JARIUS BONDOC: PING IMMORALIZED IN BOOK ON TRIADS
MANILA, April 28, 2004 (STAR) GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc - Terry Gould has written scores of articles on organized crime. As an investigative journalist in Vancouver, he covered gang wars and cocaine trades, police busts and court dramas. He analyzes the motivations for mischief of criminal minds, for which he has received 38 awards in Canada. Nothing obsesses Gould, however, than the "untimely death" of a young, unseemly Chinese street pug. So much so that he wrote a 500-page tome, Paper Fan: The Hunt for Triad Gangster Steve Wong.Why would a journalist – and Canadian Mounties and insurance investigators, too – hunt a dead man? For the most obvious reason: he isn’t dead at all. Gould is sure of it. He knows Steven Lik Man Wong like the back of his hand. They had met when the gangster was still a middle-level soldier of the 14K Triad in Vancouver’s Chinatown. It was 1989, and Wong was hustling a quartet of Gould’s students in English as Second Language, an adjustment course for teenage kids of immigrants newly arrived in the West. Gould’s wards were being recruited as street pushers, and he was instinvtively protective of them. He knew what ganglife would amount to; his own grandpa had been a Mafiosi in Brooklyn where he grew up, and had brought agony and shame to his Jewish clan. Gould witnessed Wong in action as a street fighter when attacked by rival pugs, and decided to write about and film a tele-docu on his Red Eagles gang.
The writer-subject relation developed into friendship. Gould learned more and more about Wong’s life and times as supervisor of a garage and security service that fronted for the 14K’s many rackets: extortion, drugs, gambling, smuggling, murder for hire. The gangster enjoyed the publicity, showing off his Triad tatoos on television, though with face shrouded. The city police in turn used the articles and tele-docu to tail Wong. Three years later they got him for attempted drug smuggling. Wong was 28. It was the first time, since he started a life of crime at 11, that he was to stand trial.
The judge was lenient. Before the first hearing, Wong applied for leave to fly to Hong Kong to meet the parents of a girl he was about to wed. He got his passport back, took out a $1-million insurance, and hied off to the Crown Colony with another girlfriend. He then flew to Negros where a Canadian gangmate was vacationing with a Filipina fiancée. Pampered and high-living Wong hired a rickety tricycle to tour the rebel-infested mountainside. In the rain, the trike flipped over and Wong banged his head on a rock. A police chief from two towns away typed out a report. The gangmate’s father-in-law-to-be, an influential lawyer, secured a death certificate. Wong’s remains were cremated at the Bacolod cemetery, and shipped to Vancouver. It was all a scam. Bacolod didn’t even have a crematorium. But Wong avoided being sentenced along with his cohorts.
Gould retraced Wong’s steps in Hong Kong and Negros low life. It took him to the 14K operations in the new casinos at the Thai-Cambodian border. He ended up in Macau, at the Lisboa Casino Hotel of Stanley Ho, in Canadian and US files as a 14K boss. Paper Fan reads like a Hollywood movie. It is also a historical piece on the birth of the Triads, the Opium Wars and how the British Commonwealth sponsored the drug trade at first, and the way the gangs were able to corrupt Asia’s police and judges.
Of sure interest to Filipino readers are chapters on Ping Lacson, former head of the National Police and touted anti-drug chief, but who is himself accused of narcotrafficking. Gould had found Wong in Macau. But Canadian authorities took too long to issue warrants of arrest. By the time they did, Wong had reportedly fled to Manila, where he had wormed his way into the National Bureau of Investigation as one of 5,000 Confidential Agents. Gould sought Lacson’s help; the general, after all, had trusted men in the NBI from his days as head of the Anti-Organized Crime Task Force. But the May 2001 assault on Malacañang caught up with them.
Gould returned to Manila in Feb. 2003, again to ask Lacson to smoke out his prey. Despite all the evidence, arrest warrants, and two long years of checking with sources, all Lacson would tell him was that Wong was dead alright. Gould sought out NBI chief Reynaldo Wycoco, who had then just fired 500 CAs in Manila and was preparing to disband the rest in the provinces. Wong wasn’t in the files, but he certainly would join the hunt. More so since at three recent huge drug busts involved Chinese Canadians.
Gould then met with Mary Ong, who had worked 12 years as money launderer for crime syndicates, then eight years as undercover narc agent for Lacson, who had condenamed her Rosebud. She instantly recognized Wong from Gould’s photographs, describing his build and tatoos. Lacson had ordered her in 1995, three years after Wong’s "death", to set up the gangster for arrest. Rosebud traced Wong to a female drug smuggler surnamed Figueroa-Coo, who in turn was connected to a Cavite political family close to Lacson. The operation was terminated; no arrests were made. Gould began to understand why Lacson didn’t help him. He also remembered reading, during a previous Manila visit, that then-President Joseph Estrada had cleared potential foreign investor Stanley Ho of drug links on the say-so of Lacson.
Lacson will cry as usual that Paper Fan is another black propaganda to derail his presidential bid. More so since the book came off the Random House press in March, in the middle of the election campaign. But that will not douse Gould’s hot inside dope. Apart from word that the book will not be available in Manila until August way after the election (except through amazon.com), Gould was introduced to Lacson by the latter’s executive assistant Jerome Tang. In a search for contacts high up in Manila, Gould had hit upon coincidence. His wife’s office secretary in Canada happened to be Tang’s daughter and Lacson’s godchild. One of many photographs at the center of the book shows the author arm in arm with Lacson and Tang at a dinner on April 24, 2001.
* * *
E-mail: jariusbondoc@workmail.com
Reported by: Sol Jose Vanzi
© Copyright, 2003
by PHILIPPINE HEADLINE NEWS ONLINE
All rights reserved