The Macau Connection

By

Micah Morrisonn

Updated Feb. 26, 1998 

MACAU--A visitor to Macau--with its seedy downtown and decadent atmosphere redolent of "Casablanca"--may start to look around for Humphrey Bogart. The Portuguese-administered territory an hour's hydrofoil ride from Hong Kong may be the most lawless six square miles on earth. Its major industries, legalized gambling and prostitution, spawn other pursuits such as money laundering, extortion, drugs and violence. Lately it's been in the grip of "triad wars"--with the rival crime syndicates battling for control of the rackets--that have claimed at least 24 lives in the past 14 months, and taken a sharp bite out of casual tourism.

While it's a long way from Arkansas, mysterious Macau has been a star setting for the campaign-finance controversy swirling around President Clinton. Charlie Trie, the Little Rock restaurateur turned Clinton fund-raiser, took refuge here before deciding to return stateside to fight his indictment for funneling illegal foreign funds to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. The majority report from Sen. Fred Thompson's Governmental Affairs Committee says Mr. Trie was one of six individuals identified by the CIA and FBI as having ties to China's intelligence apparatus. Rep. Dan Burton's House committee had scheduled further hearings on Mr. Trie this week, but they were canceled because two key witnesses were unavailable. Mr. Trie himself has invoked the Fifth Amendment and was not scheduled to appear.

Mr. Trie's choice of Macau as a refuge was scarcely an accident, since it is the base of his business partner Ng Lap Seng. (Mr. Ng is also known as Mr. Wu, since the Cantonese and Mandarin dialects have different pronunciations of the ideograph for his name.) The Senate report finds that Mr. Trie and Mr. Ng collaborated in a scheme to funnel "hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign funds" to the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Ng wired in a total of more than $1 million from accounts in Macau and Hong Kong to Trie accounts in the U.S. The report says that Mr. Trie's "bank records and tax returns reveal that he received little or no income from sources other than Ng Lap Seng."

Mr. Ng's largesse won him 10 visits to the White House between 1994 and 1996, including at least one with President Clinton, according to White House entry logs. Mr. Ng and Mr. Trie were seated beside the president at a February 1996 fund-raiser at the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington, and in October 1995 they organized a reception for then Commerce Secretary Ron Brown at Hong Kong's Hotel Shangri-La. Given all this activity, questions naturally arise: Who is Ng Lap Seng, and what did he want?

Mysterious Figure

According to several well-informed sources in Hong Kong and Macau, Mr. Ng is a mysterious figure with extensive business in China, where he also held a minor post as a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in his hometown of Nan Hai in Guangdong province. In Macau, his most visible interest is his ownership of the Fortuna Hotel, a garish high-rise in the gambling district, featuring a 20,000-square-foot nightclub with "table dancing" by strippers, as well as a massage parlor and, according to its brochure, "over 30 independent karaoke rooms, all luxuriously decorated with the most advanced sound system for any one interested in performing his favorite songs." The brochure also boasts "attractive and attentive hostesses from China, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma together with erotic girls from Europe and Russia, certainly offer you an exciting and unforgettable evening with friends or business associates."

Sources in Macau say Mr. Ng's nightclub is frequented by officials of China's People's Liberation Army. And also that its private VIP karaoke rooms are known hangouts for the Wo On Lok Triad, which is involved in gambling, loan sharking, protection rackets and prostitution. The Wo On Lok and its main rival in Macau, the 14K Triad, are at the center of the continuing gang war. "The 14K is one of the world's biggest organized crime syndicates," Agence France-Presse noted in a January report. "The 14K and Wo On Lok have more than 400,000 members around the world between them, intelligence officials in Hong Kong say, ranging from couriers and street corner thugs in London to corporate chiefs in New York."

The triads play a complex role in Macau and elsewhere in Asia. According to a 1995 report by Jane's Intelligence Review on organized crime and money laundering, most of the triads are based "in Hong Kong and Macau, from where they maintain their international links." Jane's adds, "Chinese organized crime is extremely powerful and their contacts extend to large, respectable businesses and even into government circles in many countries in East Asia." And, according to Jane's, "the so-called Triads or Secret Societies" handle the heroin trade out of the Golden Triangle. "Western anti-narcotics agents in Southeast Asia emphasize that it would be impossible for drug traffic to operate without the cooperation of local officials in the producer as well as transit countries."

The triads also exercise a political influence often more subtle, say, than the cocaine killers of Colombia or the terror bombers of the Italian Mafia. Controversy erupted in Hong Kong last year when Wong Man-fong, a former deputy secretary general of China's Xinhua News Agency, disclosed that he had met with triad chieftains prior to the signing of the 1984 Sino-British Declaration on Chinese rule. "I told them that if they did not disrupt Hong Kong's stability, we would not stop them from making money," he told a forum at Hong Kong's Baptist University.

According to a May 1997 report in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, Mr. Wong "refused to say if the idea for the meeting had been instigated by Beijing." But after the agreement was reached, China's security minister said, "Not all of the Triads are bad. Some of them love the Motherland."

With Macau's tourist trade suffering, some efforts have been made to contain the triad wars. The Morning Post reported in August that local "police raided several hotels including the showpiece Lisboa, the Grande and the Fortuna. The raids came as part of a move to clean up the enclave's image. Prostitution is not illegal in Macau but organized crime laws introduced late last month forbid soliciting in public and give the authorities powers to imprison pimps."

Following a New York Times report in October linking him to organized crime, the Morning Post caught up with Mr. Ng. It reported that he declared: "I am very upset, especially about this allegation that I am linked to organized crime. It is absolutely untrue and has no basis in fact." Mr. Ng did not respond to repeated requests by the Journal for an interview on the matter.

In Macau it is not unusual to find "black businessmen," involved in both legal and illegal activities. Mr. Ng is unusual for the Macau business community because of his extremely low profile. "Ng does a lot of business in China," says a Macau "big brother," or triad associate. "But no one really knows where his money comes from. Even in Macau, he is a mysterious figure."

From Nan Hai, near Guangzhou city, Mr. Ng arrived penniless in Macau around 1979, locals say. He began working in the local garment industry as a middleman, reselling cheap cloth from China to factories in Hong Kong and Macau. Trade with China is Macau's way of life, and by the early 1990s Mr. Ng was a wealthy man. In addition to the Fortuna Hotel, he owns a small commercial center linking the hotel to the Lisboa Casino, the flagship of casino magnate Stanley Ho. In partnership with Mr. Ho and mainland concerns, Mr. Ng also has a major stake in what seems a fitting gamble for a gambling town--a grandiose $1.4 billion development project called Nam Van Lakes.

The development involves the conversion of Macau's harbor into two inland lagoons surrounded by apartments, hotels and resorts. Launched during a regional boom in 1992, Nam Van Lakes became a favored site for wealthy Chinese to move "hot money" out of the neighboring wealthy Guangdong Province into the more stable precincts of Macau. Late last year, Mr. Ho announced plans to take the project public in Hong Kong by 1999. But with the Macau property market weak, prospects appear dim. The project is scheduled for completion early in the next century, and it is not clear how the investors will fare. But today thousands of empty apartments rise from the site, with no visible signs of life.

Mr. Ng has also made efforts to expand his business empire to Arkansas. In October 1994, Mr. Trie incorporated San Kin Yip International for Mr. Ng in Little Rock; the Senate report says its bank records "revealed neither earnings nor any genuine business activity." In early 1994, Mr. Ng also appeared as an outside investor in Mr. Trie's bid to buy the Camelot Hotel in downtown Little Rock. According to testimony by FBI Special Agent Jerry Campane before the Senate panel last July, Mr. Ng arrived in Little Rock with a suitcase full of cash. "There was a meeting in a hotel room," Mr. Campane testified, "and an eyewitness told us that Charlie Trie turned to Mr. Wu [i.e., Mr. Ng] and said, 'I need some money for expenses.' And Mr. Wu opened a suitcase, which was described as full of cash, and handed Charlie Trie approximately $20,000 in cash."

In a rough debate before the Little Rock Board of Directors, a city commissioner raised questions about the source of Mr. Trie's capital and the Chinese drug trade. Little Rock deal maker and attorney Joseph Giroir, a close associate of the Clintons and former head of the Rose Law Firm, protested the "offensive remark," but Mr. Trie lost the bid.

Mr. Trie next enlisted the help of Lehman Brothers investment banker and DNC fund-raiser Ernest Green, who wrote a 1995 letter offering to raise money for investment in Van Dam Lakes if the Macau government approved his investment concept. Mr. Green told Senate investigators that Mr. Trie approached him, and that he traveled twice to Macau to meet with Mr. Ng and other investors. In a videotape pried out of the White House by the Senate investigation, Mr. Green is shown introducing Mr. Ng to President Clinton at a November 1995 forum in Georgetown. Mr. Green told the president that Mr. Ng was "very helpful" in arranging an event for then Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ng was working his new White House connections. According to White House entry logs, Mr. Ng visited Mark Middleton, an Arkansas aide to then Chief of Staff Mack McLarty, six times between June 1994 and February 1995. In one instance, Oct. 20, 1994, Mr. Middleton met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with his brother, Stephens Inc. investment bank executive Larry Middleton, as well as Mr. Trie and Mr. Ng, according to Mark Middleton's White House calendar. That same day, $100,000 was wired from Mr. Ng's Macau account to Mr. Trie.

Mark Middleton left the White House in February 1995 to pursue a career as an Asian deal maker and by July was receiving a $12,500 retainer from Mr. Giroir--the Arkansas operative who had risen to the defense of Mr. Ng in the Camelot Hotel bid. Mr. Giroir, closely associated with Mochtar Riady's Lippo Group, gave a deposition to Senate investigators, but Mr. Middleton invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify. As with most things touched by the hapless Mr. Trie, the deal never materialized. When the media began exposing the Clinton campaign-finance connections, Mr. Ng dematerialized back into the vaporous intrigues of Macau, shunning requests for interviews and making no public appearances.

"The source of Ng's funds and what he or those behind him hoped to gain through Trie remains unknown," the Senate campaign-finance report concludes. From here on the streets of Macau, there would seem to be various possibilities, none of them reassuring.

Listening Post

Macau has for decades also been a listening post and staging point for the world's spy agencies. The Senate Committee accepted that the Chinese government had a plan to infiltrate American politics, though the Republican majority and Democratic minority disagree on whether it had any actual effect. The triads, so prominent locally, also have world-wide interests. In an article reprinted here Jan. 13, Bruce Gilley of the Far Eastern Economic Review reported that Ted Sioeng, another fugitive Clinton fund-raiser, showed up in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, in the company of Theng Bunma, a controversial businessman who has been barred from entering the U.S. due to suspected drug trafficking. Of course, it may be hard to discern where criminal societies end and various Asian governments and intelligence agencies begin.

China has long exercised de facto control of Macau, but is now preparing to assume formal rule in 1999. Asked whether gambling and prostitution will remain legal, a Chinese diplomat invokes "one country, two systems." Last month the Chinese government honored Mr. Ng with a big promotion from his Nan Hai post to the national Chinese People's Consultative Conference in Beijing. Two other Macau figures were also named to the Beijing Conference--Stanley Ho, the dominant figure in the Macau economy, and Macau legislator Chen Kai-kit. Both have also crossed paths with President Clinton.