Mishegoss: Literally, insanity, madness.
—LEO ROSTEN, THE JOYS OF YIDDISH
I’m squatting at the edge of a muddy creek, trying to peer below the surface. Jungle vines border the spot. I look closer at the water. I can make out little black forms. They begin heading for me. One leaps from the water onto my leg, another onto my arm, more onto my neck and face. I feel the sharp stabs of their mandibles. I’m being attacked by biting spiders!! “Help! Help!”
I lurched up, stared into the hot room—jungle hot—causing me a thousand pinpricks of blossoming sweat. I must have forgotten to lower the thermostat when I checked in last night. My Indiglo Timex told me it was five in the morning, Hong Kong time, and I threw the covers off, turned the thermostat from 30°C to 15 and tried to get back to sleep. But the jet lag and the metaphorical terror of my nightmare turned my racing mind to the Triads.
As soon as I’d landed, I’d seen them on the garish movie posters. When I got off the Airport Express in Wanchai, the karaoke bars showed them shooting each other up on music videos. Every book stall I’d passed on Lockhart Road had up-front displays of the newly published Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads, by British journalist Martin Booth. In short, the Triads were the talk of the town. And with good reason. Rumors that they had all fled Hong Kong after the arrival of the Chinese were false, Booth reported. Much as they always had, after 1997 thousands of Triads had figured out how to operate under (and with) their new overseers, giving double irony to the Communist phrase for Hong Kong: “One country, two systems.” Most spookily (for me, anyway), they’d just crippled one journalist and hacked off the arm of another.
I raised my head and looked around at the room, barely big enough for a bed. I shuddered at what it would be like to be kidnapped and locked in a Kowloon hellhole, waiting for sadists to arrive with choppers and blowtorches—
Enough!
I got out of bed, popped a Nicorette, and got ready for a long day.
The captain of my sampan on the south side of Hong Kong Island shook her head when I jumped aboard and told her to take me to the Jumbo Palace, the floating restaurant Stanley Ho would be towing 700 miles to Manila.
“It close now,” she said. “No more meal. Send away next week.”
“That’s okay. I’m a writing a story about it, I’ll get someone to let me on.”
“Will no let you!” she insisted. “I take you Jumbo Number One, right next Jumbo Palace. You get off there, okay?”
“Whatever you say.” I put out my hand for a shake. She was a sturdy old gal in coveralls and gum boots. “I’m Terry,” I said.
“Tin,” she replied, offering me a sailor’s grip and a wink. She pushed the throttle forward, sending me tumbling, and her into a fit of hearty laughter as she caught me with a hug.
We headed up a lane in Aberdeen Harbor’s quaint suburb of junks, where a couple of hundred fisher families lived under rattan roofs on ramshackle decks. Before I’d left Canada I’d read that 6,000 people had once made this corner of the harbor into a floating city, but that fish stocks had plummeted and most of the seafaring families had moved into the town’s tenements, hidden behind the 30-story condos rising in pink and white stacks around me. What I hadn’t known was that these Tan-ka, or “people who live on the water,” had been the inspiration for Ho’s multimillion-dollar fleet of floating restaurants. This tidbit was contained in The Jumbo Kingdom: Realization of a Legendary Fantasy, a glossy booklet put out by Stanley Ho that I’d picked up at a kitsch shop across from Tin’s sampan. It seems that the junks had first arrived in the 1700s to serve the needs of pirates; when the British drove the pirates away, the Tan-ka stayed, their numbers swelling with each successive upheaval in Mainland China. Eventually the fishermen converted several junks into temples and gradually the temples evolved into evening gathering spots for eating, drinking, and socializing.
“Tan-ka make first floating restaurants,” Tin verified this info. “Then Mr. Ho come 1955, build first big one, call Tai Pak, mean god who love food and wine; then 1976, Jumbo; then 1991, Jumbo Palace.”
We were now passing under the bridge to Ap Lei Chau Island, and Tin pointed ahead across the harbor to a line of immense floating structures that resembled four-story temples in Beijing’s Forbidden City, complete with stacked rows of scarlet pillars and delicately tiered eaves of green tile. “Jumbo Number One—two thousand guests,” Tin told me proudly. “Jumbo Palace—almost two thousand. Little cousin, Tai Pak, eight hundred. You know how much Jumbo Palace cost?”
“How much?”
“Almost fourteen million Hong Kong dolla’! Two year to make. Now sail Philippine, too bad.”
To my eye the Palace looked about as seaworthy as a prop in a Monty Python film. It was 200 feet long, towered 60 feet above the waterline, and the walls to its decks were made entirely of glass. I looked towards the beige-colored breakers at the entrance to the harbor, then out past Brick Hill to the white-capped ocean. I told Tin this pile of wind-catching roofs would never make it across the typhoon-swept South China Sea.
“Mr. Ho, he do, it make money, no worry,” she laughed, swinging the tiller around to bring us into a buoyed area on the shore side of the restaurants. I leaned over the gunwale, thinking that Grauman’s Chinese Theater had nothing on the Jumbo Palace’s grand entrance. A 20-foot gold-leaf dragon roared atop an arched marquee decorated with tile sculptures of whiskered bats. Squares of gold-leaf flora and twisting branches made a vignette frame around the gilded doors.
“Stop here,” I said, as we came abreast of a scarlet dock roofed by kelly-green tiles. Tin threw the engine into idle, and a guard standing on the deck moved towards us. I put one foot onto the gangway, asked to see his boss, but he shouted something angrily to Tin and waved her away. She gave me an I-told-you-so scowl, throttled up and pulled up at the Palace’s fraternal twin, the Jumbo. “Dim sum very good here,” she said, shooing me off onto the steps. “You like, bye-bye, so long.”
I looked around. On this megabarge two gold dragons blew their whiskers at me, while no fewer than nine dragon heads shot streams of water into the harbor. I walked up the marble steps and into a lobby more encrusted with crazy tchotchkes than the outside. Ahead, at the bottom of a gold balustrade that led to the upper levels, was a full-scale replica of the throne of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor, flanked by chairs for the emperor’s wife and the chief of his concubines. Above, the ceiling was fitted with a thousand lightbulbs hung from a thousand mirrors framed in scarlet wood, suffusing the room in a lobster glow. Like the Lisboa, the Jumbo was beyond tacky.
I introduced myself to the service manager, a lean fellow of about 40 in a black jacket. He bowed and with two hands offered me his card. I told Chan Wing I was doing a story on the Jumbo Palace’s last days in Aberdeen and first days in Manila—was there any chance I could go aboard? “Oh sorry, sorry, no chance. Working now,” he said.
I took out my pad. Could I ask him a couple of questions? For instance: How long would it take to pull the Palace to Manila?
“Maybe four, five day,” he said. “It will be ready for open New Year. Millennium Eve! Big celebration! You visit then?”
“Shoot! I’ll be there a couple of days after New Year’s,” I said. “Will the whole boat be converted to a casino?”
This query seemed to change the tenor of our discussion. Chan smiled and I could tell that he no longer trusted me. “Oh, ha ha, I only know it will be a restaurant.”
“Well, why is Dr. Ho sending it then?”
“Maybe business. Not enough business here for three restaurant anymore.” At that he turned to an assistant and began talking with him in Cantonese about something that seemed to have nothing to do with me.
“Just one more thing. Can you tell me when it’ll be sailing?”
“December 21,” he said, without looking up.
“The day after Macau’s handover?”
This time he did look up. “One thing nothing to do with other.”
Two hours later I was on the jetfoil to Macau, reading the Sunday edition of the now PRC-friendly South China Morning Post. A full-page article, called “Gangsters Who Have Forgotten the Rules,” was filled with terror tales about Macau, and how, in a few days, the Chinese would save the territory from those who had forgotten the rules—that is, the ones who shot it out in the streets Steve-style. The implication seemed to be that if gangsters remembered the rules—taking their cut in a businesslike way—they would be more acceptable.
To illustrate the thesis the Post featured photos of the fearsome 14K dragon head Broken Tooth and a smartly uniformed PRC army garrison with their fists in the air, with the cutline “Community leaders support the post-handover garrison in Macau, hoping it will stop Triads from creating as much havoc as ‘Broken Tooth’ Wan Kuok-koi did.” That was Stanley Ho’s line, too, one he’d been using to ingratiate himself with the new rulers, who knew perfectly well he’d leased VIP gambling rooms to Broken Tooth. Ironically, the appearance of the People’s Army in the territory was completely illegal; they were supposed to have waited until the day of the handover, and thereafter be used only as a defense force against external threats. Their arrival as saviors was made all the more ironic because (as the Post pointed out) many of the recent gangland slayings “were carried out by hitmen hired by local Triads from the Mainland.” Well then, I thought, who was saving whom?
When I got off the ferry a raven-haired hostess in a red silk cheongsam handed me a map and schedule of the handover events. Beside her a classical Chinese trio was playing some many-blossomed tune. Around us the newly built glass-and-polished steel terminal was done up with flowers, lanterns, and trilingual red and gold banners. I became suddenly giddy. I was stepping onto a chip of land where political history was being made, where gangster history had just been made, and where both past and present had come together to kick Steve down the road.
Looking my information package over, I plotted how I might accomplish my mission. I wanted to discover Steve’s alias and find out when he had left Macau permanently. Had he gone straight to Cambodia, or first to the Philippines? Was Cambodia just a side trip from the Philippines or a main show? These were my questions, but how was I going to even begin getting answers to them? All Garry Clement’s old contacts had retired and moved back to Portugal. Given the closed-door policy at the RCMP Liaison Office in Hong Kong, I was in a far more isolated position than six years before. I couldn’t very well walk into the Lisboa, flip out a photo, and announce I wanted to find out the Paper Fan’s name and activities. I might never walk out. I therefore decided on a safer, if less easy, method of operation. I would visit Broken Tooth where he was locked up on Coloane Island, offer him the flattering press I knew he craved, and ask him my questions.
There was a tourist information booth behind the hostess in the Suzie Wong dress. A rep in a red business jacket within the booth told me that for special interview requests I’d have to speak with somebody at the Handover Ceremony Coordination Office, where they were set up to accommodate the hundreds of international journalists in town for the celebrations. She put a pen to my map. The office was in a building just across from the new $100-million Cultural Center, at the south end of the vast landfill that had added a square mile to Macau since I’d been here in ’93.
Outside the terminal I waved away the hack drivers and strolled down Avenida da Amizade, along the Outer Harbor, and turned south where it doglegged west towards the Lisboa. I stuck to the water, following the landfill to the Cultural Center, where the “I Love China” and “Return to Motherland” events were to be held. Workmen were hammering wooden forms into place for the new sidewalks being poured. A crouching army of white-gloved landscapers were laying squares of turf. Security guards seemed to be stationed every 10 yards—probably outnumbering the Triads, for this week anyway.
When I got to the Handover Office building I sat down on a bench and block-printed a request to interview Broken Tooth in jail. Upstairs, a uniformed woman behind the main media desk read my letter and looked at me as if I’d just propositioned her. She told me to have a seat, and, holding my missive by the corner as if it smelled, went into the back, then came out and ignored me for an hour. When I asked her what was going on she curtly told me to come back in a month, this was a bad time for such a request.
“You could have told me that before this,” I said.
She turned her back on me. Obviously, the Handover Office wasn’t enthusiastic about too much being made of Broken Tooth during these joyous celebrations.
“Just tell me how to get there,” I said.
“You want to go to prison?” she replied, an unsettling question under the circumstances.
“Just to see it. Is there a bus?”
I think she saw this as an opportunity to get rid of me, because she said, “You know Lisboa?”
“Vaguely.”
“Bus in front. You take No. 21. Give driver this.” She wrote some Chinese characters on a pad and handed it to me.
Bus 21 must have been one of the least-used in the fleet, because it took almost an hour for one to pull up. It was, of course, a beautiful spot to wait; I had the comings and goings of the Lisboa to ogle and the Avenida Da Praia Grande to admire. With the trees and glittering bay on one side and quaint cafés and Mediterranean hotels on the other, the Praia Grande was still the colony’s showpiece, and it was because of what had taken place there two and a half years ago that the world had learned something was terribly wrong in Macau—and had been wrong for years.
On May 4, 1997, a couple of blocks west of where I was standing, amidst bumper-to-bumper traffic and strolling throngs of locals, two motorbikes with passengers on the back pulled up beside a stretch limo carrying three 14K officials away from the Lisboa. The motos’ backriders yanked out Chinese military automatic pistols and opened up for 20 seconds, splattering blood and glass all over the car and street. When a gangland hit is well planned, as this one was, the rat-a-tat-tat comes and goes so swiftly that it sounds like happy-go-lucky fireworks, and most of the people on the boulevard merely turned to see where the lion dance was. Word soon spread, however, drawing crowds so dense that it took 15 minutes for the police to fight their way through to the limo. When the victims inside were identified as Shek Wing-cheung, Broken Tooth’s right-hand man, and his two senior assistants, Fong Mou-hung and Lo Wing-hwa, investigators with the Public Security Police deduced the hit was the work of the 14K’s chief rival, the Soi Fong, or “Water Room Gang,” an offshoot of the Wo On Lok Triad.
The international press converged, reporting that since the New Year there had been 17 gangland assassinations, and dubbed Macau the “Chicago of the Orient.” Reacting to this colorful characterization, Macau’s Portuguese governor, General Vasco Rocha Vieira, reassured the world that the killers were professionals; that the gangsters were only killing each other; and that neither innocent bystanders nor police were being hurt. The governor forgot to mention that Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Apolinario, deputy director of the Gambling Inspectorate, had been shot six months before.
A multisided civil war had in fact been raging in Macau for over a year: within Steve’s 14K Triad; between the 14K and the Wo On Lok; and between all the Triads and the police, who sometimes actively favored one of the gangster armies over the other. When I had last been to the territory, Macau was a smoothly running, mobster-seamed city-state: the Triads, Stanley Ho, the corrupt police, and the passive Portuguese administration had pretty much worked out an arrangement on how to best get along peaceably. Then several things happened in the mid-′90s that made Macau explode into gangland anarchy.
According to Stanley Ho’s own China-friendly explanation, offered to the British reporter Jill McGivering, “In 1996 the Hong Kong police, in order to give a clean city back to China, launched a tough anti-Triad campaign and tried to drive them out of the territory. As usual, the Hong Kong police were very competent, and did clean up a lot. With such easy immigration laws in Macau, most of the Triads came to Macau for shelter, but Macau is a tiny place—it cannot accommodate so many Triads.”
The local police were part of the problem, Ho said: “With the cost of living going up every day, and the police working on a very tight budget, it has been suggested that some of the police, in order to earn more money and knowing that 1999 was coming up, may have become involved with the Triads to earn more money. Since 1996, we’ve had this violence in Macau, and the government has found it very hard to rely totally on the police, because part of the force is really involved with the Triads…. I’m also told … the police were too kind to some gangs and not so kind to other gangs and that again caused fights.”
It became clear to the gangsters—this was a factor Ho didn’t mention—that whoever ran the most action at the time of handover would be in the best position to negotiate with the PRC for the right to grab some of the new gambling opportunities when the aging Ho’s monopoly expired in 2001, as well as to negotiate the right to work the lucrative chaperon market from China to Macau. The chaperon market—essentially a travel agency for booking gambling tours—generated two-thirds of all casino revenue.
Finally, the “Asian Flu” ended the boom of the past 15 years, squeezing the dizzy earnings that had yielded enough for everybody, which in turn caused a real estate crash that left 30,000 apartments vacant and houses selling at half what they were a few months before.
At the start of Macau’s gang war, one in 25 men in the colony were Triad members, making for a total of about 10,000 hard-core criminals, giving the gangsters twice the manpower of the three branches of the police, of whom a considerable percentage were on the Triads’ payroll anyway. As the opening shots were fired, the stakes were huge. Each of the Triad-leased VIP rooms in Ho’s casinos was raking in millions a month. The Triads also controlled the city’s 10,000 prostitutes who worked within or around the casinos. Selling consolation to the losers and dessert to the winners, the hookers brought in over $300 million a year. A not inconsiderable sideline of the Triads also worth fighting over was smuggling drugs, guns, and girls out of China—historically easier to accomplish through compliant Macau than through Hong Kong.
Just after the Avenida Da Praia Grande assassinations the Macau Government Tourist Office issued an optimistic press release that stated “eight million tourists shop with confidence in Macau,” but the fact was that the very business over which the Wo On Lok and 14K had been fighting suddenly dropped off precipitously as tourists and gamblers stayed away from what seemed like a war zone. Soon after the killings, a torso was found in a factory, then a businessman approaching a bank died after his arm was nearly hacked off by Triads trying to separate him from the money handcuffed to his wrist. For the month of August 1997, tourist arrivals were down 36 percent compared with the same month the year before.
For Stanley Ho, enough was enough. At the time less forthcoming about the violence than he would be a couple of years later, and anticipating the public release of tourist statistics, Ho called his own news conference on July 24, 1997, and told the world not to worry. The 14K and Wo On Lok had nothing to do with his casinos, and, at any rate, they were holding peace negotiations. The government would see that civility would be restored to the quaint streets of Macau. In any case, “when Macau changes hands to China, all the Triads will run away.”
Lest the government try to put Stanley Ho’s words into action before Macau changed hands, the Triads exploded a bomb in front of the governor’s palace, and continued to go at each other, setting off car bombs and hurling firebombs and hand grenades all over the city. By year’s end the official body count in the tit-for-tat killing spree had risen to 29 (police suspected there were more bodies in concrete or watery graves), and the American State Department warned people not to visit the territory. Some hotels ran at 20 percent occupancy, taxicab use was down by two-thirds after dark, stores closed at sundown instead of the usual 10 P.M., and the busy restaurants along the city’s main boulevards stood empty.
As is usually the case when the world looks like it is spinning out of control, the government and the police sought to put the blame on one bogeyman, and they found him in the Al Capone of the “Chicago of the Orient,” whose arrest would put an end to the chaos in the colony. That man was the 41-year-old dragon head of the Macau 14K, Wan Kwok-koi, aka Broken Tooth.
Wan got his sobriquet cutting his teeth—that is, breaking them—in gang fights whilst growing up in Macau’s back alleys. Like Steven Wong, he was a grade-school dropout, and like Wong he proved a master at recruiting young loyal followers and at underworld tactics aimed at out-maneuvering competitors in his own Triad. One of them was Macau’s senior 14K member, Kai Sze “Market” Wai, who’d got his start (and his nickname) in Hong Kong, extorting money from businessmen in the Mong Kok market, then moved to the welcoming Philippines, where he amassed a fortune running gambling casinos under Marcos. Wai showed up in Macau in 1987 and formed an alliance with the then-rising Broken Tooth to overthrow the reigning head of the 14K, “Touch Hair” Peng. Wai then purchased from Ho’s STDM company the legal franchise to several of the private gambling rooms. That put him next in line to be overthrown.
If Broken Tooth were a businesslike gangster who played by the rules, the ensuing gang wars of the second half of the ’90s might have been slightly less violent, or at least more clear cut. But he was a sociopath with megalomaniac tendencies. As he gained in stature and power he began boisterously challenging Market Wai’s control—and his dignity (in one case, posting signs all over the city alleging Market Wai was a narcotics trafficker). Market Wai reacted by attacking Broken Tooth’s poster-pasting 49s. Broken Tooth retaliated, and the two factions went to war with hatchets, bombs, and machine guns. Wai got the worst. When Wai’s New Century Hotel was raked by AK-47 fire, he stayed holed up in his suite instead of coming out and fighting like a man. This was a final loss of face for his followers, who took Broken Tooth’s threats to heart and switched sides. Broken Tooth then took over Wai’s franchises in the Lisboa and set up his own club, called the Wan Hau, which began raking in $6 million a month. He used his wealth to invest in several legitimate enterprises, buying a popular disco called the Heavy Club, promoted several Canto-pop concerts, bought real estate, became a licensed seller of gambling chips, and of course, a high-stakes gambler, particularly favoring the game of choice on the Macau Riviera, baccarat.
He then made the same fatal mistake as John Giotti and Al Capone—the same one that Steven Wong unwittingly made: he gave media interviews in which he openly bragged about being the top dog in Southeast Asia’s underworld, with thousands of followers, at least a hundred of whom were ready to pour into the streets at a moment’s notice. He drove around town in a purple Lamborghini (only one of a fleet of custom-built luxury cars he owned), wore a solid-gold, diamond-encrusted Rolex (prominently displayed in a five-by-seven glossy publicity photo showing him smiling into a cell phone), and paraded into discos and casinos with an ever-changing roster of beautiful women on his arm. Amazingly, he also financed a bio-pic about his exploits, called Casino, starring Hong Kong film star Simon Yam. Casino is in the same genre as dozens of other films that seduce young Chinese into the gangs and that feature murder and mayhem mixed in with glamorous images of ultra-well-dressed gangsters making their just way in an unjust world. Broken Tooth humbly left his name off the credits, but he took part in every aspect of production, from screenwriting to filming. Typically (and laughably), within hours of its release, the Wo On Lok Triad pirated the film and began selling thousands of cheaply priced copies.
As with Capone, Giotti, and Wong, the police took Wan’s flagrant hoopla as a wildly waving red flag. After the May 4, 1997, massacre, the Macau Legislative Assembly drew up an anti-Triad bill modeled on the one Hong Kong had had for 30 years. The bill came into effect on August 15 and was drafted to stop the uncivilized Triads generally, but some of its provisions seemed specifically targeted against dragon heads such as Broken Tooth, who was among the first to be charged under the statute. It made being a member of a Triad a crime punishable by a three-year prison term for junior members and 12 years for senior members. It also offered amnesty and witness protection to Triad members who came forward to testify against their bosses. Broken Tooth took the legislation personally. On June 7, all eight Chinese newspapers in Macau and its local television station received a press release: “Warning, from today it is not allowed to mention Wan Kuok-koi alias Bang Nga-koi [Broken Tooth-koi], or the 14K, otherwise bullets will have no eyes and knives will have no feeling.”
Arresting Broken Tooth in Macau in 1997 proved as difficult as arresting Steven Wong three years earlier. After the warrant was issued, Wan had no difficulty leaving Macau for an overseas holiday. Then, on July 28, a judge mysteriously declared the warrant invalid and dropped the charges. The judge then retired and moved back to Portugal, and Broken Tooth moved back to Macau. Another warrant for his arrest was issued in the PRC, and this too was suddenly dropped. According to Broken Tooth, there was no funny business involved in these legal cha-chas—at least none that was his fault. Both warrants were issued, he claimed, at the corrupt instigation of Market Wai.
To discourage police harassment (the police alleged) Broken Tooth tried to send law enforcement a message by less than subtle means. On March 24, 1998, senior gambling inspector Francisco Amaral was shot dead a few feet from security headquarters. On April 16, the chauffeur to the territory’s undersecretary for security, Manuel Soares Monge, was shot in the head as he left home to pick up his boss. The next day, Dr. Rui Afonso, an adviser to the Chinese and Macau governments drawing up the new Basic Law, openly accused the Macau government of lacking the will to put a stop to the Triad chaos. Then, two weeks later, on May 1, the car of Macau’s judicial police director, Dr. Antonio Marques Baptista, was bombed.
This rule-breaking behavior was too much for Baptista, who was jogging nearby at the time. He hastily organized a posse and, 12 hours after the explosion, marched into the Lisboa and personally arrested Broken Tooth as he gambled at a baccarat table. Dressed in a gaudy shirt decorated with a camel and rider striding through date palms, Broken Tooth was led handcuffed down the Lisboa’s grand porte cochere before a crowd of onlookers and reporters and shoved into a police van. This time the police threw the book at him, charging him with organized crime membership, running illicit gambling businesses, blackmail, loan-sharking, dealing in contraband, and possession of firearms. The cops swept the city and arrested nine of Broken Tooth’s lieutenants on the same charges. A week later, on May 8, presumably in sympathy with Broken Tooth, a coordinated series of explosions were detonated all over the city, which reinforced the belief that while the 14K leader could be jailed, those who displeased him could be reached. Fourteen cars were firebombed and a number of shops and motorcycles lit up the night sky with flames. By the end of the year, 27 men had been killed in gangster-related violence.
On November 10, 1998, while Broken Tooth stewed in the pretrial remand jail awaiting the beginning of his trial, set for March 17, 1999, the court froze $20 million of his assets. Threats of “disruptions” began to be received, and fearing a courthouse bombing, the trial was delayed. On April 22, 1999, Wan was additionally charged with the criminal intimidation of Lisboa casino workers, but in a separate trial, he was acquitted when witness after witness took the stand and said they had no idea what the prosecution was talking about—a bad sign for the main trial. On April 27, the main case was delayed again because witnesses (and witness statements) began to disappear. Over the summer, as the inter-gang violence continued (a remote-controlled nail bomb tore to shreds two Soi Fong Triad gangsters in August), the judge in Wan’s case quit, and a brave replacement had to be brought in from Portugal. Finally, on Wednesday, October 6, 1999, with the death toll standing at 37, and Macau set to be handed over to China in 10 weeks, the trial began at the Court of the First Instance.
Just the fact that it was taking place at all sent shivers through the underworld. Shortly after the Mainland Chinese took over Hong Kong in 1997, PRC police had showily tracked down and arrested on their own soil a Triad boss from Hong Kong named Cheung Tze-keung, who was accused of masterminding sensational kidnappings. Minutes after he lost his appeal, the Chinese executed him. In addition, after concluding negotiations on the Basic Law with the Portuguese, the Chinese announced they would be stationing troops in the Macau Special Administrative Region even before the handover. Gangsters in the know feared that, despite promises that these soldiers were to be used strictly for military defense, they would instead be used to maintain law and order. All over Macau—all over Asia—the so-called underworld (it was often hard to tell under from over) was in a state of movement and flux. That very week, October 11, 1999, Stanley Ho made a trip to Manila and announced he was moving the Jumbo Palace to Manila as a floating casino. Also that very week, 14K hit men gunned down three of their 4 Kings rivals at Don Muang airport in Bangkok over control of the casinos in tormented Cambodia.
Broken Tooth’s trial lasted five weeks and the prosecution called 50 witnesses. The civilians testified they had trouble remembering seeing Broken Tooth doing anything worse than losing his temper when he was losing at baccarat. Public Prosecutor Augusto Serafim Vasconcelos admitted to the three presiding judges that the memory lapses of his own witnesses were curious in the extreme, and so he entered into evidence Wan’s own words, published in the numerous magazine interviews Wan had granted in the last few years, and in which Wan all but admitted to being the dragon head of the 14K. Vasconcelos showed the film Casino, asserting it was clearly Wan’s self-produced autobiography. Then he called less amnesia-prone witnessess—cops such as Police Director Baptista—who testified to evidence, gleaned from anonymous informants, that showed Wan was responsible for the gangland assassinations and bombings. The defense objected strongly to the inclusion of this hearsay, the judge overruled the objection, and one of Wan’s lawyers, Pedro Redinha, quit the case in protest.
On November 8, the last day of the trial, Wan stood up and addressed the court for seven minutes, accusing Baptista of uttering “nothing but lies.” He said he’d made his fortune from legal gambling at reputable establishments (e.g., the Lisboa) and sound business activities like promoting pop concerts and trading in real estate. Of course, he said, like everyone else he’d heard of the 14K, but he had nothing to do with the gang. He admitted to only two vices: gambling and a bad temper. Otherwise, “I’ve always obeyed the authorities.”
Presiding Judge Fernando Estrela said he would hand down the decision two weeks later, November 23. A week before the verdict, amid fears of commando-style rescue attempts, Wan and the nine co-accused were secretly moved from the remand jail to the new high-security unit of Macau’s central prison on Coloane Island.
For the historic verdict, Zhu Entao, the head of Interpol China, paid a visit to the territory, announcing that he was pleased with the way public security had recently improved. At 3 P.M. the three judges filed into the Court of the First Instance. Wan stood up. Judge Estrela looked down at the charge sheet and read the counts, pronouncing Wan guilty on all. Broken Tooth was sentenced to 15 years, and led away to an armored car that took him in a caravan of police vehicles to Coloane Island.
I jumped on the No. 21 bus in front of the Lisboa and told the driver, “Coloane Prison.” He looked at me without comprehension and I handed him my Chinese note from the Handover Office. He read it and looked at me again. I took my pen and knocked it against my tooth. “Where Broken Tooth is. Wan Kwok-koi.”
“Yes, yes, Wan Kwok-koi,” he said, shrugging. When I sat down, I noticed the entire busload of passengers staring at me.
“Are you America government?” asked a fellow in a worn suit beside me. I was pleased by the mistake. That morning in Hong Kong I’d donned a blue shirt, blue tie, a trim jacket and mirrored sunglasses, in mind to impress authorities, who always responded warmly to the outfit.
“I’m a reporter,” I said. I noticed he had a packet of Marlboro sticking out of his jacket pocket and an unlit cigarette in one bony hand. I popped a Nicorette and gave him one. “I’m here for the handover. Were you just gambling in there?”
“Yes, yes!” He smiled ecstatically, which probably meant—in that contradictory Chinese way—he’d lost. Or else he just liked the hit of the Nicorette.
“Do you know where Broken Tooth’s VIP lounge used to be?” I asked. “Before he got arrested?”
“Oh high, very high, upstair.” He held his hand a foot over his head, then pointed to the top floor of the casino receding behind us.
“Too high for you?”
“Yes, yes.” Chewing loudly, he gave me that Buddha smile again. “Too high for me. On’y rich rich. He very bad man, Wan. Kill lots people. Now no more fun for him. Finished.”
“How do you feel about the handover?”
He looked left and right, lowered his voice. “Nobody like. Want stay like it is. No good for young people. Chinese no free.”
“I guess you’re stuck with them though.”
“Yes, stuck. No more Wan, but now Chinese. Stuck.”
The bridge south from the Lisboa climbed over the Praia Grande Bay to Taipa Island, which looked like a pocket of Mediterranean quietude compared to the Vegas bustle on the peninsula behind. My neighbor got out at a beautiful old square, calling “Bye bye!” to me as we pulled away. We followed an avenue called Marques Esparteiro through leafy hills, and came down onto a causeway that was lined with sculptures replicating the signs of the Chinese zodiac. “Help me, Ox,” I mumbled as we passed my sign.
If Taipa looked quiet, then Coloane Island, at the end of the causeway across the next muddy bay, looked positively somnolent. Good place for a prison, I thought, contemplating the treed hills interrupted by neither homes nor high-rises. We wound our way up switchbacks, until we reached the top of a low mountain. My driver pulled over to the side of the country road at a place where you could see the ocean. He looked back at me and pointed to a small white blockhouse with no buildings behind it. “Prison?” I asked, stepping hesitantly down.
“This, this! Prison,” he said impatiently, and pulled away.
Where was it? In the middle of the blockhouse was a steel door set flush with the concrete, with no knob or keyhole, just a little glass window. A speaker with a button was set in the wall beside the door and above it hung a video camera, tilted down at me. It suddenly occurred to me that the Coloane Prison must be an underground institution, built right into the mountain. Inmates would have to tunnel through bedrock to escape. I pressed the buzzer, and a long couple of minutes later a voice answered in Chinese. I asked if someone there spoke English. Another couple of minutes went by. Finally a voice answered in Portuguese. “Quem e ou, señor?”
“Yo esta journalista, aqui para handover,” I said, hoping Span-English resembled Portuguese. “Quiero habla con chef.” I looked up at the camera watching me, held up my notebook. “Journalista,” I repeated. “I want to speak to the warden.” There was some mumbling, and then silence for a couple more minutes. Finally a voice said, “No—no. Not possible. Go away.”
Go away? Well, that was pretty direct.
Now what?
Across the road two matrons in cleaning uniforms wearing ID badges stood waiting for the bus back into town. I noticed a service road going downhill around the blockhouse, and I asked them where it led. “Escola Superior das Forças,” one woman called.
“The what?”
“Police Academy,” called the other.
Well, that’s all right! Around the world police academies are reservoirs of well-connected cops. Maybe some officer would know someone who knew someone who could get me my interview? At the very least, I might bump into someone who might gossip about what was going on in the force vis-à-vis the 14K. “Can I just go in?” I asked the matron who seemed to speak English.
“I don’t think. Area proibido.” A secure area.
I walked to the top of the road and looked down. Halfway to the bottom of a steep hill the road was blocked by a cross-arm gate, beside which a couple of uniformed guards lounged outside a shed. Okay, then, activate disguise. I fished out my cell phone and put it to my ear. I adjusted my shoulder bag so that I carried it by the handle, like a briefcase. Then I set off downhill in a confident gait, talking loudly on the phone about the stupidity of the home-office boys, their utter ignorance of what I had to deal with on the ground. As I closed on the guards I gave them the briefest of nods, angrily preoccupied with what I was saying on the phone. I raised the level of my argument to outright shouting as I ducked under the gate, and then just kept going. I should have been shot in the back for pulling that stunt, but it worked. As I would discover over the next couple of months, imitating a pissed-off DEA agent in a hurry to meet with the chief gets you in almost anywhere.
Okay: now what? I thought.
At the bottom of the hill was a modern concrete building, with a blue-and-white coat of arms on it. “ESFSM” was written across the top of the shield, with the letters spelled out below: Escola Superior das Forças de Segurança de Macau. Macau Security Forces College. I pushed through the doors. Opposite was a bank of glass-walled offices. To the right was a passageway into what looked like a canteen. To the left was a stairway, with a spray of WWI-era rifles and bayonets affixed to the wall. I heard someone’s lonely whistling echoing up the stairs. I took out my note with the Chinese lettering on it and showed it to the uniformed whistler as he crested the landing and approached me.
“There’s a prison around here.”
“Not here,” he said. “There,” pointing to the hill.
“Yes, there.”
“Okay,” he said, and walked away.
I chewed another Nicorette, stood waiting for five minutes. Suddenly, through the glass doors I saw a parade of cadets dressed in blue knit sweaters and crisply pressed slacks marching by, in rows of four. I walked outside. The cadets passed in perfect step, eyes front and blind to me. When the last of them passed I fell into line behind them. It was kind of amusing: I felt like Roberto Benigni marching behind the camp guards in Life Is Beautiful.
They walked up the lane and, dressing their line into pairs, turned right through a narrow stone archway into an old section of the compound. They marched up a steep flight of well-worn stone steps between ochre walls, crossed a walled balcony, then mounted another flight.
We came out on a high veranda and I caught a stunning view of the green forested peaks of Alto de Coloane and Ponto Central, the shallow strait between the island and Mainland China, and the town of Coloane below, nestled in a cove. In the foreground were Moorish barbicans and an eight-sided turret with a flared pagoda roof, the architectures of the two cultures layered side by side in the academy, as they were in official buildings all over the territory.
I followed the cadet corps into a cafeteria, filled with about 200 men eating a late-afternoon Portuguese lunch. The young men halted at a room-length table, marching in place. Someone shouted an order and they left-faced smartly to the table. Another order, and they sat down. I was the only one left standing, now the center of attention of the entire room. Mercifully, I spotted a single empty seat by the plate glass window on the east side of the building, at which several middle aged Chinese men and a woman in uniform were dining.
“Hi, I’m a journalist here for the handover,” I announced to the table. “I’m looking at the Police Academy today.” An older fellow with his back to the window held out his hand to the chair beside him. “You from?” he asked.
A collective chorus of approval went up from the table. “I am Cheong Kiang-chum,” said my new host.
“Pleased to meet you,” I enunciated. “And I am Terry Gould.” I didn’t have much time here and so made the decision to get straight to the point—vaguely risky, but I knew I couldn’t ask for a safer time to be flaunting my mission in this Triad town. “I am writing a book about Chinese criminals,” I said.
My companions either didn’t understand or were concentrating on first things first. Cheong took an empty plate and placed it in front of me. The others passed down plates of fish, rice, soup, bread, fruit, and a bottle of wine. Digging in, I told them that in Canada our police force was called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Mounties,” I repeated, although it was obvious I wasn’t getting the point across. Cheong announced something in Cantonese to the others, and they all smiled and looked at me perplexedly.
“Congratulations on Broken Tooth,” I said.
They again looked at me without understanding. “Broken Tooth—the Triad boss,” I repeated, and they began to talk among themselves in Cantonese, turning back to offer me polite smiles. I began riffling through my shoulder bag. “He’s in jail now,” I said. I took out the Morning Post article with his picture.
That got their attention. The whole table burst into laughter. “Ohhh, Wan Kwok-koi!!! Wan Kwok-koi!! He is here, here!” Cheong turned around and pointed through the glass, across a gully to the thickly forested hillside. At the bottom of the hill, barely peeping from the junglelike growth, was a long whitewashed building. “Under building,” Cheong said.
“Under that building?”
“In hill, yes.”
Someone shouted from the other end of the table, “Are you a fan?”
“No,” I said. “I want to talk to him. I want to talk to the warden to get permission.”
“Ohhhh, ohhhh,” they said, and returned to talking among themselves. They passed down a bottle of olive oil for me to dip my bread. Cheong said: “You want talk Wan Kwok-koi? For book?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right. I want to interview him about a Canadian criminal I know, a Triad man, who probably worked for him here in Macau. I think he knows him.”
“Ohhhh, ohhhh.” More discussion among themselves, then Cheong said: “I think no possible. He not allow visitor. Too dangerous.”
Well, maybe. But I’m getting close. At least I can see the wall between Wan and me. I just have to get through it.
“Did you see his movie, Casino?” I asked Cheong.
“Casino—uh, I no go Wan’s,” he replied, and I realized he thought I’d asked whether he’d gambled in Wan’s VIP room.
“No, no, he made a video, about himself. Casino.”
“Oh,” he said, then looked away.
It turned out Cheong wasn’t even a cop, but a fireman, teaching a course in emergency rescue. They were all teaching courses. At my table were a customs agent, a ballistics expert, a bomb squad officer, and a homicide investigator. His specialty naturally intrigued me, but carrying on a conversation about the two-score murders over the last few years was next to impossible. His accent was so heavy he had to repeat each word thrice, and I knew he would never be able to put them into a comprehensible sentence for me. My agony must have been apparent, because suddenly two young cops appeared beside me. “Maybe we can help you,” one of them said.
“Oh, that’s nice of you! You speak English!”
“A little.”
As the older gentlemen excused themselves to go back to work, the younger ones sat down beside me.
Simon Wong was one fellow’s name—a sweet-faced, clean-cut cadet in his late 20s. He said he used to be a bank clerk before he entered the academy last year. His companion was Lin Heng-chi, who was taller, leaner, and older but equally friendly-looking; he said he’d been a Macau policeman on street patrol for five years and, like many other officers, had been assigned to the academy to learn Mainland Chinese law, “because after Macau go back to China, Portugal law go back, so there will be more China law we in police department must learn.”
I explained my book project about Chinese criminals, and Simon said, “You come at the right time. We are having a course about the Triads later, law against the Triads association. Would you like come to our canteen talk with us?”
Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away.
“So it’s happening today?” I asked Simon down in the cadets’ canteen on the first level.
“Yes, this afternoon. It’s about five. Concerns the new Triad law of 1997.”
“Can I go?”
“I don’t know, you have to contact our commander before you can come in.”
The commander! Great! Maybe he would help me climb the ropes to Broken Tooth. Even if an interview couldn’t be arranged for today I could catch the gangster when I got back from Cambodia, before I went to Manila.
Lin, the older one, said, “We can give you his name. Commissario Cheang Lek-sang.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, now I think he is still in Macau. Because many things go on. Maybe about four you go to his office.”
“Is your book on just Macau?” Simon asked me.
“Macau and all of Southeast Asia. I’m writing about the handover’s effects on the criminals. The criminals are running all over Asia. They go to Cambodia, they go to the Philippines.”
“Yes, most of them run away,” Simon said. “They are scared that now the Chinese will catch them. We learn in class, the more the world develops, the criminal is going to develop as well. They will develop in a certain fashion, but the way they work will be probably fresh. I mean that people from China will go United States, people from United States will go China, they will join together. Because they have money, they can hire people of good skills. They can tell them to do some bad business. So more and more effort need to be done by policemen, by keeping noble, vigilant.”
“You’re an idealist,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” he laughed. “Just new. I hope I stay like this.”
Some student cops playing cards at a table beside us shouted at their hands, then threw their cards down and stood up. One of them said something in Cantonese to Simon, who said to me, “Excuse me, they are in my class, go to swimming practice. I go. You will stay to talk Lin?”
“Maybe we’ll speak again tonight,” I said hopefully, “at your Triad class.”
Over espressos a few minutes later, Lin said to me: “Information we learn is that years ago, before Hong Kong go to China, a head of the Hong Kong syndicates, he met with Chinese syndicates. Chinese boss say to him, ‘You can invest in China but you can no come here.’ Then Hong Kong boss, he come Macau instead, he make things very confused for Wan.”
“What was his name?”
He hesitated, looking at my pad. “Doesn’t matter. Because now Chinese come in, all calm down. Because Macau members of syndicates they run to Thailand, Cambodge, other places.”
“Did you know Wan—as a policeman?” I asked.
“No,” he smiled shyly, “because I’m a young member—just sidewalk. So I just see young Triads. Maybe there are thousands, but most of them are kids, temporary. They think there is no way to make money. Sometimes they go away and leave this syndicate. Temporary measure. Not like Wan. He is crazy killer. You stay for the handover?” he asked me.
“Just for the day,” I said, “because from here I’m actually going to where the Triads went. See, I came here looking for someone. A Triad man I know from Canada used to work for the 14K here. So I’m going where he goes. Here, Cambodia, the Philippines.”
“I think is very dangerous for you.”
“Well, I was here in 1993 and nothing happened. Many Canadian-Chinese gangsters came here—to gamble, do business. So I was here looking for him. He’s a 14K official.” I reached into my briefcase and took out the photo of the Paper Fan in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as the ones that showed his tattoos. “Maybe you saw him? His name is Steven Lik Man Wong, but I’m sure he changed it because he was on the run. He left but I don’t know when.”
Lin looked at the photo, pursed his lips, shook his head gravely. “You looked for this 14K official and you still live—?”
“Oh, I’m sure it was dangerous but—”
“Very dangerous for foreigner,” he said. “You talk to someone they don’t understand what you say, so you cannot make to communicate. Explain you are not police. Because you look like foreign police. Maybe they make mistake, want to kill you.”
“Do the Triads target policemen?” I asked, probing a topic I’d initiated in the cafeteria. “Or do they work with them?”
“Some of them,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “Some of police have secret relationship with Triads, so Triad friends not hurt them. But then other side want to kill policeman because he is friend with enemy gang. But if someone in police is always against Triads, then they try and kill him too. So the situation is severe.” He looked uncomfortable with what he’d just said. “But I think Macau in a few days become calm,” he added, moving onto safer ground. “Because Chinese law is strict. Only thing—” He hesitated, then came out with it. “Sometimes they don’t do straight law. They arrest person for political crime. That is what we are a little afraid. We will see. Now I go study. Farewell. I’m sure I will read something about you soon.”
I hoped he meant something by me soon.
I had an hour or so to kill before looking up the commander, so I walked back up the stairs to the cafeteria veranda to take pictures of the splendid views. The academy occupied a series of terraces and I ascended another stone flight to the highest plateau. Here, facing a wide concrete courtyard, was a baroque administration building that wouldn’t have been out of place in a square in Lisbon. It was several hundred feet long and two stories high, pastel ochre in color, with windows sealed by green wooden shutters and embellished above with white curving pediments. The central bay of the building had a pediment encrusted with the Portuguese coat of arms, and from its middle rose a white flagpole from which flew the red and green Portuguese flag, flapping south in the wind blowing from China.
As I photographed the flag, a stocky, middle-aged cop in a T-shirt and blue cap wandered out of one of the sleepy offices on the first floor and crossed the courtyard to me. “December 20—flag come down,” he said. “No more. Five hundred year, then no more.”
He stood a few feet from me, looking up at the flag with his hands on his hips. I didn’t say anything at first, merely appreciated the quiet—a thoughtful, almost mournful interlude in the late-afternoon sun, with the birds chirping. He turned and looked at the Mainland and I contemplated his sad face.
“Do you think China will make the criminals afraid?” I asked. “Is China good for the police?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “China very very strict to all people. China not so good to all people, I think.”
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, I have children.”
“Now they will grow up Chinese,” I said. “Communist.”
“Yes,” he said, sadly. “Yes, Communist.” He rested his foot on the old stone wall at the edge of the courtyard and looked out through the semi-tropical foliage, silhouetted green-black against the silvery-blue bay. A lone motorbike accelerated up the mountain road below, disappeared from view, then roared around the wall and pulled up beside us. The policewoman driving it holstered her radio and said a few words to him, looking at me. He joked softly with her. She looked at me without smiling and drove away.
I pointed to the prison. “Wan Kwok-koi is now far down underground,” I said. “He’s in the basement jail by himself, in solitary.”
“Yes, killed many people—police, politician, killed many many people. It’s special cell for him and his friends, special prisoners. You know the Nepal soldier? One hundred special Nepal soldiers guard him.”
“You mean Gurkhas?”
“Yes, yes, special come to guard Koi. Because Koi Triad maybe kill Macau police. Macau governor call one hundred Nepal soldier look-see Koi.”
“Wow!!” I held my hand as a phone to my face. “He can call to someone to say, ‘Kill that man’?”
“I think not now. He cannot telephone another—I hope so,” he chuckled.
There was a long pause while he surveyed the view, looking out to a forested finger of land across the bay. “You are here because—?” he said to the view.
“Well, today there is a special class to learn about Triads at five o’clock,” I said. “I will go see your boss, the commissario, to see if I can go.”
“I think he no let you. Maybe secret. Are you invite guest here?”
“Well, I just came by. I’m a journalist.”
“Okay. You want something drink—go downstair here, senior officer canteen. I something to work now. Okay, bye-bye.”
Ten minutes later, I was under arrest, standing in the officer canteen in front of the seated Commissario Cheang Lek-sang. Flanked by the two cops my friend up top had sicced on me, Cheang was going through my briefcase, trying to get to the bottom of what I was up to in his fortress academy.
I’d explained to him that I’d merely taken the public bus south from the Lisboa and wandered up a deserted delivery lane. Unfortunately, a minor investigation had shown him I’d ducked the gate without presenting credentials to the guards. So Cheang was aware I’d lied to him right off the bat. There was also the little matter of my having made a beeline to the cafeteria, where, he’d just learned, I’d interrogated idealistic cadets about Triad infiltration of Macau’s police department. Now, with knitted brows, he was comparing two contrasting letters of introduction from my publisher, Anne Collins: One certified I was writing a book describing my travels through Southeast Asia; the other that I was writing a book about Asian organized crime.
Cheang rubbed his forehead and scratched his head. He was a round-faced, avuncular cop of late middle age, pleasant enough—a Chinese headmaster, really—and I got the feeling he just wished this hadn’t happened. Apparently there had been a tour of journalists who were shown around the facilities for an hour early that morning, and they had departed without leaving any stragglers. Why hadn’t I come and gone with them? Why was I prying and breaking the rules?
“Please, you must tell me the truth,” he said, pulling papers from my briefcase. “It is a question of security for me.” Cheang unfolded my tourist map of the island, on which I’d marked an X and written: “Wan Kwok-koi.”
“That’s the reason, Commissario. I was hoping you could talk to the warden for me and I could interview Broken Tooth.”
“You came here because you want to talk to Wan Kwok-koi, there?”
“I wanted to tell my country about his bad deeds. He’s very colorful.”
“Yes, yes, colorful,” he soberly agreed.
He pulled from my briefcase a white manila envelope and used two fingers to gingerly spread it open, as if it were evidence. He glanced through the 10 pages of my Saturday Night article. Then he pulled out the single-page column I wrote a year and a half later. His lips moved as he translated it. When he was done he raised his eyes. “This man—he is in the Lisboa? Now?”
“No, no,” I said. “He’s gone now. Ran away.”
“Ah, I see.” He thought on that a moment. “So this man, and Wan—”
“He was in Wan’s Triad.”
“I see. I see.” I was beginning to make sense to him. Perhaps my methods were objectionable, but what I was saying sounded at least plausible. “Why do you tell me there were no guards then?” he asked, pointing up the road. “Why?” He said this with such aching sincerity that I was hoping I was past the worst. He just wants the right answer so he can throw me the hell out, I thought.
“I didn’t want to get them in trouble. They saw I was on business and just let me in. I wasn’t up to anything illegal. Just trying to find someone who could get me an interview with Wan.”
I leaned over and took the articles, put them back in the envelope, took the letter about me being on assignment to write about organized crime, and left him with the other letter. “Okay, I’m going to let you guys get back to work now.”
“Not permitted what you have done!” he announced, this with such cruel authority that he frightened the daylights out of me. “You cannot do this!”
He stood up, barked something in Chinese to the two cops, who came around to me and took my arms. “Must deal with this, must!” he said, and I was praying this was only a face-saving gesture, that I wasn’t going to be thrown into a dungeon guarded by stony-faced Gurkhas.
The cops hauled me out the door and held my arms as they pulled me down the road towards a back entrance to the compound. When we were out of the sight line of the commissario, however, they suddenly let me go. We proceeded to merely stroll to the gate, with them beside me, but well outside my personal space.
“How long you stay Macau?” the younger one on my right asked, not unkindly.
“I have an appointment with a Canadian official tonight,” I lied, just to let them know someone important would be asking questions if I disappeared.
“You must be very careful. 14K fellows—” He tapped my briefcase. “Very bad. Very bad. We find people—phttt.” He sliced his hand down his middle, pulled open an imaginary coat. Then he pointed over his shoulder to the prison. “He have them killed. He!”
“Maybe it’s not a good idea to interview him, then.”
“No him, no anybody with him! Otherwise, that—” he pointed to my head “—there—” he pointed to the curb. “And the rest there”—indicating that my torso and legs would be on the other side of the street.
The official handover was still four evenings away, but my schedule showed that every one of them was clogged with events, including tonight’s main feature, called the “Nam Van Lakes Lighting Exhibition,” to be viewed at 10 P.M. from the esplanade southwest of the Lisboa. An hour before those festivities began, the Bank of China building opposite the casino was officially lit up. The crowd oohed and aahed at the neon Sputnik balls emanating sprays of light and lotus petals, reflecting the trademark oddity atop Ho’s tower. A flying dove delivered another Sputnik lotus to the top of the facade of the famous Ruinas de Sao Paulo. Atop this, the Great Wall of China snaked to the roof, with more spiked balls tumbling down its central walkway. What is it with Ho and these stupid balls? I thought. Did his mother have a nightmare?
Some dignitary then delivered a speech on a bandstand, followed by a dress rehearsal of the takeover flag-raising, with blaring martial music that, to my ears, sounded like the theme for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, orientalized. Three guys in tuxes and white gloves slowly raised red star flags almost to the top of the poles, then lowered them.
After the applause I strolled with the crowd up the Praia Grande to the Nam Van Lakes, a new addition to the town since I’d been here, created by a landfill that encircled a section of the bay, with something called The Gate of Understanding in its middle. Fifteen minutes later, at exactly 10 P.M., the lakes were lit up. The still, black water became studded with dozens of floating lucky lotuses, red with yellow lights in their middle, and red leaping carp—glowing Sputniks in their mouths, of course. Against the skyline, two 30-foot-tall goddesses slowly twirled, the equivalent of giant music boxes playing orchestral tunes that reminded me of the strains Ronald Colman heard when he beheld Shangri-La. Strung along the water between them were red and gold lotus pads, each with black Chinese characters.
There was a China-TV crew filming the lights, and I introduced myself to the cameraman and asked, “What does that say?”
“This say, ‘The People of Mainland China Say Welcome to the People of Macau.’” The cameraman moved his finger left. “Next one say, ‘Macau Love China.’”
“Yes, because this start of new era for Macau. Come home. Peace, prosperity.”
“No more gang violence.”
“No more. Bad people no more. Only good people now.”
Those who played by the rules, I thought. One country, two systems—or maybe four. I wished him luck and then caught the midnight ferry to Hong Kong. I regretted I would miss the official handover, regretted even more that I’d found out zilch about Steve. But it was time for me to move on to a country with about a hundred systems, one for every crook on Interpol’s wanted list.