Jul 4, 2026 – 5.00amEven for a company known for its staff parties, VGW’s 10-year celebration in November 2020 struck many in attendance as elaborate. Held in a ballroom at the Crown Perth, there wasn’t just one champagne tower; there were several dotted about the room filled with the company’s employees.The night started off as relatively civilised, with dinner and speeches. Billionaire founder Laurence Escalante, who started the gambling business by taking advantage of a loophole in US law to deliver slick online poker machine games to millions of Americans, cut a four-layered gold cake with the words “happy 10th anniversary”. But once the formalities wrapped, the curtains behind the stage rose, music pumped, balloons and glitter dropped from the roof and the ballroom was suddenly transformed into a nightclub.Subscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Primrose RiordanAssociate editorPrimrose Riordan covers private companies and family offices from the AFR’s Sydney newsroom. Primrose was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and covered foreign affairs and politics in Canberra. Message Primrose on Signal: https://tinyurl.com/PrimroseSignalMark Di StefanoColumnistMark Di Stefano is a Rear Window columnist at The Financial Review, based in the Sydney newsroom. You can securely send him tips encrypted messaging platform Signal (@MarkDiStef.82). He previously worked at ABC, BuzzFeed News and The Information.Fetching latest articles
‘It was wild’: The untamed reign of Perth’s golden boy
Former employees of Laurence Escalante’s VGW lift the lid on the wild parties and toxic workplace culture they say were rife at the billionaire’s gambling empire.
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