Whitey's Payback (7 page)

The
Daily Gleaner
chronicled Morgan’s exploits with blazing headlines, and the youths of West Kingston dreamed of being just like him. “When he gave me his gun to hold,” one youngster was reported to have said, “it made me feel like a general.”

Needle in hand, the junkie named Africa searches his arm for a vein. Any vein will do.

“Tie off, motherfucker,” his friend Leon reminds him.

In his haste to satisfy his need, Africa has forgotten one of the most elementary junkie rituals: wrapping a strip of rubber cord around his bicep so that his veins bulge. That task accomplished, he pierces his right arm. His soft brown eyes lift toward the ceiling. He lies back on his mattress and lets out a long, mournful sigh.

In tiny, dormitory-size rooms in the Marion Hotel on Broadway in Upper Manhattan, Africa and Leon are free to indulge their self-destructive cravings. Both men have been diagnosed as HIV-positive; they are using the nine-story dwelling as a flophouse while they wait to die. Emaciated addicts, many of whom contracted the AIDS virus from using the dirty needles that litter the floors, wander squalid hallways, openly shooting up.

On the fourth floor, in Africa’s room, forty-year-old Leon rhapsodizes about the increased purity of heroine now circulating in New York. A longtime addict, he gives his full endorsement to today’s product: “The shit is slammer.”

Leon’s enthusiasm is understandable. In recent years, the quality and quantity of the dope has indeed been on the rise, as a result of the expanding efforts of a major new supplier: the Hong Kong mob. In Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and other cities, evidence of its success is plain. Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have reported unprecedented seizures of heroin coming into the United States. In Congress, hearings have been held to discuss smokable heroin, a choice for users who shun needles. In hospitals across the country, overdoses are on the rise.

To junkies like Africa and Leon, the identity of their ultimate supplier remains a mystery shrouded by myriad street sellers, mid-level suppliers, and international brokers. For people in law enforcement who follow the drug to its source, the facts are more discernible but far from comforting.

The heroin business is part of a sprawling international empire with its heart in Southeast Asia. Although the empire has existed for centuries, surprisingly little is known about how it works. Law-enforcement officials have struggled for years to understand how the heroin business interconnects with a staggering array of rackets from prostitution, gambling, and money laundering to the smuggling of illegal aliens. Impressed by the vastness of the empire, some have misleadingly dubbed it “the new Mafia.” In law-enforcement circles, federal agents refer to it more pointedly as the Chinese connection.

In the 1980s, as the influence of Cosa Nostra waned, no criminal group in the world made more progress than that of the ethnic Chinese. Since the early 1950s, immigrants have been fleeing social and economic oppression throughout Asia, settling in South and Central America, Australia, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants have shown themselves to be among the most industrious citizens in the world. Although certainly smaller in size, the criminal element among them has proved to be equally industrious.

For decades, these Chinese criminal groups were content to operate within the confines of the world’s Chinatowns, extorting small businessmen, extending usurious loans, and capitalizing on the Chinese community’s insatiable affection for gambling. Today, the burgeoning heroin business has changed all that.

In 1984, Southeast Asian heroin constituted only 5 percent of the market in New York City, home to nearly half the heroin addicts in the United States. By 1989, that total had increased to 80 percent. The purity levels of China white, as the drug is commonly known, are so high that Mexican, Pakistani, and Turkish sources have been virtually eliminated.

Back in 1968, when “Popeye” Doyle shattered the French Connection and seized 246 pounds of heroin with a purity level far below that of China white, the supply dried up and prices soared. The most startling fact of recent years is that even with much larger seizures from coast to coast, junkies around the country hardly seemed to notice.

Says DEA Special Agent Richard LaMagno, who has been investigating the Chinese connection for years, “It’s a whole new game. We’re seeing volume and projected revenues that must make this the most profitable criminal business on the face of the earth.”

The forces behind today’s dope trade form a labyrinthine underworld that begins in the Golden Triangle—the poppy-growing region that encompasses northern Laos, Thailand, and Burma—and spreads to transshipment points in Bangkok, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The controlling interests are diverse, yet for such a vast criminal network to exist, many international law-enforcement agencies suspect the triads, Chinese secret societies founded in the seventeenth century. Originally, an underground political movement formed to overthrow the corrupt Ming dynasty, triads evolved into a criminal brotherhood with similarities to the Sicilian Mafia.

Today, triad societies are spoken of with awe throughout the Far East. They are believed to control virtually all organized crime activity in Hong Kong. Their name derives from the equilateral triangle use as their symbol, representing heaven, earth, and man. Triad membership is for life. Traitors are executed, often with a single bullet to the skull.

The societies are currently facing the biggest challenge in their 300 years of existence. In 1997, the British government’s ninety-nine-year lease on Hong Kong expires, and the territory comes under the control of the People’s Republic of China. When the changeover comes, a considerably less tolerant regime will come with it. Enterprises that thrived under the laissez-faire capitalism could well perish in the grip of a totalitarian regime. Hong Kong’s criminal element is understandably nervous. Already, law-enforcement groups around the world have been warning their governments of an impending triad incursion. In the next five years, triad members may outnumber the Mafia in this country three to one.

To understand why the triad members are running, it helps to pay a visit to Kowloon’s Walled City, the territory’s most notorious ghetto. Located in the shadow of noisy Kai Tak International Airport, the area—as is much of Hong Kong—is a tightly packed enclave of concrete dwellings, just 100 yards wide by 200 yards in length. Within the walls, a maze of dank four-foot-wide passageways leads underground. Overhead, exposed electrical wiring dangles precariously and pipes leak a rust-colored sludge. An occasional concrete stairwell leads into darkness.

In 1842, when China ceded Hong Kong to the British, it claimed jurisdiction over the Walled City. The British apparently felt the compound was more trouble than it was worth and refused to police or even govern its approximately 50,000 inhabitants. Predictably, the area became a triad breeding ground. Opium merchants, child-prostitution rings, and gangsters on the run found refuge here. Other strange activities proliferated, from the practice of unlicensed dentistry to the selling of poisonous snakes.

The Chinese government has made it clear that when it takes over in 1997, it would prefer that the Walled City not be there. In the spirit of cooperation, Crown forces have been slowly evacuating the area. Rodents and alley cats are now the primary inhabitants.

The Walled City is scheduled for demolition, a fate that some believe may await other triad sanctuaries come 1997. Although the homes may be destroyed, the residents and their enterprise will surely move elsewhere.

Tsim Sha Tsui, one of Hong Kong’s many neon-lighted commercial centers, is a prosperous triad stronghold. The fruits of capitalism are amply displayed with glittering jewelry stores, huge shopping malls, and lavish nightclubs jam-packed within a few square blocks. The average citizen probably wouldn’t know by looking at it, but the area is considered to be the domain of Sun Yee On, one of Hong Kong’s largest triads. Many of the stores pay protection money; the nightclubs, bars, and restaurants are guarded by triad bouncers; and a portion of the profits from producing and marketing counterfeit brand-name merchandise goes to Hong Kong gangsters.

Beyond Tsim Sha Tsui, in a small coffee shop on the outskirts of Kowloon, a young Sun Yee On member has agreed to talk. Knowing that the betrayal of his oath is punishable by death, the man—we’ll call him Louie Leung—will answer questions only if his real name is not used and the location of the interview is not described in much detail. “I must warn you,” he tells the interviewer, “if anyone learns of this conversation, both me and you will be in a lot of trouble.”

The motive for Louie’s willingness to talk stems from his dissatisfaction with triad life. Five years earlier, far away in Brooklyn, two fellow Sun Yee On members were executed on the street in the middle of the day. New York police suspect that the murder of Billy Wong Ming-fung and Wong Chi-ming, both twenty-five, arose from a power struggle for control of an illegal casino in Chinatown. The case was never solved, but Leung claims he knows who ordered the killings. “Sun Yee On offices in New York hired professional assassins to murder their own members,” he says.

He goes on to say that he was disgusted that triad officers would order the killing of fellow members. “I was always told that when there are disputes between members, no matter what, we should sit down and work it out. As far as I am concerned, Sun Yee On violated its own oath.” Since the murders, he says, he has tried to avoid triad activities and live a “clean, law-abiding life.”

But Leung’s growing disenchantment with his triad affiliation was a long time coming. Eighteen years earlier, when he was first inducted into Hong Kong’s secret criminal fraternity, he couldn’t have been more proud. Like many youths that have come from poor and working-class families, he was recruited while hanging out in video arcades and playing soccer in his neighborhood.

When Leung was barely a teenager, he was roughed up by a group of gang members and told that if he didn’t want it to happen again, he would have to join their organization. He acquiesced. For one year, he waited to be initiated, a period known in the triad lexicon as “hanging the blue lantern.”

One evening, Leung and a group of twenty or so other youths were rounded up by their
dai lo
, or “big brother,” who had sponsored their memberships. The inductees were scared to death. “There was a small shrine in the room, with a statue of an ancient Chinese warlord. We were each given a stick or two of incense, which was lit. Then we recited the thirty-six oaths, extinguishing one incense after each oath. We all stood in a circle and they pricked our middle fingers with a needle. A drop of blood from each of us was mixed with water in a bowl. The bowl was passed around and we all had to take a drink.”

An egg with a face drawn on it was placed before the group. Each inductee was told to slice the egg with a knife. The egg represented the face of an informer. By cutting the egg with a knife, the triad members pledged to seek vengeance against any member who cooperated with the police.

“From that day forward,” Leung says, “I am a triad soldier, what we call a Forty-Nine. If I talk with anyone outside the group about triad business, my whole family will die. I will be killed by a tiger in the forest. If I go swimming, the fish will eat me.”

Having become part of one of the oldest and most revered criminal organizations in the world, he began practicing the ways of the brotherhood, triad style. “Me and the other Forty-Nines, we meet maybe a few times a month. We discuss new groups operating in our territory. Should we beat them up, take them out? We go to the market for extortion. We take maybe five dollars each from all the small businessmen. When we walk into a restaurant and eat, we don’t pay for the food. We just sign the Sun Yee On symbol on the bill and walk out.”

After eight years of dedicated involvement, Leung was promoted to the prestigious rank 426, or Red Pole fighter. Only the triad leader, or Dragon Head, can authorize such a promotion. In ancient times, the Red Pole was the triad’s most respected warrior, a proletarian symbol of righteousness and liberation. Today, his primary role is to punish triad rule breakers and terrorize shopkeepers who are slow to pay extortion.

“If some brother make a mistake,” he explains, “we slap him in the face and give him a verbal warning. If he don’t listen, we beat him up. Then we cut him. Also, we protect businesses in our territory. One time there was a shooting in some Sun Yee On mah-jongg club. We tell the parties involved, ‘Listen, go make your living somewhere else.’ They didn’t listen, so we went after them.”

Leung is quick to add that, given the triads’ reputation, violence is not often required. Any Hong Kong businessman knows the routine. In fact, many so-called legitimate businessmen are themselves members of a triad, having joined to enhance their chances of succeeding in a highly competitive environment. This relationship between business and criminal elements has been termed the “Chinese waltz,” and it is a dance familiar to any Chinese gangster—from low-level racketeers like Leung to the most powerful international heroin traffickers.

When asked whether or not it would be possible for a professional criminal to exist in Hong Kong without being a triad member, Leung laughs. “Yes, of course. If this person had a death wish.”

The omnipotence of triads is a shared preoccupation in Hong Kong. At least once a week, the
South China Morning News
—the territory’s largest English-language newspaper—contains a triad-related article. Estimates by the Royal Hong Kong Police place membership somewhere around 160,000, or three percent of the population. There are close to fifty triad groups, with turf established along territorial lines.

Typically, rank-and-file membership is composed of working-class kids roped in at a young age, enamored with the triad’s ritualistic trappings and the sense of importance provided by the secret societies. Yet the attractions have proved to be far-reaching, with solicitors, policemen, an occasional legislator, and white-collar types having opted for the triad life.