Legendary Crooked Cop

Legendary Crooked Cop Lui Lok Laid To Rest

 

A three-decade-old manhunt for one of the most notorious figures of the Hong Kong underworld — a man who pumped millions of dollars of his ill-gotten gains into B.C. — ended Thursday in a Metro Vancouver cemetery.
Staff-Sgt. Lui Lok was part of a cabal of five powerful station sergeants who ruled Hong Kong’s police jurisdictions during the early 1970s, collecting graft while allowing the triads to conduct their criminal activities.
The most infamous of the corrupt cops was Lui, dubbed the “$500 Million Man.” He and three other Dragons fled to Vancouver in the mid-1970s before seeking sanctuary in Taiwan. They left their families behind.
It is unclear when or where Lui, who was in his nineties, died. But unconfirmed sources said he is believed to have died in Vancouver.
Thursday, about 80 friends and family members gathered at Forest Lawn cemetery in Burnaby for a Taoist funeral service.
At the funeral hall, a large portrait of Lui stood above wreaths bearing his name, amid paper effigies of houses, cars and cash — the so-called “hell money” that can be used by the departed in the afterlife.
After the service, mourners — including family members wearing white sashes, headbands and hats — left the chapel, got into their cars and followed a silver hearse carrying Lui’s body to the crematorium.
Lui’s eldest son, cradling a black-and-white photograph of a dimpled, middle-aged Lui in his arms, led the procession into the crematorium, followed by pallbearers carrying the casket.
According to a covert police study originally published in The Province in 1999, Lui was part of an exodus of Hong Kong cops to Canada. They fled after the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) was formed in the mid-1970s.
The study identified 44 corrupt Hong Kong officers, dubbed the “millionaire cops,” their wives, children and concubines, and found them to have invested tens of millions of dollars in businesses and real estate in Canada, mostly in B.C. and Ontario.
With the help of Immigration Canada officials, Asian organized-crime investigators found that 30 of the officers had invested in at least 13 B.C. companies and purchased about 50 pieces of property in the Vancouver area.
These included large homes in West Vancouver and Shaughnessy, commercial buildings, a shopping mall and vacant acreages.
Brian McAdam, a former immigration-control officer in Hong Kong, said in an earlier interview with
The Province that he managed to stop at least six ex-cops suspected of being affiliated with triads from entering Canada in the 1980s.
“But many more got through with their connections or by pumping money into investor immigration schemes,” he said. “Some of these guys had close connections in high places and we were not seeing all the paperwork.”
The Hong Kong government later initiated civil proceedings to go after the loot amassed by the fugitive cops.
It is believed that in 1986, Hong Kong authorities reached an out-of-court settlement with Lui’s family, who remained in Vancouver.
In its ensuing investigations, the ICAC brought 260 police officers to court after finding 18 criminal syndicates operating in the Hong Kong police force.
It issued an arrest warrant for Lui on November 1976, making him one of the former British colony’s longest-wanted fugitives.