He’s exactly where you thought he was…. We’ll move on him.
—STAFF SERGEANT GARRY CLEMENT, MAY 27, 1994
One thing that helps in a lot of these matters is time. The passage of time.
—TONY DOHM, CANADIAN DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, NOVEMBER 8, 1994
“These affidavits are conclusive,” Garry Clement told me, after reading through the sworn statements of Minase, Tronggo, Esteva, and Biches. “You just saved the insurance companies a million and a quarter dollars.”
He called in the burly boss of the mission, Inspector Garry Lagimodiere, and I beamed like a schoolboy as the big Quebecois gave me a congratulatory clap on the back and announced in a basso profundo voice: “He’s been filling me in—good stuff, Terry! Steven Wong, what a piece’a work, eh?”
I opened my notebook eagerly. “So—tell me the state of the investigation now. What’s the plan?”
The plan, Clement said, was to ship these affidavits to Vancouver for Jerry Moloci to give to the Department of Justice. Clement would then start the paperwork to get himself to the Philippines to officially duplicate my research with the NBI, after which the Mounties’ Commercial Crime Squad would look into the possibility of laying a fraud charge against Steve. While that was taking place, Bob Youill of the Triad Unit and Steve Carruthers, an RHKP drug inspector who had a file on Steve, would put the word out to their informants in the Lisboa. Unfortunately, Clement added, all of this was likely to take some time: the meetings with the Macau informants had to take place under the radar of certain parties who might blow the whole operation; on top of that, the Mounties were working across numerous international boundaries—Canada to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Macau, Macau to Portugal—and everyone had their rules.
“Well fuck, I don’t have to pay attention to international protocol,” I declared. “The Macau tourist bureau’s got my bed made at the Lisboa right now.” I told them I’d head over there tomorrow with Guard Force, spend two days taking pretty photos of old cannons with a reputable bureau guide, then spend the next two days looking for Steve in downscale Triad haunts. “If I find Steve, I’ll phone you directly.”
“You can disappear awful quick over there doing that,” Lagimodiere warned.
An older and wiser hunter than I was, Clement thought a moment on the situation, then began to discuss Steve in a way that made it sound as if the Paper Fan really was a dead spirit, and if I tried too hard, he would dissolve before my eyes.
“He’s been spooked, I’m convinced ofthat, so for now he’s not going to be where you think he’s going to be,” Clement said. “If you go over there looking for him, if you purposely set out to find him, I’m convinced you’re not going to succeed. But if you go over and do your story strictly on the tourist thing, I think you’ll have a better chance of running into him.”
Looking at Lagimodiere he drummed his fingers on his desk three times. “Now, is that a risk?” he asked himself. “My feeling is no; it’s gonna look pretty funny—here you are under the auspices of the Macau tourist association and something happens to ya? Not likely. Wong doesn’t want that kind of heat. If, however, you spent the extra couple of days there, then I think the questions are gonna start being asked by other people: what the fuck is he hanging around for …? So, do your travel article like you intended, let them take you where they want to, and that’s it. Two days, then you’re back here.”
“If you have to stay over here for the couple’a days, we’ll make the reservation,” Lagimodiere generously offered. “We get the corporate rate. We could pull some strings for you.”
“Yeah, I can get you in the Hilton for $950,” Garry cracked. “Actually, I know what I’d be doing—I’d be hitting Prudential for some of these expenses. Because you’re not gonna get much protection from Guard Force, if you’re going under the impression ofthat.”
This was news to me, but Clement said he’d garnered the intentions of Guard Force at a stormy meeting yesterday with one of the agency’s executives, Paul Taylor, as well as Prudential’s lawyer in Hong Kong, Martin Lister. Lister had couriered to my new hotel a detailed affidavit they wanted me to sign before I went over. The affidavit had gone missing for a couple of hours. I told Clement and he went to their office. That was when he found out they wanted the affidavit because they had decided not to accompany me when they’d been unable to determine the identity of the two old duffers who’d met me at the ferry. “You better be prepared,” Clement said now. “You probably won’t have that other set of eyes behind you.”
Lagimodiere whistled, laughed, clapped me on the back again, wished me luck, told me to stay out of trouble, and then went back to his office. Clement began scribbling in his Day-timer. One way or the other—whether the ID came from me or the informants—he was determined to have his ducks in a row when the Paper Fan appeared through the mist. “I wanna be prepared to move quickly when there’s a need to move quickly.” He would alert his impeccable source in Macau—the one who would arrest Steve for us—as soon as I left the office. Garry then mused on how he could speed up the extradition process. His opinion was that it would be best if the DOJ allowed him to handle it directly. “The question is,” he said, “can they send the extradition request to me so I can personally hand it to the head of the Macau judiciary and say, ‘We know this is the place; here he is; now can you go make the arrest?’ It would have been so easy if we could’ve picked him up here in Hong Kong.”
“Yeah—well,” I said, packing up, “Canada’s wheels of justice moved too slowly for that. I better get over to Lister’s office and deal with this Guard Force thing. Wanna come?”
“I got ten reasons not to,” he replied, not anxious for another row. “Meantime, I’ll get a report out to Vancouver on this. If you get into trouble over there I will call my source and pull out all the stops; otherwise, when you get back from Macau gimme a shout and I’ll get you the government rate at a hotel. And hey?”
I turned at the door. “What’s’at—?”
“I can’t thank you enough.”
See, I thought, taking the elevator down to Exchange Square, a remark like that, coming from a guy like Garry, makes it all worth it.
I crossed Connaught Road to the Mandarin Hotel and passed the usual coffee-break crowd of Filipino maids at Statue Square, just across from the ornate Legislative Council building. There were over 150,000 such Pinoy guest workers in Hong Kong at the moment, a fraction of the millions around the world providing the Republic with precious foreign exchange. I’d heard it mused by ordinary Filipinos that overseas maids kept the country afloat—not Ramos and his windbag plans to make the country into an “Asian Tiger” by 2000. At the very least, the money sent home by the maids wasn’t being heisted by bureaucrats in the Development Assistance programs.
I took the elevator up to the 38th floor of the Asia Pacific Finance Tower and was ushered into a plush-carpeted, wood-paneled office that looked like a London gentleman’s club. Two men greeted me. Martin Lister was a fluffy-haired fellow who bore a distinct resemblance to actor Gene Wilder—quite a contrast to Paul Taylor beside him, a big, Cockney-accented ex-cop, with a voice even deeper than Lagimodiere’s. After a half-hour briefing on my Negros adventures and my plan for the morrow, Lister came out with the expected news. “We’re no longer offering you a bodyguard service there. That implies a certain level of danger, which means, at the level of danger we’re talking about, Guard Force shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
I looked at Taylor. “So you and your crew will not be going with me?”
His reply made me realize I didn’t want to be in a tight spot with this guy anyway: “Well, basically, as Martin said, Prudential and Martin are our clients, and obviously they are under instructions, provided it’s in conjunction with the investigation, and unless it is, I don’t see in any way, shape, or form for us to comply with anything but the instructions because otherwise we would not be instructed.”
Lister smiled. “The best evidence is you—unless there’s some good reason you can’t testify—like you’re going to get shot—”
“Which brings us to the affidavit,” I said.
“Precisely.”
I looked at the expensive bond envelope in my hand:
Terry Gould, Esq.,
c/o Windsor Hotel….
FOR COLLECTION BY YOUR GUEST
TERRY GOULD ON 29TH SEPTEMBER
STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
I took out the heavy bond paper:
“I, TERRY GOULD, of the City of Vancouver in the Province of British Columbia, MAKE OATH AND SAY AS FOLLOWS….”
“You got a couple’a dates wrong here,” I said. “The ‘two-part news feature’ was in 1990, not 1992.”
“By all means, make any alterations in the margin, and we’ll have a fresh copy prepared before you leave.”
“I’ll put this in a safe place and see you when I get back,” I said. “Meantime, I’m going to Macau.”
Before heading to Macau the next morning, I decided to pray to the god who might be of some help to me even if Guard Force wasn’t. Two gods in fact.
The Buddhist-Taoist Man Mo Temple stood at the top of Ladder Street, where it crossed Hollywood Road, about half a mile from Exchange Square and a hundred feet above it. Back when the film The World of Suzie Wong was made, Suzie’s neighborhood had consisted of bamboo shacks and whorehouses, but now the 1847 temple at its heart was hemmed in by con-dos and office buildings. Despite the urban ambience, I felt transported to an ancient realm at the sight of the old white walls and green pagoda roof. Man Mo was the domain of both Kwan Kung (known locally as Mo or Kuanti) and Man Cheong—a third-century B.C. statesman who’d evolved into the Cantonese god of literature, office seekers, and civil servants. The place looked pretty deserted this morning, but I’d read in my Lonely Planet guide that parents still flocked here to pray to the twin deities in the hope that their children would be blessed with the wisdom of Man and the strength of Mo.
As I walked through the temple pillars two red-robed fortune-tellers beckoned to me by shaking bamboo cylinders filled with inscribed fortune sticks. I wasn’t even tempted to see which stick matched my fate. If something bad was about to happen to me, and these old geezers could divine it, then it was unavoidable, and I’d rather not know about it. On the other hand, if something good was to happen to me, why spoil the surprise? In any case, right now I knew my fortune: you will travel to exotic places and meet interesting people.
Inside the temple, dozens of huge beehive-shaped incense coils hung from the rafters and from bamboo poles stretching the length of the walls. The overpowering sandalwood scent from the lit coils ascended through the open eaves to feed the souls of the dead and carry messages to the gods. Two gold pots, filled with cigar-size incense sticks, stood before the steps to the main altar, on either side of which were divans for carrying Kwan Kung and Man Cheong through the streets during their assigned days of worship. On the left, Kwan Kung held a sword; on the right, an equally fierce-looking Man Cheong held a pen. On a plank in front of a pillowed stool for kneeling I saw a few drops of red, which might very well have been dried blood. Old-timers (and Triads) still came here to settle disputes: they killed a chicken, soaked yellow paper in its blood, and then burned the paper to send the oaths of settlement up to the gods.
I pronammed deeply, lit a joss stick, knelt with my knees on the stool and prayed that Kwan Kung would send Steve my way and that Man Cheong would give me the smarts to write about him for the third time. I took a piece of yellow paper from the stack in front of the stool, wrote “Steven Lik Man Wong” on it, and burned the paper in one of the pots. As the paper smokily crinkled and shriveled, it suddenly occurred to me that Steve’s middle name Man had very likely been derived from the god of literature whose help I was now seeking. Yue Kim Wong had possibly even prayed here for Steve to become a scholar or a high office holder—maybe even a Paper Fan.
It’s quite likely that the gods canceled each other out, because my two-day trip to Macau proved boringly safe and journalistically fruitless. A middle-aged tourist agent in a red silk choker and scarlet miniskirt met me at the ferry, then taxied with me down to the Lisboa and efficiently checked me in. My room was in an older section and looked out on a yellow clay school yard and stacks of ugly office towers. The yard was gaily decorated with lanterns from last night’s Full Moon Lantern Festival, so I took a picture of the view, and, for some reason I still can’t figure out, the toilet with the lid up. (I’ve gone over that picture a dozen times with a magnifying glass. Was it the marble wall behind the tank that made me click it? Did I expect to include it in the article with a cutline: “Lisboa Hotel Room Toilet”?)
Twenty minutes later, Daisy (or Dai See—I never found out which) met me for lunch at the 4, 5, 6 Lisboa Restaurant. No amount of flirtation or outright begging got me any more than qualified answers about the possibility of interviewing Stanley Ho. “Dr. Ho so very busy now—maybe you write letter and someone future can arrange.” I told her about the old guys who’d met me at the ferry, and she seemed offended that I thought the Macau Tourist Office would send non-English-speakers. “Maybe hotel think you stay night, send courtesy car with driver and porter.” That sounded plausible, but when we stopped at the reservation desk and asked if they had a no-show for me on September 16, they found nothing. “So is your mistake,” Daisy said, smiling, and I decided to drop trying to figure out if my cover—such as it was—had been blown.
Daisy then took me for “Unique Tour Day One—Little Visited North Sights.” By horse and buggy we toured Barrier Gate up by the Chinese border, the Cinidrome dog-racing track, the Kun Lam Temple, Sun Yat-sen’s Memorial House, the Lou Lim Ioc Garden, the Old Protestant Cemetery, and the Cameo Gardens. We finished off day one at the Praia Grande Restaurant on the harbor esplanade. Over a romantic Mediterranean-Cantonese meal of tapas and duck, we went through Daisy’s stack of glossy tourist brochures in her Gucci satchel.
“So much see in Macau,” she sighed, “so sad when people just go casino then back.”
“Can we visit an opium parlor tomorrow?” I asked, just to bug her. “I heard the Triads still run them.”
“Opium?” she asked. “Oh, no no, ha ha, that old days, no more opium places, ha ha ha.”
Maybe it was the rowdy question or the fact that she suspected I really liked her outfit, because the next day she met me in the lobby wearing a sober pants outfit and no choker. “Standard Tour Day Two” included the main churches, the Monte Fort (I got my cannon pictures), the ruins of St. Paul’s Church, Senado Square, the Maritime Museum, and several of the big, new hotels—the Hyatt, the Mandarin Oriental, the Kingsway, the Holiday Inn, and, finally, of course, the Lisboa. This time an outright offer of a $50 tip couldn’t convince her to let me in the casino with my camera. When we said goodbye I kissed her hand.
“You know,” she wagged a finger at me, “you very bad boy.”
Back in Canada, I wrote like a demon and then we delayed the article month to month—waiting for the good word that would send me over the moon. It took until February 1994 before all the paperwork went through permitting Clement to head to the Philippines and do the official investigation with the NBI. Unfortunately, when he got back, there was still no word from the informants in Macau. Meanwhile, the Canadian Department of Justice had decided to hold off on a fraud charge against Steve. While the case was overwhelming that he had staged his own death, the Mounties didn’t have him in hand yet as prima facie evidence.
I took advantage of the extra time to call Lisa Lee and ask her about the bash Steve had thrown when she had made the force, but all she said was, “Um, well, I’d rather not talk about that, actually.” Using their own sources, the Mounties looked into that party, as well as information from Chuck the Chink that, back in the summer of ’92, Lisa had informed him she’d been questioned by the RCMP about Wong’s disappearance. The Mounties complained to the Internal Investigations section of the Vancouver Police Department, and on February 15, a cop from Internal named Scott Driemel called me in and we sat down for an hour and discussed Lisa, Lily, Chuck, Steve, Edison Yee, Newson, the penthouse apartment, and what I knew of the party.
“You keep talking over her!” Driemel cried in frustration, as we listened to the tape of my conversation with Lisa.
“Sorry, I was nervous.”
“You ask a question, then let them talk!” he instructed me testily, as if I were a new recruit.
By the middle of March, Garry Clement still had no news for me. He was set to be transferred back to Canada in June and so Saturday Night and I decided to go with the article in April. My guess was that Steve was still sitting pretty in Macau, and that “The Search for Steven Wong” might spark the Macau administration, or somebody who could profit from his surrender, into taking some action.
The guess proved correct.
Six weeks after the article came out, my spook contact informed me that Ray Chau had just been deported from Canada on the grounds that he hadn’t declared his heroin conviction on his immigration form. Two weeks later, on May 27, 1994, Garry Clement phoned me from Hong Kong.
“I just wanted to let you know—and I will confirm it when I’m positive—but I may have located our man.”
“Oh!” I breathed. “Fabulous!”
“And if all goes well, I would think he’ll be in custody late next week. It’s just right now fifty-fifty. But just to let you know, I’m still—This is the last thing I wanted to clean up before I left.”
“What a last thing to clean up! Did you get the article, by the way?”
“Yes I did—thank you very much,” he said.
“Now! Where is he?” I asked.
“He’s exactly where you thought he was.”
“You’re makin’ my day!” I squealed.
“It’s not a hundred percent yet, but I promised I’d call you if I got anything on him, so I thought I’d let you know.”
“I appreciate that. So it’s not a hundred percent but what is leading you to believe—?”
“I’m fairly confident. I won’t tell you right now how I’m doing it. I just don’t want to burn anything on this.”
“No, not at all, not at all,” I said. “I’m not going to anybody with this, don’t worry about that. But just let me ask you—you think he’s gonna voluntarily give up, or you’re gonna move on him?”
“Oh, no—we’ll move on him, we’ll move on him. I’m meeting with another person today. And if all goes well—you know, it’s gonna take a little bit of luck—but hopefully we’ll luck out.”
“When are you leaving Hong Kong?” I asked, a little worriedly, because I’d had enough to do with police to know that when investigating officers were transferred, new guys were lost in space for a while.
“June 24,” he said.
“Okay, so you got a little bit of time to stay on it. So, we’re talking about one of the hotels I mentioned to you?”
“Yep, the first one.”
“Jackpot!! What is he doing anyway? Is he working in that hotel?”
“Yeah. It’s exactly—it’s a hundred percent what you originally were told.”
“Or, what I concluded from all my—”
“Your investigation. It’s right on that.”
As it turned out, the “other person” Clement had met with was Macau’s Assistant Police Commissioner Tony Salvado. To make the arrest, Salvado needed an affidavit from the Canadian Department of Justice stating that, as soon as he nabbed Steve, Canada would press for extradition on a fraud or perjury charge (also an extraditable offense, based on Steve’s false affidavit to Judge Cohen in March 1992). I found out later that Salvado’s informants had identified a short, 30-ish 14K Triad on the lam from Canada who was working security at the Lisboa. The make was confirmed by none other than Ray Chau, the cuckolded husband of Patsy. From Macau, Ray offered a recently retired CLEU inspector $100,000 to broker a deal: in return for setting up a sting on Steve, Ray would be allowed back into Canada. Clement turned the deal down because it was totally unethical. It was also unnecessary, since Salvado had the pull to arrest Steve where he stood without an elaborate sting involving a gangster who, as my spook had told me, was “a few times” worse than Steven on the hierarchy of Triad criminality.
Clement telexed his report requesting the affidavit to Unit One, who handed it over to the Department of Justice on Friday, June 3. Everyone expected an immediate return telex ringing with the bugle call of a cavalry charge. But a week went by with no response. Then another week. By the third week I began to get worried.
Almost daily Clement pleaded by telex, fax, and phone with DOJ bureaucrats to fire off the document Salvado needed. With Clement’s transfer to Ottawa only a few days away, I began to suspect something was wrong. They simply never got back to him except to say it was now out of the hands of the RCMP and in the hands of people who knew how to deal with these very complex matters. In other words, the request had dropped into a web of Canadian bureaucracy that would try the sanity of the most hardened cop—not to mention the equilibrium of a writer who’d spent over a year on the story.
I was assured it was useless to resist Canada’s slow-motion functionaries, famous for staring at forms like Third World customs agents pondering a language they didn’t understand. Arrest a gangster who had taken refuge in the Asian territory of a European nation? You want an affidavit saying we “will” extradite somebody “once” he’s arrested? For dat I must talk to someone else beside me. Because me, I have already asked myself, and he don’t know.
On June 24, Clement returned to Canada. And that brought us into vacation season, when bureaucrats were entitled to their month at the beach. Alone in Hong Kong all summer, awaiting Clement’s replacement, Lagimodiere had no time to hector Vancouver and Ottawa. By the middle of July my eyes were welling with tears of frustration. By the end of August, I was crying blood. Then, the day before the Labor Day weekend, an affidavit was produced—only to be rejected in Ottawa a week later and returned to Vancouver with suggestions for changes. Its intended destination was suddenly not Tony Salvado via Garry Lagimodiere, but the Portuguese authorities in Lisbon via Sergeant Leon Letour, liaison officer for the RCMP in Madrid. That was apparently “the proper way” to get it to Salvado. But, I wondered, would the authorities in Lisbon really care about a Canadian in Macau on the run from a 12-ounce heroin-trafficking charge? Worse, once in the hands of Portuguese bureaucrats who had no knowledge of the sensitivities involved in the case, and no knowledge of Salvado’s crucial involvement, what was to prevent them from sending an open letter to Macau asking some desk sergeant to see what he could do about Wong?
All of which worry was (for the moment) moot, because by October the affidavit—four months after Clement had requested it—had still not left Canada. The DOJ bureaucrats kept passing endless drafts from one side of the country to the other niggling about the wording. At my wits’ end, I called my spook; I called Andy Nimmo, the head of the Asian Crime Squad; I called the San Francisco Gang Task Force and the DEA; I called all the contacts on my Rolodex and shared my grief and outrage. The Canadians said, in effect, What else is new? That’s why we have early-retirement plans. The Americans just laughed: Four months? We’d have had the paperwork done in one day, and the bad guy home the day after.
The autumn rains began, Clement’s replacement, Sergeant Dan Ouellette, arrived in Hong Kong; in Macau, Tony Salvado was transferred, replaced as assistant commissioner by an officer named Sebastio de Rosa. By the last week of October, the affidavit still had not left Canada, although translators were busy working on a Portuguese draft for Lisbon. On Halloween Eve, the translation of the affidavit, along with a provisional warrant for Steve’s arrest, finally “went forward.”
And then a fatal error occurred—although by then I was certain it hardly mattered. On November 1, Interpol took charge of the file, and without using the RCMP as liaison, they forwarded a file on Steven Wong to the diplomatic adviser of the governor of Macau. They might as well have given it to a clerk at the Lisboa.
A meeting was scheduled for November 4, and on that day Lagimodiere and Ouellette took the ferry across the Pearl River estuary and sat down with Sebastio de Rosa, a morose Tony Salvado, and the diplomatic adviser to the governor. The Mounties were informed that a search of the location where the suspect Steven Wong was supposed to have been employed had turned up nothing. From what they could gather, the suspect hadn’t been seen in the Lisboa for some time.
Ten months later, August 1995, the ownership certificate for Steve’s old Mercedes SL was transferred to Patsy Chan. When investigators learned of the transfer in September they jumped on customs records, cell phone records, and gangland sources, and became convinced that the laughing man had been back in town during the summer. Two weeks later I discovered the Mercedes parked in a carport at Patsy’s new quarters on Oak Street. At the time, I was working on a column about last year’s DOJ fizzle, so I watched the car for a whole Saturday, then, at eight in the evening, followed it to an Asian nightclub on Cambie Street called The Mirage. I thought about going in, but the truth is, I considered my column, entitled “A Letter to Steven Wong,” the swan song to my hunt for the Paper Fan. Go—live your crooked life—see if I care! I told myself. Who needed the heartache? Maybe Steve is like a spirit, I thought. If I stopped pursuing him, he’d come to me when I was ready to receive him. “Do nothing and nothing will not be done,” as Lao-tzu advised.