I know you, kid, you’ll never be satisfied.
—AL GOULD
Cops talk in code when they’re tailing someone. If they need to reverse direction they announce over the radio, “We’re changing feet.” After my last article on Steve was published, I changed feet to swingers. A little over three years later I broke the story of millions of club-going couples to a bug-eyed public. And yet, Steve was in my book—right there in Chapter One—an example of a promiscuous male who led the gangster life in order to impress women.
To celebrate The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, I threw a theme party on the last Valentine’s Eve of the century, at Vancouver’s Club Millennium. Somewhere around midnight I found myself standing with a government spook—one of several I’d invited. We discussed the South Asian gangs that frequented this club; I mentioned my cameo portrait of Steve on page 20; and the spook told me his colleagues were sharing reliable information about Steve being in Cambodia.
I put my drink down, looked left and right at my 200 provocatively dressed guests. “Cambodia?” I pictured land mines, skulls in the monsoon mud, and no electricity. “Last I’d heard, Cambodia was a basket case and even the basket was coming apart. What’s he doing there?”
“What he usually does I’d imagine,” he replied. He turned and watched a bank manager leave the dance floor in a Frederick’s of Hollywood getup.
“And—?” I rolled air with both hands.
“It’s already a few months’ old news, eh?”
“Is he still there?”
He shrugged. “If he is it’d be because there’s no way to do anything about it.” He turned back to the dance floor, smiling at the interesting costumes and some girl-girl dancing. In a booth across the floor sat Robert McGinley, the Lifestyles Organization’s CEO, who’d flown up from Anaheim for my do. Talking to him was a journalist friend of mine, Daniel Wood.
“That guy there knows a college teacher who knows Cambodia,” I said. “Guy with the glasses talking to McGinley?”
His eyes took note of Wood.
“Steve likes glitz and rich chicks, he wouldn’t stay long in Cambodia,” I said, mostly because I didn’t feel like flying off to Phnom Penh tomorrow morning. At least not based on old news and with so little chance of the Canadian government doing anything even if I did net him this time. Besides, I was having a lot of fun doing the swinger book shuffle. With the press coverage over the last two weeks, The Lifestyle had made it to the bestseller lists, I was getting calls from all over the world (The New York Times and Dan Rather’s 48 Hours included), and international speaking requests were pouring in. As for Leslie, she said she preferred the fallout from swingers to the fallout from gangsters. I was almost famous, and nobody wanted to kill me. On the contrary.
“Kind of an interesting place to set up shop, if you look on a map,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s a back door to the Golden Triangle. But I still would’ve thought Thailand’s more Steve’s style.”
“Might’ve found some opportunities. Talk to the guy your friend knows.”
On my way over to Daniel I was intercepted by an earringed character who looked like a cross between Sinbad the Sailor and a Venetian gondolier. “Is this a swinger party or what?” he demanded.
“Naa, naa,” I said, “too many cops.”
As it turned out, Cambodia was exactly the kind of place where Steve would set up shop, according to my friend’s friend, Cam Sylvester, Vancouver’s resident Cambodia expert. When I called Cam at Capilano College he told me the land of the killing fields was finally emerging from 30 years of chaos, which made it very attractive to criminals who wanted to do business fearing neither war nor arrest. In July 1997, a former Khmer Rouge colonel named Hun Sen had staged a murderous coup that had smashed his troublesome opposition, then won a multisided civil war that had also ended the terrorism of his former colleagues in the KR. Eight months ago he’d held a semilegitimate (most said fraudulent) election, and since then he’d given the country just enough stability to open it up to the outside world. Now all elements from that world were inspecting the new opportunities and, not surprisingly, Interpol had just announced that its hundred most-wanted fugitives were ensconced in Cambodia. Indeed, glitzy gangster nightclubs and gambling casinos were opening up in instant towns in the middle of the jungle.
“Gambling casinos?” I asked Cam.
“Yeah, the gamblers are coming in from Thailand, where it’s illegal,” Cam said.
If there were casinos, I thought, then Macau’s gangsters couldn’t be far behind. In fact, Macau’s gangsters were probably leading the way.
Swingers may have been endlessly entertaining and instructive, but all the time I’d been researching and writing The Lifestyle I’d never really lost sight of what was going on in Macau. In 1996, the 14K, the Sun Yee On, and the Wo On Lok Triads had begun turning the pretty little place into a war zone, each gang jockeying with the others for control of Stanley Ho’s VIP gambling lounges before the Chinese took charge at a second past midnight on December 20, 1999. The rumor was that the Communists were planning to open up Ho’s gambling monopoly to competition, and who could resist killing in order to be in a better position to share in the expansion? Several dozen gangsters had been cut down and, on one day in May 1998, 14 car bombs had exploded in the streets. The man held chiefly responsible for the chaos was the new head of Macau’s 14K, “Broken Tooth” Wan Kwok-koi. He legitimately leased a VIP lounge in Ho’s Lisboa Hotel, but the government considered him to be getting out of hand, especially after three members of the Portuguese administration investigating Broken Tooth had been assassinated. Then, about 10 months ago, a bomb destroyed the car of Macau’s chief of police, who was not in it at the time. In a move that I wished he’d made with Steve, the enraged chief had led a platoon across town and into the Lisboa itself, personally collaring Broken Tooth at a baccarat table. As for the ultimate proprietor of the Lisboa, after spending years denying there was a problem, Stanley Ho had finally admitted there was a problem. But Ho was sure all would be cleaned up before the Chinese took over Macau—or at least that the Chinese would clean it up shortly thereafter.
Not likely, I thought. Since I’d lost Steve, organized crime groups around the world had been forming alliances with political leaders in the governments that had emerged in the post-Communist world, as well as with leaders in those tenuous democracies that already had entrenched syndicates. The compliant states, from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, represented the new world order for a large segment of the globe’s population. Free markets, democracy, the rule of law, and public accountability—these were the lofty promises of the day, but by the time the promises reached the street they were only rumors. Too many politicians were making too much money from gangsters for anybody to quickly “clean it up,” and Interpol was now issuing warnings to the press and national law enforcement agencies that the criminal underworld seemed to be entering a new phase, one that darkly mirrored the transnational corporations leading the way in the trend towards “globalization.”
On October 25, my eye caught a front-page Vancouver Sun article about Cambodia, with the headline “Gangsters Flee Macau Before Handover.” The article was completely congruent with the information I’d received back in February about Cambodia. By then my publisher and editor, Anne Collins, had been urging me to change feet back to Steve, and as my eyes moved down the page I got that sickening feeling that if I didn’t write this book, somebody else would—maybe even coming up with Steve in the process:
There are signs that Triad members operating in the Portuguese gambling enclave of Macau are moving into Southeast Asia ahead of the territory’s handover to China. Three members of the Hong Kong-based 14K Triad were killed in a gangland-style assassination a week ago on the airport expressway in Bangkok…. Thai police say the killings are related to control of casinos in Phnom Penh, capitol of neighboring Cambodia. For over three years the 14K Triad had been involved in a street war with rival gangs in Macau over control of aspects of gambling in the territory. The spoils of war are sub-leases of so-called “VIP lounges” for high-roller gamblers in the nine casinos all operated by Stanley Ho…. The Triads may well be looking for new pastures ahead of Beijing’s takeover of Macau…. In Cambodia in particular there are links between the drug traffickers, gambling and government. Gambling is illegal in Thailand, but it is big business in Cambodia where international law enforcement agencies have detected links to well-known drug traffickers.
I called Cam Sylvester again, and what he told me caused me to spray coffee over the Sun. “Speaking of Stanley Ho,” Cam said, “I understand he’s moving out of Macau to the Philippines, have you heard that?”
“No!”
“He’s bringing a floating casino into Manila Bay. He’s kind of tied into President Estrada. Ho’s giving himself some options to diversify in anticipation of the Chinese.”
“I think I mentioned to you the Philippines is where Steve staged his death,” I said.
“That’d be a good place to do it.”
“And the Lisboa, which Ho owns, is unofficial headquarters of the 14K Triad, to which Steven Wong belongs, and the members of which are headed to Cambodia. Cam, it seems to all tie in. When I heard that there was a good reason for my guy to be in Cambodia, then that the 14K was opening gambling casinos there, all the little pieces fell into place. Now, what you’re telling me about the Philippines—I’m thinking, Could he be back there?”
I wrote down: Pick up trail in Macau, follow to Cambodia, then to the Philippines? “Have you heard anything lately from Cambodia?” I asked while scribbling.
“Actually, I’ve had a couple of students who’ve come back and things seem to have settled down, but that’s for the tourists—for what you’re trying to do I’m not quite sure things have settled down. I’m not sure what the parameters would be for your safety.”
“What I’d be trying to do is get proof he was there and the alias he’s traveling under. Then I could track his movements to wherever he is now. The alias he used in Cambodia would be the key.”
“In that case you should try and get the help of the Canadian embassy in Phnom Penh. I mean if the Canadian government still wants this guy—”
“They do—there’s a warrant, he’s on Interpol’s Most Wanted list. I know the cops are still pursuing it from this end. But they don’t have the budget to go gallivanting.”
“I’ll tell you who to talk to here.”
He gave me the name of the ex-Canadian ambassador to Cambodia, Gordon Longmuir, who’d just returned from a four-year posting in Phnom Penh. “He’s a law-and-order-type,” Cam said. “I think he’s gonna be pretty sympathetic to you.”
Longmuir had just moved into a condo in North Vancouver, right by the ferry, at the bottom of the mountainside on which I lived. He was a gray-goateed, seaworthy-looking man—the ruggedly handsome picture of everything he’d been in life: 30 years a navy man; four years high commissioner to India; another four as an ambassador in the heart of darkness. I’d sent him my Saturday Night article to read, and one of his first sentences to me when we sat down in the Cheshire Cheese Inn at the Lonsdale Quay was: “If your guy would want to go to ground in the region, Cambodia would be a very good place to do it.”
I asked him if he knew any Cambodian gambling barons who were allegedly “well-known drug traffickers.”
“Teng Boonma,” he replied without hesitation. “Chiu Chau Chinese, used to run the chamber of commerce—still runs it behind the scenes.” Teng, Longmuir said, was Hun Sen’s longtime crony, the owner and builder of semirural Phnom Penh’s only five-star Vegas-style tower, the InterContinental. A short-tempered entrepreneur, the 55-year-old Teng had shot out the tires of an Air Cambodge 737 jet after his luggage had been delayed upon returning from Hong Kong. In 1998, the DEA had listed Teng as an alleged drug trafficker and barred him from entering the United States. Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan had then followed suit. The richest man in the country, the president of the Cambodia Mekong Bank, and the acknowledged leader of the large and dominant Chinese-Cambodian business community, Teng was also a major investor in the wave of Triad-affiliated casino developments in jungle towns all along the border with Thailand. Indeed, until last year Teng had run a high-stakes casino in the health club of the InterContinental itself—that is, until the World Bank had instructed Hun Sen that it was unseemly for such operations to be operated so flagrantly in the capital by shadowy friends of the prime minister.
“One casino you should definitely visit is over on the Thai border,” Longmuir said. “It’s on a bit of land called Koh Kong, cut off by jungle and water from the rest of Cambodia. Two weeks ago the casino’s manager and assistant manager were gunned down there. It’s owned by a Thai-Cambodian, Pat Supapa. Close adviser to Hun Sen—you can find him on the Internet.”
I circled the remote nubbin of land in my Lonely Planet guide and later discovered that Mr. Pat was as “well known” as Mr. Teng, his name appearing under the Bangkok Post headline “Popular Way to Launder Money from Drugs and Illegal Deals.” The article, about Koh Kong, stated that Pat and three of his Thai partners had been “black-listed by Thai and Cambodian narcotics suppression units for their involvement in the drugs trade and other businesses, and for money laundering in Koh Kong.” During that search I also read a Post article, “Invasion of the Triads,” which reported that the Thai Crime Suppression Unit had discovered that the Bangkok airport murders last month were connected to a war between the 14K and another “Macau-based Triad,” the 4 Kings, over control of the casino in Koh Kong. The three dead men at the airport apparently weren’t 14K, as first reported, but 4 Kings, and their assassins were almost certainly working for the 14K, which had moved into Cambodia’s burgeoning gambling scene in 1998—that is, shortly after Hun Sen’s coup and shortly before I’d been told that Steven Wong had been working there.
“I’ll bet Koh Kong’s one Wild West town,” I said now. “Would I be safe to assume that smuggling is also big business there?”
“Goes without saying, some of the senior generals and the civilian officials in Cambodia are up to their necks in it,” Longmuir said. “A civil servant in Cambodia below the rank of undersecretary makes about twenty or thirty dollars a month. You need a hundred and fifty to live any kind of life at all in Phnom Penh. So there’s absolutely no alternative to it—you take the squeeze when you can. If I was a customs officer working on the Thai-Cambodia border, I probably paid a lot to get that job in the first place, so I want to amortize my investment pretty fast. I’m sure not going to be too surprised if somebody comes and tucks a few bucks in my pocket if I turned my back.”
“What about heroin?”
“The Cambodia-Thai border is wide open, the Cambodia-Laos border is wide open. So think about it. If you take the path of least resistance from the Golden Triangle, you go up through Burma, through Laos, and back down through Cambodia … out to sea from Sihanoukville or Koh Kong. Another bad problem is child prostitution. The people you’re interested in would probably be involved in that too.”
Longmuir gave me a good contact at the Canadian embassy, Bunleng Men, a Canadian-Cambodian who would tell me who to see, who not to see, and who to see who might have seen my man. One high minister Longmuir had infinite respect for was named Sum Manit. A light amidst the darkness, Sum Manit, now secretary of state, had been the director of Cambodia’s National Authority to Combat Drugs during the period when I’d heard Steve was there. Sum Manit had actually been making arrests, although, not surprisingly, Hun Sen had recently replaced him with one of his cronies.
“Hok Lundy is the chief of National Police—I would not recommend you talk to him,” Longmuir said. “If you do, don’t be frank with him. You don’t mess around with the Cambodians. You look at their history and what they’ve been through in the last thirty years, these people who are still around are survivors. And they survived by being pretty ruthless. You can be frank with Bunleng Men. He’s worked for us for six or seven years. Very trustworthy, very discreet. Sum Manit also is impeccable. Otherwise, you’ll have to stay on your toes, no doubt about it.”
“What I’m doing now is arranging plans to go over for December and January,” I said over the phone to one of my knowledgeable spooks. “I’m going to the embassy in Cambodia and talk to the ambassador there, and maybe get some help from this guy Sum Manit on Steve’s alias. Then I’ll catch up with my people in the Philippines—”
“Yeah, that’s my plan. Hong Kong, Macau, Cambodia, and the Philippines. Because I just got word that Stanley Ho is expanding out of Macau to the Philippines. He’s setting up a floating casino in Manila Bay. And he’s negotiated it with the president, Joe Estrada. So the Philippines is starting to look good again for me. You know it’s a big round world and I’m looking for one guy outta six billion, and I wanted to take a larger overview about where he’s been, what he’s been doing, how it all ties in. It’s just that he’s so much a part of that world, and it’s so fascinating, I just got focused on it all over again. It all fits together.”
“Yeah, the Philippines, that is a very interesting spot,” he said, “and there’s so much corruption there that that would be—” He hesitated. “Let me put it this way, okay? It would be of concern for you, if you were to follow up on anything over there at the moment. You know, the fact that there are lawyers and police and everything else that work with these guys, right? And now you got Stanley Ho going over there who’s a very influential businessman…. It does all fit, it would be conceivable that these things are developing, since Macau’s turning over. But there’s a man with a lot of influence, Ho, and when you think of the chain of people that associate there and associate with each other, as you go down the links—”
“Well, there’s Patsy Chan and Ray Chau,” I said.
“Yeah, there’s a direct link there, right?”
“I must tell you that I had amazing cooperation from the National Bureau of Investigation on the island of Negros,” I said. “They met me at the airport with drawn Uzis, they bodyguarded me for days.”
“Yes, the NBI was the reputable one,” he said, and then fell silent.
I noted his use of the past tense, then said, “I suppose you never know, there could be a flip side to that. What do you think?” When he didn’t reply, I said, “It sounds as if the Philippines might be a better place to go find him.”
“I wouldn’t make any travel plans to Cambodia based on finding Steven there,” he replied. “A trip to Bangkok or Cambodia might prove interesting to that particular murder case you read in the paper, and the infiltration of the 14K wherever they are worldwide, probably being Cambodia and Thailand as well, that would fill in that gap of the story for you. But I’m not particularly confident that would fill in any gap about where Steven Wong is at this point.”
“Well, it’s good to know he’s still alive. It’s one of those stories, isn’t it? It’s like a string, and you pick up one end and you just keep following it.”
“He’ll be at the top end of it.”
The ex-DEA/CIA agent leaned over his whiskey in the Mexican bar. “I’ll do some quiet checking, but I can tell ya right now: most of the guys we ran in the Philippines played both sides of the fence.”
Around us a hundred couples frolicked by the pool of the Qualton Resort, where a Lifestyles tour was in full throttle. It was mid-November ’99, and I was down in Ixtapa producing a nightly Internet radio show for Eyada.com’s “Love Bytes.” Last night the Lifestyles host, an LAPD corporal named Tony Lanzaratta, had introduced me to ex-agent Richard at the Rio Ha! Ha! disco. Once I discoverd Richard was still connected to spooks in the Philippines, I tripped over myself running back to my room to get him the Saturday Night article on Steve.
“I’ll be traveling on my American passport this time,” I said now. “It’s not Steve so much I’m worried about, it’s his friends in high places who could tip him off if I ask the wrong person for help.”
“Be so careful,” his wife told me. “Richard says you never, ever go into an operation where you can’t even make one mistake.”
“They covering your expenses?” he asked.
“Why? You wanna come with me?”
“No way!” his wife said. “That’s over with.”
We glanced over at a burst of laughter coming from the pool. Half a dozen women stood in waist-deep water, turning slowly in a circle, body to body. They looked like middle-aged nymphs from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. I lowered the camera below their faces and took a photo to send “Love Bytes.”
“Is that what you’re going to do in Cambodia or the Philippines—take his picture?” Richard asked.
“It’s a thought,” I said. “Interpol has a red alert for him, and if I can get his alias—”
“That may not get you anywhere,” Richard said. “When a guy pulls a stunt like this, and you say, ‘How in the world did he walk away from all this?’ a lot of times they work both sides of the fence. He’s over here dealing drugs, but yet he gives some government just enough information to make him a hero and keep them off his back. If that’s his game, you ain’t gonna get him, he’s too well protected. I’ll just put some feelers out trying to find out, in a quiet way, if there’s this possibility that the people you’ll be talking to to get his name, if it’s in their interest not to have you catch him.”
One of my well-connected contacts and I had just come back from a hike to the Mosquito Creek waterfall above my house. It was late November and we were both soaked from the rain and the spray. We sat down at the kitchen table, where Leslie joined us with three bowls of hot soup. I briefed him on my discussions with swinging Richard and Longmuir. By then I’d spent a week in Richmond’s Chinatown, now the main hangout for B.C.’s Big Circle Boys and a reconstituted Lotus gang. I told my contact that, from winking answers to direct questions, I was convinced Steve was somewhere in Manila. I said I was leaving December 13: I’d check out the Jumbo Floating Palace in Aberdeen—the one that Ho was going to send to Manila; then I’d catch the lead-up to the handover in Macau; then take off for Cambodia, where I hoped to get Steve’s alias from Sum Manit. I’d continue on to the Philippines, snoop around Ho’s floating casino when it arrived, and meet with the NBI. I was going to make the call to Danny Mendez tomorrow. I opened a folder and showed him the list of people I’d met in 1993 whom I was planning on getting in touch with when I was over there. With Steve’s alias in hand, who knows but that the NBI might come up with him in the capital?
He seemed awfully restless listening to all this. He looked at Leslie, then down at the table.
“If you can just tell him something that would keep him from walking into a trap,” Leslie pleaded.
“I can tell you who not to see,” he said. “The police over there are corrupt, and he’s got himself tied in in such a way that any inquiry with the police in Manila—”
“Well, you know,” I said confidently, “there’s the PNP and the NBI, and the NBI guys I worked with, if they weren’t trustworthy, they could have arranged my disappearance no problem.”
“They could have,” he said—but that was six years ago, and things had changed. “Particularly in this case. Although they are the most trustworthy police force, it looks like that’s the police force that Steven has aligned himself with.”
“The NBI?!” I shouted.
“Oh my God,” Leslie said. “Terry, you can’t go.”
“So you’re not gonna find out what you wanna find out through them—unless you had somebody that you totally, totally trusted.”
“And I do,” I said. “Or—I did.”
“If it backfired on ya, you’d be in trouble.”
“That’s what I was gonna tell you,” Richard explained over the phone the day before I left. “The NBI over there got this agent system—call it CA—Confidential Agent. Five thousand of them. I can’t see your guy’s gonna be a main man—a full agent, because it’s like the FBI—you gotta have a Ph.D. or be an accountant or a lawyer, so they only got five hundred’a those. But these others, they’re deputies, they’re informants—they give them badges, they walk in and outta headquarters, but they’re just quasi. So they let the CA’s operate, protect them, and get their information. You go asking, they’ll probably just tell ’im, ‘Reporter’s over here on your ass, Chico, move on.’ He moves on, you lose ‘im again. That’s your best-case scenario. Worst-case is if he’s one’a them all the way—highly unlikely but just say—then someone’ll just take you out to the dump, avoid the scandal.”
I heard his wife screaming in the background and Richard muffled the phone and yelled for her to pipe down. “Raisin’ hell here—over you,” he laughed.
“The guys you got,” I asked, “will they work with me to get him outta there?”
“I did explain your situation,” he said, “but the answer’s no. There’s very few people they can trust in the Philippines now. Say they hand you over to someone and you wind up dead? It’s just not worth it to them gettin’ involved.”
I got off the phone assessing my prospects as far more dim than my last trip. Garry Lagimodiere was long gone from the Mountie Liaison Office, replaced by an inspector from Unit One named Paul Brown. He hated reporters, considered us nothing but trouble. His assistant in Garry Clement’s old spot, Henry Chan, wouldn’t make a move without Brown’s say-so. Here in Vancouver, a monosyllabic inspector named Murray Dauk, cut from the same mold as Brown, ran Unit One. So my old freewheeling trips with charts and affidavits into Hong Kong’s Mountie stables were over. I did have a number to call if I found ole Stevereno, but otherwise, I’d be on my own.