Empire of Crime

by Tim Newark

  Won Tip had placed himself at the centre of the international trade in illicit drugs and guns that spanned the British Empire. But in order to survive in this bitterly contested market, he had returned to playing his old games, knocking out the criminal competition in Antwerp and providing misinformation to the police.

  ‘For some time after his arrival in Antwerp,’ continued the gullible Special Branch officer, ‘Won Tip was the subject of observation and enquiry by the Belgian Police but no evidence could be then obtained that he was either allowing his premises to be used for opium smoking or was engaged in the traffic of narcotics.’

  Burgess knew better, but the slippery Won Tip was no longer in his jurisdiction. In 1929, Won was finally sentenced to a month’s imprisonment in Antwerp for smoking opium – the tip of his personal iceberg. But, at last, he was behind bars.

  Won Tip managed to keep to the shadows for most of his criminal career, whereas the most infamous Chinese drugs dealer of this period was attracted to the glare of West End glamour in Jazz Age London. Brilliant Chang was born in Canton to a well-off merchant family and arrived in Britain as a student in 1913.

  As early as 1917, Chang was caught up in a drugs raid in Birmingham, but he then moved to London and opened a fashionable restaurant in Regent Street. From there, he started selling drugs to London’s smart young set, including young actresses like Billie Carleton. Cocaine, heroin and opium were the favourites.

  Whenever he took a fancy to one of these attractive women dining in his restaurant, he had a waiter pass them a printed note, which read:

  Please do not regard this as a liberty that I write to you, as I am really unable to resist the temptation after having seen you so many times. I should extremely like to know you better, and should be glad if you would do me the honour of meeting me one evening where we could have a little dinner and a quiet chat together.

  More often than not this approach worked, and he could also supply the girls with the drugs of their choice.

  The death of Billie Carleton had brought unwelcome attention to the narcotics business, but what really did for Chang was his association with the cocaine-overdose death of Freda Kempton, a nightclub dancer, in 1922. He had dated her the night before her death and given her £5.

  Chang was questioned at the coroner’s court, but there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him for supplying her with the fatal dose. The jury decided that the poor woman had committed suicide while temporarily insane. ‘When the jury returned the verdict,’ noted a News of the World reporter, ‘Chang smiled broadly and quickly left the court. As he passed out, several well-dressed girls patted his shoulder, while one ran her fingers through his hair.’

  The blatant sex appeal of Chang and his association with beautiful white women added a charge to the whole affair and ensured his titillating activities remained in the headlines. It was bad news for him. After several police raids, he was eventually forced to sell his restaurant and relocate his drug-dealing business to Limehouse, but even this didn’t save him.

  A sharp-eyed detective noted that the dilapidated shack Chang rented under a railway arch in Limehouse Causeway was regularly attended by glamorous women stepping out of expensive cars. Put on trial in April 1924, Brilliant Chang was sentenced to 14 months’ imprisonment followed by deportation. ‘It is you and men like you who are corrupting the womanhood of this country,’ said the judge.

  After his time in gaol, Chang was supposed to return to Hong Kong, but rumour had it that, like Won Tip, he had simply moved his operation to the Continent, running drugs and prostitutes in Paris.

  With the demise of Brilliant Chang, the London East End drugs business continued in the hands of Chinese and non-Chinese who had been operating, more quietly, alongside him. One of these was the Jamaican-born jazz drummer Eddie Manning. His first conviction was for shooting a man in London’s West End. The fight broke out in Cambridge Circus when a pimp insulted Manning’s girl by throwing a lighted cigar in her face. He retaliated by chasing the pimp and shooting him, along with two other men. He was sentenced to 16 months.

  When Manning came out, he went back to his business of running prostitutes, illegal gambling parties and dope orgies. It was in Manning’s rented house in Hallam Street that army officer Eric Goodwin took the overdose of heroin that killed him.

  Manning continued to deal in opium throughout the 1920s, eventually ending his life in Parkhurst prison, where he died from syphilis.

  Despite the presence of other nationalities in the London drugs trade, it was the involvement of the Chinese that lodged in the minds of the public. The scandalous details of Billie Carleton’s death were added to by lurid journalistic descriptions of nights spent in the East End’s Chinatown. In 1919, George R. Sims visited an opium den in Poplar called the Ladies’ Paradise.

  There is a certain fascination about opium-smoking when you see it done in the suggestive mystery of a Chinese lodginghouse, with a dull red fire, in the front of which may be a black cat, and a gas stove on which is an earthenware basin, which is filled with the thick, sticky stuff which looks to the uninitiated like black treacle.

  It didn’t hinder the sales of newspapers when it was explained that many of the young women visiting such dens had most of their clothes removed by the proprietor. This was to ensure they didn’t leave before spending all their money.

  ‘Today there are hundreds of Englishwomen in the grip of the opium fiend,’ warned Sims. ‘The habit once acquired is rarely shaken off. Taken at first to relieve pain or produce pleasure, it soon ceases to be a luxurious indulgence and becomes a necessity. Under its influence, willpower is gradually lost, and moral degradation is the inevitable result.’

  This sensationalism had broad appeal and crossed the Atlantic. In White Slavery, published in Chicago, its author portrayed an even more vivid nightmare. He warned that young women were being seduced by Chinese men, who showed them round Chinatown, took them into a shop, gave them beautiful silk dresses and then offered them a cup of tea.

  ‘You know the rest,’ he wrote. ‘The tea is drugged, the girl goes to sleep and wakes up hours later in some cavern way down in the earth, and there she stays, the Slave of the Chinamen until death takes her. And her body is buried in a hole among the endless tunnels of subterranean Chinatown.’

  Such melodramatic accounts gave birth to a new genre of pulp fiction. The most famous of these titillating tales were the Dr Fu Manchu thrillers, written by Sax Rohmer, in which the Chinese master criminal runs his empire of vice from London’s Limehouse. His evil appearance is described in The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, published in 1913:

  Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan … one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present … Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

  The best-selling books were turned into a series of popular movies that further fostered the character of the sinister Chinese man as arch villain.

  Curiously, in contrast, in China it was the imperial Briton who was being demonised. Having brought an end to its opium trade from 1908 onwards, the British might have hoped that their reputation would improve, but far from it. As they helped the Chinese enforce their prohibition of smoking opium, they were accused of criminal corruption.

  A major scandal erupted in May 1910 in the port of Weihaiwei – a British colony since 1898 – in Shandong province in eastern China. The British governors were accused of shaking down middle-class Chinese householders. For every opium pipe needle they found, they charged the owner $5. For every opium pipe bowl, they imposed a fine of $50. And for a whole pipe, it was a draconian $100. To some Chinese, this looked like a shameless money-spinner.

  ‘That the British authorities secretly “plant opium” is clear from the following fact,’ complained one. ‘There is a wealthy gentleman named Wang residing in Weihaiwei. The British authorities under
cover of searching for opium took Wang’s women folk, tied them up in a yard, forcibly stripped off all their clothes and wantonly insulted them. No proof however was forthcoming but subsequently a useless piece of iron wire was discovered under a wall and this it was insisted was an opium needle: so Wang was taken into custody, fined $100, and given one year’s imprisonment with hard labour.’

  The combination of sexuality and criminality was a familiar one established in the pulp fiction of the Yellow Peril, but on the other side of the world it was being applied to the British. The colonial authorities were so outraged by this libel that they insisted the national Chinese newspapers publish an apology and pay a fine. Disappointingly for its liberal sponsors, the British prohibition of opium was not working as well as they had wished.

  As for the Chinese government, they were frustrated by their own failures to ban the production and smoking of the drug. In September 1910, the Chinese Emperor sent a decree to his provincial governors censuring them. He accused them of being too quick to prevent its importation but slow to suppress its consumption. He had sent out his own army of secret agents to monitor their progress.

  They show that even in the suppression of opium every province has in its report been guilty of varnishing the truth. For instance from Kirin, Heilungchiang, Honan, Shansi, Pukien, Kuangsi, Yunnan and the New Dominions reports were sent us that the cultivation of the poppy in these provinces had entirely ceased, whereas as a matter of fact in no instance was this the case.

  The British Foreign Office could only agree. ‘Opium is now produced in more than half of the eighteen provinces of China,’ said an FO report. ‘The comparative cheapness of the Chinese opium, the lighter duties levied upon it, and the increasing care taken in its cultivation are enabling it to compete successfully with the Indian drug, and a time is confidently anticipated by the Chinese when Indian opium will be entirely supplanted by the native drug.’

  Having stepped back from its control of the opium trade, British imperial administrators could now see they had handed this monstrous machine to the Chinese, who had no qualms whatsoever about selling it to their own people, as well as transporting it around the world to emerging markets in the West. This new demand had arisen during the Great War – and hit the headlines with the scandalous death of Billie Carleton – and it would be up to the British to clear up the mess. This task would fall to a British imperial warrior who would make it his personal mission to reveal to the world how dangerous drugs were passing from East to West.

  4

  THE FORMIDABLE RUSSELL PASHA

  WHEN THOMAS WENTWORTH RUSSELL – later known as Russell Pasha – joined the Cairo Police in 1912, he thought he should get to know every aspect of his beat. Six foot three inches tall, he did not go unnoticed as he patrolled the streets of the Egyptian capital, but he possessed a natural authority that indicated to anyone thinking of messing with him that they would be biting off more than they could chew.

  The Wagh el-Birket district of Cairo was its red-light quarter. It was built on what used to be a lake fringed by Mamluk palaces but had since become an area filled with hotels for foreign visitors who had fallen on hard times. European prostitutes lived in its crumbling buildings. They were women who no longer commanded the high prices they had earned in Marseilles or their European home towns and were using this as a staging post before being passed on to markets in Bombay and the Far East. Any nationality could be bought, apart from British women, who were banned by the British Consul from operating there.

  ‘A stroll through its narrow and crowded lanes reminded one of a zoo,’ recalled Assistant-Commandant Russell, ‘with its painted harlots sitting like beasts of prey behind the iron grilles of their ground-floor brothels, while a noisy crowd of low-class natives, interspersed with soldiers in uniform and sight-seeing tourists, made their way along the narrow lanes.’

  The king of the vice business in Wagh el-Birket was a huge Nubian called Ibrahim el-Gharbi, who sat cross-legged on a bench outside his house every evening, dealing with his minions. ‘Dressed as a woman and veiled in white,’ noted Russell, ‘this repulsive pervert sat like a silent, ebony idol, occasionally holding out a bejewelled hand to be kissed by some passing admirer, or giving a silent order to one of his attendant servants.’

  El-Gharbi controlled the buying and selling of women throughout Cairo and his influence spread beyond the underworld to Egyptian politics and high society. He could provide anyone with any kind of girl or boy they fancied and made a fortune doing it.

  In 1916, with an influx of British and Commonwealth soldiers fighting in the Middle East, it was decided to clean up the red-light district and remove the hordes of freelance male and female prostitutes to make way for government-regulated brothels. An internment camp was set up for those reluctant to give up their living.

  When Russell mentioned the pivotal role of El-Gharbi in this trade to Cairo Police Commandant Lewa Harvey Pasha, he was surprised to learn that his boss had never heard of him. Harvey Pasha was a fierce Scotsman who had fought with the 42nd Highlanders at Tel-el-Kebir and had a ‘temper like a box of fire-works’. Immediately, he ordered that the vice king of Cairo be arrested and brought before him.

  ‘Half an hour later an officer arrived,’ observed Russell, ‘leading by the hand what looked like a huge negress, clad in white samite, her golden anklets and bracelets clinking as she minced down the corridor. I followed them into Harvey’s office and, for a moment, feared I had imperilled the life of my choleric chief, who blew up like a landmine.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean by bringing this disgusting patchouliscented sodomite into my presence?’ Harvey Pasha bellowed.

  The red-faced commandant ordered El-Gharbi stripped of his female finery, handcuffed and sent off straight away to the internment camp. It was a gross humiliation for the Nubian; his servants gave out the pretence that he was absent, looking after business in his home village. He spent a year in captivity and was forced out of the city, dying a few years later.

  On reflection, Russell wondered whether his dispatch had been such a good idea, as his role was later taken over by European pimps who were not subject to Egyptian law and kept their women in order with the threat of razors and vitriolic acid. But by then, Russell had more pressing demands – he was to be the first global drugs-busting policeman of the twentieth century.

  * * *

  Thomas Russell was born at Wollaton Rectory near Nottingham in 1879. The son of a clergyman, he was educated at Haileybury and Trinity College, Cambridge. Early on, Russell had a passion for animals, which began when his father allowed a ferret to pop up from beneath his surplice when he was preaching. ‘During the course of his life he had an astonishing variety of pets,’ recalled his son-in-law, ‘including weasels, a cheetah, desert jerboas, a duck-billed platypus and among these exotic fauna a succession of cats and dogs. I remember that he was on affectionate terms with a rhinoceros in the Cairo zoo.’ His last pet was a Senussi-speaking parrot called Koko.

  In 1902, Russell joined the Egyptian civil service. At this time, Egypt was not directly part of the British Empire but was being administered for the Egyptian king by a British civil service that looked out for its interests, especially the flow of shipping along that conduit of imperial traffic, the Suez Canal.

  As an inspector for the Ministry of the Interior, Russell formed a camel corps that brought law and order to the wild desert frontiers of the Nile Valley. He fought with bandits and smugglers, learning the ways of the Bedouin Arabs.

  At the beginning of the century, contraband hashish was the major illicit drug entering Egypt. It came from Greece via Cyrenaican ports and was smuggled across the Western Desert by Arab caravans. Forty years later this same harsh terrain, including the sand dunes south of Siwa and the Qattara Depression salt swamp, would be fought across by troops led by generals Montgomery and Rommel. In those early years, the smugglers had no motorised vehicles to help them and relied purely on their camels. What advantage t
hey did have was in their magazine-fed foreign-supplied rifles. They were able to out-shoot the single-loading Martini carbines carried by the Egyptian Coastguard Camel Corps. Early combats between the two forces resembled blood feuds.

  Made up solely of Sudanese tribesmen, the Coastguard Camel Corps came unstuck one day when it clashed with the king of the hashish smugglers, a Tripolitan Arab called Abd el-Ati el-Hussuna. Near a waterhole, west of Dakhla Oasis, one of the Sudanese policemen was shot dead as the Arab caravan made a dash across the Western Desert to Egypt. A relative of the dead man, a sergeant major, made it his duty to avenge this slaughter.

  For over a year, the police tracked the elusive Abd el-Ati. When they got word from Greece that he was to take possession of another large consignment of hashish, they sent out scouting patrols to find the tracks of his caravan. Once they picked up his scent, they rushed after him in pursuit, nineteen of them mounted on thoroughbred Sudan camels, each carrying four days’ forage and water.

  On the third night, the Sudanese police made contact with the rearguard of the Arab caravan and fired shots at them. They had a stark choice – either take on the smugglers or perish, because they did not have enough supplies to return empty-handed. The next day, across blistering hot sands, the camel corps dismounted and advanced in open order against the smugglers. To their relief, they saw that the panicking Arabs had dropped a double-load of bullock skins containing water. Normally, the Arabs would have slit the skins to prevent the police gaining them, but under pressure from the attacking Sudanese they had left them intact.