Macau is in essence a Triad city.
—MARTIN BOOTH, THE DRAGON SYNDICATES
At sunset we made our approach to Hong Kong, passing over the multibillion-dollar Chap Lok Kok Airport being constructed north of Lantau Island, then banked steeply right and began the breathtaking descent over Kowloon to Kai Tak, the single-runway airport that was the world’s busiest in terms of cargo and third-busiest for international passengers. The green mountains—Kowloon Peak out one window, Victoria Peak out the other—were spectacular, but the apartment high-rises were so close to the wingtips that you felt as if you were about to land on the street. I laughed out loud as we bounced down with a thump, the brakes squealing and the reversers roaring to keep us from running into the drink.
It was then the height of the Asian boom years and the top-end Royal Pacific on the Kowloon side was the only hotel with a room available, so I endured the riot and heat of a double-decker that took me through the crumbling tenement blocks to the northwest end of Tsim Sha Tsui. There, for 150 bucks a night, the desk people put me into a coffin on the 23rd floor with a view into a rat-warren office across the way. Before retiring I sat on the lumpy bed and, as arranged, phoned Prudential’s Jim Gallagher in Toronto, who gave me the name of a detective agency-cum-bodyguard outfit I should call if I got into a jam. “Martin Lister, our lawyer in Hong Kong, has recommended to me that Guard Force is the best, and he urges you to contact him if you have the slightest concern about your safety. He will take care of the rest.”
“How about stop two?” I asked, referring to Manila.
“You will be met at stop two and taken under guard to a nearby hotel. At the moment, I’m actually less concerned about that than I am about your excursion before you arrive there.” He meant the side trip that I was planning on taking to Macau when the warrant came down.
“I’ll let you know how that turns out,” I said. “I plan on winning big there.”
The next morning I awoke four hours ahead of my ten o’clock appointment with Garry Clement and donned a John Deere baseball cap, a pair of mirrored shades, and an olive monkey suit over my business shirt and slacks. It worked—I looked like a diesel mechanic from Moline, Illinois—but the heavy coveralls from my farm up north were a burden. Out on Canton Road the temperature was already in the high 70s, the air humid and gritty from pollution, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I got off the MTR at Sheung Wan, on the Hong Kong Island side. I strode up the stairs into the fluorescent-lit mall of the Shun Tak Centre, followed the cute little steamboats that illustrated the way to Ferry Hall and, just past a collection of tony brand stores, came to a clattering food mart opposite the gangway entrance to the jetfoil.
Now, where to wait so I could face the hordes of souls who enjoyed risking the condo on a day’s fun at Ho’s tables? I decided on a position a few steps west of the wide departure gate, in a cozy nook the other side of the emergency-exit doors. By then I was so sweaty my socks were drenched, but a hunt was a hunt, my disguise was my camouflage, and here was my blind. The nook was in shadow, and the departing passengers walked straight into the white glare of the glassed-in ramp that took them down to the choppy waters of Victoria Harbor. I shoved my hands in my pockets, leaned casually against the jamb of the exit doors, and began surveying each of the 300 holiday gamblers who surged by every 15 minutes. By 9:45 I had surveyed perhaps 3,000 faces.
An effort in futility, I told myself, feeling as I must have looked: a gwailo on a break hoping to catch his Chinese lover on an illicit jaunt. Still, I knew my lover boy was a late riser. He’d risk extradition before setting his alarm. I’d try again about the time Steve would be shaking off sleep.
Up on the 14th floor of One Exchange Square, at the RCMP Hong Kong Liaison Office, Garry Clement was getting ready to sting a guy thought to be responsible for the death of 68 Vancouverites. Kim Kong was the bad guy’s wonderfully allusive name, a tall, bespectacled, smartly dressed 36-year-old who lived in Quarry Bay and cruised around Hong Kong Island in a big new Mercedes. A Dai Huen Jai dragon head, Kim controlled much of the heroin shipped to Vancouver, and thus a fair proportion of the heroin shipped onward to the States. He was also a clever marketer. In early spring he’d ordered his street dealers to treble the smack in their single-dose caps from 7 to 20 percent, and cut prices. In May alone more than 40 Vancouver addicts had overdosed on Kim’s cheap and potent product. Despite the collateral damage, however, the marketing strategy worked. Those who survived liked the richer mix. They upped their addictive consumption, stepped on the high-grade doses, and dealt one-for-three to new kids on the train. As usual, supply increased demand, and Kim’s net profit increased.
While the addicts were dying on the Downtown Eastside, Clement had been coordinating Vancouver’s Unit One, the Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau, and the Triad Bureau to stop Kim Kong. On March 30, a shipment of paintings from Bangkok had been inspected by Canada Customs at Vancouver International Airport and the hollowed-out frames were found to contain 6.9 kilos of 97 percent pure heroin (an irony of supreme proportions, considering the fact that “picture frames” were the hypothetical means of concealment that Steve and I had joked about in our CBC interview). Unit One was called in and the drugs were removed and replaced with smack-look-alike and a bug. Officers then moved into an Eastside hotel room beside the one listed on the shipment forms and let the deal go down. The bugged exchange that followed gave them a Hong Kong phone number, which they traced to an apartment building just north of Kai Tak Airport. A fellow by the name of King Shing Chu was arrested by the RHKP two weeks later and he agreed to cooperate in an investigation that nailed the picture frames to Kim Kong.
Now Clement was arranging a whole slew of crucially timed events: the cops at the Narcotics Bureau had to arrest Kim at a 3 P.M. sting; the Triad Bureau had to be lined up to testify at Kim’s extradition hearing the next morning; and a Unit One officer named Rico Wong had to be on a plane to Hong Kong to whisk the informant King Chu to Vancouver, where he was scheduled to plead guilty and then testify against Kim.* Clement didn’t reveal his target’s name to me until the sting went down, but as I listened to him on the phone making last-minute preps for his arrest and extradition, I thought: here’s the man who’ll get Steve to Canada for me.
Clement was a 21-year veteran, with striking blue eyes, a fit torso, and the ever-present Mountie mustache. He’d started his drug-cop career working Jewish groups in Toronto in the late ’70s, then Asian groups in Vancouver for much of the ’80s, which had helped to land him in Hong Kong as an authority on Triads. During his time in plainclothes, he’d worked in some extremely dangerous undercover projects, and had come to know firsthand his prey’s opinion of the B.C. courts. He was therefore a fan of my jail-time prescription for bad guys: put them away for years, and if they hit the street and were convicted again, don’t let them out until they were old men.
After we went through my schematic diagram and the pile of paperwork I’d brought him from home, he picked up the phone, punched in some numbers, then held his palm over the receiver: “Gonna put you in touch with the Superintendent of the RHKP Organized Crime and Triad Bureau—Bob Youill.
“How ya doing, buddy!” he said into the phone. “Would you be willing to sit down with a journalist by the name of Terry Gould? He’s assisting on a guy by the name of Steven Wong, he’s 14K, did a disappearing act in the Philippines—basically, he’s wanted on drug charges in Canada and he fabricated his own death, he’s connected to the infamous Macau. So Terry’s over in Hong Kong and he’s going to Macau and the Philippines and his focus now is to get a sighting on this guy, ’cause what Wong did was….”
I sat back and listened to a three-minute recapitulation of the epic, right up to my last meeting with Moloci. “Terry’s done a hell of an investigation proving it and supplied it all to the RCMP and we’re looking at laying fraud charges,” he concluded, giving me a thumbs-up. “He’s in my office right now. I’ll give him your number and he’ll give you a call.”
When he got off, he handed me a sheaf of press clippings from his file on Macau. Then he warned me that I’d have to keep a very low profile over there. “Any appearance of publicity to anybody who doesn’t want it could lead you into serious trouble.”
“I’ll be staying in the Lisboa for four days,” I said. Yuk Yuk Yuk.
That almost brought him out of his chair. “Really?! I’d be really careful asking around—I really would.”
“I’m basically gonna put on this pair of sunglasses and hat and act like a goof,” I told him, putting on my mirrors and John Deere cap. “The Macau tourist people think I’m writing an article on the Lisboa and are putting me up when I get back from the Philippines. Tomorrow they’re paying for me to go over for the day for a ‘familiarization tour.’ But I’ve been really careful about who knows what I’m about. I’m not gonna ask a single question. But—I don’t know. I’m hoping to see him.”
Garry took a deep breath and let it out with an audible sigh. He was up to his ass in alligators with this Big Circle Boy thing, and now here I was, telling him I’d be wrestling the alligators in their nest.
“Okay,” he said finally, “if you see that he’s over here, and I get something officially from Vancouver, then I will use it to contact this guy and confirm.” He meant that he had somebody in Macau he totally trusted, an assistant commissioner of police whose name I would later learn was Tony Salvado. “Probably I can go through him and maybe have Wong arrested on a provisional warrant, if that’s the thrust of what the Department of Justice asks for. But it’s—” He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands. “I mean, I don’t know…. Macau is very much the domain of the 14K.”
“And Steve is 14K.”
“That’s right. It’s just recently other factions have been allowed in. Like the Kung Lok Triad from Toronto, but I believe they’re just an extension of the 14K. I’ve been saying that all along, everybody tries to differentiate between the two of them, but they’re one and the same. The Kung Lok is the 14K. So Wong ran the 14K’s bodyguard service in Vancouver. So whatever he wants—you name it, it can be done. I’d be really careful asking around—you’ll end up as fish bait.”
“I’m aware of how dangerous this is, Garry, and I’m not suicidal,” I protested. “It’s just I’ve spent months making all these connections. Ray’s married to Patsy and Patsy’s smooching Steven—and the hipbone’s connected to the thigh bone—”
“Right, it all falls into place, this group is the most incestuous group of people I’ve ever been around in my life. What you’re telling me makes perfect sense—that’s the way things operate here. He’ll probably feel safe enough just being in Macau, nothing’s gonna happen to him in terms of inquiries, formal or otherwise, because they can’t get the inside information on him.”
“Not yet,” I said.
I wrote out my schedule of travel to Macau and the Philippines, and he gave me his home number, told me to phone him in the middle of the night if I got in a jam.
I tucked the info into my wallet next to the numbers of Unit One, Martin Lister, Guard Force, and Gallagher. “Most of Macau’s in Stanley Ho’s pocket, isn’t it?” I asked, because even though Ho had probably never even heard of the Paper Fan, he all but ruled the territory.
“Anybody will tell you,” Clement said, indicating the stack of press clippings in my hands, “Macau is Stanley Ho.”
At noon I was back in my nook at Shun Tak, killing time thinking about old Stanley as I watched the parade to the ferry. Most journalists who’d written about Ho stated that while his corporate empire was legitimate, Macau—the city synonymous with Ho—was a Triad town. Macau was in that fix because its main business was gambling, which drew gangsters like flies to scat. In that regard Macau was no different than Vegas in the ’50s and ’60s. But whereas Las Vegas had been more or less cleaned up by 1993, Macau was still overwhelmingly dirty.
In their off-the-record conversations with journalists, the police alleged Stanley Ho was in some way complicit in maintaining the dirt, even if only by looking the other way at what went down on his premises (see source notes). For his part, Ho vigorously denied any connection to Triad criminality. He pointed out that the Triads had attempted to kidnap and extort him a couple of times and that he’d fought against them ever since he’d won Macau’s casino monopoly license. To try to break that monopoly and share the wealth, the Triads in the early ’60s had threatened to close his hotels, attack his boats, flood his casinos with beggars, buy off his dealers, launch grenade attacks at his offices, torment the Portuguese government until they withdrew his franchise, and kill him slowly. In fact, beyond pointing to Ho’s business associates and hirelings, the police could not substantiate any rumors that would sully his civic reputation. He held an honorary doctorate from the University of East Asia, had received service decorations from various governments, including Malaysia, the Philippines, and the United States, and was an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire as well as a Portuguese Commander of the Order of Benefaction. In addition, he was a noted philanthropist, generously supporting and sitting on the boards of the University of East Asia, the University of Hong Kong, the Community Chest of Hong Kong, the Lions Club, the Hong Kong Ballet Group, and various amateur sports associations.
And yet, for all his good works, power and wealth, he couldn’t get rid of the notorious Triads who worked within his enterprises—the cause of all the rumors and speculation in the first place. In this he reminded me less of a gambling pioneer like Bugsy Siegel—who had embraced his criminal colleagues and paraded his gangsterism in Vegas—than of a respectable version of Jay Gatsby, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegant, charming, and self-made icon of a glittering demimonde.
When authors quote Fitzgerald on the rich they limit themselves to the famous platitude “They are different from you and me,” forgetting Fitzgerald’s more profound observation that the rich “are cynical where we are trustful.” When it came to Stanley Ho, the cops who listed him on their secret rosters would probably agree he had a cynical side.
Dr. Stanley Ho Hung-sun was born rich—on November 25, 1921—into one of the wealthiest families in Hong Kong. His grandfather, the Honorable Ho-fok, and grand-uncle, Sir Robert Ho-tung, were chief compradores for Jardine Matheson, and his father Ho Sai-kwong was a director of the Hong Kong trading company Sassoons, which, like Jardine, had made millions dealing in Chinese opium in the 19th century. As Stanley Ho told British reporter Jill McGivering for her book Macao Remembers, a collection of interviews with Macau hotshots, in the 1930s Ho Sai-kwong “speculated heavily in Jardine’s shares” and “lost heavily. He was on the verge of bankruptcy, and he ran away to Saigon.” In fact, Stanley Ho put the best face on a bad past: his father had not just had a streak of hard luck, but had participated in a flagrant insider-trading scheme, causing a scandal even in Hong Kong—the capital of insider schemes—which led to the suicide of Ho Sai-kwong’s partners before his own flight to Indochina.
Left penniless with his mother and sisters, Ho renounced his pool-playing rich boy’s youth, buckled down, and in 1939 won a couple of scholarships to the University of Hong Kong. Two and a half years later, when the Japanese conquered Hong Kong, the 20-year-old Ho threw away the British army uniform he had briefly worn, fled to neutral Macau, and joined a firm that was one-third owned by the Japanese army. That was how he made his first fortune—trading with the brutal conquerors of his birthplace, in the process building up a network of valuable contacts in the Axis-leaning Portuguese administration. Throughout the war, while the Hong Kong Chinese cringed under repression, and POWs of all nationalities rotted and died by the thousands in hellish camps, Ho smoked the best cigarettes in Macau, drove motorcars and motorbikes, and hosted parties almost every night, serving the Japanese officers delicacies out of reach of ordinary citizens.
Ho never felt guilty about getting his start this way, or even tried to conceal his past. On the contrary, he bragged about it. “Macau was paradise during the war,” he congenially told McGivering. “In Hong Kong, many people, even some of my relatives, suffered considerably because of shortage of food, bombings, and harassment from the Japanese gendarmes.” But not Ho in Macau. “In those days, if you had the money, you could enjoy the best kind of cigarettes, American, British, right up to the end of the war. If you had the money, you could carry on using motorcars and motorbikes all through the war—gasoline was available. And you could have excellent food—if you had the money. I had big parties almost every night. Bird’s nests, roast pork.
“Agreed, there was a lot of killing,” Ho went on, but “I became the teacher of the most important Japanese man in Macau during the war. There was a Japanese Special Branch in Macau, which was even more important than the Japanese consul general. The head of it, a man called Colonel Sawa, went to see the governor one day and told him he wanted to learn English—but he needed a reliable person who mustn’t murder him.”
Colonel Sawa had good reason to fear for his life. The Special Branch worked in league with the Kempeitai—the Japanese equivalent of the Nazi SS. The Special Branch had had the Japanese consul general shot in the stomach and then ordered his body mutilated as a lesson to others who might make the mistake of being too friendly with the British consul. Sawa was understandably hated and feared in Japanese-occupied China—as well as in Japanese-surrounded Macau. In fact, Ho’s own boss, the Macau businessman Roger Lobo, was under some threat from Sawa’s Special Branch. Lobo worked undercover as a British intelligence agent, risking his life picking up downed British and American pilots and sending them on an underground railway into China, where they could meet up with the Nationalists and be sent back into battle. It was Lobo who witnessed the sadistic mutilation of the Japanese consul general.
The governor of Macau was therefore on the spot as to whom to recommend to Sawa to be his instructor. As Ho tells it: “The governor thought about it and said [to Sawa]: ‘What do you think of the grand-nephew of Sir Robert Ho-tung? You were such good friends with Sir Robert—would you trust a member of his family?’
“Colonel Sawa accepted immediately,” Ho went on proudly. “From then on, he sent his car—with no number plate, just one Japanese star—to my house to pick me up, every morning at six, and drove me to Zhongshan, across the border in China. There, the two of us would climb together to the top of a small hill. Then he started singing in Japanese and taught me how to sing with him—and in return I taught him English. I was his teacher for one year, and in that time all the Japanese soldiers in the Special Branch would kneel down to him—and to me, as his teacher. What a great difference! While my relatives, my mother, were suffering in Hong Kong, the Japanese gave me excellent treatment.”
Ho thus found himself in a unique position—a trusted liaison between the conquerors of East Asia and the quasi-fascist Portuguese government. He was promoted to the rank of superintendent of supplies and began trading with the Japanese, profitably exchanging Macau’s stash of war materiel, which the Japanese army so desperately needed, for Chinese rice to be sold to Macau’s starving half-million people. “I started a small trading company myself,” Ho said. “By the end of the war, I’d earned over a million dollars—having started with just ten.”
As soon as the war was over, Ho bought a boat and established the first regular ferry run across the Pearl River Estuary between the British and Portuguese colonies. Then he started buying and selling Hong Kong real estate. His fortune grew, until by 1960 he was one of the wealthiest men in the colony. And then came the venture that would make him one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Gambling had been legal in Macau since the middle of the 19th century, but there were never more than a handful of casinos, unairconditioned and mixed in among the red-light and opium districts in the backstreets by the harbor, offering only Chinese games like fan-tan and pai gow. Ho saw the potential for high-class gambling hotels that catered to Hong Kong’s ultrawealthy, who would be served by high-speed ferries that could get them to Macau in an hour, and that would offer them sophisticated games like baccarat and roulette. In 1961 he bid on the monopoly rights to gambling in the territory, and thanks to his contacts in the Portuguese administration, got the franchise. His company would eventually build nine glitzy casinos and attendant hotels, the first and most famous of which was the Lisboa, a corncob-like hotel tower topped by a ring of spikes cradling a bizarre object that looks like a cross between a Sputnik and a lotus. From its breezeway to its batty mast, the Lisboa is arguably the ugliest building in Asia.
There was also some ugly work that went along with Ho’s contract to build high-speed ferries and high-class hotels. “I also promised to clear the resettlements along the Praia Grande and outer harbor,” he told McGivering. “In those days, the early 1960s, all these Nationalist farmers, who’d run away from Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta to settle in Macau, occupied the outer harbor. There were over a thousand families in little squatter huts. One of my obligations was to clear all that away.”
After clearing “all that away,” Ho expanded into other parts of Asia, which included, in the 1970s, cutting a deal with the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to run nine casinos in the poverty-stricken archipelago, most of the revenue going into the pocket of Marcos himself. At the same time Ho was working with the brutal Marcos, his director of security at the Lisboa was a 14K Triad boss, Lau Wing-kui, who would soon become a part owner in Ho’s Jumbo floating restaurant in Aberdeen, on the south shore of Hong Kong Island. In 1974, Lau immigrated to Canada and formed the Kung Lok Triad in Toronto, taken over by Danny Mo after Lau was deported in 1980. That same year, the San Francisco Asian Gang Squad alleged that Ho’s business partner, Yip Hon, was a heroin trafficker and a Triad member. Ho had a falling-out with Yip Hon, bought out his interest in the company, and was free of that taint until, in 1987, a 14K dragon head by the name of Kai Sze Wai moved to Macau after a stint at running gambling casinos in the Philippines. Before the year was out, Ho’s personal secretary and the chief manager of STDM, Thomas Chung, was chopped to death—an unsolved murder that the Hong Kong police thought was related to an unnamed Triad group’s attempt to muscle in on Ho’s business. Along with a 14K up-and-comer by the name of “Broken Tooth” Wan Kwok-koi, Wai eventually negotiated a lease on several VIP gambling rooms in the Lisboa, allegedly laundering Triad drug money through them, and set up a loan-shark operation on the eighth floor of the hotel, which was still running when I showed up in town.
Given all this, it was no surprise that when the subject of Stanley Ho came up in law enforcement circles, his relationship with the Triads was, as they say, “of interest.” Did he serve them, or was he coerced into doing business with them? Did he fight them, as he claimed, or did he legally capitalize on them in a society seamed by gangsterism, in the same way he had legally capitalized on the Japanese during the war and Marcos in the ’70s? Whatever the answer, something was wrong in Macau, and, as Ho was the most powerful man in the territory, the cops felt they had every justification for surmising that he was at least partly responsible for establishing a climate in which the Triads thrived. He leased his premises to their front companies, partnered with alleged Triad members in business, and perhaps played one off against the other.
This last speculation was being privately talked about in cop shops throughout Hong Kong the very week I arrived, and it highlighted how the Triads had tainted the reputation of Macau. A couple of months previously, two ruling council members in the Sun Yee On Triad, Ki Ming Po and Ben Chan, had opened two floating casinos in international waters, beyond the jurisdiction of the Portuguese governor. The police received intelligence that the Hung brothers, dragon heads of the Sun Yee On, viewed the operations of Po and Chan as competing with their own plans to establish a stake in the Kingsway Casino, located between the jetfoil pier and the Lisboa. In the first two weeks of September, both ships had burned to the waterline.
By 3:30 P.M., I had surveyed some 4,000 Macau-bound faces and was bored to tears. Hold on till five, I told myself, and then the hell with it.
Long before then, at 3:50 (I did look at my watch just afterward) my heart went for a loop and my breath turned to panting gusts. No, it couldn’t be. That’s him! my brain screamed, as I watched a low-altitude head bobbing among hundreds of others crowding from the mall hallway, then turning hard right at the food mart in a race to catch the four o’clock sailing. He was carrying a black case—too small for a suitcase. The white silk shirt was his style; and the man was the same height. He’s lost a lot of weight, I thought, which would fit, considering the anxiety he’d been living under; aviator glasses, hair cut short on the side and long on the top; waddling walk; the same walk. In my mind I saw his face sneering at me as we sat on his couch on Clarendon Drive three years ago, but now he seemed childlike, bewildered, very worried, and suffering.
That’s him!
No side glance—he hadn’t noticed me, I realized, thanking God—as he hustled past the jetfoil marquee and the “No Smoking” sign and the block glass partition—then stepped onto the knobby rubber of the gangway.
Gone.
What should I do, what should I do? If I chased after him down the ramp, they couldn’t hold him at customs on my say-so. Then again, he might lose it and shoot me dead. On the other hand, by blowing my cover I could screw up an arrest when the warrant came through. I knew where he was going, and if he knew I knew, he might not stay there.
And while all these thoughts were boiling between my ears, I was feeling, in my heart, Why can’t we just call time-out, you and me, and sit down in the food mart, you tell me what’s been going on with you? Because I felt bad for Steve—the trouble I was causing. Making him run here, run there—the Philippines, Macau, Hong Kong, back to Macau. You lovable fuck, just stay in one spot so I can get you!
I ran to a pay phone opposite Rainbow Leathers, called Clement—but he was out on the Kim Kong thing. “Tell him to call me at my hotel as soon as he can,” I told his secretary. “It’s about Steven Wong.” Then I phoned his home and told his wife, Lee, the same thing. Then I phoned Bob Youill and gave him the scoop. Then I went back to the hotel and waited. Waited. Waited. Because the goddamn Liaison Office had the budget for only one cell phone, and Garry’s boss had it.
“You’re kidding!” Garry said when he finally got home from the arrest of Kim Kong and called me. I stayed calm, although I’d gone through a whole blister pack of Nicorettes by then.
“I was watching every face in the crowd as they were coming through, and at 3:50, at the entrance to the STDM jetfoil, the arcade entrance to where you walk through there—Listen, what can I say? I am ninety-five percent sure I saw the guy. Now, there’s a possibility that you could get the passenger manifest for the four o’clock sailing for the jetfoil. There’d be at least a list of names.”
“They don’t keep a manifest on the jetfoil,” he said. “You just go and buy tickets.”
“Aw shit!”
“Except he would’ve had to have used an immigration document. What I will do tomorrow, I will get hold of Bob Youill and I’ll see if we can check that time frame. He still gets checked going out, he still has to clear immigration. I think I can get that checked tomorrow. But I’m a hundred percent sure he’s gonna be on a false passport.”
“Yeah, he would have something all set up, in another name and another identity,” I agreed. “Shit, I couldn’t chase after him, I couldn’t very well shout ‘Steven’—so I don’t know what to say. I’m virtually certain that I saw him—I looked through hundreds and hundreds of faces before I locked onto that face.”
“Okay, what I’m gonna do is this: I’m gonna be talking to Vancouver on that other matter,” he said, referring to Kim Kong. “I’ll just see what the chances of Canada asking for Wong’s extradition are. Because if they ask for extradition, then I can start doing some inquiries through the contact I have in Macau. I would think it’s in our vested interest to go for extradition on him. That’s my own view…. It’s unfortunate that he wasn’t coming in to Hong Kong. If we could’ve put him in a hotel, we could’ve really had some fun tomorrow. I could have arranged with Bob Youill, we could have just paid a visit on him, with you in our presence. I’ll work on it tonight just so I can see what I can come up with. You’re going over to Macau tomorrow?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m going over on the ten o’clock jetfoil. I’m scheduled to come back on the 10 P.M. I phoned Bob Youill today and I have to phone him Friday afternoon to confirm a meeting for Friday evening.”
“Okay, take care of yourself. I’ll give you the cellular-phone number, I’m gonna be packing it tomorrow—I’ll be in and out on this extradition proceeding, but as far as I’m concerned, the urgency is over on that because the arrest has gone down and he’s in custody.”
Oh, Garry, I thought, if those words were only for Steven Wong.
The bench warrant for Steve’s arrest had still not arrived by the next morning, Thursday, September 16. I was scheduled to leave for the Philippines at 10 Saturday morning. About all I could hope for on this trip, then, was to make Steve in Macau so that when Clement received the telex, he could get on the phone to his guy and—Who knows? There he is, Officer—arrest that man!
I decided against the sweaty diesel-mechanic disguise and mixed and matched with shades, green shorts, black socks, sandals, Hawaiian shirt, and a big Calvin Klein shopping bag. Mr. Goof from Biloxi, here for a few bargains, a rush at the tables, and maybe a little Chinese fanny if I won.
Down at Shun Tak I discovered it was a good thing I had a VIP reservation from the Hong Kong office of Macau Tourism; otherwise I would have had to wait a whole 15 minutes for the next sailing. Nobody on my trip could have borne that. On the other side of Customs, at the glass doors to the departures lounge, I walked into a loud argument between two uniformed hostesses and a couple who were apparently getting bumped. Losing a quarter-hour at gambling was a big deal to the passengers on this flying boat. Weekday morning or not, the jetfoil’s airplane seats were filled with well-dressed, grim-faced Chinese men and women who looked about as much in the holiday mood as people in line at the methadone clinic. This was serious business. The engines whined like a DC-8, the safety instructions were given in English, Cantonese, and Portuguese, and we took off—literally. Within minutes we were skimming the blue-green surface on winglike foils at 60 miles an hour. Not a second to waste.
I looked out the window at the Chinese silk screen of green islands in white mist and russet junks riding the waves, but most people were ignoring the view. They had their heads down, scratching the lottery cards the stewardesses sold. The instant cards were illegal in Hong Kong. Here they were hors d’oeuvres to the main menu of high-stakes roulette and poker, pai gow and craps. At last! The freedom to gamble! My seatmates hungrily ripped through one $10 package of cards after another, and another, preparing for a day’s spree at tables that, all told, would contribute about a billion dollars to Stanley Ho’s coffers that year.
There were two old Chinese gents in sports jackets on the other side of Macau Customs holding up a sign that said: “Mister Jery Gold.” One was beaming and bald and the other silver-haired and sweet-looking. I assumed they were from the tourist office, here to accompany me on my “familiarization” tour. I shook their hands and discovered they spoke as much English as I spoke Chinese. They had a waiting car for me.
“Where we going?” I asked.
The bald one looked at me without comprehension.
“Are you from the Macau Tourist Office?”
He didn’t understand, but heard the question in my voice and ecstatically beckoned me to the back seat. I was suddenly as tempted to get in that car as I was to walk down Avenida da Amizade with sandwich boards that read, “Steve—I’m here.” I gave the old duffers a U.S. fin each and refused their ride, or tour, or one-way trip to the woods. They looked devastated, talking to each other in loud singsong as I strolled west away from them, towards the Lisboa. Feeling awfully naked at my back, I heard the car door slam, the engine gun, and looked right to see them creeping beside me. They both called out in Cantonese, shrugged helplessly to each other at my friendly but dismissive wave, and then were gone. Or maybe not gone. They knew who I was. Jery Gold.
Just down the street from the Kingsway, I saw that Stanley Ho and the government of Macau were adding another 10 percent to the size of the tiny domain, constructing a 50-square-block jetty into the Outer Harbor where the squatter huts used to be. It was a massive project, a forest of derricks, pile drivers, and D-8 Cats building roads into the ocean. In addition, a half-completed bridge arched up over the bay on its way to Taipa Island to the south. To the north, condo towers and hotels were going up everywhere I looked. Why not? Prospects were bright. Revenue projections for Ho’s casinos in 1997, when the jetty and bridge were to be completed, were over $2 billion, almost a third of it to be paid in taxes to the Macau government, which relied on the casinos for half its total revenue.
At the end of Amizade I saw the 200-foot Lisboa. Even in Vegas I hadn’t come across a structure as overwhelmingly disharmonious. The neighborhood around it was terrific, of course—a backdrop of European boulevards and cafés running along the glittering Praia Grande Bay, but you had to look past the Lisboa’s eye-crossing kitsch to see it. The white-and-orange tower brought to mind a garish condo in Miami; the three-story sphere on top was out of an Ed Woods sci-fi film; and the casino roof, rafters exposed, looked like a whitewashed elephant cage. Chinese doormen dressed as Portuguese matadors ushered me into a lobby that had millions of dollars’ worth of vases behind glass, a first-century A.D. seismograph, an ancient warlord’s gold-lamé uniform, a porcelain Kwan Kung, life-size cloisonné lions, and naval junks in full sail, miraculously carved from solid ivory. There were no chairs or couches where I could sit and admire these precious works or watch for Steve, though. Not one. Sitting was not the point of being here—unless I took my seat beyond the metal detectors, at the end of a corridor down which it seemed the whole world was headed, heedless of the museum in the lobby.
I checked my empty Calvin Klein bag and entered a stadium-size casino suffused in gold gloom, where thousands of people were packed around scores of tables that ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week—even in the midst of typhoons that shut down Hong Kong. Several stories above the heads of the gamblers was a domed roof—an upside-down thousand-petaled lotus. Botticelli-like reliefs gazed down upon the masses from within the immense flower. Roman columns encircled them. The crazy decor and sheer size of the place seemed to have an effect on the decorum of the players. The chainsmoking gamblers behaved as frenetically as traders at the Chicago futures exchange—shouting, reaching, jostling one another as they stood several tiers deep around each table, throwing money down, picking money up, racing to other venues and starting all over again.
To think that I would spot Steve in here was wishful thinking, but I went at it for two hours anyway, surveilling every table and corner until, my third time around, I noticed some goons on their cell phones obviously relaying information about me—the only gwailo in here. I kept a dingbat’s smile on my face as I left the Astrodome of casinos and climbed the flight of plush-carpeted stairs to loftier realms.
In those days you had free access to VIP rooms with names like the Royal and the Golden Palace, each level progressively higher in stakes, each more quiet than the one beneath. But despite the high-class hush, it was still a low smoky world. The ever-present security guards suspiciously eyed Mr. Goof as he made his tour. I kept smiling with a rube’s wonder as I watched the bigshots lay down their $10,000 bets. Softly they offered prayers to Kwan Kung’s statue, then, millimeter by millimeter, peeled back a jack or a king that put them over the top. A groan, a shrug, and then another prayer—without, I was sure, promising to make the effort to be good afterward. It was all a lie told to God—and they knew it. Which was why so many criminals gambled, I surmised. Please, Kwan Kung, let this dope deal go down without a problem.
That night, after a wander around the entire town, inspecting every pedestrian I passed, I had a meal at an outdoor restaurant on Praia Grande. Then it was over to the Lisboa again. This time I took the elevator to the eighth floor of the hotel and emerged into an utterly quiet and quite civilized corridor. I don’t know what else I expected up here. Perhaps to hear the bloodcurdling wails of men who’d crossed the Triads and were dying slowly from a thousand cuts.
Oh God! Don’t even think about that.
The next day, on my way to visit Clement, I stopped into the Macau Government Tourist Office and asked a rep if he’d set up two guys to meet me at the ferry yesterday. He found the correspondence on my trip from their Tourist Information Bureau in Richmond and said that somebody from the B.C. office must have arranged for the two chaperons. But it wasn’t his office. That information sparked a flurry of international calls from Clement to Prudential’s James Gallagher and Gallagher to Martin Lister and Lister to the detective agency Guard Force; and finally from Gallagher to me at 2 A.M. Saturday, with dire warnings like, “Do not, repeat, DO NOT go to Macau when you return from stop two unless accompanied by Guard Force security! Richmond Bureau did not arrange chaperons! We think your cover has been blown! Meet with Lister and Guard Force immediately upon your return!”
I said I definitely would, and then tried to get back to sleep. I was still wide awake when I had to get ready for stop two.
*Kim Kong was extradited to Canada on November 29, 1993.