AT Christmas and New Year, many Australians' thoughts turn to crime. Sales of thrillers soar. Of true crime stories, too.
And this is a zone where the Asian Century has already made its impact - it's not just restricted to trade and travel.
Manhattan has only a single rival for the roles of the most intense, sleepless city of the world, and also of the capital of crime: Hong Kong. Not for the numbers of crimes - which remain low - but for their sheer drama.
Take kidnappings. Still a rarity in Australia, but a core earner for Asian crims.
The champion of criminal daring must be Cheung Tze-keung, usually known, for obvious reasons, as Big Spender, whose sojourn at the home of Asia's richest man, Li Ka-shing, rates as one of the most sensational sleep-overs of all time. A master of armed robberies, he turned for even bigger pay-offs to a more challenging way to raise revenue - kidnapping tycoons.
There have been many kidnappings in Hong Kong - more, of course, than the public or even the police have heard of. For the targets and their families often comply with the criminals' insistence that the authorities are never told.
The two biggest kidnappings in Hong Kong were not even known to the public until years after they happened. Both were perpetrated by Big Spender Cheung.
He was born in a remote village in Guangdong, the province that adjoins Hong Kong, to which his family migrated when he was four, in 1959.
He grew up helping in the family business, an illegal gambling racket that his father ran, leading to Cheung's first criminal conviction aged 16.
Cheung, who succeeded through his charisma and bravado in running his own show, never joining a triad or subjecting himself to arcane triad disciplines, attracted a gang of followers.
About the time he turned 30, he organised and personally led a series of robberies of gold and jewellery stores, in which his balaclava-wearing gang used AK47 assault rifles to terrify staff and then to battle police in Hong Kong's narrow streets as they fought towards their getaway vehicles.
His web grew wider. He also organised highway robberies of trucks across the border in mainland China, in which gang members often used military uniforms.
He appears to have developed a contact in the People's Liberation Army who helped sell the weapons and other equipment needed to launch this crime wave.
He hit every headline when he was charged in 1991 with organising one of the world's biggest cash heists a year earlier, of $HK167 million (then worth about $28m) from a security van at Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport.
He was eventually acquitted after two trials and an appeal, after he served three years in jail. He had two sons with his partner, who had been working in the control room of the security company at the time the van was raided. He had two statues made of her, in the form of a sphinx, and a bust of himself.
Cheung owned dozens of properties, in which he usually kept golden Buddhist images to protect him from evil spirits and arrest, and to reinforce his rising fortune. "Gold attracts gold", as the saying there goes.
He once entertained a group of journalists to dinner at home and showed them around his house. A large letter M was carved into the headboard in the master bedroom. He explained what it stood for: money. He also owned a yellow V12 Lamborghini Diabolo and a fleet of Mercedes.
Like most gangsters in Hong Kong - where all gambling, even on mahjong, is banned except via the Jockey Club - he was a wild gambler, losing millions of dollars at a time in sprees in Macau's then-seedy casinos.
In the mid-1990s, his focus turned to Hong Kong's wealthiest families.
His first target was the Li family. Li Ka-shing, now aged 83, worth $26 billion, the richest man in Asia, was then old enough to be Cheung's father.
They came from a remarkably similar background. Li - nicknamed "superman" by happy punters who follow his stocks - was also brought to Hong Kong as a boy from a poor background in Guangdong.
But he made his fortune the legitimate way, first selling watches and then setting up his own business making plastic flowers.
His bespectacled elder son Victor, a more serious, less flamboyant figure than his younger son Richard, was already then knuckling down to the long haul of an apprentice tycoon - a role he continues to this day.
He was being shadowed, though, by members of Cheung's gang, who traced his travels. Eventually, on May 23, 1996, they pounced.
As Victor Li, aged 34, drove in his blue Nissan President from the company headquarters in frenetic downtown Hong Kong, on the north side of the island, towards his father's house on a promontory high above Deep Water Bay on the more secluded, rugged south coast, Cheung and another driver sandwiched his car between them.
Wearing bulletproof vests and carrying AK47s and pistols, they tied him up, taped his mouth, and drove him in a waiting van back north, then through one of the tunnels under the harbour to Kowloon, and on to a rundown property in the New Territories not far from the border with mainland China, where they kept him penned up, bandages over his eyes and shackles around his legs.
Then the ice-cool Cheung drove back south to the island and down to Li Ka-shing's Deep Water Bay mansion, where he asked to see the great tycoon.
He told him that he wanted $HK1bn (then worth about $170m) in used notes in exchange for his son's life. He had chosen to seize the son because he believed the father was better positioned to organise the withdrawal of such a massive sum.
Li senior explained that this would take some time to arrange if it wasn't to arouse the interest of the police. Cheung said that was fine, he would wait there.
So the two migrants from Guangdong ended up spending two intriguing, tense days together in the vast house overlooking the South China Sea.
The details beyond this are a matter of conjecture, because the Li family has never spoken about what happened. But it appears that while much of the money was assembled by trusted workers of the Li family in large plastic bags, some may have been remitted to an overseas bank and sent on to accounts established by Cheung elsewhere, including Cambodia, where he liked to gamble.
Cheung told Victor Li back in the New Territories, once he held the ransom - of which he kept half for himself, the rest split between his gang - that because the Li family had kept its word and not informed the police, "I will never trouble your family again."
Immediately, he began planning another kidnapping, targeting the next wealthiest family in Hong Kong, the Kwok family behind the giant Sun Hung Kai real estate corporation.
On September 29, 1997, Walter Kwok, aged 47, was kidnapped as he made a similar journey to Victor Li's - over the island from the SHK HQ to his Beach Road home in Repulse Bay on the south coast.
Kwok, also now held at a rural New Territories property, was less co-operative. He refused to call his family to start withdrawing the ransom payment, so he was beaten, stripped to his underwear and pushed into a small wooden box with holes.
Cheung this time phoned a family member, identifying himself nonchalantly. Rumours have swirled that some in the family were reluctant to pay.
Kwok's wife Wendy Li and younger brother Thomas were instructed to meet Cheung at an apartment owned by SHK on Old Peak Road. But he left before giving them a ransom figure.
He kept taunting them by phone with different demands, even including SHK shares, until the family discovered that internationally the previous top ransom paid - they had no clue about Victor Li's kidnapping - was $HK200m.
They offered to triple this, to $HK600m (then about $100m), which was eventually assembled - after Walter had been held for six excruciating days - in 20 large red, white and blue carrier bags in two Mercedes saloons, which were parked in a quiet lane in central Hong Kong. Cheung and a gang member drove away with the cars and the cash,
Li Ka-shing bided his time. But it appears that in 1998, on a visit to Beijing to finalise a massive project just east of Tiananmen Square, he had confided very selectively in Jiang Zemin, China's president, who then puzzled Hong Kong by railing against crime in a speech during a visit.
Cheung had believed himself almost impregnable, having paid off police and others in Guangdong as he kept criss-crossing the Hong Kong border. But when Li played his trump card, the power of the central government was suddenly brought to bear, and Cheung and 36 gang members were arrested. Only at the trial in October 1998 did the prosecutor reveal the high-profile kidnappings, claiming they were being tried in China - in a fortified courtroom - because the crimes had been plotted there.
The Li and Kwok families had refrained from reporting the kidnappings in Hong Kong, which does not have the death penalty, and whose authorities did not press to try the gang. The HK Bar Association complained as a result that the case "could give some people the false impression that the rule of law in Hong Kong is subordinate to China".
Cheung told the Chinese police that he had feared a bad fate when a jade pendant he always wore broke before his arrest.
He told them: "I cannot allow myself to be poor. I'm already more than 40. If I want to get rich, I must take some unconventional steps. Without money you cannot do anything. But life is very short and fragile."
Cheung was shot by firing squad on December 5, 1998, at an execution ground outside Guangzhou, immediately after his conviction by a judge with the nickname Iron Fist.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments always welcome!