Inside Vancouver’s Chinese organized crime! Tonight! An exclusive interview with one of the leaders of Vancouver’s Asian gangs and his enforcer! Tomorrow! The link to the largest organized crim network in the world: the Chinese Triads!
—PROMO FOR THE CBC EVENING NEWS, MARCH 12, 1990
Tsunami Sushi was a kinky kind of place, known for its little Japanese fishing boats that circled the middle of the restaurant as a floating buffet. Patrons, mostly upscale Asian tourists and gang kids, hovered like herons on the shore, spearing their servings and then paying for their choices at the register. Of course, Steve and I weren’t required to work for our salmon rolls, in any sense of the word. The fellow at the door greeted the Paper Fan with ecstatic servility—“Ah-so-nice-to-see-you-again-Mr.-Wong!”—and ushered us to a table overlooking fashionable Robson Street. Within seconds a carafe of sake and two boats of fish were set before us. The only element missing at our perfect repast was David Paperny.
“I wonder where he is,” I said, 15 minutes later, scanning the street below. “Sorry about this, Steve.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it,” Steve comforted me. “I bet he figures, he’s late, you lose face with me.” He gave me a strangely Yiddish shrug, raising one hand and pursing his lips. “Then he moves in where you’re at, eh?”
He meant I had attained a position worth stealing, although in his mind my good fortune probably had less to do with journalistic access than with being on the verge of moving from gang-observer to gang-player, and then—who knows—heroin honcho. Surely Paperny would scheme to elbow me out ofthat lucrative spot.
“You figure that’s what he’s up to?” I asked. “I don’t think he’s that coldblooded, Steve. He’s a nice guy—”
Steve snickered and quoted a saying that had been used in Chinatown since gold-field days to describe white men: “Warm on the outside, cold on the inside. How long he’s making you drag your ass to talk to Phu? Now we’re gonna settle it, so where is he? Doesn’t that tell you something?”
I reached for Steve’s cell phone, but the gangster put his hand on it. “You don’t wanna let him know this is costing you face. How much he’s paying you anyway?”
I told him the pathetic amount—$1,200 for the project—although I was “in discussion” with the newsroom’s dai lo, Sue Rideout, to double it.
“You’re in the wrong racket,” Steve advised. “I pay that to my guys for one trip to the fucking airport and back.”
Five minutes later, in the midst of describing his latest first-class flight to Hong Kong, Steve focused his eyes past my head. “Don’t turn around. Let the cheap prick know you don’t give a fuck.”
“Sorry I’m late, gentlemen,” David said, pulling back a chair. “I got held up in the editing room. Nice place here, Steve, very nice. Interesting,” he added, noticing the stream of floating sushi.
“Yeah, the boys like it,” I said, cool as Steve.
David shot a glance at me, his perpetually inquiring eyes a bit more blue than usual. I casually surveyed the crowd. “Phu’s a go,” I added, to no one in particular. “We’ll need a camera Wednesday at two.”
“Phu at two,” Dave rhymed dryly, noting the day and time.
“Long as you don’t show who he is,” Steve stipulated.
“Yeah, I want him in the shadows,” I insisted to Dave.
“And Phu wants me there, that’s the deal,” Steve said. “Then he’ll tell ya what the Lotus been up to with our guys. When’s this thing gonna be on anyway?”
Paperny steepled his fingers. We hadn’t worked out whether we were going to give Steve a heads-up or not. “Two weeks maybe?” he asked me, as if I knew. “Hard to say—could be three. We still have a couple of shoots.”
This puzzled Steve. “Who else besides Phu?” he pointedly asked me.
I removed my eyes from Paperny’s long face and put them on Steve’s round one.
“Ah, you know, no Lotus are in it. Your side against Bill Chu’s and them guys.”
The Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit (CLEU) where Bill Chu worked was housed in a huge, utterly bland building, designed to be as anonymous as a tax department office. Even veteran waitresses at the Anza Club across the street didn’t know they worked beside the nexus of the fight against organized crime.* So secret were the doings inside the block-long edifice that when we pulled up in a van and tried to film an establishing shot, two plainclothes Mounties came running out and told us to put the camera away or the interview was off. Ironically, while the public was forbidden to know the location of CLEU, a Polaroid picture of the concrete building was thumbtacked over the urinals in Fraser Billiards, with a Chiquita Banana sticker pasted to its corner and an arrow pointing to a mirrored window marked with a bull’s-eye. “Banana” was an epithet that Hong Kong Chinese like Steve employed to refer to Canadian-born Chinese like Chu—who were supposedly yellow on the outside but white on the inside.
Chu obligingly gave us a mug shot of his detested cousin. We filmed it, then chitchatted in a conference room while John Collins arranged flattering blue lighting behind the gangbuster. John did such a good job that even my mother—whose tastes in men tended towards Humphrey Bogart—exclaimed when she saw the show: “Oh! what a handsome man that officer is! Whereas you—whatsamatta—you weren’t sleeping then or what? Couldn’t they use makeup? I could see every line in your face.”
My opening question was simple. “Who is Steven Wong?”
“Steven Lik Man Wong is basically a typical gang member who has progressed into Asian organized crime,” Chu told the town. “He was a Red Eagles member at thirteen years old and he worked his way up in violent confrontations with rival gangs. He went from street enforcer to the position where he is at now, leader of the Gum Wah.
“Now,” Chu went on, tilting his talking head in a different direction, “Steven has another side to him, where he has connections to the Far East and is involved in various other crimes at a higher level. The heroin trade is a safe area to say he is involved in and he openly admits it. So I would say he’s dealing on two levels. Internationally he has a longtime commitment to Asian organized crime groups to ply his trade of drug importation. Whereas on the street he is a violent gang leader, the one who has drawn our attention and is certainly a thorn in our side.”
“Is it a mark of his intelligence that he hasn’t been caught yet?” I asked.
“No,” Chu replied curtly. “Steven’s been lucky. He was indicted on a heroin conspiracy charge about a year and a half ago and, for one reason or another, his charges were stayed. But he may be here today and may be gone tomorrow. He himself knows he’s treading on thin ice, and the violent confrontations between the Lotus and Gum Wah illustrate that he is not untouchable.”
“When you say Steven may be gone tomorrow, do you mean dead tomorrow?” I asked.
“In a very basic way, yes.”
He also had a swollen Achilles’ heel—as I’d discovered—and Chu threw a stone of sarcasm at it. “If you or I were dealing with the heroin trade, we wouldn’t want to bring attention to ourselves. Whereas Steven, he’s a different piece of cake altogether. His ego grows as far as being recognized. Steven, with the profile of his personality, likes to be in the forefront and never forgotten. That’s why he’s chosen to be the Gum Wah leader, which in the opinion of our section is a violent Asian street gang that serves his wishes.”
That night, across the pool table at Fraser Billiards, one of Steve’s most violent gang servants contemplated me with mean eyes. Shooting a game with a Gum Wah gangster about Steve’s age, Phu had a black zoot-suit coat slung across his arm like a bullfighter’s cape, one pocket of which was heavier than the other. With every missed carom he glared at me as if it were my fault, then adjusted the coat.
I’d shown up to pre-interview Phu, although just now I wished I were doing it elsewhere and in the daylight. As I had walked in Steve my protector had walked out, hand in hand with his girlfriend Laura. That was when Phu had crossed the room in my direction and pointedly thrown his coat over his arm, as if he suspected I would snoop through it when his back was turned—a not entirely outlandish thought. A couple of years ago he’d been one of the main gunners in the Woodland Drive shoot-out. I wondered what caliber he was packing now.
“Laura’s some chickie doll,” I said to Phu, trying the colloquial approach. “You kinda wonder—”
“Fuckin’ what?” he asked, and I thought, never mind the pocket, watch the cue.
His pool partner, resting his palms on his cue tip, regarded us without expression. At the surrounding tables, half a dozen other Gum Wah I’d never met also looked on with flat faces. One of them, chalking his tip, said something to Phu in a singsong dialect. Phu grunted.
“What’s up?” I asked, smiling.
“He says you smile too much,” Phu’s partner said to me, in accentless English.
Now that it was pointed out to me, the muscles of my face suddenly felt awfully tired. Like most white people, since about the age of four I’d used my rubber smile to get what I wanted from strangers. The Chinese, who usually saved their smiles for friends, saw our outside warmth and inside coldness as our defining characteristic. Gwailo was their pejorative for us—“ghost person” or “foreign devil,” take your pick. Both stood for more than our race.
“Relax, no one’s gonna hurt you,” said Phu’s partner, who, I found out later, Steve had assigned to protect me. He laid his cue diagonally on the table, called Phu over, looked meaningfully at me and then at the line of club chairs against the wall. I took the hint and sat down on one of them. A moment later Phu put on his lopsided jacket and joined me there.
Over a pad I explained to Phu that it would be awkward and tense for him tomorrow, but he’d be wreathed in shadow. For now I just needed a few details of his life so I could ask him some pertinent questions that would encourage him to explain the plight of refugees and then the evil deeds of the Lotus.
Phu’s halting English was peppered with so many angry expletives it obscured the tragic details of his life and made him simply scary—in other words, I realized, great for TV. Born in the Mekong Delta in 1969, he spent his first six years in a free-fire zone that went back and forth between the South Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong. His sister was killed by a mortar; at 10, he made the perilous voyage with his family across the South China Sea; they spent a year in a refugee camp in Hong Kong; and finally immigrated to Canada in 1980. That might have been the dawn of a new day for Phu were it not for Steve. The Paper Fan picked him up for the Eagles straight out of an ESL class and broke him into the glories of hooliganism. Twenty street battles and a 12-month stint in jail later, Phu left the Eagles and followed Steve into the Gum Wah. A year after that, defending Steve’s territory in the Woodland Drive shoot-out, he’d taken a bullet in the chest.
In my opinion, Phu had zero to show for it. Despite Steve’s claims that he paid his charges $1,200 for a single trip to the airport, I saw no evidence of wealth in Phu’s life. He drove a rusted-out Datsun. His clothes were Canto-pop fashionable, but frayed at the cuffs. Perhaps he was a killer, but I kept picturing him writhing on the street in agony after one of the senseless battles that served Steve’s ends and no one else’s, getting killed for nothing.
“Tell me honestly, Phu, what do you think of Steve?” I asked.
“What I think? He good friend. He help me.” Then he said: “No more. I want play pool.”
The next day, while Steve and I circled the CBC’s headquarters looking for a parking spot, the Paper Fan noticed something I don’t think any reporter inside ever had: the downtown building was difficult to assault. From the front the six-story structure gave the impression of see-through openness, but Steve-the-commando spotted the illusion. The ends of the building were solid concrete, the wall of windows on the broad back end didn’t start until the second story, and while the main entrance may have been made of glass, it opened onto a plaza that was walled on three sides, making a flank attack impossible. “See, they give you a way in from Georgia, but look how narrow it is.” Steve pointed to an alley through the concrete, then pretend-shot a couple of preppy CBC types emerging single file from it. I later discovered the corporation’s Western headquarters had been designed in the wake of the 1970 October Crisis, when the Canadian government had been truly worried about revolutionary assaults. It took a warrior’s eye to spot the real purpose of the architecture.
We sat down on one of the benches in the plaza to wait for Phu, and five minutes later he came striding up, compensating for his fish-out-of-water feelings with glares at the overpowering building and curses in the direction of the privileged white folks enjoying their government-sponsored coffee breaks all around us. We paged Paperny, who came out with a Chinese-speaking cameraman, who led us to an atrium in the building and wired us up with the bright yellow sun behind us. Steve had a look in the eye cup to make sure Phu was in shadow and then courteously asked Paperny if he wanted to have a check. I took out my pad and asked Phu my first question. “You were in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. What was that like?”
“Bad. Got locked up.”
I waited, but his bloodstained story wouldn’t come.
“Locked up—like in a prison camp?” I asked.
“Yeah, like a prison camp.”
“How did you get from Vietnam to Hong Kong?”
“Came in a little sailboat; twenty-six people in it. My whole family in there. A little boat.”
“So that was dangerous?”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
Oh well, I thought, on to gangster business. “So now you’re an enforcer in the Gum Wah. Are the police giving you any problems for that?”
“Me, I’m not worried about going to jail,” Phu said, waving a cell phone at me angrily. (Later, viewers watching us in silhouette went bug-eyed, thinking he was holding a gun.) “What for? I’m used to go in jail.”
“You’re used to it? You’ve been in jail before?”
“I been in jail before! That’s a couple of years ago, right?”
“No comment on that!”
“Were you innocent for that one?”
“No comment!!”
“I hear the Lotus are giving you problems, too.”
“Me, I’m not scared, right? If they want to fucking look for me, come down the pool hall. Why shooting at innocent people, right?”
I asked him to explain the root cause of the conflict between the Lotus and the Gum Wah.
“Fuck their mother cunts! Lotus fucking shoot innocent fucking people all fucking time. Fuck!!”
“Maybe we should’ve rehearsed,” Steve told Phu after we unwired him.
The first segment on Steve aired at 6:15 P.M., March 12. Nine hours later, about three in the morning, my wife shoved me in bed. “Oh shit Terry!” she hissed. “Someone’s in the house!”
I sat up, moving my hand to the barrel of my old .303 farm rifle, which I’d propped by the bed before retiring. I listened but heard nothing. We lived in a block of run-down row houses on the University of British Columbia campus. Every floorboard in the living room downstairs and on the flight to our bedroom was a hair-triggered squeaker—a natural alarm system impossible to disarm. “What did you hear?” I whispered.
“Downstairs—I know I heard something!” she insisted.
“Shhh!” I did hear something. Someone was scratching the door, as if working a knife at the lock edge.
I dialed 911, gave the phone to my wife and, rifle in hand, moved sideways to the window. While she gave our address to the emergency operator, I flattened against the wall and hooked the curtain away with the .303’s barrel. I felt like I was in a ’40s film noir. There was Steve’s Mercedes parked down below, with Phu and another Chinese kid leaning against it, the exhaust smoking in the cold night behind my own car. Then I heard soft tapping. I climbed on a chair so I could see straight down below. I was looking at the top of Steve’s big head. His hand was stretched out against the front door, his head down, as if figuring out what to do next. If Steve were here to kill me, I thought, he wouldn’t show up in his car and put his boys on display under the streetlights.
Tap tap tap. Scratch scratch scratch. Tap tap tap. It sounded like pleading, actually. Steve took a step back and looked right at our window. He turned around to his enforcers and pointed his finger at the parted curtain.
“Tell them he’s not in the house, he’s outside,” I said to my wife.
“Oh God, it’ll be five more minutes!” Leslie whispered from the phone in a panic. “She says they have to call a cop off another call!”
“I’m going to stall him. They’ll see him outside.”
“No!”
“He’s gonna lose his cool and break in here. I don’t want to shoot him.”
I took the rifle and went down the stairs, flattened myself against the wall of the foyer by the entrance to the living room.
“Um yes, just a moment please,” I said through the door. God, did that sound stupid. “Who’s there?” Even worse.
“Lemme in, I wanna talk.”
“Is that you Steve?”
“You fuck, you’re a fuck, you know that?” Steve said. “You got your tape recorder running in there? You know you’re a lousy fuck?”
“Why?” I said, trying to sound truly astonished. “Didn’t I do what you wanted me to—I showed what shit holes the Lotus were. That’s what you wanted so that’s what I did.”
“Shut up, you fuck! What’s on this fucking part two? That’s all I want to know.”
“Oh, it’s really light. It shows your sense of humor. I’ll call you tomorrow morning, from CBC, okay? The police are on their way here.”
“You call the cops on me, you fuck?” he said. “You think I’m here to rip your throat out? What am I gonna do, knock first?”
“Oh I know that. It’s a nonthreatening visit, but I’m pretty sleepy. So I’ll have to talk to you tomorrow.”
“You cunt, you knocked, I let you in—you can’t do the same for me?”
“Steve, you’re overreacting. No one likes the way they look on TV.”
There was no reply, just retreating boot steps, then the slamming of car doors and the squeal of Steve’s tires. A couple of minutes later I heard the siren. From the time I phoned 911 to now, nine minutes had elapsed. But, in the end, I had judged Steve correctly. If I were Chinese I’d be dead now. But I was white and alive.
I spent most of the next morning in meetings at the CBC building, then on the phone with their Toronto head office, then on the phone with the Mounties and the Vancouver city police. CBC had received a call from one of Steve’s lawyers and was trying to make a decision on whether to run part two, balancing the issues of the ethical treatment of gangsters versus the public’s right to know about them. Meanwhile the Asian Crime Squad was trying to get Steve to calm down. I found out later from Martin Turner that, at the same time, they were toying with the idea of sending a video of the segment to Eddy Wong, Steve’s Triad boss in Hong Kong, although having Eddy put a stop to Steve in the usual Triad way seemed rather crude. For their part, the Mounties were trying to decide on how best to keep Steve from putting a stop to me. In the midst of all these negotiations, the receptionist called me across the newsroom. “There’s a Mr. Wong on line three.”
“I wanna see what’s in there and I want to see it now,” Steve said.
“I have to ask the bosses,” I told him.
“I don’t like to make enemies for too long, you can ask my police friends, so I just want to see what’s in there. All I know’s what I been hearing.”
“You mean you didn’t see it?” I asked, astounded. “Well then, Steve, all this is over nothing! I’m not saying you’ll love it—”
“Terry!” he said, and then fell silent for a moment. “Terry, shut up, okay?” His voice was low and even. “I just wanna see it. That’s all. What I’m hearing, this could get me killed. Not just killed.”
Well, I knew that was coming.
“Okay, Steve. Can I call you back?”
“It won’t cost me anything to hold on,” he said.
I went to David Paperny’s desk and he went into Sue Rideout’s office and she went into the office of the executive producer, Graham Ritchie. Graham told Sue to tell Dave to tell me to tell Steve that we decided it was best to allow him the courtesy of seeing both segments.
“Okay Steve,” I said. “Why don’t you come on down in half an hour.”
“I’ll wait out front—I’m a block away.”
I strategized with David before the meeting, asking that it be made absolutely clear to Steve that I was affiliated with the organization—that it should be made even more clear that this was a group effort, with a lot of different players. Otherwise, Steve would see me as hanging out there on my own, easy enough to whack without then having to confront the CBC gangsters.
Steve showed up with Phu. Sue Rideout took a look at the corpulent hood as he waddled into the newsroom and I could tell from her expression that he did not meet her expectations. He was trying to keep his face businesslike, but a grin actually cracked through. In social situations, no matter what the stresses, he really was an irrepressibly friendly guy. Phu, meanwhile, tried to fry anyone who met his eyes.
What followed was one of the weirder meetings in CBC history. We sat in Graham Ritchie’s office, with Ritchie playing the cultural-empathy card by repeatedly using the word gwailo, as in, “Now I know you think we’re all gwailos here”—although, actually, I’d never heard Steve use that word. To describe white people he would use the ancient Chinese expression: useless cunts.
Steve wasn’t listening anyway. He knew right away I was low man on the totem pole yet he kept looking at me as if I could fix things, set the clock back. Whatever was said, whoever was speaking, he kept his eyes on mine, his face showing total puzzlement as he searched for yesterday’s friend. Here was a gangster who lived by manipulation and betrayal, who fully understood the Darwinian benefits of living a life based on lying, yet he had really believed he had met someone who understood why he shot people and ruined the lives of children and dealt heroin and spread rumors of police corruption; a white person who valued him despite, or even because of his evil deeds, and forgave him. He simply couldn’t believe that I had used the trust he had in me to get past his radar for my own benefit.
Ritchie was explaining how I had come to CBC with a story that would “give shape and substance” to the violence in Chinatown, that would tell the real tale of the Goldstone to gwailos.
“Yeah, but you came in my house like you were my friend and you said this and this and this and you were wired!”
“Terry identified himself as a reporter and you talked with him,” reasoned Rideout.
“Yeah, but I didn’t fucking know he was going to trick me,” Steve said, still looking me straight in the eye.
“You lead a very public life, Steve,” Ritchie said. “Terry believed the public wanted to know about it and you said you wanted them to know.”
“You told me this and this,” Steve declared, his anger rising. “Harry Rankin, and Bill Chu and the Lotus gettin’ their side….”
This was developing into exactly what I was afraid of: Steve was putting all the blame on my deceitful wits—not illogically, but I felt somebody else should share the burden. I nudged David with my foot, who sprang to life: “Steven, all of us were interested in this story. It’s a large issue in the city. And your side in it is large. It’s a fascinating world you live in.”
“You’re on my side, right, Terry?” Steve said, raising his chin and leaning forward. “And you fucking call the cops on me!?”
“Okay,” Ritchie said, taking charge and calling the increasingly hot meeting short. He graciously offered his office as a screening room and we foreign devils walked out and took a half-hour break.
“He’s a punk,” Rideout said contemptuously.
I felt like saying they’re all punks—loudmouthed, violent, gross people—stylish at times, yes, but there were no “men of honor” in that world. That was the story—all of them were like Steve. Still, at the moment I felt too short of breath to do anything more than agree.
“Well, it’s bad, but not as bad as people were telling me,” Steve said when we came back in, to my infinite relief. “There’s things I want out of that second part. You got me threatening the cops in there and talking about my rank in the 14K.”
Ritchie told him we didn’t have him doing anything—that’s what he said. Steve announced he would talk to his lawyer. As he left the newsroom I tagged along behind, sheepishly, with my hands in my pockets.
“Somebody said you work for the cops,” he told me by the door.
“I don’t work for the cops, Steve.”
“I’m talking you wanna find stuff out, they wanna find stuff out—so that’s working. So you’re an informant.”
“I’m a journalist, Steve.”
“Okay, same thing.”
And then he did the strangest thing he could have under the circumstances. He giggled and put out his hand for a shake.
After he left I called Bill Chu and asked what I could expect from Steve. “We had him in,” he said. “He’s got other things to worry about now besides you, Terry. He knows it’s the stupidest thing he could do—if anything happened to you, who are we going to go looking for?”
This didn’t reassure me, and the Mounties weren’t so sanguine either—they had their own informants. The UBC detachment called me at the newsroom and said they were putting me under a protection program. I should leave the building by a different exit than I usually used and take a cab home instead of risking starting my car. They asked where my daughter went to school and where my wife worked.
An hour before airtime, Steve phoned again and this time he sounded wildly edgy. He asked me to read through the script and demanded that offending bits be cut. I heard him talking to Chinese voices in the background, then he shouted, “You do it, Terry!” There was some back-and-forth talk with the lawyers in Toronto, and at 5:30 I took the master to the editing room. “I’m the only one in Canada. There might be someone higher than me but not that I know of” fell to the floor, and the words “I don’t care if it’s the police,” got cut from in front of “anybody fucks around with me, one way or another, I’ll catch up.” We snipped a few other phrases until I said, “That’s it. It sounds too choppy now.”
“Better it gets chopped than you do,” said the editor, and laughed.
Two RCMP officers moved in with us that night and explained to Leslie and me what to do in case there was a ruckus.
“Don’t come downstairs under any circumstances,” Constable Mike Russell said. “Hide in a closet or under the bed. Remain quiet until one of us calls you.”
“Otherwise sleep tight,” my wife muttered to me as we squeaked up the stairs.
There happened to be a ruckus that night—although of the Keystone variety. The Vancouver police sent an unmarked patrol car onto the UBC grounds to check up on me, and the cops shone a flashlight at my living room window. That caused my two Mountie guardians to hit the rug and hunch-crawl to the door and the window in expectation of gunfire.
The cops stayed a few nights and then the RCMP technical crew came in and affixed a panic button beside my bed. “This’ll send right to the station,” a sergeant told me. “You press it, we’ll treat it as a Code 3.”
“So I don’t have to dial 911?”
He seemed offended. “If you need to hold a hand for the minute it takes us to get here, then go right ahead.”
My neighbors were very accommodating about all of this—even when the alarm went off by mistake. It was a warm afternoon in summer, my parents were visiting and Leslie and I were out with them on the town. All the mothers in the block of row houses were playing with their children in the backyard when the complex was suddenly surrounded by wailing police cars and officers in flak jackets holding high-powered rifles. Helmeted cops poured into the yard and told everyone to quick, grab the kids, go into their respective houses, get under the beds and to stay there until they got the all clear. Then they burst into our house and combed it for bodies.
When we got home and found out what had happened, my dad shook his head and said, “I wish I knew someone on the Coast here.”
“Whaddaya talking about, Al!” my mother exploded. “Don’t start with that ‘know someone’ business now. He knows the police. That’s all he needs. Know someone,” she said disdainfully.
“I’m just saying,” he replied.
“Well don’t say! Like they don’t have enough trouble already? And Terry, promise me one thing. Don’t you ever write about your own. Because they will kill you!”
“Your mother’s right,” Al said. “Brighton Beach you stay away from.” He winked at me. “Even da rabbis don’ say a void.”
*In the late 1990s, CLEU was reorganized as the Organized Crime Agency.