by Ray Black
Present day Triads have become more business-like organisations, with their criminal activities being more diverse and complex than most other Asian mobsters. Their impact has been felt not only nationally but internationally, too, causing major upheaval with their extortion, murder, kidnapping, illegal gambling, prostitution, robbery and loan-sharking. Keeping up with modern trends the Triads have now moved onto drug trafficking, credit card fraud, theft of cars and computer equipment, counterfeiting, money laundering and piracy. They are now reputed to be among the most dangerous and powerful of the organised crime syndicates in the world, controlling much of the world’s drug trade and operating in nearly every major city.
There are believed to be as many as fifty-seven Triad societies in Hong Kong and tackling the problems brought about by these gangs is still one of Hong Kong’s greatest challenges. With Hong Kong being passed back into the hands of mainland China, it appears that more and more Triads are now fleeing their home town and seeking their fortunes elsewhere.
The Tong are a Chinese–American secret society whose activities flout the law. The very first Tongs modelled themselves on the Triads and dedicated themselves to the overthrow of the Qin dynasty. However, unlike the Triads, the Tongs formed without any clear political motives and soon found themselves embroiled in lucrative criminal activities. With the first wave of Chinese immigrants to the USA in the 1800s, many Chinatowns sprung up throughout the east and west coast. Soon certain inhabitants of these Chinatowns concentrated on providing vices to the Chinese population, including gambling, prostitution and opium. Prostitution became their most profitable business due to the high male-to-female ratio among the early immigrants. They would either kidnap or buy females from China and then smuggle them to the USA to work in brothels. However, because of the rich pickings, the various Tong gangs started to fight over territories which ultimately led to a period in history known as the Tong Wars. Fights broke out in almost every major Chinatown across the USA from the mid-1800s and lasted into the 1970s. The foot soldiers became known as boohowdoy, which is Cantonese for hatchetboy. Which was very apt as they always used a hatchet or a cleaver as their weapon of choice.
Although the fighting eventually dissipated, the Tongs continued their criminal ways and even today continue to engage in extortion, murder, gambling, prostitution, smuggling illegal immigrants and, of course, drugs from the Golden Triangle, which is one of Asia’s two main illicit opium-producing areas.
Still operating the hierarchy principles, the Tong have an an kung (grandfather) or shuk foo (uncle) to oversee the group’s activities. The top gang position is held by the dai dai lo (big big brother). Directly below the dai dai lo, in descending order, are the dai lo(s) (big brothers), the yee lo/saam lo (clique leaders) and at the very bottom the ma jai (little horses).
There do not seem to be any set rules that apply to these gangs but they do appear to respect the ah kung, beat up members of rival gangs, follow the orders of the dai lo and finally, and perhaps most importantly, do not betray members to their own gang. Of course these so-called rules are frequently violated and the violators are punished, sometimes severely, usually by physical assault or cold-blooded killing.
The Baybasin Cartel
The Baybasin cartel have never been shy about telling people of their illegal activities, proudly boasting of their drug smuggling and violence. Added to this they had various political and intelligence links which they used to their own advantage. The Baybasin cartel, were a Kurdish gang, who controlled up to ninety per cent of the heroin which came into the United Kingdom. The cartel itself is enormous and straddles several international borders.
Their leader, Huseyin Baybasin, settled in the UK in the mid-1990s with his brother, Abdullah. Huseyin made his fortune by controlling the flow of opium which comes from Afghanistan, crosses his own family’s lands in south-east Turkey, before being finally processed as heroin in the west. He is believed to have amassed a fortune of ten billion pounds from his drug smuggling empire.
When interviewed, Baybasin described himself as an ‘International Man of Violence’. He was a self-made gangster who had financed not only the Turkish ruling classes but the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) as well, killing anyone who insulted his honour.
Although the Baybasins are believed to have entered the UK illegally using forged Dutch passports, there appears to have been no attempt to regularise their immigration status. Added to this the gang were allowed to move freely between Turkey and London, allegedly after Huseyin agreed to tell Customs and Excise investigators what he knew about the involvement of senior Turkish politicians and officials in the international heroin trade. Eventually the UK became a so-called sanctuary for the cartel members.
Abdullah, despite being bound to a wheelchair following a shooting incident in a bar in Amsterdam in the 80s, took over the helm of the cartel after his brother, Huseyin, was arrested. He was apprehended on one of his so-called ‘business’ trips to the Netherlands. Despite insisting that his drug trafficking days were over, Huseyin was jailed in 2001 for twenty years for conspiracy to murder, drug trafficking and kidnap. His sentence was increased to life following an appeal. Authorities believe that Huseyin Baybasin, despite sitting in a Dutch prison, is as powerful as ever.
In his brother’s absence, Abdullah recruited a gang of young thugs known as the bombacilar (bombers) who spread fear throughout the Turkish and Kurdish community in London. They were a dangerous gang who ran a protection racket, forcing their way into shops and small businesses armed with weapons and demanding money. On one occasion, a gang of up twenty men, armed with samurai swords, metal bars, pool cues and a gun, forced their way into a Turkish cafe in Stoke Newington. One man had his index finger chopped off by the gang and several shots were fired, making sure that their ‘customers’ were duly terrorised into handing over their money.
It was the murder of an innocent family man, Alisan Dogan, however, that started a chain reaction which brought about the end of the reign of Britain’s heroin godfather. Matters came to a head when some of the cartel’s victims expressed their frustration to some members of the powerful PKK. On November 9, 2002, the bombacilar clashed with their PKK rivals. A massive fight broke out in the Haringey area of north London and one man, Alisan Dogan, was fatally stabbed and twenty other men were injured.
The murder triggered a new alliance of interests between the Kurdish and Turkish communities and the police. The Kurds told detectives that since the Baybasins had moved into Edgware, they had been paralysed by fear. People were constantly being kidnapped against their will, brought to a special room at their headquarters and threatened with their life. The Baybasin foot soldiers (the bombacilar) were starting to wreak havoc, extorting money out of the local businessmen by firebombing and inhumane forms of torture.
After this incident, Scotland Yard decided to step up their efforts to gather as much information about the Baybasin cartel as they could. It soon became clear that the battles on the streets of north London were being masterminded and funded by one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the world of organised crime.
In the past five years it is believed that as many as twenty-five murders have been attributed to the cartel. In May 2001, twenty-six-year-old Oguzhan Ozdemir from Enfield, north London, was shot dead. Two months earlier Hasan Mamali, twenty-three, and his friend Sama Mustafa, twenty-six, were gunned down in east London. Mamali was shot in the head as he sat in the back of a car. Mustafa tried to run away, but was brought down by a volley of shots. All of the victims were east European and it is believed they were killed because they got on the wrong side of Turkish heroin suppliers. The police were certain that all the violence was connected with the increasing growth in the drug trade. Added to this was the fact that the gang members were getting younger and consequently more reckless. Many of the bombacilar were aged between fourteen and eighteen and proved to be a dangerous force when armed with guns. It is believed they were paid around £200 to
oversee a drug delivery, supervise the arrival of illegal immigrants or make sure that protection money was paid. Although there had been constant complaints about the protection rackets, police struggled to infiltrate the gangs responsible because they were a close-knit community, often involving family members, who were sworn to secrecy.
The police discovered that most of the criminal activity in the area was centred around certain Turkish cafes, which were notorious for not actually selling any food. Instead, they were a front for illegal gambling, with the back rooms being used for the planning and delivery of drug shipments.
Meanwhile the Baybasin gang were busy making political contacts. The first man they used for their own purposes was a councillor by the name of Alan Sloam. Sloam was a well-known figure in the north London Labour party, who was later barred from holding office after some dodgy dealings with a neighbouring council. Abdullah asked Sloam if he could do anything to help Huseyin’s wife, who was finding it difficult to visit her husband in the Netherlands. Sloam contacted MP Tony McNulty, who had been appointed a Home Office Minister in May 2005 with responsibility for immigration, nationality and citizenship. By writing several letters he managed to persuade Claude Moraes, the Labour MEP and former director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, to raise questions on Huseyin’s behalf in the European parliament.
Apart from their illegal activities the Baybasin cartel were also involved in several legitimate business enterprises. They owned many residential properties in and around Edgware and also owned a car sales business in London. They purchased a former rest home for retired policement on the seafront at Hove in East Sussex, which they turned into a hotel. Added to this they had numerous hotels on the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts which were visited by thousands of holidaymakers each year.
By early 2003 the National Crime Squad – a police agency responsible for tackling criminal organisations committing serious and organised crime – were starting to close in on the cartel. Detectives managed to hide a tiny video camera and microphones inside an office at the back of a sports club in Green Lanes, North London. It was where they believed Abdullah was running the Baybasin cartel’s business transactions. Over the period of the next eight months, the police managed to obtain information on drug deals, distribution of guns, assembly of bombs and also evidence of the gangs violence. On one occasion they were able to watch footage of one of the bombacilar being stripped and threatened with a machete over some breach of gang discipline.
In December 2003, they carried out a series of raids and arrested several of the cartel members. They uncovered guns, machetes, stolen mobile phones and large amounts of counterfeit money and the police also discovered what they believed to be a torture room in Huseyin’s large detached house in Edgware, north London.
Abdullah Baybasin now faces a twenty-two-year jail sentence after being convicted in London in 2006. Another ten members of the gang were also jailed at Woolwich crown court for up to fifteen years for crimes including blackmail, arson and firearms offences. A further six cartel members were jailed for conspiring to supply heroin.
Although other leading members of the cartel remain at liberty, they are being closely monitored to make sure they do not reassemble the bombacilar and renew the period of terror and violence that the Kurdish and Turkish people of north London have recently been subjected to.
PART SEVEN: Cold-Blooded Men
Richard Kuklinski: The Iceman
There were a few things you just didn’t do around Mafia hitman, Richard Kuklinsky. One was falling behind with payments to whomever Kuklinsky was working for. Another was getting his family involved in his business dealings. The third was to actually show up on his property and make threats. George Malliband was foolish enough to do all three.
One day while Kuklinsky was cooking a family barbecue, he saw a figure striding across the lawn of his house in Dumont. It was Malliband and he was making a big and fatal mistake that would be compounded by a later threat that he now knew where Kuklinsky lived, implying that he would do something to upset the rhythm of Kuklinsky’s precious family life.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if Malliband had not been falling behind in his payments to a man called Roy DeMeo who happened to be a capo in the Gambino crime family. DeMeo was a butcher by trade, as well as by nature; a psychopath with a terrifying bloodlust. His henchmen followed his example. In a grimy apartment rented from a man known as Dracula, they would ‘deal’ with people who had somehow wronged them. Their procedure included stabbing the victim in the heart repeatedly to stop the blood from flowing. They would then hang the body above the bath until all the blood had drained away. At this point, DeMeo’s former occupation would come in handy. The corpse would be cut into small pieces and these would then be wrapped and distributed in litter-bins and skips around the city.
George Malliband had been introduced to DeMeo by Kuklinsky; so, Kuklinsky was responsible for him, as DeMeo was at pains to make clear. Therefore, as was the way of these things, Kuklinsky would have to deal with the situation. Driving him back to New Jersey from Brooklyn one night, Kuklinsky calmly pulled over to the side of the road and shot Malliband five times with a .38. He then drove to Jersey City and tried to stuff the body into a steel drum. Finding it did not fit, he severed the tendons in Malliband’s legs so that they would bend a little further back and forced it into the drum. He then drove back to Brooklyn and repaid Malliband’s debt, out of his own pocket. Honour satisfied.
Malliband, however, was far from Kuklinsky’s first murder. As a child he had delighted in killing neighbourhood cats, but, in 1949, at the age of fourteen he had beaten another boy, a bully, to death. His first kill, he later admitted, had made him feel ‘empowered’, as if he was ‘someone’. From that point on he brooked no defiance or disrespect. The cold killer that became the Iceman was born.
Kuklinsky, a six-foot five, 300-pound mountain of a man, born on April 11, 1935, in Jersey City, had an uncanny means of detaching himself from the hundred or so people he killed. In one of two TV documentaries made about him, he described how when he made his first hit, using a car bomb triggered by petrol, he walked away from the scene, feeling nothing. He reckoned it was a result of the abuse heaped upon him and his brother during their childhood by a drunken father. His brother Joey went to prison aged twenty-five for the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl whose body he threw off the roof of a building. He got life in Trenton State Prison.
Kuklinsky was a master of his art and, over the years, he experimented with different ways of dispatching his hits. He used firearms, including a miniature derringer, ice picks, hand grenades, crossbows, chainsaws and even, on one occasion, a bomb attached to a remote-control toy car.
Once, while he was experimenting with the crossbow as a means of killing, he opened his car window as if to ask directions, and when a man approached, he fired an arrow which went straight through the man’s head, killing him on the spot.
The Iceman’s method of choice, however, involved cyanide. ‘Why be messy. You do it nice and neat with cyanide,’ he told Dominick Polifrone, an undercover Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent. He would administer a cyanide solution into the face of his victim using a nasal spray bottle. Cyanide attacks the cellular enzyme system that processes the body’s utilisation of oxygen. The victim experiences a burning in the mouth and throat, grows dizzy and disorientated and is, basically, asphyxiated. Best of all, cyanide is hard to detect, as it is rapidly metabolised by the body. The only way you know it has been ingested is a bitter almond smell that can be detected in the victim’s mouth.
Nevertheless, he would happily use whichever method was appropriate to the situation and to his paymasters, and would then bring into use his special talents for the disposal of the victims’ bodies. On one occasion, as with George Malliband, he stuffed a body into a steel drum again and left it beside a hot dog stand. Every day for weeks, Kuklinsky would stop, buy a hot dog and lean on the oil drum. Then one day it ju
st disappeared and he never found out what happened to it and its grisly contents.
His most famous disposal gave rise to his nickname, the Iceman.
Robert Prongay was known as Mr Softee on account of the fact that he had an ice cream van. But as well as peddling ice cream, Prongay also worked as a hitman for DeMeo and did a few bits of business now and then with Kuklinsky, mostly in the pornography line. It was from Prongay that Kuklinsky learned of the efficacy of cyanide. To demonstrate it to Kuklinsky, Prongay walked up to a complete stranger in the street, sprayed him and they then watched the man collapse and die within a matter of seconds. It was from Prongay that Kuklinsky got his supply of the deadly poison.
Prongay and Kuklinsky wanted to refine the art of killing and wondered if it would be possible to freeze a body to disguise the time of death. It would ensure that the killer need not worry about an alibi. They decided to use a small-time crook called Louis Masgay as their guinea pig. Masgay wanted to purchase a quantity of video tapes from Kuklinsky and on July 1, 1981, he left home with $95,000 in cash, never to return. His van was later found abandoned, the secret cash compartment ripped out and the cash gone.