Saturday, July 02, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Self-made multimillionaire and Las Vegas high roller Chopot slain in Costa Rica
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SPOKANE, Wash. -- Ed Chopot, who grew up poor before becoming a multimillionaire who loved gambling, has been found slain in Costa Rica.
Chopot, 76, was $12 million in debt to Las Vegas casinos, according to court records, when he disappeared from Spokane in about 2003.
His body was found last week in an apartment complex in the village of Escazu, near the Costa Rica capital of San Jose, a family spokesman said Wednesday.
Spokane attorney Bob Caruso said he had been a friend of Chopot's for more than 40 years.
"He was found murdered in his apartment in Escazu," the lawyer said. "He suffered wounds to the head and bled profusely in the apartment."
Chopot grew up during the Depression on a small family homestead near Colville. By 15, he was out on his own, selling ice and doing farmwork.
In the 1970s and 80s, he owned various sawmills in the region and also a company in the Fiji Islands that made a fortune by refurbishing and reselling Army helicopters scrapped in Vietnam, the Spokesman-Review reported.
At a sawmill he started near Plummer, Idaho, he turned timber mill waste into electricity by building one of the first co-generation plants in the West.
In the mid-1990s, Chopot built a five-story, 15,000-square-foot chateau, Sleeping Child Hot Springs, on a 30-acre estate in the Bitterroot Valley, near Hamilton, Mont.
He apparently was single and living alone at the time of his death.
He was a recognized big-stakes regular at the gambling tables in Nevada. The casinos would send their private jets to Spokane to pick up Chopot and his friends for trips to Las Vegas in the 1990s, friends and associates have said.
Chopot eventually was given lines of credit at most of the casinos in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.
But shortly after 2000, he started running up unpaid gambling debts at five casinos, including $3.5 million at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, public records show. Four years ago, the records also show, Chopot went to the Venetian in Las Vegas where he was given a $1.8 million line of credit that remains unpaid.
