by Jake Needham
Try to keep up, but please don’t interrupt. I’ll leave time for questions at the end.
TWO
HONG KONG’S MASS Transit Railway is the skeleton under the muscle and skin of the city. Without it, Hong Kong would collapse into a formless pile of crap.
My office is just up the hill from Central Station so I use the MTR a lot, particularly when I need to get across the harbor to Kowloon. I could take the Star Ferry, but most of the time that means a lengthy exposure to Hong Kong’s stifling heat and suffocating humidity, and anyway mostly tourists ride the Star Ferry. Or I could take a taxi, but the around-the-clock traffic jams on the approaches to the harbor tunnels could easily turn a trip across to Kowloon into a half-day excursion. The MTR whisks me in air-conditioned comfort straight from Hong Kong Island, underneath the harbor, and up the Kowloon peninsula most anywhere I want to go in ten or fifteen minutes. It’s the only game in town.
At the bottom of D’Aguilar Street, I ducked into the Central Station entrance by Giorgio Armani. That’s how people give directions in Hong Kong. Go past Tiffany’s, turn left at Hermès, then right at Jimmy Choo, and you’ll see it in front of Giorgio Armani.
I trotted down the two flights of steps and tapped my fare card on the pad at the nearest turnstile. Central Station is an underground chamber so vast that it’s impossible to see from one end to the other. It is always very crowded. The Chinese generally have frantic looks etched on their faces as they rush through the station, appearing to be terrified they might be left out of God-only-knows what. There are train announcements occasionally — recorded in English with a British accent, and in Cantonese and Mandarin — but no soothing music and seldom any loud noise. Just a ceaseless, muffled rumbling from thousands of feet shuffling over the faux marble floors, an endless procession of harried people with somewhere else to be.
Everyone calls the Tsuen Wan Line the red line because on the MTR system maps it’s drawn in red. It’s the most direct route from Central across the harbor to Tsim Sha Tsui and beyond to Jordon Road, Yau Mi Tei, and finally Mongkok. Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty tops.
I made my way through the crowds toward the track for the northbound red line trains. Everything was chaos, of course, but Hong Kong people seem to thrive on chaos. Chaos is their natural state. Walking in public spaces is mayhem. Everyone moves at different speeds and in different directions and with sudden starts and even more sudden stops. People are constantly slamming into each other and bouncing off again like human bumper cars.
Through the shifting mass of bodies I saw the doors of a sleek silver train opening. The emerging wave of humanity threatened to sweep me away, but like any westerner who has toughened up enough to survive in Hong Kong, I plunged straight into the onrushing mob without a second thought. A moment before the doors hissed closed behind me, I slipped into a car and wrapped my hand through the strap above my head.
As the train began to move, I automatically shifted my weight to balance in the swaying car and thought about what I was going to say to Uncle Benny when I got to Mongkok.
Uncle Benny isn’t really my uncle, of course. I was born in New Jersey and grew up in New York, so I’m pretty sure I don’t have any Chinese uncles. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know what Benny’s real name is. The only thing I’ve ever heard anyone call him is Uncle Benny.
I first met Uncle Benny when a casino security guy in Macau for whom I had once solved a rather touchy money laundering problem suggested Benny talk to me about a similar problem Benny was worried he had. There had been a sudden spike in the funds passing through Benny’s foreign currency exchange booths in the tourist sections of Hong Kong. He was happy to have the extra business, of course, but he didn’t believe in the Easter Bunny any more than I did. The new money was coming from somewhere, and it might mean big problems for him if that somewhere was the wrong place.
My first thought was that the spike might be triad money, and the Chinese triads are something I don’t mess with. Not ever. Most of what most Americans know about the triads comes from bad kung fu movies, so generally Americans think of the triads as a bunch of slightly comical Chinese guys who strut around the city streets in their undershirts with toothpicks in their mouths. I wasn’t one of the Americans who thought that. From personal experience, I knew the triads were anything but comical.
Over a century or so the triads have evolved into a number of separate and distinct organizations: the Wo Shing Wo, the 14K, the Big Circle Gang, the San Yee On, the Luen Kung Lok, and many other smaller and less organized groups. The most dramatic growth of triad power in Hong Kong came in the late fifties and early sixties when the opium trade was replaced with a flood of heroin coming through Thailand from the Golden Triangle. Heroin put Hong Kong on the map, and the triads controlled every aspect of the heroin trade.
These days the triads are more subtle and sophisticated about their enterprises, but they are still growing. A guy who knows about such things once told me that the Sun Yee On alone has about six hundred high office holders and more than thirty thousand soldiers in Hong Kong, which makes just that one triad bigger than the entire Hong Kong police force.
Triad battles in the streets of Hong Kong are largely a thing of the past, although not entirely, but you still have to be out of your mind to fuck with these guys. Particularly if you’re a white guy, a gwailo as the locals call us.
I had asked around about Uncle Benny, of course, before I took him on as a client. You never knew who had triad connections in Hong Kong and that’s something you want to know about before half a dozen triad soldiers swinging meat cleavers show up in your apartment some night. Uncle Benny had come out squeaky clean. Benny had taken a small inheritance from his father and run it into a decent sized business empire. His foreign exchange service, a chain of restaurants, a driver training school, a bunch of apartments, and a handful of modest sized office buildings.
I had no doubt Benny knew triad guys and even cooperated with them now and then, but that’s the way things work in Hong Kong. If you’re in a business that draws the triads’ attention, you feed the crocodiles and hope they eat you last.
I also discovered Uncle Benny had a degree in business from UCLA, but when I asked him about it he denied it. That didn’t really surprise me. Every Chinese guy I knew lied about his education. They either told you they had a Harvard MBA when they never graduated from college, or they told you they never graduated from college when they had a degree from UCLA.
I’ve never really figured out why they all lie. I guess it’s a cultural thing westerners have no hope of understanding.
THREE
MONGKOK STATION IS near the intersection of Nathan Road and Argyle Street. An endless river of people, hundreds of thousands of them, flows through it every single day. The massive crowds move without order or pattern. Yellow lines are painted in the middle of walkways to channel foot traffic into orderly lanes. Naturally, everyone ignores them.
I admire Hong Kong people. They’re tough little bastards. Wiry old men, shirtless in the heat, lug big sacks of rice from trucks parked at the curb. Old women who could be ninety, stooped and bent with age, push heavy steel carts loaded down with boxes. There’s no social safety net in Hong Kong, no welfare. You work until you drop or you don’t eat.
Maybe that’s why most westerners appear out of place in Hong Kong. We’re too soft for it. We generally look haggard, harassed, and overwhelmed. Because we usually are.
When I got off the train it took me a few minutes to find the exit I wanted in the vast underground space of Mongkok Station. After wandering around aimlessly for a bit, I trotted up some steps and emerged just off Portland Street next to a grimy looking 7-Eleven.
Glancing around to get my bearings, I noticed a man about twenty feet away sitting on a folding metal chair right in the middle of the sidewalk. He was Chinese, of course, a bit chubby and dressed in a dirty white undershirt and wrinkled gray shorts, and he was calmly reading a newspaper while the cro
wds flowed around him. No one paid him the slightest attention. Hong Kong people are world champions at minding their own business.
Benny worked out of a suite of offices in the Sun Hing Building, about a block to the south. His offices were almost ostentatious in their plainness, but that was typical of most Chinese businessmen I had met. Making money mattered. What your offices looked like didn’t matter. In fact, the crummier your offices, the more money you were probably making. Measured by that standard, Uncle Benny was practically Warren Buffet.
When I got to the Sun Hing Building, I took a creaking elevator up to the fourth floor. Like a lot of elevators in Hong Kong, it smelled sour. A vinegary stew of sweat, garlic, and animal urine. At least I hoped it was animal urine.
Some of the lights in the hallway were burned out, but I could see well enough to follow the cracked green linoleum to the unmarked door for Benny’s office. I didn’t bother to knock. Too western. In Hong Kong, that sort of courtesy would just confuse people.
Inside, in a small office with a scarred wooden desk, a middle-aged Chinese man in a white nylon shirt gone slightly yellow from repeated washings sat surrounded by piles of old-fashioned gray-bound ledger books. He gave me a harried glance over his glasses and waved one hand vaguely in the direction of Benny’s door. I didn’t recognize him, but I understood why he didn’t have to ask who I was. I was probably the only white guy who had ever come to see Benny.
I opened the door and walked into Benny’s office.
Benny’s hair was jet black and short, shaped close to his head in a no-nonsense cut for which I’m sure he refused to pay more than five dollars. His skin was so pale it glowed, and he had a pair of plain black eyeglasses sitting low on his nose so he could look over them and through them at the same time. He wore no jewelry other than an inexpensive-looking wristwatch with a black rubber band.
Thin and wiry, Uncle Benny radiated intensity. He looked as if any second he was about to leap from his chair and take several laps around the room. I had no idea how old Benny was. From what I knew about him, I figured he was in his mid-forties, but westerners are hopeless at judging the age of Asians by their appearance and I could have easily been off by fifteen years either way.
There were papers and ledger books scattered haphazardly over his desk and Benny was peering down through his glasses writing in one of the ledgers when I walked in. He didn’t bother to look up.
“Hello, Uncle Benny.”
“What you want?”
Westerners often maintain the Chinese are rude. It’s a cultural stereotype that fuels many of the jokes westerners in Hong Kong tell each other about the Chinese, some of them quite funny. Like most stereotypes, there is at least some truth to the claim. Still, I had learned that to blame the entire culture for not adhering to western standards of courtesy was often a misreading of specific situations, particularly when you’re dealing with people like Benny. Rude or polite simply doesn’t come into the calculation with him. It’s merely a matter of practicality. Business is business. Why waste time on unnecessary conversation when there is so much money out there to be made?
Benny was wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt with the cuffs folded back over his wrists. On the pocket, TrueValue Hardware was stitched in red thread, and above the pocket, also stitched in red thread, it said Hank.
“Nice shirt,” I said.
“Bought six dozen. Cheap, cheap.” Benny put down his pen and peered at me over his glasses. “Give you very special price. How many you want?”
I hadn’t been invited to sit down, but then I hadn’t expected to be. I turned the beaten up wooden chair in front of Benny’s desk toward me and sat down anyway.
“Very tempting,” I said, “but not today. I’m just looking for some information.”
Benny instantly lost all interest in our conversation. He picked up his pen again and went back to whatever he had been writing in the ledger when I came in.
“You do owe me a few favors, Benny.”
Uncle Benny said nothing. His eyes stayed on the ledger book and he continued to write.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions. If you give me a few helpful answers, we’ll call it square.”
Benny kept writing.
“Do you know Eddie Lo?” I asked.
Benny stopped writing.
“Why you care?”
“It’s a case I’m working on. He has a connection with it.”
Eddie Lo had come out of nowhere in the tight little world of Hong Kong finance. One day he was only a kid working for Citibank and the next day he was being mentioned in connection with every deal in town. No one knew exactly where Eddie’s money had come from, only that now he had a great deal of it and he spread it around lavishly.
Benny put his pen down and pushed his glasses a little further down his nose with one finger. He squinted over them at me.
“What connection?”
“Trust me. You really don’t want to know.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
I had never seen Uncle Benny smile, at least I didn’t think I had, but the corners of his mouth twisted in a weird way right then and it occurred to me it was at least possible the old bastard might actually be smiling.
Benny took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He took his time about it and I let him rub away knowing he was calculating the value to him of each of the various responses he might give me. I had no doubt Benny knew Eddie Lo, but my bet was he would deny knowing Eddie at first and see what he could work me for before he admitted it.
I was wrong.
“Eddie Lo is nasty motherfucker,” Benny muttered. “And dirty. Better you stay away.”
“I can’t do that, Uncle Benny. I’ve been hired to find some money that’s missing, and I think Eddie Lo knows where it is.”
Benny thought about that for a moment or two, then the corners of his mouth curled again.
“Tell me,” he said.
So I did.
FOUR
“DO YOU KNOW what a sovereign wealth fund is?” I asked Benny.
He did that thing with the corners of his mouth again so I decided to go with the short form answer. I could always circle back later if I had to, but I doubted I would. Benny was a smart guy and far more sophisticated about matters of business and finance than he let on. He preferred being underestimated to being overestimated. In New York or London it would be exactly the other way around, of course, but this was Hong Kong and all sorts of things are upside down here.
“A sovereign wealth fund is an investment fund owned and controlled by a country rather than individuals,” I began. “Most of them work the same way private investment funds do and invest internationally in both real estate and financial assets like stocks and bonds.”
I paused and Uncle Benny gave me a crisp nod so I kept talking.
“A sovereign wealth fund has the same purpose any other investment fund has. To make money. But a sovereign wealth fund makes money for a country, not for private individuals. The amounts involved are huge, far larger than the amounts in private investment vehicles. As you might imagine, corruption is not unknown.”
I could see I had Uncle Benny’s full attention now.
“You saying Eddie Lo rip off one of these funds?” he asked.
“Don’t get ahead of me here, Uncle Benny.”
Benny made a rolling motion with his index finger. He obviously wanted me to get to the good stuff and skip the finance lecture, but I was a former college professor and it took a lot more than that to shut me up.
“About five years ago, the Malaysian government started a sovereign wealth fund. They called it the Malaysian Development Fund and its purpose was to take the capital inflows that Malaysia was attracting and make investments to promote local economic growth. There was, however, one big difference between the MDF and most other sovereign wealth funds.”
I saw Uncle Benny was getting impatient so I tried to condense a complex story into th
e very basics.
“Unlike most sovereign wealth funds,” I told him, “the MDF wasn’t sitting on a big pile of cash. From the outset, its business model was to raise money in the international debt markets with offerings backed by the credit of Malaysia and use that money to acquire investments. Goldman Sachs sponsored some bond issues for MDF and raised just over three billion dollars.”
That got Benny’s attention.
“Hong Kong dollars?”
I shook my head.
“United States dollars?”
I nodded.
“Fuck your mother,” Benny muttered. “This fund have no assets, got no investments, and Goldman Sachs still raise three billion dollars for them?”
I nodded again.
“Fucking crazy.”
“Not so crazy for Goldman.” I rubbed my forefinger and thumb together in the universal gesture for money. “They got a fee of about three hundred million dollars out of it.”
Uncle Benny went silent for a few seconds, probably out of respect for the sums of money I was bandying about. Then he asked, “What this got to do with Eddie Lo?”
“Eddie Lo is a close friend of Harry Sayid. Harry Sayid is a member of the Board of Directors of MDF. Harry Sayid is also the son of the Prime Minister of Malaysia.”
Benny nodded. “How much money missing?”
“About a billion.”
Benny’s mouth opened slowly.
“A billion dollars?”
I nodded.
“American dollars?”
I nodded again.
“You serious?”
I nodded for a third time.
“Shit,” Benny said, which I thought pretty much covered it.
“The people who hired me—”
“Who that?” Benny interrupted.
I shook my head. Benny shrugged.
“The people who hired me,” I went on, “think it’s likely the missing money was siphoned off by Harry Sayid and then hidden in companies created by Eddie Lo.”
