It’s amazing, this should be a Hollywood movie. Nothing I’ve ever seen of suspected fraud cases comes close.
—JAMES GALLAGHER, VICE PRESIDENT, PRUDENTIAL INSURANCE
The private eye wore a blue trench coat and was driving a van with the windows darkened in the back. That amused me. From my own car I watched Mike Richards standing in the parking lot and looking around for me. Three things crossed my mind as I waited for him to guess I was the person he’d phoned yesterday. He might not be who he said he was. His reason for meeting me might be a total lie. And he might shoot me as I extended my hand in greeting. Stupid thoughts, but that was my state of mind when I got out of the car and walked towards the man who’d stunned me with the news that Steve had been killed.
It was early spring 1993. Since July I’d been traveling quite a bit, working on articles about health food scams in the States and illegal logging in Sarawak, plus others on heroin-addicted schizophrenics, organized crime lawyers, and a fund-raising ruse in the British Properties. But while on these projects I’d missed something. On August 14, 1992, a cop had left a warning message on my answering machine saying I should stay away from Steve’s latest caper. He hadn’t mentioned a funeral and I remember thinking it was probably another shoot-out or another bust, not worth breaking my deal with Steve over—at least not until he’d been jailed for a long, long time. By the time I returned the cop’s call he was on vacation and I let it go. Meanwhile, the cops had told no one about the funeral or that Steve had missed his trial, and the story never made the press.
Richards was in his late 20s, with gelled hair atop a frat-boy face, sharply creased slacks, and shiny black shoes—too corny by half, in my opinion. “Mr. Richards,” I said. “Your boss give you the budget to buy me a beer?”
“Of course,” he replied, and we crossed the lot to my neighborhood pub, the Queens Cross. He held the brass handle to the door.
“You first,” I smiled, squeezing the record button on my pocket tape machine, fully expecting that he had done the same.
Over Richards’s shoulder I lifted my brows to a good-looking waitress named Vicki. I often brought bad guys here for interviews and Vicki was adept at guiding me into a booth that put my face and Bad Guy’s back in her direction—just in case. As Vicki reached towards Richards to wipe the table, he pointedly averted his eyes from her loose V neck.
“I think I gave you a little bit of background regarding our interest in Steven Wong,” he said.
“Too little.”
He took out his private-eye card from Major Investigations—the number two firm in town—and flicked it down like an ace in front of me. Then he slipped a steno pad from his trench coat pocket and laid it on the table. I took out my own steno and touched my spirals to his. Richards looked at our fencing pads. “I’m afraid I can’t add much to what I told you over the phone,” he said, raising his eyes. “Mr. Wong appears to have been killed in an overseas road accident and burnt beyond recognition. That’s the extent—”
“There’s no way to ID the body? No teeth?”
“I won’t be able to go into that,” Richards said. “Basically, we’ve been retained by a large company back East that has some interest in what has happened to him. Our job is to get a picture of Mr. Wong before all that happened. The reason I’ve made you my first stop—well, it became apparent to me from your Vancouver magazine article that you had obviously developed an insight into the workings of his mind.”
He was referring to “Leader of the Pack,” now two and a half years old. “Who brought the article up to you?”
“I’m sorry, that has to stay confidential too.”
It was irritating being on this end of a one-way interview with an ingenue dick who looked like Ricky Nelson. Strange to say, though, I wanted to talk. So this is what it feels like, I thought. The urge comes up from between your stomach and heart and upsets your better judgment. This is why crooks, dyspeptic with screaming self-importance, talk to you. Everybody wants to be a somebody, and when you’re interviewed you’re a somebody. How interesting.
“I’m in a tough spot now, Richards,” I said. “Perhaps it’s necessary for you to keep me in the dark about what’s going on, but Steve was a murderer, a drug dealer, an official in the 14K. He was connected at significant levels with significant swordsmen in Hong Kong. Oh, he was a likable guy, I really liked him, but he could turn around and put one in your head. Maybe you heard I was under police protection from him for six months?” Richards was writing all this down, with me thinking, Jeez, listen to you, here you are, babbling away. I hit the brakes. “So at the very minimum, I need to know which company back East has hired you. It could be the Cosa Nostra, for all the fuck I know.”
Not a glimmer of a smile spoiled his gumshoe mien. Actually, I kind of liked the wooden technique. I’ll try it sometime, I thought. “I can’t tell you anything about our client either,” he said, “except to say our client is perfectly legitimate.”
“Okay, just tell me when Steve was killed; where was he killed.”
“I can tell you when, I don’t know if I can tell you specifically where. He was killed, allegedly, on July 19, 1992. In Asia. So I don’t mind telling you he is allegedly dead in Asia.”
“He was supposed to go on trial September 1st. So he turns up dead in Asia. Hmmmm. It concerns me you’re saying allegedly dead.”
“How so?” he asked, getting ready with his pen again.
I took out a Nicorette. Since my goodbye to the Paper Fan in September 1990, I’d quit smoking. Having avoided a quick death, I didn’t want to invite a slow one, but every now and then I liked a dose of the harmless chemical to juice my normal New York belligerence.
“All right, look, if you start going from rock to rock to get to some destination on behalf of some mystery client and my name comes up as one of your sources, it could be very dangerous for me.”
“I can understand that, and that won’t happen.”
“Good, but that’s just the first part. The second part is that if you want me to help you with your involvement, without helping me in mine, forget it. That kind of discussion’s not the way I work. You can tell that to your client. Or I’ll tell him. As soon as you and I say goodbye, I’ll find out who he is.”
I took some satisfaction in having rearranged the bottom and top rails on this fence. “Mr. Gould,” Richards said finally, “this is my job, I’m under instructions. I was just interested in talking to you so I know how to proceed on this. I’d like to get a better understanding of Mr. Wong’s life—his underground associates, perhaps his friends, certainly his family.”
“His family? Is his family collecting insurance on this? Is that what’s going on?”
His eyes tracked rapidly to the left. “Uh, I don’t know the details too much on that.”
There it is, I thought. That’s what this is all about.
“So you’re working for an insurance company. Steve’s been killed or murdered overseas and been incinerated, so you’re not sure if it’s Steve. So knowing Steve from my article, a scam seems consistent with his career. So you’re investigating an insurance scam. Am I right or wrong?”
His only answer was another inadvertent glance away from me, which caused me to feel a surprising cascade of relief. I hadn’t exactly cried when Richards gave me the news yesterday, but I’d felt awful enough. I’d leapt to the conclusion that Steve had been murdered by his own people, burned to a crisp as a lesson to all who would transgress, and his death, I was sure, would be written below my name in the karmic minus column. Now that grief was turning into excitement. He was “dead” and our deal was off. God, did I miss Steve.
I shook Richards’s hand. “Okay, Richards, your ends are my ends,” I said. “Lemme call a Mountie and I’ll get back to you.”
Acting Corporal Rick Aselton was a drug cop who’d been called off another case to help arrest Steve in the Project Bugs sting. I phoned and gave him the news that a life insurance company’s private eye was looking into a claim by the relatives of Steve. “Who supposedly disappeared off the face of the earth,” Aselton said.
“I think the guy’s still alive, Rick.”
“Oh, I’d have to agree with you on that one.”
“It sounds like he took out a ton in a life insurance policy.”
“He sure did. It was quite a bit of money, a substantial amount. We found that out after, of course. The big joke is about Steven Lik Man Wong going missing over in the Philippines, killed in a car accident.”
“The Philippines, yeah. A car accident—burnt to a fucking crisp is what I heard.”
“I don’t know if it was actually in the car accident. What I heard, he went over to the Philippines and supposedly was killed in the jungle, on some remote island called Negros. Then his body was cremated, burned locally, and everything else—no proper identification was ever made. A real crock of shit. I would suspect he’s in Hong Kong, waiting for the insurance money to come through. Yeah, that’s the standing joke in the drug office, Terry. It’s a joke because, first of all, the judge should never have let him travel, I don’t know why the judge ever gave him his passport back—”
“The judge gave him his passport back!?” I shouted.
“You didn’t know that? Well, welcome to British Columbia’s world of justice. Unit One has quite a bit of information on all of that. Mike Hiller’s the investigator who’s in charge, he’d probably be the best to talk to—but I should talk to him first and see where the investigation is at this point. You can nose around on your own, of course, but in your situation—you know—you still wanna live to tell it.”
“Ah life’s too long anyway, Rick,” I cracked. When he didn’t laugh I mentioned my theory. “The insurance company doesn’t wanna pay the money. Steve made it out to his family—or was it Laura?”
“I’m not sure if it was his girlfriend or his mother, it was one’a the two anyways,” Rick said. “But I wouldn’t wanna pay it either. Suffice it to say there’s a lot of people now would love to see him come to justice. Everybody’s worked on Steve at one time or another and we’re all frustrated. Why don’t we deal with it like this: I’ll call Unit One and speak to Mike Hiller directly. He’ll talk to the staff sergeant and then take it from there. I think everybody pretty well read that drug-war article you wrote. Everybody was talking about it when it came out.”
The drug-war article Aselton was referring to was published as a cover story in Vancouver magazine’s May 1992 edition. A month later, that is, four weeks before Steve had taken off for Asia, the RCMP’s Drug Intelligence Unit had republished “Drug War? What Drug War?” in the June issue of their eyes-only bulletin, distributed to drug agents across North America. The bulletin’s editor, Corporal Roy Bergerman, had added my home phone number to the article’s end, inviting readers to call me with “comments you may have on the article.” Within days of its appearance, my Rolodex doubled. The calls came from U.S. DEA agents and INS officials, from Asian squad city cops and Mounties like Aselton. “Drug War” hadn’t mentioned Steve once, since I was still living under a death sentence if I broke our “deal,” but its thesis explained why the Paper Fan would shortly find it so easy to get out of jail free, pass Go, and then try to collect $200 after his miraculous rebirth.
Contrary to popular belief, there was no war on drugs being waged in Vancouver. The cops were certainly arresting traffickers, but the courts were nullifying those arrests. At the time I wrote the article, only 7 percent of the people convicted of dealing hard drugs went to jail for more than three months and a third of the trafficking charges filed that year had been stayed. I tracked down David Lim, the drug dealer whose record Steve had unscrolled for me. Now supposedly an ex-trafficker, Lim was a veteran of 16 arrests, 27 charges, and 12 guilty verdicts, which had cost him only $1,400 in fines and three 10-day jail sentences; until he was finally handed a 10-month sentence, he hadn’t even factored jail into his multimillion-dollar business plans. Neither did his gangster buddies. The upshot was that Vancouver had become a magnet for thousands of junkies shooting up in the streets, and out-of-town traffickers who considered it a safe haven. It was a frustrating state of affairs for drug cops like Aselton, Bergerman, and Staff Sergeant Jerry Moloci, who headed Unit One.
A couple of weeks after my call to Aselton, Moloci gave me the okay to visit Hiller at the RCMP’s concrete and glass HQ at 33rd and Heather. By then the investigation into the disappearing Paper Fan had long since been terminated. Steve’s ashes had arrived in Vancouver from the Philippines on August 7, 1992, a death certificate had been issued on August 13, and his funeral had been held the next day. Two weeks later, on September 1, the judge at the opening of his conspiracy trial found Steve “not compellable.” Although he let the charges stand, he did not issue a warrant for the dead man and later severed Steve’s case from Yak and Tam’s. On September 8, Steve’s lawyers, Neil Sacks and Jim Hogan, applied to Mike Richards’s mystery client for Steve’s benefits, backing up the claim with a thick stack of documents from the Philippines, including numerous eyewitness affidavits and police reports. No funds, no time, no manpower, no cooperation from the Department of External Affairs, and, most particularly, no warrant from the judge, were the reasons Unit One had found it necessary to put Steve’s file on ice.
Nevertheless, neither Moloci nor Hiller had given up. Hiller was a six-foot-four-inch, 13-year veteran, as soft-spoken and clean-cut as Gary Cooper, to whom I thought he bore a vague physical resemblance. As we rode the elevator from the headquarters lobby to Unit One’s floor, Hiller said Steve’s lawyers were now pressuring the Crown “to abate the charges,” that is, wipe them from the books, on the grounds that the Paper Fan had died before trial. Hogan and Sacks reasoned that since a man was innocent until proven guilty, and a dead Steve could never be proven guilty, it was only fair to nullify the slight against his good name. Meanwhile, as word of Steve’s caper began to make its way through the gangster underworld, Chinese drug dealers were watching to see whether the Paper Fan could pull this off.
“How you dealing with the lawyers?” I asked.
“I’m quite adamant, this is a scam,” Hiller said, leading me down the fluorescent-lit corridor to the unit. “If we abated the charges we could never reinstate them. I’m standing my ground.”
Hiller introduced me to his boss, Moloci, a barrel-chested mustachioed fellow whose voice boomed through the office in good fellowship. We shot the breeze about other bad guys I’d been writing about for Saturday Night, the national magazine I was now working for as a contributing editor, and then Hiller took me down a passageway to a small interview room near the planning office where Project Bugs had been developed. The walls of the interview room were done up in white and yellow tiles that swirled in patterns vaguely reminiscent of an Aztec relief, which for me lent an air of magical importance to the moment.
“The insurance companies handling this are Prudential and Voyageur,” Hiller said, looking at his notes. “At this point they’re being sued by Steven’s parents and I think they’ll give you any information that we can’t—just based on the fact that a lot of what we have is sourced or privileged.” He said the insurance companies were on the hook for $1,080,000 to Yue Kim Wong, and he thought I could expect them to be very cooperative. He asked if I wouldn’t mind keeping the Mounties informed of anything I found out on my own.
That was okay by me, and I started right in informing him of some inquiries I’d already made. “You ever meet David Lim?” I asked.
“Yeah, I worked on him,” Hiller said.
“He knows his way around, and more important he hates Steve. He says Steve’s two white buddies know what’s going on.” I took out my notebook. “Charles Gough and Sonny Newson. He calls Gough ‘the Chink.’”
“We’re familiar with those two,” Hiller replied. “You’ll see Newson’s name coming up repeatedly in documents from the Philippines.”
“Okay, here’s something else. There’s an old Triad guy at the Hoi Ming Gwok named Ming, eyebrows like a sheepdog. He used to be Steve’s mentor.”
“Shows up there at two every afternoon,” Hiller said.
“That’s him. Lim says Ming’s aware of what went on, although to get it you’ll need a Cantonese speaker in plainclothes on him.”
Hiller made a note. “Mmmhmm—”
“So what I’m planning—I’ll follow up on all these leads, put it all together here. Then I’ll go over there, I’ll get the proof, and I’ll find him for you. Then I’ll tell you where he is, you get the warrant, and arrest him. All I want in exchange is to be sitting behind him on the plane when he comes back in chains.”
“Sounds like you got it all worked out,” Hiller nodded soberly. Then he cracked a smile—the first of the interview—and handed me a sheet. I looked down at half a dozen insurance company contacts. “Apparently Prudential’s got an ex-CIA guy on it who’s talking with the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation,” he said. “It’s their version of the FBI. The NBI’s a small force. There’s another police force, though—the Philippine National Police. That’s the big one.”
“You mean big in Steve’s scam, or just big physically?”
“Both. Put it this way: I don’t think you want to contact the PNP directly about Steven before you go over. Overall, I think you’re going to have to be pretty careful on this.”
“Have you talked to anybody in the NBI?”
“Nope. That’s country to country. We can’t do that unless DOJ okays it. We don’t have a warrant so we haven’t gotten an okay. So, no, we haven’t phoned the Philippines once on this.” Hiller turned a page. “The trial’s set to start up again in September. Obviously we’ve got an interest in getting a warrant; the insurance companies have their own interest—they don’t want to pay the money. See, we’re coming at this from two directions.” He placed his elbows on the table and put the tips of his fingers together. “And it’s checking out. It does make sense. I don’t think you’ll be on a wild-goose chase over there.”
The vice president and associate general counsel of Prudential didn’t think I’d be on a wild-goose chase in the Philippines either. After James Gallagher got the results of his own investigation, he flew to Vancouver to meet me at the company’s downtown law offices on the 27th floor of 700 West Georgia Street. A secretary showed me into a conference room, from whose windows I beheld a spectacular view of the mountains and Burrard Inlet. While I waited for Gallagher, I eyed the parade of Asian cargo ships floating under the Lions Gate Bridge. One of the vessels was almost certainly carrying a shipment no bigger than a shoe box that would make the town’s addicts happy. Hidden among thousands of other shoe boxes in a container stacked on a ship with hundreds of other containers—each of which cost $1,000 to inspect—the smack would be almost impossible to detect. I looked east to where that smack would end up. Chinatown’s alleys and the blocks bordering them had been taken over by users and sellers, and as their numbers grew, they were advancing into other lower-middle-class areas. The residents felt their neighborhoods had been sacrificed to the open drug market, and their sense of hopelessness was becoming extreme. I had witnessed this same downward progression in New York, and I didn’t want to see it here. The network of people who brought the drugs in and who marketed them had to be stopped. People like Steve.
On entering the conference room, Gallagher plopped a large brown envelope on the table. He was a stout man, quite staid in dress and expression, but he was as excited as I was by this criminal melodrama. “It’s amazing, this should be a Hollywood movie,” he said, opening the envelope and pulling out sheaves of stapled reports. “Nothing I’ve ever seen of suspected fraud cases comes close, at least not on the scale of all the people involved, and all the countries!”
We browsed the reports one by one, and what Hiller had not been able to give me, Gallagher now offered up. When we were done reviewing the files, he turned on the speakerphone and put us through to his undercover agent in the Philippines, Danilo Mendez, who seemed to know someone of importance on each of the archipelago’s 7,000 islands. Danilo then gave the phone to his cousin—an NBI cop, Supervisory Agent Virgilio Mendez. As part of an investigation into corruption in the Philippine military and the national police, Mendez had been looking at the doings on Negros after Steve’s suspicious death. He explained that his information pointed to a powerful international drug syndicate at work on the island: lawyers, government officials, top police officers, and the military appeared to be involved with Steve’s 14K Triad. Certain Steve’s death was faked, Mendez wanted to implicate and prosecute the kingpins involved in the Steven Wong affair, since the NBI was finding it impossible to catch them at drug trafficking and money laundering.
Unfortunately, Mendez had a problem: the NBI needed the Canadian government to make an official representation to the Philippines before they could launch a full-scale investigation into the death of a foreign national. “So far we have not heard a word from your embassy,” he said. “Is there perhaps a reason for that?”
I took a stab at addressing what he was hinting at. I told him I didn’t think there was any funny business; there was just no warrant for Steve’s arrest. “The Canadian government believes your police reports,” I said. “They think he’s dead.”
“I see,” Mendez answered softly. There was a long silence, during which I could hear the chaos of a Philippine street in the background. “All right,” he said finally, “shall we approach the situation perhaps in the following manner: if a Canadian journalist were to come over here on a reputable assignment, then I and some of my men could accompany him in his investigations to see that certain procedures were followed. So as to make his reports legally sound for your authorities to be persuaded of the fraudulent death. Shall we say it like that? Does that perhaps sound feasible?”
“Certainly Virgilio,” I replied, “let’s say it like that. That sounds perfectly feasible.”
After the crackly conference call, Gallagher stacked all his reports, reinserted them in the envelope, and handed the package to me. As I took the envelope, he said, “Just to inform you, we’ve been told that there are very few people we can trust on Negros. I mean by that, our own people, for their own safety, have tried to go in and get out without anyone knowing they were there. But obviously, as a journalist, you’re going to be opening this up.”
“More than that, Jim,” I said. “I obviously want to find the guy.”
“And that is certainly congruent with our ends,” he said. “You’re the expert on Mr. Wong. But at a very basic level there are personal-security issues if you walk into that rat’s nest and start asking questions. So we’ve decided to have our agent arrange protection for you in the Philippines; as well, we’ll offer you the services of a security firm in Hong Kong if that’s necessary. We’re going to be as helpful as we can—but I have to say this: we can’t guarantee your safety. I just wanted you to know that.”
To warm the sudden coldness in my butt and lighten the mood of this clearly decent man, I replied in wiseass mode: “Ah, Jimmy, I can take care’a these characters. All I want from Prudential is a break on a million-dollar life insurance policy and a ten percent bounty when I come back with Steve’s head.”
I had to tell Gallagher three times I was just kidding.
I went home with my pile of material and began collating it with what the Mounties had been able to give me and with what I’d learned on my own time. To my mind there were still some gaping holes I would have to fill in before I took the leap and traveled to Asia. But I now had enough to begin drawing a wall-length schema of the events leading up to July 19, 1992.
When I had known him, at the height of his dangerous days battling the Lotus and Los Diablos, Steve had held a Prudential life insurance policy of a mere $80,000. On January 25, 1992, the day before his 28th birthday, he changed his policy. He’d been busted and his war-torn nights had actually calmed down by then, but he nevertheless drove to Chinatown and applied for another three-quarters of a million from an insurance agent named Stanley Leung.
In March, after the policy was approved, Steve went to his lawyers’ office on Alexander Street and instructed Neil Sacks to draw up an affidavit applying for a loosening of the terms of his bail. It was an 11-point deposition that ranks as one of the more audacious documents submitted to the court that year, and deserves to be quoted in full.
I, Steven Lik Man Wong, of 5018 Clarendon Drive, Vancouver, British Columbia, MAKE OATH AND SAY AS FOLLOWS:
1. THAT I was charged on December 12, 1990, with conspiring to traffic and import heroin.
2. THAT on December 14, 1990, in Courtroom 102, Vancouver Provincial Court, His Honour Judge K. Smith ordered that I be released on a recognizance in the amount of $100,000.00 with one or more sureties and that I surrender any passport in my possession and not apply for a passport.
3. THAT it was my understanding that I would be permitted to request the return of my passport if I required it for travel so long as I submitted an itinerary to the R.C.M.P. regarding such travel. I took this understanding from submissions made by my lawyer at the bail hearing referred to in paragraph 2 above as well as submissions made by the Crown prosecutor at that hearing.
4. THAT I have maintained contact with my lawyer, James W. Hogan, throughout this proceeding.
5. THAT my trial in this matter is set for September 1 through October 2, 1992, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
6. THAT I have lived in Vancouver for twenty-four years, and have resided at 5018 Clarendon Drive in Vancouver with my mother and father for approximately four years. I have many other relatives in the Vancouver area and all of my personal roots are in Vancouver. I am a Canadian citizen.
7. THAT I have made one trip outside of Canada since I was charged in this matter and that was to New York for two weeks with my nephews. I took this trip without incident and returned as planned.
8. THAT my girlfriend, Patsy Chan, who I have known for over one year, resides in Hong Kong with her family. We have intentions to marry in the future and it is traditional that I meet her family which we both desire me to do as soon as possible. I require my passport in order to travel to Hong Kong for this purpose.
9. THAT if this Honourable Court sees fit to increase the amount of my surety recognizance I would be in a position to comply with such an order. My parents, Yue Kim Wong and Cheung Ing Wong, own the property located at 5018 Clarendon Drive in Vancouver. This property has an approximate equity value of $500,000.00. Both of my parents are willing to act as surety to an increased amount.
10. THAT if this Honourable Court sees fit to order that I report to the R.C.M.P. in Hong Kong, I would comply with such an Order.
11. THAT I swear this Affidavit in support of a Petition for variance of my bail.
Beneath Point 11 Hogan’s partner, Neil Sacks, notarized the sworn affidavit at the bottom and, to the right, the Paper Fan signed a cramped and stubby “Steve Wong.”
On March 17, 1992, the affidavit was quietly registered at the Supreme Court of British Columbia, where it was examined by the Honorable Mr. Justice Cohen three days later. Typically, the schedule of prosecutors in the underfunded DOJ was overloaded on the day Steve’s application came up, and the prosecutor of the moment neglected to inform the Mounties of what was taking place. He did argue that the charges were serious enough to keep Steve’s passport in the custody of the government, but, with no witnesses called, Judge Cohen had to consider whether in fact those charges would tempt the accused to jump bail overseas. One other factor was the criminal record of the “auto sales manager” before him. Steve did not have a criminal record. Had the Mounties known what Steve was up to, they could have testified to his past—but they didn’t know.
On March 20, Judge Cohen amended the Paper Fan’s bail as follows:
1) Mr. Wong’s (the accused’s) passport is to be returned to him forthwith.
2) The accused, Mr. Wong, is to report within twenty four (24) hours of his arrival to the R.C.M.P. in Hong Kong and is to inform the R.C.M.P. of the date of his departure.
3) The accused, Mr. Wong, is to surrender his passport on or before July 20, 1992.
In accordance with a literal reading of Point 2, Steve did not inform the Vancouver Mounties that he would be departing Canada; he only felt inclined to tell the Mounties in Hong Kong (when he was already there) that he was leaving the Crown Colony—for the Philippines.
As soon as he got his passport back, Steve did three things. Tax time was rolling around and in order to camoflage his considerable proceeds of crime, he declared personal bankruptcy. He then broke up with Laura, his girlfriend of several years—for reasons that would not become clear to me until I spoke with her. Next he phoned his girlfriend in Calgary, Lily Lee, and invited her to accompany him on his trip to Hong Kong, all expenses paid. He told Lily he wasn’t sure of his departure date—he had to make certain arrangements—but would let her know. According to what Lily later told the Mounties, Steve mentioned absolutely nothing about going over to meet the family of his supposed fiancée, Patsy Chan.
May was a busy month for Steve, much of it spent making plans with the two white men in his life. Sonny Newson had a kite tail of convictions for drug trafficking and violent crimes that was as long as he was tall, and he was then engaged to marry a Filipino woman on the island of Negros. He had been traveling to the Philippines regularly since 1989. The other white guy, Chuck the Chink, had accompanied Steve to Hong Kong on most of his trips in the years before the Project Bugs bust. The trio met in a penthouse pad that Steve had been sharing for a year with a Gum Wah gangster named Edison Yee (contradicting the claim in his affidavit that he resided with his parents). The penthouse, at 711 Broughton, just off Robson, sat four stories above a flat that the Chink rented. Possibly figuring that the timing of the climax of his trip too neatly preceded by a day the July 20 date he was supposed to surrender his passport in Vancouver, on May 27 Steve applied to Judge Cohen for an extension. He immediately received it: “The accused, Mr. Wong, is to surrender his passport on or before August 1st, 1992.”
A few days later he phoned Lily Lee and solidified their departure plans for the first week of July. Steve then went down to his travel agent in Chinatown and purchased the tickets, plus a $250,000 life insurance policy from Voyageur. He was now carrying $1,080,000 in life insurance, with his mother, Yue Kim, the beneficiary.
Lily flew in from Calgary and flew out with Wong for Hong Kong the next day on Canadian Airlines. The couple arrived late Saturday afternoon, July 4, and checked into a new hotel, the name of which Lily couldn’t remember. On Sunday they took a taxi to a market and “did a lot of shopping,” all on Steve’s tab. For his mother Steve bought a ring encrusted with emeralds and diamonds, a jade pendant, and an ivory mah-jongg set. The next morning Steve kept his promised engagement with the RCMP, taking the elevator up to their 14th floor liaison office at One Exchange Square, where he startled an officer named George Gibbs with the announcement that he was just checking in, and that he would be leaving for a week’s vacation to the Philippines the following Saturday, July 11, to attend his friend’s wedding. Gibbs hadn’t a clue who Steve was; and the Mounties at Unit One only learned Steve was out of the country when Gibbs phoned Vancouver and asked: “Who’s this character Steven Wong who says he’s supposed to report to me?” By then Steve was out the door.
According to what Lily later told the Mounties, the couple spent their week touring, shopping, and enjoying the Hong Kong high life. During one of their outings, Steve met with someone Lily identified as Patsy Chan, but according to Lily, Patsy was “just a friend. I don’t think there was any love involvement. Not that he told me.” And there was no meeting between Steve and Patsy’s family. On Friday, July 10, Lily and Steve took the 40-minute jet-foil ferry to Macau, where they were met at the terminal by a limo containing some important-looking colleagues who proceeded to give the couple the red-carpet treatment in the Las Vegas of Asia—whose underworld was dominated by the 14K Triad.
On July 11, his last day in Hong Kong as a living man, Steve, on the way to Kai Tak Airport, handed the jewelry and mah-jongg set to Lily, instructing her to give the gifts to his mother in Vancouver. (“Did you not find it strange that Steven asked you to give the ring to his mother—wouldn’t he want to give it to her himself?” the Mounties asked her after Steve’s death. “No,” Lily replied, “I don’t find it strange. He’s disorganized. He would probably lose it.”) An hour after she boarded her flight home to Canada, Steve flew on to Manila, where he was met at Ninoy Aquino International Airport by Sonny Newson, who had flown in from Canada that day.
The movements of the two gangsters over the next week are lost in the mists of desperado lore, but at 11:30 A.M. on July 19, they surfaced, walking out of the Royal Palm Hotel into the solar furnace of Bacolod, the capital city of the Hawaii-size island of Negros, 310 miles south of Manila in the Visayan Sea. The pair must have looked like what cops call a Mutt-and-Jeff deuce. The low-altitude Paper Fan, his eyes and backside now a bit baggier than they were at his arrest 19 months ago, strode alongside the tall lanky Newson through the killing heat of this poverty-stricken town, with its pot-holed streets lined by open sewers and a beggar on every corner.
Steve could not have asked for better environs to arrange his next few hours—desperate places offering unique opportunities to desperate men. Aside from Goldenfield, a 10-square-block area of Bacolod next to the airport—which was devoted to gambling casinos and nightclubs filled with teenage hookers who catered to Chinese gangsters and other Asian tourists—the island of Negros was destitute, a paradigm of all that was wrong in the Third World. Much of the mountainous interior was in a state of armed insurrection against the lowland’s oligarchic abuses, official corruption, and rapacious mismanagement. Excluding drugs, gambling, prostitution, and a couple of beach resorts that catered to the rich, “Sugarland,” as the island was known in the Republic, had a one-industry economy: the cultivation and processing of sugarcane on huge plantations lorded over by a few wealthy families living in palatial haciendas amidst the squalor of their landless workers. In 1985 the bottom had fallen out of international sugar prices and 250,000 plantation workers had been thrown out of work. Because the hacienderos refused to make even a tiny fraction of their one million acres available for growing food crops, many starving peasants went to the mountains to join the Communist New People’s Army in a guerrilla war against the government. The lawless, denuded mountains, now covered in secondary jungle, were a virtual national reserve for criminals who had the right credentials: according to Virgilio Mendez, some of the guerrillas had recently replaced their dried-up cold war funding by growing poppies, refining heroin, and running methamphetamine laboratories for members of Steve’s 14K syndicate.
About noon, Wong and Newson arrived at the dilapidated Hernaez Street bus station, just a few blocks from the air-conditioned office of Sonny’s soon-to-be father-in-law, Alex Abastillas. The wealthiest and most influential lawyer on Negros, Abastillas represented the hacienderos in their dealings with the government, and his business card sported the slogan “In God We Trust.” As Sonny was a frequent visitor to Negros, he had made all the arrangements for an expedition Steve wanted to take to a town called Santol, high up in the NPA-dominated mountains.
Waiting at the bus station for the two Vancouver big shots was Sonny’s Filipino friend, a peasant’s son with high ambition named Stephen “Bindo” Granada. Sonny introduced Steve to Granada, who respectfully took the suitcase in which the mobster kept his ample undershorts and his bulletproof vest. Steve held on to his cell phone, whose scramble-codes were now so complicated that he’d recently boasted to his friend Chuck the Chink, “Even the FBI in Quantico can’t break them.”
At 12:45 Steve said goodbye to Newson, then boarded the air-conditioned Ceres Line bus with Granada for the first leg of his journey south along a road bordered on the west by the powder-blue Panay Gulf and on the east by sago palms and the omnipresent sugarcane fields. An hour and 15 minutes later, Steve and Granada arrived in a ramshackle town named Binalbagan, Granada’s home ground.
Beside the bus stop was a line of gaily colored “tricycles”—taxi-licensed motorbikes whose frames were welded to sidecars that could, in a pinch, seat two people. One of these lightweight vehicles was owned by Granada’s friend, Ronald “Kulas” Gamboa, who agreed to take Steve to Santol, “as it would be a matter of sight-seeing,” he would later swear in a statement to the Philippine National Police.
If the PNP reports are to be believed, at about 2:30 Steve squeezed in beside Granada in Gamboa’s sidecar, and the trio headed inland, passing, 20 miles later, through Isabela—a heavily fortified police-and-army barracks town, the last outpost before the rebel-held mountains. It was the height of the rainy season, and as the jungle closed in and the road narrowed to little more than a rocky buffalo track, the cumulus clouds, which had been building all day, suddenly let loose a torrential downpour, turning the trail into a running stream. According to their affidavits, Granada and Gamboa told Steve that it would be best to turn back, but Steve told Granada “he will answer for everything in case the tricycle shall be damaged.”
At 5 P.M., just a couple of miles shy of Steve’s destination, with Gamboa gunning the tiny engine to pull the combined 400-pound weight of the three passengers up a steep incline through rushing water and over two-foot rocks, the tricycle bumped “a stone,” tipped over, and Steve was hurled violently from his seat, smashing his skull against “another stone.” “The injury on the head was so severe that he died on the spot,” Granada attested later. The two men unceremoniously left Wong dead in the ditch and, “in panic … we went to report the incident to [the] PNP.”
In their panic, however, Granada and Gamboa raced right by the Isabela police station, reporting instead to the Binalbagan station. The cop they spoke to was the highest-ranking PNP officer south of Bacolod, Senior Inspector Celestino Guara, a longtime acquaintance of the lawyer Abastillas, Sonny Newson’s future father-in-law. Guara told Granada and Gamboa that they should travel the 50 miles back to the capital and inform Sonny and Abastillas of the mishap. Then, without telling his subordinates, Guara strapped on his guns and went alone where other lawmen dared not tread to view the body. It was still pouring rain and completely dark, but Guara found the corpse and all of Steve’s identifying papers, and noted Steve’s “severe head injuries,” “several tattoos,” and “Oriental features.” Without reporting the accident in either Santol or Isabela, Guara returned to Binalbagan with the body and stashed Steve in an undisclosed location separate from the two modern morgues east of town. Here he went through Steve’s pockets and scrupulously listed the “personal effects of the deceased,” including: “ONE (1) passport Canada CN 144816, one (1) male wallet containing one card BCAA CAA, one (1) British Columbia driver’s license,” plus all Steve’s credit cards and roughly $1,000 in Canadian, Hong Kong, Macau, and Philippine currency.
All these effects, plus the body, Guara turned over to Sonny and Abastillas when they arrived the next afternoon. Apparently shocked at the rapid decomposition of Steve and also ignoring the two available morgues, the lawyer and the drug dealer ordered that Steve be shipped immediately to Bacolod for cremation.
Over the next couple of days, Guara, Abastillas, and Sonny collected a stack of affidavits and certificates, which included a death certificate signed by a local doctor; a certificate from a 78-year-old Santol police captain (a rare official the rebels had not yet killed), who in Binalbagan gave a detailed description of Steve’s tattoos and attested that Steve had died exactly as reported; a municipal permit to transfer the cadaver to the capital; a Bacolod Health Department certificate granting permission to cremate the body; and a certificate from a “licensed cremator” named Aaron Menace, who stated that on July 22, he burned Steve’s remains in the crematorium of the Bacolod City Cemetery. Guara then filed his report, which declared Steve’s end “purely accidental in nature,” and recommended “that this case be dropped and closed.” Abastillas placed the report atop all the other paperwork and shipped the package to the Canadian embassy in Manila.
While all this was going on, Steve’s penthouse roommate, Edison Yee, received a call from Sonny Newson on Negros telling him of the tragedy. Yee phoned Steve’s parents, then phoned Lily Lee. From the hysterical reaction of the women in Steve’s life, they almost certainly believed the news that Steve’s days of gangs, dope, and shoot-outs had come to an untimely end.
In the Philippines, however, Virgilio Mendez and a Negros NBI boss named Philip Pecadre were not so sanguine. According to what Mendez had told me in that conference call at Prudential’s law office, the NBI knew there was no crematorium in Bacolod, nor was Aaron Menace a licensed cremator, nor could a tricycle make it up to Santol without someone pushing it most of the way.