ILLEGAL casinos organised by Asian crime gangs were thriving in Gold Coast high-rise apartments that were also venues for organised prostitution.

Sources yesterday said a group offering gambling holidays to wealthy Chinese and Hong Kong tourists had sought a manufacturer in southeast Asia to make forged membership badges to the Gold Coast Turf Club for clients.

The apartments offered accommodation to Asian working girls on short-term visas and to tourists who met and mingled around illegal baccarat tables, a source told The Courier-Mail.

It is understood gangs also recruited Asian tourists from Jupiters Casino.

The source said organisers netted a financial bonanza by lending cash to gamblers at high interest rates and offering to move vast sums of personal gambling funds from China to Australia.

A police officer originally involved in forming Queensland's ethnic crime unit after the Fitzgerald inquiry said monitoring of Asian gangs became more difficult when the unit was disbanded around 1990.

He said the ethnic community had lobbied against the crime unit and an ethnic liaison unit within the Queensland Police Service was uncomfortable about the crime squad's existence. It was subsequently closed.

At that stage, the major concern about Asian organised crime was drugs, and police interest centred on Darra and Fortitude Valley, he said.

A police spokesman said these days there were two specialist units focusing on Asian crime were contained within the Drug Squad and the Organised Crime Squad.

A former police officer in the 1970s yesterday said it was common for police informants to receive a commission equivalent to half the fine of any SP bookmaker they helped snare.

While one group of police were busy organising sham raids on protected brothels, another group was virtually going to bed with prostitutes to prove the existence of illegal unprotected brothels.

He said police officers were expected to go only as far as handing over money for sex to prove the claim, but it was suspected some had gone further.

Yesterday, the state Opposition called for an urgent review of the illegal sex trade.

Opposition justice spokesman Mark McArdle said the review was needed to explain why illegal prostitution was flourishing and why state laws could not stop the growth of organised crime.

"How does the illegal prostitution industry continue to flourish despite the best endeavours of law enforcement officials? What are the impediments to shutting this industry down?" Mr McArdle asked.