Authors: Alex Josey
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Assistant Supt. Ranjit Singh, a prosecution
witness, testified that when he took over as head of SIS in November 1976, he
had also taken over all the items which were kept in the SIS safe. He received
a total of 31 items relating to 17 cases, but none of the items were exhibits
from the gold bars case.
Mr Chan on oath denied he had instructed
Inspector Oh to put the money in fixed deposit in the inspector’s name. Mr Chan
testified that by the time the claimant’s solicitors wrote to the
Attorney-General’s Chambers, it was clear that the claimant had a valid claim
for at least $29,000. Asked by Oh’s counsel whether the reason for initially
putting the money in a fixed deposit was that he wanted to generate interest
for the Poor Box, Mr Chan replied that he could not now recall how the question
arose. But he recalled it was more the question of easy availability of the
money that was discussed. The question of interest was to the best of his
knowledge, incidental. Asked if it would not have been easier to retain the
money and then release it to the solicitors, Mr Chan recalled that the
solicitor had asked for a cheque, and he had confirmed in writing that payment
would be by cheque. Mr Chan said that because of the long time which had
elapsed and the many discussions he had with Oh, he could not remember most of
what happened then. Mr Chan said he never instructed Oh to put the money on
fixed deposit in Oh’s name. “So far as I was concerned, I took it that he would
deposit the money in accordance with whatever regulations that governed this.”
Mr Chan could not recall asking Oh about the balance of $3,550.
On 7 May 1980, Inspector Oh was acquitted.
Senior District Judge, Michael Khoo, said that the prosecution had failed to
prove that Inspector Oh did not hand the money over to the then head of the
SIS, Deputy Superintendent T.C. Perreau. Mr Khoo, however,
stressed that his finding was not in any way to be
interpreted as casting
any aspersion on the integrity of Perreau.
Perreau died in 1977. The Judge said that in his statements, Inspector Oh had
defended himself by saying he had handed over the money to the proper officer,
Perreau. “The onus in this case lies not on him to prove that he had handed
over the money, but on the prosecution that he had not done so. Until this is
proved, a presumption of misappropriation or criminal breach of trust does not
arise ... it is for the prosecution to establish by definite and clear evidence
that the case for the defence is untrue.” The Judge said that it was
unfortunate that Perreau had died, but in any event this had the same effect
for both the prosecution and the defence. The prosecution was unable to prove
that Inspector Oh did not hand over the money, while the defence could not
substantiate its claim that the money was given. The Judge pointed out that if
he accepted the prosecution’s case as reasonable and called the defence, and
Inspector Oh elected to remain silent without calling witnesses, he would have
to convict Oh. “This, I find, I will be unable to do in all the circumstances
of the case and on the evidence before me.” He ordered Inspector Oh to be
acquitted.
Charged
with being a member
of a notorious heroin-smuggling
gang operating in Singapore, Malaysia and London, May Wong in December 1976
pleaded guilty. She explained that she had infiltrated the gang, the Overlords,
in an effort to track down the men behind the murder of her father in
Singapore.
She confessed that she became an essential
operator in the gang’s drug network in London. Between 250 and 900 drug addicts
depended upon her for regular supplies. Within seven months of her arrival in
Britain early in 1975, May was banking £9,000 (S$37,500) a day. She lived
extravagantly. One report said that her dresses cost an average of $300 and
were exclusively designed. She had only a few pieces of jewellery, but these
were very expensive. Her lover owned Saville Row-tailored suits. He wore Pierre
Cardin shoes. On his wrist was a solid gold watch.
On 26 October 1976, May walked into a police
trap at Heathrow Airport when she returned from a visit to Singapore. She was
charged with conspiring with others to bring £500,000 worth of heroin into
Britain. She pleaded guilty. She spent 15 months on remand in Holloway Prison.
After their arrest, May and her lover, Li
Jaafar Mah, collaborated with the police. Li Jaafar Mah led the police to an
unoccupied flat in North London which they had used as a warehouse to stock
heroin. The police found £700,000 worth of the drug and two automatic pistols
with ammunition. Two red account books in which May methodically kept
day-to-day records of heroin sales and the names of purchasers were also seized
by the police. These led to the arrest of her street-pushers and small-time
dealers. This did not result in the collapse of the gang. May Wong was no more
than a wholesaler working for the unknown Overlords who were extremely efficiently
organised. May Wong and her distributors dropped out. Others would take their
places. Heroin-smuggling is a profitable business. May is believed to have
earned more than $300,000 in her few months as a heroin wholesaler in London.
“Born,” as the Judge said, “with a golden
spoon in her mouth, expensively educated in the best schools in Britain,” May
Wong turned her back on her husband and three children to become, in the words
of the prosecution, ‘little less than an assassin’ through the sale of heroin.
Why? Vengeance—so she said. She believed that others had masterminded her
father’s killing. Only their ‘hirelings’ had been punished. From her own source
in Penang she learned that the Overlords (a Malaysia-Singapore crime
organization) knew the identities of those behind her father’s murder. She
discovered that an all-girl crime group known as the Butterfly Gang (they had a
butterfly tattooed on the inside of their upper thighs), operating in a
nightclub in Singapore, had links with the Overlords. She decided to make
contact with the Butterflies. She began work in the nightclub as a hostess.
Several months later she was accepted as a member of the gang and sent on
heroin-delivery errands to contacts in London and Amsterdam.
Then May met Mah in Singapore; he was four
years her junior. He worked for the Overlords. He owed them $125,000 and was
distributing heroin for them to repay the debt. The organization decided that
May should become a distributing agent in London. Mah went with her.
She was in Singapore when Mah was picked up
by the police. They trapped her into returning and she was arrested at the
airport. A newspaper report said that except for cursing the police in foul
language for tricking her, May remained calm and controlled. When she was being
interrogated later, she laughed and joked with the police. One policeman said
that there was no mistaking May as the boss of operations. “She is as hard as
nails, cold and ruthless. When the others, including Mah, were buckling under
the shattering experience of being arrested, May remained cool and smiling.
Unlike the others who were worried and asked about the number of years they
could expect to serve in jail, May hardly asked any questions.”
May sobbed uncontrollably in the dock when
her counsel, Mr J.P. Harris, QC, told her story in his plea for leniency. He
revealed that May had never been able to penetrate the inner circle of the
Overlords in her efforts to find out who ordered her father’s murder. Counsel
said: “When May left for Singapore in October before her arrest, she had come
to a point where she felt she could go no further in the investigations. She
had never meant to return to London, or to continue her heroin distribution
there anymore and had taken, without Mah’s knowledge, almost all her valuable
belongings with her back to Singapore.”
He submitted that it was because she was
concerned about the welfare of Mah (pretending to be a friend of May’s, the
police had telephoned her to say that Mah had been involved in a serious
accident), that she had returned to London, to walk into the police trap.
“Concerned about Mah?” said the sceptical police. “Nonsense. She was worried
about the heroin stored at her warehouse. The woman is ruthless. The heroin
meant money to her. She didn’t know that Mah had already told us where the
warehouse was.”
Did May Wong (her full name was Wong Shing
Mooi), fabricate the entire story of her penetration of the Overlords, or was
there a grain of truth in it? If it was sheer invention, why did she create it?
The best explanation seems to be that May knew she would get a long prison
sentence unless she could convince the Judge that all her wicked activities had
been motivated by a loving daughter’s determination to bring the real murderers
of her father to justice. To find them she was willing even to leave her
husband and children and to become a nightclub hostess and even to dabble in
heroin!
Wisely, her counsel did not dwell upon all
this in his plea for clemency. Briefly he told the story of the life of this
beautiful, ruthless woman. He said that Wong, mother of two, aged 10 and three,
and an adopted daughter, aged six, came from a wealthy Hong Kong family who
settled in Singapore in 1960. Born in Selangor, she had been educated both in
Singapore and at Roedean, an exclusive girls’ school in England. When her
grandmother died she was told to return to Singapore, where she sat for her ‘O’
level examinations. Then she went back to London to attend a finishing school
in Kensington. In London she attended a modelling school. On her return to the
Far East she opened her own boutique and a beauty culture and modelling school
in Penang. She married in 1966. Her husband was a business executive.
Mr Harris said that May Wong’s ‘stranger
than fiction’ story began on 29 December 1971 when her father, a bullion dealer
and merchant, and two of his assistants were murdered by members of the ‘Gang
of Overlords’. Seven of the nine murderers had been hanged in Singapore. After
her father’s death, May and her mother (according to Wong) had received
anonymous telephone threats. One kidnap attempt was made on her family.
While working in her beauty salon, May said
she heard stories of girl couriers being employed by the Overlords to bring
heroin into Amsterdam. She suspected the same gang was involved in
masterminding the murder of her father. So she left her husband, giving him the
excuse that she wanted to stay with her mother in Singapore. In Singapore, May
became a hostess in a nightclub because she hoped her work would bring her into
contact with people who could give her more information about the Overlords.
Mah was one of her clients at the nightclub.
She learned that he had connections with the Overlords in the drug trade. She
said she did not love him but agreed to go with him to Britain in the hope that
in her association with him, she would obtain more information which would help
her track down the men who ordered her father’s killing. She arrived in London
in March 1975. She made trips to Amsterdam with Mah. She acted on his instruction,
and because the Overlords demanded ‘strict accounting’ she helped Mah keep two
red account books on the drug sale transactions. She did not realise how deeply
involved she was getting by helping Mah in his work. In early October, she
decided to return to Singapore for good. Mr Harris said: “Wong had reached a
point where she felt she could not go further. She packed up most of her
possessions and returned to Singapore on 6 October.” Mr Harris appealed to the
Judge to show compassion and to give her some hope for the future.
The Judge disbelieved her story and
sentenced her to jail for 14 years. Judge Argyle said he had come to the
conclusion that May Wong and her lover Mah were undoubtedly the main
ringleaders in a multi-million-dollar heroin-smuggling racket. The Judge said
he did not accept the truth of her story that she infiltrated a criminal gang
to avenge the murder of her father. “You did it to get money,” he said.
Including both May Wong and Mah in his remarks, the Judge added: “You have become
the spreaders of crime, diseases and even deaths. You have walked in the valley
of the shadow of death.”
In March 1980 in the Penang High Court, May
Wong was divorced by her husband on the grounds of desertion.
ONE OF THE MYSTERIES OF THIS BRUTAL,
ill-planned murder plot was how it was possible for three middle-aged men to be
attacked, beaten and strangled by a gang of nine thugs in the compound of a
bungalow without waking the other four occupants, a middle-aged woman, her daughter
(in her 20s) and two young girls. The three men fought for their lives. They
struggled and shouted. One pleaded for mercy. There were noisy blows and
groans, and sounds of scuffling. The women and the children slept through it
all. One explanation could be that it was all over in less than five minutes.
The Solicitor-General suggested that the
failure of the plot was because the gangsters who were recruited were
incompetent (he used the word irresponsible). Had they been efficient and
experienced they would have realised the importance of disposing of the bodies.
The Solicitor-General argued that had the bodies been thrown down a deep well
the police might never have found them, or when found the bodies might have
been unrecognizable. As it was, the bodies were tossed into the fringe of the
jungle, one into a pond, where they were soon found and recognized, the police
quickly determining that the three men had been murdered.
Did the Chou brothers and the other plotters
plan this part of the operation carefully? Did they calculate that the bodies
would not be found for some time, and that when found they should not be
recognised? They must have known that in the tropics bodies decompose within a
matter of hours. Were they counting on this? There was no evidence that the
plotters placed any special emphasis upon the importance of getting rid of the
bodies quickly and finally. There was a great deal of evidence about dumping
the bodies, throwing them away, but none of the plotters or the gang recruited
to dispose of the bodies stressed the vital need for this to be done
efficiently and thoroughly. The very success of the whole plot depended upon
the bodies not being found in a recognizable condition, but nobody involved in
the murders apparently mentioned it.