Cheung was, by all accounts, a pretty nasty guy. Nicknamed "Big Boss" or "Big Spender" (the latter because of his penchant for gambling -- one report on Time magazine's Pathfinder news service says that he'd been known to blow as much as $12 million in one casino session), his favorite rackets were kidnapping, arms dealing, robbery, extortion, and murder. His recent exploits included a couple of kidnappings in which he demanded and got a total of $204 million in ransom, from the families of the business tycoons his gang kidnapped at gunpoint.
None o' this happened, unnerstand?
Cheung was able to get away with this kind of thing because he had the same ace in the hole that mobsters from Al Capone to John Gotti have been able to count on -- nobody's willing to testify against a gangster, because they know the price will be deadly retaliation. When Cheung's gang kidnapped Victor Li, the Hong Kong-based son of a wealthy Canadian businessman, Li's father paid a ransom of $134 million (another report, in Maclean's magazine, put the figure at $275 million Canadian). The Li family refused to notify the police, testify against Cheung, or even acknowledge that the kidnapping had occurred at all, so terrified were they of being killed by Big Spender and his gang.
This is one of the fundamental problems inherent in a democratic society: Criminals are innocent until proven guilty -- and if no one will testify against them, they don't get proven guilty. That's what happens in this country, and that's what happened in Hong Kong, when it was a British colony. That's how organized criminals are able to get away with it here, and that's how Cheung got away with it there.
The rules of the game changed, however, when Hong Kong was transferred from British to Chinese rule. In China, you're not innocent until proven guilty -- you're innocent until you do something that gets the attention of the higher-ups in Beijing. And you can't get much higher-up than Jiang Zemin, the president of China. In a speech given at the one-year anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China last July, Jiang blasted "evil elements" who were "causing severe damage to the people's interest and investors' confidence." Shortly after that speech, Cheung and 35 members of his gang were arrested. They were put on trial in October and convicted last month.
The trial at which Cheung was convicted and sentenced was held behind closed doors -- although there were a lot of leaks to the press. The bottom line was that China's ruling executives had simply had enough of Big Spender and his offenses against people who, through their investments, carry a lot of weight in an underdeveloped country (or even a developed one, for that matter).
Witnesses or no witnesses, Big Spender was found guilty, and he was executed on December 5th.
There's holes in that thar Bill
In this country, the Bill of Rights is the most sacred cow we have. From our first days in school, we're indoctrinated with the idea that the Constitution -- and, in particular, its first ten amendments -- are an unequivocal boon to society, and that they're the only thing that separates us from tyranny and enslavement.
The most Politically Incorrect statement one could possibly make would be to suggest that maybe there's a downside to the Bill of Rights. Well, never being one to fear the occasional brickbat, I'm telling you: there's a downside to the Bill of Rights. And the case of Big Spender Cheung illustrates it, plain as day. With the rule of law comes the rule of loophole -- which crooks in this country have been exploiting as far back as our history goes. When you can intimidate (or eliminate) witnesses, you can get away with just about any crime you can dream up.
Say what you will about the evils of Communist dictatorship, but one thing's for sure: those governments were (and, in some cases, still are) good at fighting crime. In the USSR, for instance, it used to be perfectly safe to walk the streets of any large city at just about any hour. Why? Because the government had a low tolerance for street crime. Since the fall of the iron curtain, that's all changed -- there are major crime problems, organized and otherwise, in Russia. They've got street crime, and they've got white-collar crime and corruption -- the latter is so bad that many investors have pulled out of the country altogether, because they can't afford the bribes they have to pay in order to stay in business.
Meanwhile, in Communist China, there may not be much freedom of speech -- but as Big Spender found out, there's also less freedom to extort, kidnap, and kill innocent people than there is in "free" countries.
I'm not advocating dictatorship, by any means -- it obviously has its own downside, too. But if Al Capone had squared off against Jiang Zemin, I've got a pretty good idea who would have won.
Copyright © 1998 John J. Kafalas