Stanley is said to have made large donations to Castilleja. Through a spokesperson, the headmistress says the school has received donations from Pansy and two sisters who also attended, but she declines to comment about contributions from Stanley.

On her father's advice, Pansy studied marketing and international business management at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit college in Silicon Valley. After her graduation, Stanley helped finance the startup of Occasions, a Hong Kong P.R. and high-end party-planning firm, which she ran successfully, earning the nickname Party Girl Pansy from the local press. She dined frequently at Dragon-i, a jet-set Hong Kong nightclub, and was a regular at the infamous, members-only Kee Club. After the breakup of her nine-year marriage to Julian Hui Chun Hang, the son of a Hong Kong shipping and property tycoon, in 2000, she was often photographed leaving Pink Mao Mao, a karaoke lounge and disco that was frequently raided by police. Gossip columns in Hong Kong played up her friendships with local celebrities like former Bond girl and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star Michelle Yeoh. Though Pansy left Occasions in 1995 and joined Shun Tak as a director, her socialite image has persisted.

A quarter-mile inland from the looming edifice of Pansy's Grand Macau, neon lights twinkle atop a cartoonish minaret-like structure that's supposed to be a lotus blossom. More lights flash, alternating to spell out L-I-S-B-O-A, in a display of kitsch reminiscent of the old Las Vegas Strip. The Lisboa is the flagship of Stanley Ho's once-unrivaled casino empire. Today, the Lisboa is dwarfed by Macao palaces like Steve Wynn's eponymous resort, Sheldon Adelson's Venetian Macao, and the MGM Grand Macau. But Pansy must go much farther from her father's side than the few blocks that separate the Lisboa from the Grand Macau.

To Pansy and other loyalists, Stanley is the consummate entrepreneur who, in his younger days, fought off pirates on the high seas (if the family stories are to be believed) as he built a small supply business into the $7 billion personal fortune he has today. But to law-enforcement and gaming officials in Europe and North America, he's a pariah linked to some of the most violent criminals on earth.

He was born in 1921 into one of Hong Kong's wealthiest and most prominent families. His grandfather, who was of Chinese and European descent, was a comprador, or go-between, for Jardine Matheson, the British trading house that once dominated the colony's financial, maritime, and opium trades. His father had served in a similar position for the powerful Sassoon trading house.

When Stanley was a teenager, his father lost everything and fled to Vietnam, leaving the family destitute. At the age of 20, when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, Stanley retreated to Macao and made the beginnings of his vast fortune by trading goods for food with the occupier. He has said that he did so to feed his starving compatriots, but no one benefited from the arrangement as much as he did.

In the early 1960s, when Pansy was a baby, Stanley set up the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macao with a small group of investors, including a gangster named Yip Hon, who helped establish and run S.T.D.M.—an enormously lucrative casino monopoly—for decades. Under the mantle of his Shun Tak Holdings conglomerate, which operates most of the family businesses other than casinos, Stanley established a fast ferry between Hong Kong and Macao. Shun Tak has since developed hotels, a shopping center, and a Space Needle-like tower that houses the island's convention center. In the 1980s, when China's economic reforms were creating a new wealthy class, the Hos' gambling business really took off—and so did organized crime. Stanley's casinos became a magnet for high rollers from the mainland, who played in dark and smoky V.I.P. rooms reportedly controlled by triads.

Stanley likes to brag that he has been photographed with Queen Elizabeth II, the elder George Bush, and Bill Clinton. He has also hobnobbed with more notorious heads of state. In 1999, he opened a casino in Pyongyang, North Korea, and was quoted in the Hong Kong press in 2003 as saying that he carried an offer of asylum from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to Saddam Hussein shortly before the Iraqi president was toppled. He has also showered the Communist government in Beijing with ostentatious gifts, including an $8.9 million Qing-dynasty bronze sculpture.