Gambler gets life in prison for killing

About 10 years ago, Canadian car dealership owner John Wolfe and his family remained cloistered in their home with the shades drawn.

A former employee, Greg Chao, had demanded $50,000 from Wolfe to absolve gambling debts and threatened to shoot Wolfe's two daughters, age 7 and 9, if he didn't get it.

When Wolfe stalled, as directed by Canadian law enforcement, Chao telephoned and asked him: "Are you going to call my bluff?" Clark County prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo told a jury Thursday in District Judge David Barker's courtroom.

It was an appropriate question coming from Chao, whose gambling debts prompted him to commit increasingly violent crimes: two thefts in 1996, the extortion of Wolfe in January 1997 and the December 1997 murder of Canadian poker player Donald Idiens in a Strip hotel.

After a penalty hearing Thursday in which Chao's criminal history was scrutinized, a Clark County jury said Chao must serve life without the possibility of parole for Idiens' murder.

The 53-year-old Idiens had gone to Chao's hotel room at the Imperial Palace to collect a debt. He was found the next morning naked and beaten to death on a hotel fire escape.

For 10 years justice has been at the forefront of the thoughts of Idiens' daughter. Colette Mondin spoke to the jury about how the death of her father affected his four children, who are now all adults.

"It changes you forever," she said.

Her sense of security has been shaken as she realized that murder can happen to anyone, even her father, described as an outdoors enthusiast who loved his family.

"My sense of security and my instinct about people has changed," Mondin said.

Authorities connected Chao to the killing via DNA evidence found later in his hotel room, days after he returned to British Columbia where he played in the same poker club as Idiens, the Apollo Card Club.

The chief argument of defense attorneys Tim O'Brien and Dan Silverstein was that police allowed leads to grow stale during what the attorneys called an inadequate investigation that focused only on Chao as a suspect.

They asked the jury to have mercy on Chao, a star ping-pong player who emigrated from China with his family at the age of 14, and give him the minimum sentence of 40 years.

Silverstein asked the jury to consider the Wolfe incident in the context of "a bluff," one he had no intention of carrying out.

As he asked for mercy, O'Brien urged jurors to give Chao, 41, hope because he "is likely going to die in a maximum-security prison."

But DiGiacomo noted that Chao was arrested for the Wolfe incident, jailed for six months and paroled by a Canadian board that described him as having a low risk to re-offend. "He bluffed his way to parole that time," DiGiacomo said.

Chao expressed remorse for Idiens' slaying Thursday.

"There's no amount of words to adequately describe my sorrow and sympathy for Mr. Idiens' death," he said.

Review-Journal writer Francis McCabe contributed to this report.