Drugs and corruption

Hong Kong's web of death

George Patterson

A good police force, it has been said, is one where more crooks are caught than are employed. By this standard the colony of Hong Kong is ill-served by its police, for constables alone are reported to take £3 million a year from 10,000 poor illegal hawkers. One informant has said that it is possible for a police officer td make more in one corrupt transaction than he could darn honestly in twenty years' service. Recent reports in the world's press about the scale of bribes made to European police officers in Hong Kong are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For a chief superintendent such as the recently defecting Peter Godber to acquire over £300,000 in a few years — and more is quoted for police and other officials above that level — indicates a source of funds for purposes of corruption on a scale that should cause serious thought to be given by any government dealing with other potentially corrupted governments of South-East Asia, and police departments everywhere. For the Hong Kong Government up till now has tacitly connived through its corrupt police force in misleading international bodies — from Interpol to International Narcotics Control — regarding any matter that had been adequately paid for. It is less embarrassing for the Hong Kong Government to have Godber with £300,000 in England than to have him in Hong Kong naming administration officials who have taken more.

In the recently released report of the Commission of Inquiry set up to inquire into allegations of widespread corruption that the administration could no longer ignore, the presiding Judge, Sir Alexander Blair Kerr, declared: In 1971 the cases against 59 officers for suspected corruption were referred by the Anti-Corruption Office to other authorities for possible disciplinary action From an examination of the files of the Establishment Secretary It appears that during the year 1971, only 1 officer was dismissed as a result of disciplinary action and the services of 1 other officer were terminated. As regards 1972, the Anti-Corruption Office referred 91 officers for possible disciplinary action. Only four officers were in fact dismissed by disciplinary action during that year.

So it is not just the Hong Kong police who are corrupt. The report continues: . . .

The same applies to the Commerce and Industry, Immigration, Housing and Labour Departments, and the New Territories Administration . . .

According to a Hong Kong public better informed than its administration there are three options laid before each policeman and official on joining the Hong Kong Government. (i) "Get on the bus": i.e., if you wish to accept corruption, join us; (ii) "Run alongside the bus": i.e., if you don't wish to accept corruption, it doesn't matter, just don't interfere; (iii) "Never stand in front of the bus": i.e. if you try to report corruption the 'bus' will knock you down and you will be injured or even killed or your business will be ruined. The syndicates who are behind the criminal 'buses' are themselves protected at the highest level. The scale of the money involved, the high-level graft and corruption, and the complexity of the operations does not only derive from the regular pay-offs by gambling, prostitution, extortion or other 'mini-crime' operations — although these are estimated conservatively to produce some £300 million a year on their own in Hong Kong itself. It is the narcotics and illicit gold smuggling, intricately enmeshed in banks and commercial firms, which provide the 'real' profits and ensure that the various criminal machines are kept well-oiled and free from official interference—as well as providing prime ministers, presidents and generals throughout South-East Asia with generous retirement benefits. It has been estimated by a US Senate Sub-Committee that some US $2,000 million annually flows back through Hong Kong in profits from narcotics. There is nothing new or surprising about

this except for the recently increased maein" tude of the operations. Within ten years of being founded Hong Kong was in the control of the triad, or secret society, organisations who operate the various syndicates, and, before the end of the nineteenth centurY, legislative councillors, an attorney-general and a superintendent of police were all involved in drug-financed corruption. The difference between then and now was that something was done about it and the men punished. Already in 1868 almost 200 tons Or opium a year was being shipped annuallY from Hong Kong to California — and there are more ships, more planes and more than 20, .million overseas Chinese businessmen around since then.

A spokesman for the US Bureau of Norco. tics and Dangerous Drugs, testifying before a Senate Foreign Relations sub-committee declared categorically: The port of Hong Kong is without question one 0! the world's great drug centres and the prime transit centre through which South-East Asian here moves to the rest of the world . . .

A known number of 11,000 junks constantly move in and out of Hong Kong's harbours. Each year 8,000 ocean-going vessels arrive in Hong Kong carrying approximately 25,000,000 (twenty-five minion) tons or cargo and over 24,000 passengers. Hong Kong airport is serviced by 28 international airlines, which fly out more than 400 flights weekly. Some 2-3 million passenger's pass through the airport terminal in both directions each year. On top of this Hong Kong is an exceedingly active financial centre where traffickers can always find funds for a price — to finance any operation . . .

But this only describes the possible channels of drug trafficking, and not how it operates; like describing the bones of a skeleton, but not the person. To do this one has to. have an intimate knowledge of several other interlocking factors, in a depth beyond the scope of this article — such as: (9' The historical factors behind the Chinese emigration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which demonkrated the ordinary Chinese person's conviction that only clan and community organisationS (triads) could put pressure on or buy off

government officials; ' (ii) the part played by those triads (or secret societies) in the immigrant organisation and distribution, and the willing acceptance bY those 23 million overseas Chinese that the triads are the cement holding the communities together (a recent commissioner of police in Hong Kong estimated that one person In six in Hong Kong was a triad member); (iii) the emergence of Hong Kong and Singapore as international finance centres in the past ten years; (iv) the emergence of Chinese financiers in gold bullion trading and smuggling in the past five years, plus the network of small Chinese money-lenders, traders and middlemen throughout Asia; (v) the Vietnam war, which not onlY provided tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of addicts, but also transport, organisation and unlimited opportunities at all levels in Indochina to increase the cultivation and widen the distribution of narcotics;

(vi) the US Government clamp-down on the Turkish opium farmers two years ago, which increased the demand for 'Chinese heroin' from South-East Asia;

(vii) the rapid Common Market expansion which permitted giant trailer-containers to move bonded goods, including heroin, without inspection from Turkey across Europe to the West;

(viii) the political interests of the various competing factions such as, for example, State Department CIA: Taiwan's Foreign Affairs /Intelligence Department among the Kuomintang remnant troops in North Burma (about 6,000 hardcore, recently involved in top-level rivalry with the betrayal of the notorious 'King of the golden triangle,' 1,0 Hsing-an) who convoy the narcotics; the

Chinese Communists' interest in gold in Macao/Hong Kong versus their official disapproving attitude towards narcotics (for example, it was possible for them to stop Hong Kong junks using US diesel engines during the Cultural Revolution by forbidding them fishing rights; theoretically, therefore, it Should be just as easy to stop drug smuggling by the same junks — but this would mean stopping the gold smuggling as well).

The above, with other factors, flesh out the skeleton of the Hong Kong organisational framework as the centre of narcotics smuggling and corruption. In his authoritative book, The World of Gold, Timothy Green writes of the international organisation of gold smuggling:

With so much at stake (US$100 billion), gold smuggling is not a business to dabble in; it is, in fact, closely controlled and efficiently operated by a network of five main syndicates, each with several trusted agents. Three of the syndicates work out of Beirut, handling the Middle Eastern, African and Par Eastern demand; another smaller one centred in Prance looks after European smuggling and does some business in India and the Far East; the fifth is Primarily responsible for South America but has some Far Eastern contacts . •

It is only recently, with the emergence of the overseas Chinese in the top echelons of gold smuggling that the gold syndicates have become associated with drugs. Previously, no Middle Eastern or Western gold syndicate would touch the drug traffic, would not travel on the same planes, and have even been known to tip off the police about a 'white Powder courier.' To quote Timothy Green again:

The most sinister source of revenue for gold is drugs. The main drug passing westwards to Dubai is hashis, which the smuggling dhows pick up in Pakistan and to a lesser extent in India. From Dubai camel caravans carry it across the deserts into Saudi Arabia, Muscat and South Arabia; planes Speed it to Beirut and into the drug networks Of Europe . . Gold smugglers always vehemently deny that they have any connection With gold smuggling, but there is no doubt that drugs do finance gold smuggling While Bombay attracts most of the smuggled gold on the west coast Calcutta is the focal point on the east. Ships coming up the twisting 80 miles of the Hooghly River from the sea off-load gold to waiting river-craft which speed the gold to Bowbazar Street gold market. The Cglcutta gold market is controlleu by some of the 50,000 Chinese living in the city, who nlaintain close contact with relatives in Hong Kong, Where most of the gold is shipped aboard the

Ships . .

This raises a whole host of questions to Which no official answers are available in Hong Kong. From where does the confidence ot the gold smuggling syndicates in Hong Kong arise? How is it possible to run or

ganisations on such a scale, with considerable International political and other implications, , without high-level assurances being given? 'What are the Preventive Service and the Marine Police supposed to be doing? Why has the Preventive Service only eight patrol boats to cope with gold and drug smuggling on this scale? If a blind eye is turned to gold can it see drugs — unless by pre-arrangement or betrayal?

One smuggling syndicate which I investigated was involved with drugs, arms, illegal refugees and intelligence as well — and included several nationalities. Two Britons Were arrested in South Korea for smuggling gold, but their connections were known to include a Norwegian seaman and an American who were ham radio operators in touch with South Korea, Okinawa, Japan and Other countries, from a flat filled with sophisticated radio equipment located in Kowloon. The American was caught with eleven kilos of heroin in his possession on his arrival in Seattle. Also known to be associated With them were ex-South African mercenaries Who were gun-running in South-EastAsia, and smuggling illegal immigrants into Hong Kong from South Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. The key contact man in Hong Kong was a Chinese with an office behind the Hyatt Hotel in Kowloon. To round it off there was an English police inspector and an English lawyer. And this was only a small syndicate.

The drug and corruption problem, therefore, is not just an academic sociological debate over whether there are 100,000 or 300,000 pathetic drug addicts in an administratively unsympathetic Hong Kong, or whether the United States with 500,000 addicts is more vulnerable than the United Kingdom with a registered 3,000, but a vast, complex, unscrupulous, criminal operation that has Hong Kong itself in a deadly stranglehold of avarice, hypocrisy, corruption and deceit, with equally cancerous tentacles spreading outwards across the world. The addicts themselves are pathetically expendable in order to safeguard the monumental profits; and, by extension, those same profits provide means to hide the culpability of administrations in Asia and beyond that are maintained in power because of the perpetuated existence of criminals both in and out of office.

George Patterson, author of Tibetan Journey, was a newspaper correspondent in China and South-East Asia for many years and has since written several documentary films dealing with that part of the world.