Authors: Alex Josey
Involved in this story of gold, smuggling
and murder is a man who smuggled gold bars out of Singapore, and his beautiful
daughter who later smuggled drugs to London. The man was murdered in Singapore
by a gang of greedy men. The girl was sent to jail for 14 years by a British
judge who described her as being ‘little less than an assassin’.
Like the tenth man who betrayed the other
nine members of the gang which killed the gold smuggler and now has to live the
rest of his days with a troubled conscience, the murdered man’s daughter also
faces a future darkened by the thoughts she must have from time to time, of the
lives she helped to ruin with drugs.
VIETNAM WAS IN TURMOIL. A bitter,
costly war was raging between communist guerrillas, and American and allied
forces. In South Vietnam, Saigon, the capital city, had become the most active
black market in the world. Millions of American dollars were in circulation.
People began to think that gold was safer than American dollar bills. By 1970,
many Vietnamese were convinced that the Americans could not beat the guerrillas
from Hanoi; they feared that in these circumstances neither the currency of
South Vietnam nor the American dollar would be worth very much. The far-seeing
in Saigon and elsewhere started to accumulate gold. Few of the thousand
Vietnamese later to receive worldwide publicity as ‘boat people’ fleeing from
oppressive communist rule after the North Vietnamese had taken over the whole
of the country, could have believed that their very lives would depend upon
their gold savings. All they were intent upon then, in the early 70s, was to
turn their assets into gold. American dollars accumulated on the black market
and in soldiers’ brothels, must be turned into gold bars as quickly as possible.
How? Saigon gold merchants were besieged. The sale of gold bars in Vietnam was
forbidden. The demand for gold was intense. Shady enterprising businessmen knew
that the answer was to smuggle gold in from places like Singapore where the
metal was sold freely to non-residents. Ships’ captains and aircraft pilots
were tempted by generous commissions to become smugglers. Millions of American
dollars changed hands. South Vietnam’s privately held stockpile of gold bars
grew higher each month. Many of the boat people would never have left Vietnam
had they not been able to buy their freedom with these gold bars.
This is the story of the murder of a
Singapore gold merchant and his two employees: they sold gold to the
Vietnamese. They were robbed in Singapore of 120 gold bars intended for Saigon.
The plotters knew they had to silence them forever, to prevent them seeking
vengeance. Ten men were involved in the robbery and were responsible for the
cold-blooded murder of three innocent men. Nine of them were found guilty and
seven were hanged, two escaping the gallows because of their extreme youth. To
save his own neck, the tenth man told all. He was a close friend of the chief
plotter. He betrayed him, not for gold, but for his own life. The police
detained him under a law introduced to keep suspected secret society gangsters
in jail indefinitely without trial. In due course, the tenth man will be
released (he might already be free). He will then have to live with his
troubled conscience, for not only did he betray his friend, he also took an
active part in murdering three men.
The house in the Singapore suburb
known as Serangoon
Gardens, where the Chou brothers lived, was quiet and in darkness.
The Christmas decorations, the paperchains and the sprigs of holly had been
taken down, for it was now near midnight on 29 December 1971. Only the
Christmas tree in the corner, fairy lights twinkling, remained. At the special
request of the children, this symbol of the festival that called for goodwill
towards all men, remained. “Just for a few more days, grandma,” they had
pleaded. They were asleep now. So was their grandmother and their young aunt.
Their mother lived in another house. They lived with their father, David Chou,
and his brother, Andrew. David and his wife were divorced.
In the kitchen and in the backyard, 10 men
went quietly about their business. They talked in whispers. They were preparing
to murder three men. The backyard led from the kitchen. It had a concrete floor
and a roof but was open on three sides. Most of the gang did not know the three
men they were to kill. They had been told they were to be beaten and killed and
their bodies thrown into a deep well. The gangsters were to be paid $20,000 for
the job. What most of the gang did not know was that the three men would be
bringing 120 gold bars to the house. The gold bars then were worth about
$500,000. By the time the murderers were hanged, three years later, the value
of the gold bars had increased to over a million and a half dollars.
Five minutes after the three businessmen
handed over the gold bars, they were dead. Doctors gave evidence that they
probably lived two minutes after intense pressure was applied to their
windpipes. Andrew Chou had stipulated that the men were to be strangled. The
job, he said, had to be clean and quiet.
David later told the Court: “I went straight
to my bedroom to check if my children were asleep. I opened the door and found
them asleep. I shut the door. I opened the door of my mother’s bedroom. She was
asleep. So was my sister.” He came back to the backyard and saw the gang
carrying two bodies to a car. Still fearful that his mother would wake up,
David helped to carry the third body. He was anxious for the gang to get out of
the house as quickly as possible. He helped to take the gold bars to another
car. Later, he helped Andrew and Augustine Ang wash the backyard to get rid of
the bloodstains. Then he went to bed. He told the Court: “Soon after 6:30
am
the next morning, I went to the
backyard to feed my fishes and to hang up the bird cages.” Everything seemed
normal. The children were still asleep. The lights on the Christmas tree
twinkled ...
In another part of Singapore, a distraught
wife was searching for her missing husband. He had not come home. She knew he
had gone to deliver gold to the Chous’. At 2:30
am
, they had told her over the telephone that he never
reached them. Where was he? What had happened to him? Not until hours later was
she to know that her husband and two others had been murdered, their beaten
bodies thrown into the fringe of the jungle off Bedok.
This case was to be known as ‘The Gold Bars:
Triple Murder’. Few murder plots seem to have been so badly organised. The idea
of the robbery and murder was conceived by Andrew Chou. He worked for Air
Vietnam and helped the crews smuggle gold to Saigon. His job was to receive the
gold from dealers in Singapore, hand it over to the flight crew, and to receive
from them American dollars in exchange. Chou then passed the money over to the
Singapore gold dealers. He handled hundreds of thousands of dollars and a great
deal of gold. For this work he was paid a commission both by the flight crew
and by the gold dealers. On one occasion, a large sum of money from Saigon was
missing. The travel bag, stuffed with American dollars, was picked up by
another airport worker, and Chou had some difficulty in getting it back. In
fact, he never succeeded in getting all of it back. In consequence, some of the
Singapore gold dealers lost faith in him. They stopped sending out gold through
Chou. This angered him. He decided to seize the next lot intended for Saigon,
and to murder the men bringing it to his house. He asked a friend, Augustine
Ang, a gangster, to arrange for a mob killing. The job should be quiet and
clean, insisted Chou. He promised $20,000 for the job.
In their defence, the Chou brothers and the
gangsters swore they never intended to murder the three men. They said the plan
was to rob them of the gold, then kidnap them and hold them until the gold was
sold. Andrew Chou said Augustine thought up this idea. Augustine had argued
that the gold dealer would never report the robbery to the police because he
would then have to confess that he was engaged in gold smuggling. When Andrew
protested that the dealer would come looking for him, Augustine said that it
would perhaps be better if they did not sell all the gold after the robbery.
Some could be held back so that Andrew could negotiate with the dealer. Andrew
argued that the dealer, being a businessman, would negotiate for the best he
could get out of a bad situation. What happened if, instead, the gold dealer
sent gangsters to beat him up? Augustine assured Andrew that his own gangster
connections would be waiting for them. He was confident the gold dealer would
negotiate, would try to buy back his missing gold.
Andrew told the Court that, in the end, he
agreed with Augustine’s plan. There was to be no violence. He said he left
Augustine to arrange for some gangsters to be at his house to rob the dealer
and to tie up and kidnap the three men. As proof of his insistence that there
should be no violence, Andrew told the Judges that, on the night of the
robbery, when the gangsters arrived, he went into the kitchen and removed a
tray containing knives from the table and put it on the top of a cabinet. He
wanted to make sure that none of the gangsters, or Augustine, could have access
to them. He searched them to satisfy himself none of them carried knives or
weapons. He stressed that the three men with the gold were not to be seriously
hurt. They were to be attacked when Augustine started to count the gold bars,
but they were not to be killed, just tied up and bundled into a car.
One of the glaring weaknesses of this story,
which the Judges refused to believe, was that at no time did the Chou brothers,
or anyone else, explain just where the three men were to be held, or for how
long, or how, and by whom, the negotiations were to be conducted.
Another weakness of the plot, even if it
was, as Chou and the gangsters claimed, a kidnap and not a murder plot, was the
serious possibility that someone in the house that night, their mother, their
sister, or David’s two young daughters, might have awakened and witnessed the
terrifying scene of a gang beating up three men. David, in fact, told the Court
he was most worried about this. He said that even while the gold dealer was on
his way to the house with the gold bars, David tried to persuade his brother
and Augustine to call the whole thing off. Augustine and Andrew were getting
things ready, pieces of nylon rope and pieces of cloth with which to tie up and
gag the three victims.
“Andrew took the pieces of cloth and rope
and put them under the food cover on the dining table. I asked Andrew not to be
involved. What if Mother should wake up? She would faint from shock if she saw
the men being robbed in our home! Augustine and Andrew seemed adamant to carry
out the robbery. I was confused, unhappy and upset. Andrew told me all I had to
do was to help Augustine catch one man. I did not have to be involved in the
robbery.” With a grim sense of humour, Augustine told David not to worry. After
all, he did not have to go down the street to help him catch the man. The man
was coming to the house! Andrew argued with his brother that the quicker the
three men were out of the house the less the risk of their mother getting up.
David should help Augustine catch one man so that the three victims could be
taken away from the house as quickly as possible. “I agreed. I had no choice,”
said David.
In an effort to emphasise that he was
involved in what he believed to be a kidnapping, not a murder plot, David told
the Court that the man he helped carry to the car tried to free himself and
groaned.
The danger of the family waking up during
the attack upon the three men was one possibility for the failure of the plot
(whether murder or kidnapping). Another was the fact that the three men with
the gold arrived in two cars, one a white Mercedes, the other a Volkswagen.
They were parked outside Chou’s house in Chepstow Close. The car which brought
the gangsters, a Cortina, was also nearby. Though Chepstow Close was a very
quiet area, it was unlikely that this concentration of cars would go unnoticed.
It did not. Chou’s next door neighbours, Shirley Lim Yew Neo and her husband,
returned from the cinema at 12:30
am
.
The bodies of the three murdered men were lying in Chou’s backyard. David
called ‘Good evening’ to her as she was opening her door. She saw Andrew
talking to a group of men. She was not to know then that they were grouped
around the bodies of three murdered men. She noticed the white Mercedes and the
Volkswagen.
The trial of the Chou brothers and seven
others took 40 days. The evidence came to 17 volumes running into 4,083
foolscap pages. On Friday, 1 December 1972, Mr A.W. Ghows, the
Solicitor-General, made his final submission. He submitted to the two Judges,
who sat without a jury, that all nine should be found guilty as charged. The
tenth man was Augustine Ang Cheng Siong, Andrew Chou’s close friend. He
confessed to the police that he had been an accomplice from the outset and had
taken part in the murderous attack on the three men. To save his own life, he
had turned State evidence. The police thereupon decided to withdraw the murder
charges against him, and Ang was discharged. The discharge did not amount to an
acquittal, it being the law that a magistrate’s court has no power to grant an
acquittal in such circumstances. Ang was promptly arrested under another law
which permits the Government to hold suspected gangsters without trial
indefinitely.
The two Judges, Justice Chua and Justice
Choor Singh did not take long to make up their minds. On Friday, at the close
of counsel’s submissions, they announced that they would give their verdict the
following Monday morning. They accepted Augustine Ang’s evidence. They said he
was a truthful witness. Accordingly, the Judges convicted all nine accused.
Seven were sentenced to death. Two youths escaped the death penalty because
they were under 18 years old when the murders were committed. They were ordered
to be detained at the President’s pleasure.