The World's Most Evil Gangs (18 page)

O
ne of the largest, richest and most secretive criminal organisations on the planet owes its success to the British Empire. For when the so-called ‘Black Societies’ of mainland China were purged by the Communists 60 years ago, they found a new homeland in colonial Hong Kong. There in Britain’s Far Eastern enclave, they flourished under the dreaded title given to them by their English-speaking hosts … the Triads.

This ‘Oriental Mafia’ grew so quickly with the help of the colony’s corrupt cops that membership in Hong Kong alone topped 300,000. And having taken over the tiny island’s underworld, the Triads exported their terror trade to Chinese communities across Southeast Asia and into the Chinatowns of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. A US report on the Triad exports to North America and
Europe of 2007 estimated annual profits from narcotics at $200 billion and human trafficking at $3.5 billion.

The roots of the Triads are found in secret societies that date back to 1000 BC when monks led peasant bands to fend off raids by despotic warlords. Over the centuries, these gangs became power brokers within the Chinese dynasties and played a part in deposing the Last Emperor in 1911. The ‘Black Societies’ thrived in the warlord era of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, particularly in the trading city of Shanghai, where the Green Gang had 100,000 members. When Japan invaded, they fought with the Republican forces of Chiang Kai-shek to defend their province. However, when the Communists of Mao Tse Tung came to power in 1949, a tough crackdown on the gangs forced many to emigrate to America and Europe, as well as to the Portuguese gambling enclave of Macao and, of course, to Hong Kong. There the English term ‘Triad’ became used to describe the triangular symbols on the banners of one of the clans, the Heaven and Earth Society.

Triads flourished in the colony, partly due to the corruption of the British police force there through the Sixties and Seventies. When a clean-out finally came, one officer, when questioned about the number of his colleagues who were taking bribes, said: ‘Well, the force was 8,000 or 9,000 strong and I definitely knew of two people who weren’t. One was religious and the other was just crazy.’

The Triads are still strong in Hong Kong, with a tighter band of 100,000 members controlling an empire worth billions of pounds. The city’s largest and most powerful Triad family, Sun Yee On, with 40,000 members, has massive influence over local businessmen and party officials. Its mysterious, unnamed ‘Dragon Head’ (Triad equivalent of
‘Godfather’) is officially listed as one of the 50 most powerful people in Asia. The Triads are also strong in the island gambling haven of Macao. On the eve of the Portuguese colony’s handover to China in 1999, a bloody power struggle raged over the illegal betting trade. Its scale can be gauged by the 2010 trial of a casino manager who admitted laundering $450 million through Hong Kong bank accounts.

The blatant manner in which the Triads operate can be judged by the activities of two ‘Dragon Heads’, one based in Hong Kong and the other in Macao, and both at the height of their powers at the time of the colonies’ handover to China. Cheung ‘Big Spender’ Tze-Keung, Hong Kong’s most notorious gangster of the Nineties, once described his Macao opposite number Wan ‘Broken Tooth’ Huok-koi as ‘a genius – he thinks I’m a genius, and I think he’s a genius.’ The two men played baccarat together and ‘Broken Tooth’ once lost more than US$1 million, saying: ‘I was really mad. But I put the cards in my pocket and went home to bed. That way, I didn’t have to kill him or do anything to him, because I wasn’t really the loser.’

‘Big Spender’ Tze-Keung was a small-time crook running gambling dens until he and his gang hijacked an armoured truck carrying $20 million in 1991. He was caught and sentenced to 18 years but got out after three on a technicality. He held such a grudge against the police for his experience in jail that he rammed a bulldozer into a prison guardhouse and firebombed the house of Hong Kong’s Secretary of Security. After hitting the big time, he travelled the world playing at major casinos, reputedly once winning $2 million in a single night in the Philippines.

In the 1990s, Tze-Keung was implicated in the kidnapping
of two of Hong Kong’s richest tycoons – Walter Kwok, one of the world’s richest property developers, and Victor Li, son of the billionaire Li Ka-shing – who were held for ransom of $US 210 million. Although Kwok himself refused to discuss the abduction,
Newsweek
magazine reported that his family paid a ransom of $US 80 million. The other abductee, Li, was reportedly kept in a refrigerator with air holes drilled in it. A ransom of $US 125 million ($1 billion Hong Kong dollars) was paid to free him.

One Hong Kong police official told
Newsweek
: ‘Big Spender’s goal was to hold people in such a state of terror that all he had to do was threaten them over the phone and they’d pay him big money.’ An intensive police operation finally cracked his gang and 30 members were arrested. Their boss was captured in mainland China.

In December 1998, he and several accomplices were found guilty of kidnapping and smuggling explosives. They were executed within hours of being sentenced to death. Hong Kong does not have the death penalty, and it was the first time that a Hong Kong resident had been executed under Chinese law. Later, another 32 gang members were rounded up and a cache of weapons, explosives, along with millions of dollars in cash and luxury cars were seized.

Tze-Keung’s opposite number in Macao, Wan ‘Broken Tooth’ Huok-koi, was also at the height of his powers when caged in 1998. As leader of the 14K Triad, an estimated 10,000 members regarded ‘Broken Tooth’ as their boss and referred to him as ‘Big Brother’. He had made most of his money by controlling the VIP suites for high-rollers at Macao’s casinos. He was also an inveterate gambler himself.

‘Broken Tooth’ so gloried in his infamy that he financed a
gangster film about his life, titled
Casino
, and promoted it with a Hollywood-style publicity campaign. He was arrested in May 1998 after a bomb destroyed a car belonging to Macao’s chief of police and he was given a 15-year prison sentence. Several of his top lieutenants were also jailed.

With the liberalisation of the communist state in recent years, the Triads have re-exported their criminal enterprises back into mainland China and handle most drugs sales, money laundering, extortion, prostitution, gambling and contract murder in Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang and Guangzhou. ‘Gang-related crime has become a threat to social stability and to the economy,’ the Public Security Bureau reported. ‘Murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, assault … they dare to do anything.’

The number of those involved in organised crime on the mainland has risen from around 100,000 in the mid-Eighties to between 1.5 and 2 million today. The 120 million-strong floating population of migrant workers make ready recruits.

An indication of Triad presence is the increasing number of bound bodies pulled from the Yellow River and other Chinese waterways. One of Henan Province’s worst gangs roamed the countryside unchecked for 13 months, robbing farmhouses and killing 76 people. Seven members of the gang, including its leader who personally cut the throat of 40 victims, were captured and executed in 1999.

Some Triad families have close relations with the police – and are even organised by them. In 2007 ten members of a police-run gang in Inner Mongolia were jailed for robbery, rape, gambling and bribery. But the Triads have spread much further afield, from Australia to Canada, and have added to their traditional money-making through drug trafficking, loan sharking, prostitution, smuggling, gun-running, and extortion
by adding high-tech crime such as credit card fraud and computer software piracy.

One of the cruellest of the fast-expanding Triad trades is the export of humans. It is perhaps the least welcome aspect of China’s extraordinary trade boom with the Western world. The group name for the many gangs who smuggle people abroad is ‘Snakeheads’. For anything up to £50,000 they will transfer their human cargo to wealthier countries, principally in North America, Europe, Australia, Japan and Taiwan.

Snakeheads, mainly based in China’s Fujian region, hide their living cargo in trucks and on ships. Subtler means include the use of false passports and visas, bribing of officials, fake business delegations and tour groups. But the object of people trafficking is not always to provide their customers with a better life abroad. Young women are often kidnapped to become labourers, mistresses or prostitutes.

One of the most ruthless people smugglers was a slightly built, 5ft tall woman from the Fujian region named Jing Ping Chen – but known to police across Europe as ‘Sister Ping’. Before her arrest in 2003, she was believed to have smuggled more than 200,000 men and women into the EU and her organisation was linked to the deaths of 58 Chinese, whose bodies were found in an air-tight truck entering Britain through Dover Docks in 2000.

According to the National Criminal Intelligence Service, organised immigration crime is one of the fastest-growing areas of the underworld. At least 600,000 people enter the EU illegally each year and around 80 per cent are brought in by Snakehead gangs. The smuggling industry is as lucrative as the drug trade – across Europe the business is worth £8 billion – but for those who are caught the penalties are far lower.
According to Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service, ‘the top Snakeheads control the facilitation process from end to end. They have contacts in China, the UK and at every stop along the route’.

‘Sister Ping’ was seized by Dutch police and brought before a Rotterdam court who heard that she had earned at least €15 million from her criminal activities. She was sentenced to three years in jail and fined €10,000 for offences related to human trafficking, with the judge declaring that she was ‘the leader of a structured group focused on smuggling human beings’.

Despite Ping’s conviction, the trade in human cargo shows no signs of slowing down. But worse is the trafficking of children. A 2011 report by China’s Public Security Ministry said that police had rescued ‘tens of thousands’ of abducted children and women. It highlighted one raid against a gang trafficking Chinese women to African nations for prostitution. In 2012 Chinese police broke up major child trafficking gangs across 15 regions and provinces, including Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Sichuan and Yunnan, arresting 802 smugglers and freeing 181 children.

Child-trafficking has become a serious problem in China because of the country’s one-child policy and lax adoption laws. A traditional preference for male heirs in China has created a thriving market for baby boys – and, equally tragically, a surfeit of unwanted baby girls.

The Snakeheads who trade in human misery are closely allied to the Triads. The violent enforcer for ‘Sister Ping’ in Holland was her boyfriend, who happened to be head of the local 14K Triad. But despite the violence revealed in the ‘Sister Ping’ court case, the trend nowadays is otherwise. As with the Mafia in America, a new generation of Dragon Heads are
adopting a discreet policy of conducting their criminal operations behind the scenes. They have done well out of China’s free-wheeling cowboy capitalism but criminologists can only guess at the scale of their multi-billion operation, for the Triads are now a secret society who really do keep their secrets.

Wherever their tentacles spread, the rules of secrecy are maintained by elaborate initiation ceremonies that can last six days and can involve ritual dances, blood-letting and Taoist and Buddhist prayers. The Hung clan, for instance, welcomes new members with a 200-year-old initiation oath that goes, in part: ‘I shall not disclose the secrets of the Hung family, not even to my parents, brothers or wife. I shall never disclose the secrets for money. I shall die by a swarm of swords if I do so.’

T
hey were momentous decisions that sent a nation into a frenzy of excitement. On 30 October 2007, Brazil won its bid to host the World Cup in 2014. Two years later, on 2 October 2009, the country’s bid for the XXXI Olympiad was also a success. But among the massive challenges that the two awards created was one that the host nation did not shout about … how, in a few short years, could it repair its reputation as one of the most criminalised countries in the world?

For every 100,000 citizens, Brazil suffers 24 homicides, with countless muggings, kidnappings, robberies and endemic gang violence. So to save the nation’s reputation in advance of the two great sporting events, a major clean-up was ordered not only of the thousands of crime-ridden favelas, or shanty towns – almost 1,000 of which blight Rio de Janeiro alone – but the other criminal elements that have given Brazil this bad reputation.

Today almost three million Brazilians live in these favelas, so it was no straightforward task for the police in their campaign to regain control from the gangs that have long stalked the overcrowded townships. In preparation for the forthcoming sporting events, the government established more than 25 ‘pacification units’, as favela-based police operations are called. Under the pacification programme, elite police units enter violent slums and evict the heavily armed drug gangs that have held sway for decades. Once security is established, officers trained in community policing move in and set up permanent outposts in the slums, mostly near tourist destinations or in areas seen as geographically key to World Cup and Olympic venues. The next step was for city officials to bring in basic services that many of the shanty towns had never received, such as sewage, legal electricity and rubbish collection.

Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil, was pacified by the authorities in November 2011. This sprawling shanty town in the hills of Rio de Janeiro straddles a main highway that connects the main Olympic venues to wealthier neighbourhoods, including the famous towns of Copacabana and Ipanema. Rocinha was established in the 1930s when landless rural workers began occupying the area, which was once a coffee plantation. They found low-paying jobs but no housing, so they set up makeshift settlements. With a further influx of economic migrants fleeing poverty in the north-east of Brazil during the Fifties, the count at the last census in 2010 showed a population of 70,000. Like all of Rio’s favelas, Rocinha has suffered from decades of neglect. In the absence of state intervention, gang leaders moved in. During the Eighties it became home to former left-wing politico-criminal
gangs that seized control of the entire community, enforcing their rule with an iron fist and enriching themselves through the drug trade, the area becoming the city’s leading cocaine distribution point.

Rocinha’s oldest gang is the Comando Vermelho or CV (Portuguese for ‘Red Command’) founded in 1979. Its original members came from Candido Mendes prison on the island of Ilha Grande. They were a collection of ordinary convicts and left-wing political prisoners who were members of the Falange Vermelha (Red Phalanx) that had fought Brazil’s military dictatorship. Although most of the original leaders are dead, it is still a force to be reckoned with. The Comando Vermelho’s main rivals are the Terceiro Comando, a criminal organisation founded in 1990, and the Terceiro Comando Puro that split from the Terceiro Comando in 2002.

But Rocinha’s largest gang is the Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends) which, before the recent police intervention, enjoyed unchallenged control of the shanty town. ADA was formed in 1998 by a senior gangster in Comando Vermelho, who had been expelled for organising the murder of another member. Two of the ADA’s most notorious leaders were neutralised by police – one killed, one jailed. Erismar Rodrigues Moreira, also known as ‘Bem-Ti-Vi’, was shot dead in 2005, ending his command over a militia that he armed with gold-plated weapons. The second ADA leader to be removed was Rio’s most wanted criminal, Antonio Francisco Bonfim Lopes.

A notorious drugs baron, Lopes, who was known simply as ‘Nem’, had been one of Bem-Ti-Vi’s bodyguards. When his boss was killed, he grabbed his chance to move up the pecking order. He eliminated the gang’s obvious successor and took
control of the Rio slums with an army of 200 rifle-toting soldiers. The sale of some 200 kilos of Bolivian cocaine a month brought Nem an annual fortune of around £35 million. Rivals and informants were eliminated, their bullet-riddled corpses burned in improvised crematoria in the rainforest around the slum. Running his business from a luxurious
three-storey
mansion in Laboriaux, a neighbourhood at the crest of Rocinha, he earned a reputation for his ecstasy-fuelled raves at which a number of Brazilian celebrities put in appearances. When police began a concerted crackdown on his empire, Nem went undercover. He used steroids and plastic surgery to alter his appearance and in 2010 even tried to fake his own death, paying a doctor to sign a bogus certificate stating that he had died of kidney failure.

‘Nem’ was finally arrested in 2011 after being found hiding in the boot of a car when it was stopped at a roadblock. His four-strong entourage told police they were diplomats from the Democratic Republic of Congo and tried to invoke diplomatic immunity before offering a hefty bribe. ‘Why is the car boot shaking?’ asked a suspicious cop before Lopes was found curled up inside.

‘The gangs are being dismantled,’ said Rio state police chief Alberto Pinheiro Neto announcing Nem’s capture. As his squads handed out pre-paid mobile phones to residents to encourage collaboration, he added: ‘This is a good moment for law-abiding citizens who want to see their children living in peace to pass information on where criminals, guns and drugs are hidden.’

So, after half a century of shocking neglect, Rocinha and other ‘pacified’ slums are benefiting from new development and investment. Although the drug trafficking gangs still have
a toe-hold on the favelas, the Brazilian military police call the shots. It is a mixed blessing for the residents who once complained about the total absence of any government authority; they now decry police corruption and abuse, and there is a cynicism about an initiative that sometimes seems more driven by real estate speculation than a concern for residents. But most, including even some in the drug gangs, agree that the makeover is worth trying. Rocinha has now become a destination to which the fashionable and the well-to-do drive to in their bulletproof cars for a taste of the nightlife and kind of parties that the Amigos dos Amigos once used to host.

Before the ‘clean up’ that now sees the shanty towns permanently patrolled by police armed with machine-guns keeping watch in front of squad cars with flashing lights, Brazil had deserved its reputation for violence. In 2003 a record 51,043 murders took place. However, during the late 2000s the crime rate has been on a firmly downward trend. In 2008 Rio de Janeiro registered the lowest homicide rate in 18 years, while São Paulo now records ‘only’ about ten homicides per 100,000 population – down from 35.7 in 1999.

The worst outbreak of violence in Brazilian history began in São Paulo on the night of 12 May 2006. It was an escalation of a war between the state authorities and the city’s largest criminal faction, Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital). Street rioting began after 700 jailed members of the PCC were transferred to tougher prisons. Extraordinarily, the PCC had for years been run with seeming impunity from within the São Paulo state penitentiary system by means of cell-phones, female visitors, lawyers and corrupt officials. The authorities had hoped that by moving the
leadership to higher-security facilities, ties would be severed to gang members on the outside. But using their smuggled phones, the PCC inmates managed to coordinate violent protests that left dozens dead, both inside and outside the jails.

In unprecedented scenes throughout Brazil’s capital city, heavily armed gangs hijacked and torched more than 60 buses, Molotov cocktails were thrown into banks and police stations came under attack from Mobs wielding machine-guns, machetes and home-made bombs. A police officer was shot in the head while he dined at home with his wife. Prisons saw some of the worst violence: mutinies broke out in 71 of the 105 jails in the state, with uprisings spreading to a further 70 jails including those in the neighbouring states of Parana and Mato Grosso do Sul. More than 120 hostages were taken. Meanwhile, street violence spread to the interior and to towns along the coast, including Guaruja, Santos and Cubatao.

By the third day of rioting, the authorities ordered schools to be closed, transport halted, shopping centres and office buildings shut down. When the situation was finally brought under control, the casualty list read like the aftermath of a military battle: military police 23 dead and 22 wounded, state civil police seven dead and six wounded, municipal guards three dead and eight wounded, prison guards eight dead and one wounded, prisoners 17 dead, civilians four dead 16 wounded, suspected criminals 79 dead.

The casualty list added up to 141 dead and 53 wounded – proving beyond doubt the power of a single gang, the PCC, to disrupt an entire nation. One of the prisoners transferred and placed in solitary confinement in the Presidente Venceslau penitentiary was Marcos ‘Marcola’ Willians Herbas Camacho, the leader of the PCC and the man who allegedly ordered the
attacks. Marcola, who began his career as a pickpocket at the age of nine, became known as ‘Playboy’ because of his lavish lifestyle but was confined to jail in 1999. In 2006 Camacho testified before a congressional committee, admitting that he was the leader of the PCC but saying that his own life was now ‘worthless’ since his successor had already been chosen. He told the committee that the PCC was organised ‘like a web made up of a comprehensible organised hierarchy’ that stretched across the state and was still successfully run from behind prison walls.

In a separate interview at the time, Camacho revealed the key to the gang’s strength, saying: ‘You are the ones who are afraid to die; I am not. Here in prison you cannot come and kill me, but I can arrange for you to be killed out there. We are a new species.’

Primeiro Comando da Capital was founded in 1993 with the purported goal of fighting oppression inside the São Paulo prison system and avenging the ‘murder’ of prisoners during the so-called Carandiru Massacre of October 1992 when São Paulo State Military Police quelled an uprising at the Carandiru Penitentiary, killing 111 inmates. The massive 2006 riots were not the first spate of violence attributed to the PCC. In 2001 the gang enacted a multi-prison rebellion and in 2003 murdered an unpopular judge.

It seems that the PCC are the gang that the authorities cannot quell. The soaring number of attacks on police is usually blamed on PCC members. At least 95 police officers were killed in São Paulo in 2012 compared to 47 the previous year. In early 2013 rioting again erupted, this time in Santa Catarina, south of São Paulo, a normally tranquil state famed for its tourist resorts. Between 30 January and 5 February, there
were 54 violent attacks, including numerous assaults on police stations, the burning of buses, trucks and cars. The attacks were clearly coordinated from within prisons and, according to the state’s public security department, were prompted by the transfer of inmates from a jail in the state capital, Florianopolis, to another some 180 kilometres south in the city of Criciuma. The prison switch followed the indictment of nine people, including four prison gang leaders accused of conspiring to gun down a prison guard outside her home in October 2012. Local media revealed another reason for the violence – a video filmed at another prison showed guards abusing inmates. In one scene, prisoners were forced to kneel naked while guards attacked them with pepper spray and rubber bullets.

According to a police intelligence report by the National Public Security Secretariat, the gang has seen a surge in membership, with a presence in 21 of Brazil’s 27 states. Strongest expansion is in the São Paulo region, where 135 of the 152 prisons are said to be effectively under PCC control. Consequently, the gang’s resources have also soared, the report putting its annual income from drug trafficking alone at $32 million. The main trade is in cocaine from neighbouring Bolivia and Paraguay.

The PCC is now so strong that its leaders believe they can negotiate at government level to achieve political objectives. Their success in forcing Brazil’s leaders to make concessions to end the 2006 riots has encouraged their ambitions. This has also boosted recruitment. New members swear a 16-point manifesto advocating social and political change in Brazil. They then routinely pay dues of anything between $25 and $225 a month, which are supposedly used to support the families and pay legal fees of their imprisoned comrades.

And these prisons are full. In 2010, there were 473,600 people incarcerated in Brazilian jails, with drug-linked crime responsible for 85,000 of the total. Prison conditions generally are harsh and unsanitary. There is severe overcrowding, with six to eight prisoners often crammed into a cell meant for three. The alleged ill treatment by staff, plus prisoner-on-prisoner violence, makes membership of a gang virtually necessary for survival. A 2003 Amnesty International report accused the Brazilian prison authorities of brutality, saying: ‘Torture and ill treatment continues to be widespread and systematic in police stations, prisons and juvenile detention centers. In some cases, police reportedly used torture as a method of extortion’.

Outside the prisons, police corruption remains a problem particularly in Rio. Dozens of police officers have been arrested on suspicion of working for drug traffickers and selling guns, while a senior officer was suspected of ordering the murder of a judge who investigated police corruption. The army has also been tainted with accusations of illegality when called in to support the police. In 2008 units were deployed to Rio’s Providencia area, where three locals were held by a band of 11 soldiers ‘for disrespecting authority’. The men, aged 17, 19 and 24, were taken to a neighbouring shanty town controlled by a rival drug gang. Their bullet-ridden bodies were later found on a rubbish tip. The deaths brought hundreds of Providencia residents onto the streets, burning buses and throwing missiles at army patrols.