Despite a long-standing ordinance that prohibits Hong Kong residents from joining secret societies, attending triad meetings, or possessing paraphernalia that in any way relates to their activities, the societies’ broad sphere of influence has consistently bedeviled law enforcement. “We try,” says David Tong, an assistant commissioner with Hong Kong’s Customs and Excise Department, “but so many citizens are fearful and uncooperative.”
Tong’s office on the ninth floor of the Harbor Building overlooks Hong Kong’s port, which hosts a colorful panorama of ferries, junks, sampans, and other seagoing vessels. Gulls sweep the shoreline looking for morsels amid a constant swirl along the docks. The harbor is the world’s second busiest, after Rotterdam, with as many as 5,000 craft passing through each day. For Tong and other lawmen, it is a continuing nightmare.
Shipments of China white are smuggled through Hong Kong’s port every day. Fishing trawlers chug up the coast from Thailand and off-load the dope in the South China Sea. Small junks bring the contraband to Hong Kong’s container terminals, where triad members see that it is unloaded. This pattern was first established a century ago, when the British government systematically foisted tons of opium on an unsuspecting Chinese populace, creating millions of addicts. “Today,” says Tong, “the heroin trade is carryout.”
It would be inaccurate to say that triads control the heroin business. An individual Chinese entrepreneur in the United States can initiate a major deal, whether he is member of a triad or not. It is unlikely, however, that the deal will proceed as smoothly as he would like without some help from the triads. A well-known code phrase or secret handshake associated with the Sun Yee On, 14K, or Wo Hop To triads can consummate a deal. Triad connections move the dope from Hong Kong to Europe and the United States.
The loosely structured manner in which triad affiliations enhance large-scale dope transactions has perplexed some Westerners. Trained on a generation of
caporegime
,
consigliere
, and
capo di tutti capi
, American law enforcement has had a hard time grasping the opaque ways triads operate internationally.
At the street level, of course, the triads function much like criminal mobs everywhere: Gangsters enforce their will through fear and intimidation, and group loyalty is brutally upheld. Unlike the American Mafia, though, which has a rigid corporate structure, upper-echelon triad members are free to initiate criminal projects on their own and use their affiliations as they see fit. “It’s more in the nature of a brotherhood like the Freemasons than a Mafia family,” says a senior officer with the Hong Kong police.
Over the years, triads have firmly established their role as an integral part of free-market capitalism, but they can play the other side of the fence as well. In the face of competition from American and European expatriates, for instance, some Chinese businessmen have exploited the triad mystique while espousing the belief that it represents a sacred historical tradition.
But that game is just about over. Now that they face the prospect of a hostile government at the century’s end, triad members are eager to make one final big killing under the old regime. To do so, they are pushing their drug trade with extraordinary vigor. It is, quite literally, their passport to the world.
In New York City’s Chinatown, the prospect of Hong Kong’s impending change in status has already begun to reshape the community’s traditional boundaries. Elaborate triad-run smuggling networks, in which illegal aliens pay huge fees to be shuttled through Canada and Central America, are flourishing as never before. Adjacent neighborhoods like Little Italy, once a Mafia stronghold, have been pressured by immigrants from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and other Asian ports of call.
For many years, Chinatown’s ruling structure has remained the same. Tongs (business associations) dole out jobs and housing to loyal members. Violent street gangs, allegedly controlled by the tongs, uphold territorial boundaries. Whether or not an infusion of triad gangsters will unsettle this balance of power is a source of much debate.
According to Leung in Hong Kong, one triad has already begun to stake its claim. On frequent visits to New York, he says, he has met many fellow Sun Yee On members. “One guy,” he contends, “a Red Pole fighter, was sent to Chinatown for one reason: to oversee the migration of Sun Yee On into the United States. The vessel they hope to use, he says, is the Tsung Tsin Association, one of Chinatown’s wealthiest tongs. Situated in the heart of Chinatown, the association’s seemingly placid, nondescript redbrick facade is the perfect cover for one of Chinatown’s liveliest gambling dens.
In 1988, infighting over a Tsung Tsin Association election led to a number of shootings. One longtime member filed a lawsuit alleging that fraud and bribery tainted the election of the association president, Tony Ng. The lawsuit claimed that Ng had been placed in office by Paul Lai, a former president and current association “adviser for life.” According to Leung, both Ng and Lai are Sun Yee On members, having been initiated into the society in a secret Hong Kong ceremony.
The fraud and bribery charges against Lai were never proved, but in a 1988 judicial hearing, even more serious allegations were raised. A lawyer for the complainant accused Lai of hiring a gang of thugs, whom he housed in an apartment on the fourth floor of the association. When asked about his triad affiliation, Lai denied even knowing what the word meant.
The possibility that one of Hong Kong’s largest triads has already penetrated Chinatown presents a daunting challenge for American law enforcement. In the past, the Chinese community was always allowed to monitor itself. Only when gang violence spilled out into the street did police intervene, and even then charges were haphazardly pursued. To many, Chinatown’s peculiar isolation stemmed from a tacit agreement between cops and the tongs, well known for their ability to grease a palm when necessary.
Leung says, “Sun Yee On wants to follow the Hong Kong style. You have to understand, Chinatown is not Hong Kong. They know they must move slow and make all the right contacts so they can place their people in power.”
With few Asian cops or agents, American law enforcement is ill equipped to deal with criminal developments in Chinatown. In their attempts to understand triad groups, many of which speak different dialects, police have to deal with a closed and distrustful Chinese community, the product of years of neglect.
Any Chinese citizen who is pondering whether or not to cooperate with
low fan
, as Caucasian police are sometimes disdainfully known, might want to consider the case of Steven Wong. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Chinatown, Wong infiltrated the United Bamboo, a powerful Taiwan-based triad, in 1985. Neither a cop nor a criminal in a bind, Wong was simply a citizen fed up with the stranglehold criminal groups had on legitimate businesspeople in Chinatown when he agreed to help in a police investigation.
“Every day I would read the Chinese newspapers,” says Wong. “I see the problem. Kids dropping out of high school, being gunned down. We have ninety-nine percent of our population living in fear of the one percent who are bad.”
Posing as a Chinese gangster with Mafia connections, Wong worked his way into the inner sanctum of the United Bamboo, a group with deep-rooted political connections in the Taiwanese government. Wearing a recording device strapped to the small of his back, he even recorded his initiation into the triad, the first time any such event had ever been taped by cops in the United States.
With a lean, muscular physique and steely glare, Wong approached his undercover duties like a method actor preparing for the role of a lifetime. Since he was a teenager, he had wanted to be a cop. Throughout the investigation, says Wong, agents and prosecutors constantly reassured him there would be a job for him in law enforcement when the case was over. “They tell me, ‘Steven, you’re a hero. We can use you.’ ”
By the time FBI agents made their arrests of eleven United Bamboo members, Wong had risked his life making heroin deals and even contracting to commit a murder. The case was tried in federal court using the RICO statutes. Wong was grilled on the witness stand by eleven defense attorneys, who accused him of being, among other things, a Communist agent and a lifelong gangster.
The trial resulted in the only conviction of a major triad group in U.S. history. Afterward, Wong inquired about his job. “They told me, ‘Mr. Wong, you are not eligible for a police job because you were a member of a criminal organization.’ ” Wong was dumbfounded. He had joined the United Bamboo solely as part of the investigation.
Having testified against his fellow Chinese, Wong was ostracized in the community. The FBI told him there was a contract out on his life. He was offered relocation through the Witness Protection Program, which he refused, asking, “Why should I have to live my life in hiding, like a criminal?”
Today, Wong works in a restaurant outside New York. He rarely shows his face in the city before midnight; his memories of the United Bamboo case haunt him. “They never did let me be a part of the team,” he says of the cops, agents, and prosecutors he worked with. “They never trusted me because I was not one of them. To me, Chinatown was at stake. But they didn’t care about anything except improving their careers.”
If Chinese organized crime were still only a Chinatown problem, American lawmen would not be sounding alarm bells. The fact that second- and third-generation Chinese-American criminals have branched out, however, is impossible to ignore. There was a time when Chinese heroin dealers made distribution arrangements only with Italians. Now, police sources say, the Chinese are willing to deal directly with Dominican and African-American groups, the primary street-level distributors of China white. The Mafia, no longer the feared presence it once was, has been relegated to a lesser role.
Far away from New York, in hill regions of the Golden Triangle, fields of poppies are in bloom. The plant’s slender four-foot stems are topped with brilliant, multicolored petals and a core bulging with opium. DEA intelligence reports say that the last three years have produced record crops of raw opium sap, which is extracted and used as the base ingredient for heroin.
In many ways, the drug trade is just an example of the way the Hong Kong Mob has always done business, and it is the base for the triad’s international expansion. By exploiting their connections throughout the world, heroin brokers reap huge profits, which they in turn launder through Hong Kong banks or use to finance multimillion-dollar real-estate deals. “Some traffickers are quite well regarded,” explains a Hong Kong investigator with triad expertise. “To them, heroin is just a commodity like sugar. You could put it on the stock exchange. These people don’t have to look at users on the street in Washington, D.C., or New York. They aren’t concerned with some poor black kid in Harlem. It’s just a business, plain and simple.”
Junkies all across America have reason to rejoice. Soon, the latest shipments of China white will be blanketing their neighborhoods. A new generation of heroin addicts is about to be born.
In the Marion Hotel, Africa cooks up a righteous batch. This time, he remembers to tie off. The needle is poised; a vein is bared. Down the hall, a junkie moans, his voice reverberating through an open window and out into the street.
Africa is asked if he ever wonders about the origins of his dope.
“Who gives a fuck?” he replies. The needle enters his vein with a pop.
By the time Mafia capo Peter Chiodo looked up from under the hood of his Cadillac, he had already been shot once in the ass. Weighing in at 547 pounds, Chiodo was an easy target. On a clear afternoon in May 1991, after he had stopped at Pellicano’s gas station on Staten Island to check his engine, a car screeched into the station and two men jumped out, guns ablaze.
Despite being hit, Chiodo pulled a weapon from inside his jacket and managed to return fire. An auto mechanic standing nearby dove under the Cadillac for cover as the gunmen chased Chiodo around the gas station shooting indiscriminately, riddling the blubbery Mafioso with twelve bullets. Chiodo finally fell flat on his back. As blood oozed from his wounds, somebody stole his gun. Then a neighborhood onlooker ran up and exclaimed, “Geez! What a shoot-out!”
The shooting of Peter Chiodo may not have been the sloppiest Mob hit in history, but it ranks right up there. Even with Chiodo’s girth and lack of mobility, the hit men failed to get the job done. Four months later, Chiodo was wheeled into a New York courthouse. Understandably perturbed by the attempted hit, he turned stool pigeon, testifying about a huge racketeering scheme that allowed four of New York’s five Mafia families to seize control of the New York Housing Authority’s profitable window-replacement businesses. He also described his own lucrative career as the Mob’s man in control of the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades, a job that frequently involved intimidation and murder.
Chiodo’s rise and fall eloquently symbolizes the pathetic state of Cosa Nostra, circa 1992. He was a powerful capo grown fat on his own success; he was the intended victim in yet another inept Mob hit resulting in yet another high-level informer; and he was a murderous criminal who was allegedly reformed through his act of contrition and became a card-carrying member of the federal Witness Protection Program. Today, for the first time in history, there may be more “made men” in the criminal justice system than there are on the street.
“Yeah, you could say the Mob is all fucked up,” says Joe Pistone, a former FBI agent who went undercover as a Mafioso for six years. “There was a time when a guy was supposed to get whacked, he got whacked. Now they even have trouble getting that right.”
Henry Hill, the wiseguy whose years in the Mob were immortalized in the movie
Goodfellas
, says, “It’s a horseshit life, the Mob. Always was. I guess more and more guys are starting to see the way they get treated.”