I’m one of those guys that believes no one has the right to wal the face of the earth with impunity. Every criminal has to have somebody on his case.
—TOM SPAN, VANCOUVER POLICE
By the end of August my chart on Steve showed his connections reaching from Macau to Hong Kong and from the Philippines to Canada and the U.S. Forty circled names were linked by vectored arrows that went straight between bubbles or swooped around the margins like end runs in a complicated football play. That was exactly what Steven’s life had become since his death. Opposing him—trying to keep the Paper Fan from playing his drug game from the other side of the Pacific—was Unit One. There was still no warrant for Steve’s arrest, and before the Mounties could move—here or overseas—they needed that warrant. On August 31, Staff Sergeant Jerry Moloci invited me into his office at RCMP headquarters to see what I had come up with to help get that warrant.
Moloci was beginning to remind me of Detective Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue. Gruff and energetic, a veteran of the Steve chase, if Moloci ran the world he’d be over in Asia hunting Steve right now. In the early ’80s he’d made a dozen trips there, but budget cutbacks had kept him home for the past decade, basically seething in frustration while the visiting team of bad guys buzzed in and out.
Moloci called Mike Hiller into the office and I unfolded my schematic map against the wall for the two cops. Moloci drew his chair close. “I know him,” he said, pointing to André Ouellette and tapping the name twice. He traced the connections sideways to Ray Chau, and upward to Fong Ngo Lam, Stanley Ho, and the Lisboa. “Ho owns that big development in Hong Kong, too, right on the waterfront there, it’s got those big shopping malls.” He was referring to the Shun Tak Centre, from where the STDM jetfoil ferry left for Macau.
“Ho owns a lot,” I said, adding that Triad mobsters hovered around a lot of what Ho owned. “The Lisboa is notorious as a safe house for gangsters on the run. That’s where I think Steven is—or was.”
I pointed to Sonny Newson. I thought it likely the Son of Sam had helped procure Steve a new identity in the Philippines. Then, with the help of Alex Abastillas’s friends in the police and military, the Paper Fan had been hustled across the South China Sea to Macau, whose extradition treaty with Commonwealth countries had not been updated since 1892. “Back then the narcotics trade was Commonwealth-sponsored,” I said, “so naturally it wasn’t included as an extraditable offense. Ergo, Macau’s popularity with fugitive drug dealers since World War II. Almost every other extradition treaty with Canada has drug offenses in it, except Macau’s.”
“I can’t believe he’s gonna live in that little place all his life,” Hiller said.
“Knowing Steve Wong—not a chance,” Moloci agreed. “That’d be home base for him, but he’s gonna be back and forth to Hong Kong.”
I concurred. It was my conjecture that, safe from arrest in the Las Vegas of Asia, Steve had waited as his 1992 trial date came and went. When no arrest warrant had been issued for his failure to appear in court, he would have felt like a free man—at least free enough to travel from Macau’s six square miles to Hong Kong. Which wouldn’t have been that difficult, I said, because Steve had influence with the Royal Hong Kong Police. In Hong Kong, Wong’s local Triad boss would not have had a problem finding the young outlaw some interesting work. And, in Hong Kong, in the event that a warrant were to be issued in Canada—making Wong liable to arrest on his drug charges in most places except Macau—he would have been just a subway ride from the ferry-departure ramp, and a one-hour trip back to asylum at the Lisboa.
“Like everyone else he’d believe there’s no extradition treaty with Macau that covered drugs,” I said. “He’d be correct—but he’d be wrong that he was out of reach in Macau. I’ve been doing some research.” I opened my briefcase and took out a fax from Prudential. “Prudential had to really dig to find a footnote to that extradition treaty for me. And what they found you can apply to Steven Wong. Not for drug trafficking, but for things that relate to stuff that went on in 1892, like piracy, train robbery—and fraud. It’s for ‘the mutual surrender of fugitive criminals … charged with obtaining dollars or services for false pretenses.’” I handed over the fax to Moloci. “I’m going over to Hong Kong in a couple of weeks, and I’m going to be in the Philippines a few days later,” I said. “The NBI is going to meet me in Manila and take me to Negros to prove the fraud end.” I’d gather affidavits from the so-called cremator at the Bacolod cemetery; the doctor in Binalbagan who signed Steve’s death certificate; the chief of traffic for the area; and the head of the police garrison in Isabela, located at the start of the trail to Santol. Then the NBI and I would head up into the mountains and I’d take pictures of the spot on the trail where Steve had supposedly died, proving the event was a near impossibility. “So the fraud that Steven has perpetrated is covered by the treaty. If that body of evidence were given to the fraud squad, they could make the case that a fraud charge is justified. And that could be used in extraditing Steve from Macau.”
Moloci reminded me that whatever I did would have to be repeated as part of an official Mountie investigation. Which didn’t bother me, I said, because that’s what the NBI wanted. The Canadians just had to initiate things. I handed over a copy of Prudential’s most recent report from the Philippines, and Hiller said he would get an original and ship it over to the office of Peter Eccles, the prosecutor of Wong’s case. Wong’s endlessly held-over trial was set to resume September 13, and with all this new data, Eccles would finally have enough to request a warrant for Steve’s failure to appear in court for his drug charges.
That got me thinking. By then I’d learned from an officer with sources close to Sonny that Sonny himself was keeping Steve abreast of events at the drug conspiracy trial through a complicated system of coded pager-and-phone relays that took at least a few hours to complete. “Newson’s gonna be sentenced tomorrow at nine-thirty,” I said. “You think he’ll get jail time?”
“Well he should, considering everything else,” Hiller said. That is, considering the fact that Sonny had forged the passport while out on bail for heroin-trafficking charges, and considering the fact that he’d been picked up on a cocaine charge while awaiting sentencing for the passport fraud. But then, this was B.C. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think he’ll be held in custody.”
“Okay, supposing he doesn’t get jail time,” I asked, “how long before the warrant kicks in in Hong Kong?”
Moloci said that depended on how quickly the judge acted on it after the request. It would certainly take at least 48 hours to get to the desk of Garry Clement, the staff sergeant at the RCMP Liaison Office in Hong Kong, and Clement couldn’t ask the Hong Kong cops to arrest Steve until he had that warrant.
I took out my calendar and started figuring out the time zone difference, then began playing chess with the crooks. If Sonny were not in jail, he would try to let Steve know about that warrant before it reached Clement’s desk. If the judge agreed to the warrant on the 13th, and the back and forth between the coded pagers took a few hours, that meant Steve would learn of the warrant with a margin of about one and a half days in which to flee to sanctuary in Macau. Eighth-grade dropout he might have been, but Steve had a lawyer’s knowledge of the workings of international arrest warrants. Hong Kong was a day later than Vancouver, and it was my guess that Steve would know it would not reach the Crown Colony until, at the earliest, 2 A.M. on September 16. The quickest way for him to get over to Macau was by STDM’s jetfoil ferry. Having no suspicion that people were theorizing he would be headed to Macau, he would feel he had all the evening of the 14th to pack. He would probably head out from wherever he was living on September 15, Hong Kong time. Here was a narrow enough margin to feasibly pin Steve down to a place and time.
I made the decision to attend court on the morning of the 13th, and fly out right after I confirmed the request for the warrant had gone down. There was a Cathay flight leaving for Hong Kong that day at 3:30 P.M. I’d arrive well ahead of the warrant.
“So you’d have to surveil him,” Hiller said. “That’s the way you’d have to do it. You know,” he laughed, “if Jerry would lighten up his wallet and send me over, I would surveil him.”
“It’s difficult for us to travel these days with the government cuts,” Moloci moaned. “They’re not letting us go anywhere. It’s hard to do the job staying at home.”
“The thing is,” Hiller said to me, “Steven knows you.”
“Still, Macau’d be the place Steven Wong would run to,” Moloci said. “If you make a sighting that goes a long way to help us.”
Hiller clicked his tongue. “The only thing I’m concerned about is that he put a threat out on your life. As soon as you get tied in with spotting and squealing on Steven, your life would be in danger.”
“Yeah, it’s like six seconds and who draws first, ha ha ha.”
The laugh was pretty lame, because I was not feeling cavalier about what could actually take place over there.
After I’d returned from Vegas I’d gone for a walk up Mosquito Creek Canyon in North Vancouver, the hillside suburb where Leslie and I had bought a house the previous year. Near the top of the creek, surrounded by the giant trunks of old-growth cedar, a log bridge spanned the canyon. I stopped in the middle of the bridge and gazed north up the boulder-strewn creek towards the peaks that formed a dark green wall behind the lighter green stand of rain forest. I turned around and gazed south to where the canyon fell steeply away through forest to the city and the sea. What a glorious place to live, I thought: a veritable national park in my backyard and a lovely city in my front. Why would I leave it all behind and risk my ass for a $5,000 story?
I reasoned that I had made it through six years of gang reporting without being kidnapped and tortured to death. In order to experience a few exhilarating moments and make it out with a good story, I’d always hedged my bets, watched my back, planned carefully, assessed the odds, made allies, outflanked enemies, and sometimes strategically retreated when necessary. But all of that had taken place in surroundings never more than a few feet from Canadian civilization, where up was up and down was down, and where even sociopathic criminals held the suspicion that gravity couldn’t be defied indefinitely.
Macau and the Philippines were something else again. In Macau the police were famously in the back pockets of the Triads, and you were out of luck if you called them because one of their gangster bosses was on your tail. (As Lonely Planet advised travelers to Macau, “The only advice on what to do if you get on the wrong side of the Triads is, don’t.”) The Philippines was even worse, and not just in the field of Chinese organized crime. In that volcanic archipelago there had been nine coup attempts since Ferdinand Marcos had been overthrown in 1986; from Luzon in the north to Mindanao in the south, kidnapping was a police-sponsored growth industry; on Negros and three other islands the back roads belonged to cutthroat brigands and battalions of gangster-guerrillas; and in the poverty-stricken towns and smog-choked cities everything was for sale, including the murder of nosey journalists, who were being knocked off at the rate of three a year, with none of the murderers coming to justice. In short, I was headed off to where chaos reigned. God knows what Steve or his friends would do to me if they got me alone in a room with no threat of consequences.
For several days, that 3 A.M. terror sat naked on my shoulder like a clawed and drooling gargoyle, keeping me figuratively stuck in the middle of my bridge. What made the overseas trek worth taking? If I was going to risk Triad torture for something, shouldn’t that “something” be more than a terrific story, which I might never live to write?
Then, a week after I came down from my bridge, the Mounties told me a U.S. liaison intelligence officer named Omar Longoria had pasted Steve’s mug shot above his desk in Richmond, near the Vancouver airport. I called Longoria and asked him why—of all the bad guys he had to worry about—he had chosen Steve’s puss to greet U.S. and Canadian cops coming through his door. “Because if what the Mounties are saying about him is true, Wong personifies the wave of the future in Asian crime,” Longoria told me. “Here’s a very flamboyant individual, almost to the point of arrogance, very proud of his connections all over the world, and very sophisticated in what he’s pulled off in several countries. He thinks he can break the law with impunity.”
That was a word I’d heard cops use over and over when they talked about Steve. As Tom Span, an officer who’d been on Steve’s ass for years, had told me: “I’m one of those guys that believes no one has the right to walk the face of the earth with impunity. Every criminal has to have somebody on his case.” The fact was, nothing violated the rule of law more than criminals who did not have to pay the consequences for breaking the law. Without consequences, criminals could do anything, and that struck at the heart of civilization. In societies where impunity reigned, ordinary people eventually joined the lawbreakers. Even the cops became criminals. I had seen it myself in Brooklyn.
And so I’d shown up here at RCMP headquarters telling myself the risk was worth taking. Finessing my way into Steve’s house that snowy day in February three and a half years ago had been part journalism and part game. Now the game part was over. I wanted to get the evidence, hand it over to the Mounties, get a fraud charge rolling, and have Steve nabbed.
Moloci stood up, jammed his hands in his pockets and then pointed to my chart. “This is really something the police shoulda been doing a long time ago! We’ve been fighting this battle now for how long?! The fact is, what our management did to us was say, ‘Hey, it’s a fraud, that’s not your mandate, blah blah blah.’ And so here we are, we can’t go either way.” Meaning Unit One hadn’t been able to expend resources on an investigation without a warrant, and hadn’t been able to justify a warrant for fraud because they weren’t a fraud squad.
Moloci turned to Hiller. “His unofficial sighting will go a long way to help us sell the fact that this is for real. I mean, he is alive!” he insisted. “As much as you speculate and say anything you want, the fact is if somebody spotted him, nobody can deny that.”
“So we’ll get the Commercial Crime Squad involved and get an investigation going in the Philippines when he gets back with his affidavits,” Hiller said.
“Well that’s something we can maybe help ourselves on here now,” Moloci said, impatiently going around to his side of the desk. “We’ll talk to Garry Clement once we get things rolling here with the charges; we might get lucky and even spot Steven coming out of those spots, coming in or out of Macau.”
“Would Garry meet with me?” I asked.
“Sure he would,” Moloci said. “He’s a good guy. Problem is, he’s under the same restraints as we are, and being the L.O., he can’t really get involved in an investigation until it’s official. We’ll phone him ahead of time and tell him you’re coming, and we’ll make sure he’s there.” He turned to Hiller. “We can fill Garry in on what’s going on, and when Terry goes over there—”
He stopped, thought a moment, then slapped the desk.
“Okay! that’s the way we’re gonna do this. If we can keep Garry juiced up on that end, and you do your thing, Terry, and if you get lucky seeing him that’s a bonus, and then we’ll lay the charges, play out the string, and when we figure the time is right, we’ll get the lawyers in the situation and then we’ll do it!”
Moloci burst into laughter, thrilled by the closing trap. “My superintendent was saying to me—when we said we got Steven Wong this last time—he said, ‘You got Steven Wong?!’ I said, ‘Yeah, we got him!’ And of course, all he’s hearing is the history—how hard this guy is to catch, because they been trying for years. Then we catch him, he asks me, ‘Did you actually get a case against him?’ I said, ‘Yeah! Mike got a case against him!’ He couldn’t believe it. But then, he skips out! Just another way to thumb his nose!”
“Well,” I said, “we’ll have to put a stop to that.”
The next morning at 9:30, I showed up at provincial courtroom 306 for Sonny Newson’s sentencing. I sat on the opposite side of the courtroom from Hiller, over by the wall and neighbor to a talky court watcher, a retired gent who enjoyed a daily peek at the shaven-headed mean types, the insouciant street sellers, and the bewildered middle-class people getting ready to stand their first time before a judge.
At ten o’clock I looked over at Hiller, ready to smile at Sonny’s repeat tardiness, when I noticed the cop’s eyes pass over mine and rest beyond my shoulder. I turned around and there was Sonny, directly behind me—a maneuver that must have taken him some distance out of his way.
Sonny’s name was called, he joined his lawyer up front, and my courtroom friend muttered cryptically, “Bad man Jose”—probably because of Sonny’s tropical attire. Alex Murray made a case for leniency, “given the facts of this case and my client’s attempts to better his circumstances.” Newson was now working full-time at Green Auto Body, he said, plus taking an evening first-aid course on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Sonny was saving his money so that he could rejoin his wife in the Philippines. Therefore, if a sentence were to be imposed, Sonny requested that he be allowed to serve it on weekends.
The judge reviewed the facts of the case, assessing that Sonny obviously had not engineered the passport forgery to further his own criminal ends. “Indeed, it would seem that Mr. Newson has not been involved in crime since then and has made efforts to improve his life,” she said, and I could see Hiller shift in his seat. In B.C., being arrested and charged with cocaine trafficking did not mean being “involved in crime”—at least until conviction. The judge went on to note that Sonny had completed high school, and that he was a member of the Longshoreman’s Union. There was every chance he could become a productive taxpayer. “Given your recent efforts to change your lifestyle,” she said, “and also your cooperation with a guilty plea, I will sentence you to ninety days, served on weekends, beginning Friday, September 3 at 6 P.M., and ending Monday at 11 A.M.”
I reached into my shoulder pack and looked at my Day-timer. September 13, the day the warrant for Steve’s arrest would be requested, was a Monday. Court started at 10 A.M. Sonny would be on the street at 11.
The full cast was in attendance at Supreme Court on September 13. Representing dead Steve was Neil Sacks, a balding, short, bespectacled fellow in a dapper-looking suit. I watched as Sacks had a few pleasant words with Crown Prosecutor Peter Eccles, a boyish-looking blond man in hornrimmed glasses. Representing Prudential’s interests was Jo Anne Carmichael, whom I’d been dealing with since Jim Gallagher had flown back to Toronto. Voyageur’s lawyer, Alison Murray, was talking with Hiller, done up sharply in a green suit—the first time I’d seen him out of jeans—looking taller and slimmer than usual.
Yak Wah Cheung, out on bail, took his seat in the dock, wearing the usual zoot-suit jacket, mauve pants, and a baggy shirt. Kim Tam, doing jail time on another offense, was led in from the back in government clothes. He was a broadly built, strong-looking fellow, with long black hair cut into bangs like Galahad’s. He sat beside Yak, then turned around and our eyes met. Beat, beat, beat. I smiled. Judge G. Peter Fraser entered, and Regina vs Kim Tam, Yak Wah Cheung, and Steven Wong was called to order.
Sacks stood up and told the judge he had a matter to discuss: Wong’s parents had put up their house as guarantee for their son’s $100,000 bail. That surety still hung over their heads. Fourteen months had come and gone since their son’s passing. They were therefore applying to the court to have their son’s charges withdrawn and the surety lifted.
Judge Fraser looked at Eccles for the Crown’s position.
Eccles stood up and began reviewing the facts of Steve’s supposed death. He cleared his throat: “The Crown has some concerns about the circumstances and the nature of the identification of the body. And the entire circumstances of the alleged demise of Mr. Wong have rapidly changed us to the conclusion that the rumors of his death were somewhat exaggerated. As a result, the Crown takes the position that Mr. Wong is not dead, that he is somewhere. Accordingly, we have not withdrawn the charges, and are not willing to withdraw charges. I advise my friend that the Crown will be seeking a bench warrant forthwith for Steven Wong.”
I saw Kim Tam lean over and whisper something to Yak Wah Cheung. Then Tam turned around and looked at me.
The judge announced he would issue an “order of committal for Mr. Wong” and stood up. “Order in court,” the clerk pronounced. The judge stepped down. Yak strolled by and into the hall; Tam was taken back to a holding cell until trial resumed after lunch. I looked at my watch: 11 A.M. Sonny was just then getting out of jail.
Outside the courtroom Jo Anne Carmichael said to me: “I’ll let Jim Gallagher know you’re on your way. Good luck, eh? Take care of yourself.”
I waved goodbye to Hiller and caught a cab to the airport. Flight CX839 left exactly on time.