Blood Brothers – Carl Ching & Fast Eddie Chan: During the Sydney Olympics

Blood Brothers – Carl Ching & Fast Eddie Chan

During the Sydney Olympics in September 2000, many Australians became aware of how well-placed and influential some alleged mobsters can be. Two members of the ‘Olympic family’, senior Uzbekistan boxing official Gafur Rakhimov and International Basketball Federation vice-president Carl Ching, were refused visas.¹

Hong Kong-based Ching was suspected of being closely linked to

Triad gangs and the Australian press reported at the time that he had also been ‘refused a visa by Canada when trying to attend the 1994 World Basketball Championship in Vancouver due to reasons of ‘‘national security’’²

Ching, it transpired, was a close associate of Eddie T.C. Chan, a

former Hong Kong police officer who fled the territory during a crackdown on corruption in the 1970s. A document from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police identifies Chan as an organised crime figure in New York, whose first main company in the United States, the Continental King Lung Group, was a major money-laundering outlet for the Triads. But, officially, the ‘Group’ was engaged in ‘banking and financing, trading in bullion, trading in securities, computer parts manufacturing, real estate development, insurance business, international trading and entertainment’³

Chan’s son Chan Wing-po later became an assistant to Ching’s

company, Frankwell Holdings, which in the 1990s was closed down in the United States and Britain as a result of investigations into various illegal activities. In 1992, Ching had been one of the organisers of a gangster summit in Hong Kong which brought together representatives from Taiwan’s United Bamboo gang, the 14K and Sun Yee On of Hong Kong, the United States-based Ghost Shadows and the On Leong Merchants’ Association, a Triad cover organisation in New York. But the Hong Kong police raided a couple of rooms in the hotel where the meeting was going to be held, and many mobsters fled the scene.⁴

On other occasions, Ching and Chan have travelled together to

China, wining and dining government officials. High-level connections were established, and a company in which Ching was a director and shareholder traded as a sauna in Hong Kong’s main entertainment district, Tsim Sha Tsui. According to the territory’s police, one of the owners, behind a nominee, was believed to be the son of China’s then military leader, Yang Shangkun.⁵

This symbiotic relationship between China’s military establishment and gangland figures went beyond such mutually beneficial business deals—and even further than low-level espionage on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong—and this became clear when a major scandal broke in the United States in the late 1990s: the so-called Donorgate saga, the revelation that mainland Chinese interests had used shady ‘businessmen’ in Macau to channel funds to the Democrats and former president Bill Clinton’s election campaigns in 1992 and 1996, leading to suspicions that Beijing was trying to buy its way into the White House to gain political influence and acquire advanced technology. None of these ‘businessmen’, who all had a stake in the murkier side of Macau’s casino industry, had any personal interest in

Clinton being re-elected but, in exchange for acting as conduits for

mainland money they would receive unofficial protection from the

Chinese military for their own business interests.⁶

But as America’s Chinatowns grew with the influx of new people

from Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland—and as Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the post-Mao era transformed China completely—it became much less controversial to show loyalty to Beijing, or to maintain contacts with mainland leaders and businessmen. Ching Men-ky, or Carl Ching of the International Basketball Federation, who was denied a visa to visit the 2000 Sydney Olympics, had perhaps shown the way when he and Eddie T.C. Chan, or Chan Tse-chiu who was also known as ‘Fast Eddie Chan’, the Hong Kong police sergeant who had fled the colony in 1974, began to travel United Orient Bank, which had its offices in the headquarters of the On Leong, was actually founded by Ching and Chan.⁷

For a while, the moon-faced Chan was also the executive director of On Leong, and later became the model for one of the main characters in Robert Daley’s novel Year of the Dragon, which was made into a film.⁸

In August 1990, a grand jury in Chicago finally indicted the

national On Leong and its local tong branches in Chicago, New York and Houston along with 27 individuals on charges of racketeering, loansharking, extortion, income-tax evasion, illegal gambling, fraud and murder. Chan was among the listed defendants, but he had already lived up to his nickname ‘Fast Eddie’ and fled the United States in the 1980s after being subpoenaed to appear before the Presidential Commission on Organised Crime. He has reportedly been spotted in China many times since then, and some reports have it that he is living in Vietnam.⁹

But Ching continued to operate more openly, and his 1992 gangster summit in Hong Kong drew some 1000 participants, including overseas representatives from Taiwan, the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Australia. Before the Hong Kong police raided the hotel rooms of some of the more suspect participants, an organization called the United World Chinese Association had been set up.

Its logo consisted of a Chinese dragon draped over a globe. A press release issued by Ching said the meeting had been held to unite all mainland and overseas Chinese with the ultimate goal of ‘promoting the excellent heritage of our ancestors in terms of diligence and creativity’ But the police in Canada, where Ching had had businesses, had a different opinion of the highly unusual Hong Kong businessman and promoter of both Chinese solidarity and international basketball. When he was denied a visa to enter Canada in 1994, it was because he was one of sixteen people the Canadian Commission in Hong Kong had listed in a confidential report as being ‘among the world’s most ruthless criminals’.¹⁰

It was under Uncle Seven’s tutelage that Fast Eddie Chan began to

transform his tong, the On Leong, into a modern organisation capable of engaging in banking and commerce—and, for the first time among the Chinese-Americans, of active participation in mainstream American politics. Before he fled the United States, Chan had established several branches of his United Orient Bank in New York’s Chinatown. When one of them—on Mott Street—was opened in 1983,¹¹

Matilda Cuomo, the wife of New York’s governor at the time, was

present to cut the ribbon. A self-proclaimed Republican, Chan also

contributed generously to the Ronald Reagan/George Bush reelection campaign in 1984.66 And when Edward Koch launched his re-election campaign in 1986, a Chinatown support committee was formed with Uncle Seven and Chan as its main sponsors.¹²

Chan’s disappearance from New York in the 1980s did little to

reverse the new initiatives that he and Uncle Seven had taken. Nor

did it upset the bonds with the People’s Republic of China that Eddie and Carl Ching had forged in the 1980s. Communist (nominally, at least) China had gained a significant foothold in one of the Guomindang’soldest and most solid strongholds in North America.¹³

Like Ng, Wong Sing-wa continued to keep a low profile after the

Donorgate scandal and subsquent disclosures in the American

media—just to resurface in December 1997, when he had opened a

new VIP room in the Lisboa Hotel in partnership with two other

local businessmen, Carl Ching Men-ky and Siu Yim-kwan.¹⁴

Carl Ching is, of course, the same person who ran a sauna in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui in partnership with the son of China’s military leader Yang Shangkun—and who was denied entry to Australia to attend the 2000 Sydney Olympics as an official of the International Basketball Federation. Siu Yim-kwan had been reported as a business partner of the shady wheeler-dealer Albert Yeung of the Emperor Group. Siu was also a major investor in Pearl Orient Holdings, a company that was widely suspected of laundering money for Deng Xiaoping’s family.¹⁵

Chen Kai-kit also resurfaced soon after Donorgate. He landed in the middle of another controversy in early 1998, when it was reported that the Ukraine would sell an unfinished aircraft carrier to a ‘leisure company’ in the then still-Portuguese territory. The Ukraine had inherited the aircraft carrier after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and badly needed hard currency. The registered objective of the Macau company, Agencía Turistica e Diversões Chong Lot Limitada— which in English means ‘Tourism and Amusement Agency’— was to run ‘activities in the hotel and similar areas, tourism and amusement’.¹⁶

But why would such a company need an aircraft carrier? And where would this obscure company get $20 million, which was the price that the Ukraine wanted for the 67 000-tonne vessel? The plot thickened when local journalists discovered that the company’s official address was on a major street in downtown Macau, Avenida da Praia Grande,¹⁷

Extracts from Blood Brothers – Crime, Business and Politics in Asia