

“When I first got on island, the very first morning, I looked down and I see the gigantic Imperial Pacific Casino three quarters built and just rotting away, towering over the entire rest of the island,” Kingman recalls. “And I immediately am like, ‘Oh, this whole thing is a gigantic Chinese money laundering operation.’ And I was a little bit shocked that the guy that brought me out there, didn’t give me any sort of heads up on that.”

To understand why a Texas prosecutor came to see himself as a token investigator in Saipan — empowered on paper but constrained in practice — you have to understand the casino, and to understand the casino, you have to understand what came before it.

Saipan is a strip of coral and limestone in the western Pacific, closer to China than to Hawaii, an island of roughly fifty thousand people that flies the American flag. For thirty years after United States Marines took it from Japanese forces in 1944, it idled in the sun, known mostly for the bases it had once housed and the battle that had nearly erased it. That changed in 1975, when the islands voted to become a United States commonwealth and the Ford administration, hoping to give a near-empty economy a pulse, handed the new Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands an extraordinary bargain. Goods made there could enter the mainland with no quotas, tariffs, or duties, and could carry the “Made in the USA” label. In exchange, the commonwealth was exempted from federal labor and immigration law — free to set its own wage floor and to admit foreign workers on its own terms.

Entrepreneurs from China, Taiwan, and South Korea rushed in and built garment factories, sewing clothes for some of the most familiar labels in American malls, and recruited their workforce from the farms and slums of the Asian mainland. In the two decades after the treaty, the commonwealth’s population more than tripled; by the late 1990s, the islands were shipping roughly a billion dollars in textiles to the U.S. mainland each year.

But over time, and under the radar, according to former prosecutors, local officials, and regional analysts, operators linked to Chinese global-influence political bodies known as United Front networks — most of them nominally businesspeople or investors — subtly gained a strategic foothold for Beijing inside the American system itself.

The workers who made those clothes lived something closer to indenture than the American Dream. A congressionally mandated task force reported that 91 percent of the private workforce consisted of foreign laborers, many paying off the fees their employers had charged to bring them across the ocean.

Although the reporting from Saipan does not draw the comparison, the economics and the population flows suggest a system resembling the snakehead human shipments then flooding the West Coast of North America, which — according to American and Canadian intelligence and immigration assessments of the period — moved through Hong Kong and Fujian-based criminal networks and, according to classified Canadian intelligence from 1993, reported by The Bureau, involved Chinese Communist Party leaders in Fujian, and the Ministry of Public Security.

The living conditions and the harsh repayment demands documented on Saipan echo what those same intelligence reports described of the smuggled laborers who worked in underground factory conditions in Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. On Saipan, federal investigators documented guarded barracks, systematic underpayment, retaliation against those who complained, and contracts that forbade workers from falling in love or becoming pregnant. The task force called the islands a national embarrassment.

When reform finally threatened — a 1997 Senate vote to extend United States immigration law to the islands — the commonwealth’s government, and the textile interests it served, turned to Washington for protection. They hired the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, then at the firm Preston Gates, who massaged the assignment into an ideological crusade aimed at right-wing lawmakers, and was eventually paid millions.

Abramoff’s method was the junket.

He and his deputies flew more than a hundred members of Congress, aides, and conservative writers to Saipan; in a memo to the islands’ principal textile patron, intercepted by The Washington Post in 1998, he wrote that thanks to those trips the commonwealth had many friends on the appropriations committees, and in his own strategy documents he called the trips one of the most effective ways to build permanent friends on the Hill. By the measure that counted, it worked.

Despite years of documented abuse, Congress passed not a single bill to reform the islands’ labor regime. The scandal eventually helped send Abramoff to prison, but the machine he had built on Saipan — the lesson that proximity to power could be purchased, and that the federal government could be made to look away — outlasted him.