This sealed urn contains nothing but the mortal ashes of the late Mr. Steven Wong.
—ROGER CERDEÑA, FUNERAL SERVICE DIRECTOR, PASAY CITY, METRO MANILA
There is no marker where the Paper Fan’s ashes are buried. The Schlipfs, Kosakas, and Holts are remembered with bronze plaques, but the Triad official has only an empty square of fescue to show for his life. “You’re sure this is his plot?” I ask Kein Battistone, the Forest Lawn Cemetery’s family service counselor.
Kein takes a step forward from where he stands discreetly behind me. Hands behind his back he bows slightly as he says, “Absolutely, Mr. Gould, that’s his plot, I’m positive.” He pulls from his breast pocket a photocopied map, shielding it from the rain with his palm. “Wong, Steven Lik Man. 1992. The Garden of Reflection. Row 2–C, Plot 582.” He kneels and pats the forlorn-looking bare spot. “Steve’s urn is right under here, I can assure you.”
I consult my own map and scan the terrain. Everything is as Chuck “the Chink” Gough drew it after Steve’s death. I’m eight paces east of a pretty copse with a pond in the middle. Orange carp are nuzzling the surface of the black pool and starlings squeal among the maples. Chuck the Chink, who is actually a white man, was part of Steve’s crew at the height of its ride. “I know Steve’s happy in that Garden of Reflection, Terry,” he told me. “He liked the birds and the fish, ya know. Also, the family’s got a great fucking view when they pay respects.”
I orient Chuck’s scrawled word “mountains” against the checkerboard of plaques marching up the hillside to the view, but white clouds hide the Coast Range. It has been warm and sunny for several days leading up to this ninth anniversary of Steve’s death; then, last night, an Aleutian wind blew in, laying down a sad gray shroud over Vancouver.
Kein has turned his eyes to the hidden mountains too, and appears to be thinking of something pleasant. He’s a young goateed fellow, his khaki shirt good-naturedly adorned with a Bugs Bunny tie. He seems like the kind of person I can talk to. “Key-in and Bat-a-stone,” he told me in his office, explaining how to pronounce his name. He’s done me a big favor, leading me through the thousands of graves in the rain to find Steve.
“Is it common when the family buries ashes that they don’t put a marker down?” I ask.
“Is it common?” Kein replies. He massages his goatee in thought. “Well, the marker takes two or three months to make, and then the family usually assesses their financial situation. Sometimes a family says they can’t afford it, and it just gets left there without a marker. There’s lots of different reasons. May I ask how you know Steve?”
I hesitate—a Chinese man in a trench coat has wandered up and is standing 30 feet away, looking down, a bouquet of flowers hanging from his hand. He leans forward and places the flowers on the grass, cups his hands and brings them to his forehead in a pronam. I’d thought about flowers myself, but when it came to paying for them at my local supermarket I broke into laughter. I gave them to my wife instead.
“I’m a journalist,” I tell Kein, when the man has strolled away. “I used to write about Steve—I’m writing about him now. But I’ve never been to his grave site.”
Kein looks at me curiously. “What did he do that you’re writing about him?”
“Oh, he had an interesting life,” I say. “And an interesting death.”
“Ohhh-kay!” Kein nods and narrows his eyes, surveying my pad, camera, and shoulder pack with new understanding. “So I guess he was murdered then, or—”
“There were things that went on.”
“Well, it must be drug-related. We get them allll the time. For us it’s like a common occurrence. That’s a reason there wouldn’t be a marker here. If he did something wrong, or if his death in some way involved criminals, then the family’s leaving it unmarked, because they don’t want the people to know where he is.”
“To tell the truth, Kein,” I say, “he was on the run.”
“There you go! That tells me a lot right there. The family doesn’t want anybody to know where he is.”
I ponder Steve’s blank patch, thinking of his parents, brothers, and nephews, not to mention his half a dozen mistresses, one of them married to a billion-dollar gambling racket. “It’s already been nine years,” I say.
“Well then, he must have had some heavyweight people after him. Maybe the family’s waiting a nice round ten years. Enough time for the people who were after him to forget. But then, you obviously haven’t forgotten him,” Kein laughs.
“No, not me,” I say, and snap a picture of the grass, stomped flat by the family of the Schlipfs. “I’ll never forget Steve.”
As we walk back towards the paved path I stop, dig my wallet out and give Kein my card. “Maybe you can let me know if Steve has any visitors.”
Kein tsks his tongue in regret. “I don’t know if I can do that for you. But some inside information I can give you is that we have only three spaces left here. Three hundred and ninety dollars.”
“Is that a good deal?”
“A deal!? Are you kidding? Whispering Pine is two thousand.” He points across the lawn. “Heartland is five thousand. So for this location, yes, you’ve got a real bargain. In fact, in fact—” he says, checking his map, “you can have one right here if you want it.”
“Ten steps from Steve,” I say, looking down between my feet. If I could collar him that way, I’d do it in a second.
Steve’s funeral was held on a hot, mid-August afternoon in 1992, two weeks before he was to have gone on trial for masterminding a heroin conspiracy, and not long after a judge had returned his passport so he could travel to Hong Kong to meet his fiancée’s parents. A dozen Vancouver gangsters, gang tarts, lawyers, and a couple of undercover cops from the Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit filed into Mount Pleasant Funeral Home to pay their respects to the two-foot urn about to be buried beneath the Garden of Reflection. Some of the attendees, like Steve’s mother, Yue Kim Wong, were distraught with grief. Others, like Chuck the Chink, were steely-jawed and stoic. Still others—the cops come to mind—could hardly suppress their smirks. Steve, they’d learned, had hastily purchased a million dollars in life insurance just before flying to the romantic East to meet the parents of his future wife, a woman whom Steve had named in an affidavit as Patsy Chan. Yet four days ago Steve’s mom had told investigators from the RCMP that she’d never heard of Patsy Chan, and that, while her 28-year-old son had a slew of girlfriends, she knew of none he wanted to marry.
I had first met Steve in early 1990, just after he’d beaten to death a rival mobster on a crowded Chinatown street. At the time, Steve was the manager of a Vancouver bodyguard firm called Kouzins Security, staffed by his murderous, 30-man Gum Wah gang. Owned by a convicted heroin trafficker named Ray Chau—the son of a senior partner in the gambling empire of Macau’s famous billionaire, Stanley Ho—the chief function of Kouzins was to protect heroin barons as they got off the plane from Hong Kong and Macau. Patsy Chan, one of Steve’s many mistresses, was Ray Chau’s wife.
Despite his rarefied connections and busy sex life, Steven Wong was not very impressive-looking. He was five foot four inches tall and weighed 150 pounds—a seemingly amiable pudgeball with thick glasses, a high, almost childlike voice, and a habit of punctuating his sentences with a schoolboy’s nervous giggle. With only an eighth-grade education and a hood’s sense of fashion, he struck most people—including the judge who gave him back his passport—as the antithesis of a sophisticated Asian mobster. Nevertheless, for the Mounties and the Vancouver city police who had been chasing Wong for years, he typified Asian criminal success. Locally he was the boss of Vancouver’s most powerful street gang, whose top rankers referred to him by the delicate nickname Paper Fan—Tzs Sin. Internationally he was a fighting official in the 14K Triad—among the largest of the Chinese mafia groups and the one that dominated Macau. Outrageously wealthy for an unemployed 26-year-old, Steve retained a prominent Vancouver city councilman as his lawyer and had no adult criminal convictions, notwithstanding his numerous arrests on suspicion of murder, manslaughter, extortion, drug running, and credit card fraud. “He really is the big gangster in town,” the Asian Crime Squad’s Martin Turner once told me.
Born in Hong Kong, raised in New York’s Chinatown, a criminal since the age of 11, Wong had set up a masterful organization for the recruitment of Vancouver’s most vulnerable teens into a life of war. He portrayed himself to judges as doing nothing more than running a service organization for underprivileged immigrant youngsters, and spoke of his lieutenants as social workers initiating the dispossessed into his self-help society. But Wong used his charges mercilessly, molded them into monsters of themselves and then put them in the literal line of fire for his own benefit, until, one after another, their lives were as good as lost.
Between the time I first walked into his home and his death two and a half years later, I had betrayed Steve twice. Nevertheless, before and between betrayals, I had become his friend, and as much as anyone in his gang, I regretted his passing. Indeed, I felt partly responsible for the Mountie investigation, Project Bugs, which had led to his arrest and then to his extensive transformation and uniting with heaven.
I still regret not being there for his emotional send-off at Mount Pleasant. The morning of August 14, 1992, I received a cryptic call from the police advising me to stay away from what my contact described as the latest Steve caper, and because I’d lived under a Mountie protection program for half a year because of him, I thought that was a good idea. The police were certain Steve was still alive. He’d flown to Hong Kong in the company of a girlfriend and, after a hop to Macau and a meeting with some important colleagues, flown on alone to the island of Negros in the Philippines, where he was met by a Vancouver heroin dealer engaged to the daughter of the wealthiest and most influential lawyer on the island. A few days later, on July 19, 1992, Steve took a motorcycle-taxi excursion into remote mountains. Tragically, the taxi tipped over and Steve bumped his head on a rock and died. A senior inspector with the Philippine National Police, who was a friend of the lawyer’s, retrieved the body and turned it over to the heroin dealer, who ordered it cremated. The lawyer then put together a stack of affidavits and shipped the package to the Canadian embassy in Manila. Two weeks later a Canadian death certificate was issued and Steve’s sack of ashes was delivered to his parents.
This was a scam if the cops had ever seen one, although in the weeks following the funeral, the knowing smirks of the police turned to grimaces. The theoretically dead Steve could not be compelled to appear at his trial, and the judge soon severed his case from his coconspirators without issuing an arrest warrant for his failure to appear in court. With no warrant to justify an investment of resources, the Mounties were forced to terminate their investigation. By the spring of 1993 it looked like Steve had succeeded in making a mockery of the Mountie motto.
At that point, Steve became my life’s work, my life’s study, my obsession. The insurance companies had by then learned of a two-part TV exposé I’d done on the Paper Fan—the one that had put me under police protection—plus a subsequent article I’d written about his ruses and capers. Looking at forking over a million dollars to Steve’s parents, they put an ex-CIA agent on the case and called me. I jumped on the story and began phoning my police contacts. A month before Steve’s demise, the RCMP’s Drug Intelligence Unit had published one of my investigative articles in their eyes-only bulletin, distributed to drug agents across the continent. The intelligence officer who edited the bulletin had appended my phone number to the article, along with an invitation to readers to get in touch with me. I received calls from U.S. and Canadian undercover officers, members of strike forces, and federal customs officials. To all my cop sources I now related the most recent revelations concerning the Paper Fan’s disappearance. The insurance companies then put me in touch with agents in the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation, who asked me to become their back-channel to the RCMP until Canada launched an official investigation. By the first anniversary of Steve’s death my home office had turned into command central of the hunt for Steven Wong.
Today, Steve is no longer officially dead. Interpol has a Red Alert/Dangerous Person arrest warrant out for the Paper Fan, and his updated résumé reads like a Hollywood script—a postmortem panorama of organized criminal adventure that circles the Pacific Rim, from Macau to Japan, from Cambodia to the Philippines. All the years Steve’s urn has been interred in the Garden of Reflection he’s been thriving on the corruption of six state governments and their law enforcement agencies, so well protected by officials that even when the cops know where he is they can’t nab him. I’ve been around the world three times trying to arrange that nab, and one thing I’ve learned hunting Steve is that in his world it is often impossible to tell the fox from the hounds, or, for that matter, from the elect gentlemen who supposedly control the hunt. Living by a code of convenience that is far more natural to men than the rule of law, politicians, police, businessmen, and criminals often sprint along in one big pack, sometimes nipping each other’s heels, sometimes licking each other’s faces, and sometimes inviting one another back home for all-night mah-jongg parties. Forced to work according to their right-side-up rules, Canadian cops don’t have a chance of arresting Steve in his upside-down world.
On the other hand, I am unencumbered by international agreements and law enforcement protocols that are followed by good cops but not by bad cops. These days, the Paper Fan is back in the Philippines, well ensconced with police buddies and smack in the center of the astounding corruption that in early 2001 brought down President Joseph Estrada. But I’ve got a friend on the inside there, a senator who is the ex-chief of the Philippine National Police—currently being investigated by his senatorial colleagues for drug trafficking, murder, kidnapping, money laundering, and illegal wiretapping. The perfect cop to arrange the extraordinary rendition of the perfect gangster.
As I say goodbye to Kein Battistone and leave the Garden of Reflection, I admit to myself that I just can’t give up the chase. My next play in this game with no rules will be to book another ticket to Manila. Call it a journalist’s penchant for throwing good money after bad, or the desire to smash Steve as an icon to the underside of man, or just my own Steve-like urge to fight: all of it makes me helpless in the face of my strange hobby. I know I’m not alone in my pursuit, of course, but as a civilian and not a cop I do sometimes get lonely. More often than not, I’m just scared.