Empire of Crime

by Tim Newark

  It was an ambiguous statement – bearing in mind the brazen gangster nature of the ABH – but the Consul assured the Incense Master that he would do his best to resolve his concerns about the police by talking to the colonial authorities. As far as the ABH were concerned, if their efforts had been appreciated by the British during their war against the Japanese, why could they not strike a similar deal in their struggle against the communists?

  British Intelligence officers understood very well the political balancing act needed to ensure useful political allies were kept on board, while they also stood up against organised crime. In Malaya, the latter desire seemed to triumph over the former.

  ‘It is probably politically a good thing that action has been taken in Court,’ said one British officer, ‘[letting] banishment proceedings [go ahead] to discredit the Ang Brotherhood before closer links with the Kuomintang were forged.’

  ‘There is more Triad activity at the present time than there has been for 20 years,’ he concluded. ‘We are now faced with the additional factor that a Triad Organisation exists openly in China on good terms with the Kuomintang.’

  That the British felt they did not need to embrace wholeheartedly the deal proffered by the Triads was down to their own success against the communists in Malaya – a secret operation that had been seeded by the Malay Police Force back in the 1930s before the Second World War.

  In the British Empire, the leaders of the Russian Revolution saw a major target for their subversive activities and encouraged undercover agents to create communist cells throughout its territories. In 1931, a French businessman was sent to Singapore on just such a mission. Unfortunately for him, the head of the Straits Settlements Police at that time was an exceptional detective called René Onraet.

  Born in Darjeeling to a family of French extraction, Onraet had been educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire before joining the Straits Settlements Police as a cadet in 1907. His flawless Chinese meant he could adopt many different guises to infiltrate gangster locations. On one occasion, he investigated an opium den by pretending to be a Chinese drain inspector. At another time, he posed as a rickshaw driver.

  ‘Organised crime in Singapore meant one of three things,’ noted Onraet. ‘Gang robbery, extortion from the public and the scheming of subversive organisations. All of these activities to a very great extent depended on immigration from China, and all derived their strength from Chinese secret societies.’

  Chinese immigrants were vulnerable to being exploited by their own people and it was from this pool of imported labour that the Chinese gangsters gained their strength. Most of the mobsters were from peasant families and were physically strong. Onraet described some of their favourite weapons:

  In later years these fellows took to using homemade bombs made from antimony sulphide and potassium chlorate mixed in with nails, screws and pieces of plate glass. These bombs were thrown into the house, generally at meal times, and the noise and smoke, to say nothing of the wounds caused by the shrapnel, enabled the gang to get to work among a thoroughly cowed household. A much more effective bomb was evolved in due course; it consisted of two or three sticks of blasting gelatine packed into a cigarette tin fitted with a fuse – shrapnel as before!

  Cut-down shotguns were also popular. ‘Some of these men were real killers,’ said Onraet, ‘shooting dead unresisting victims simply to terrorise or make a name for themselves. When cornered, they sometimes shot it out from barricaded rooms or housetops.’ As in Shanghai, police assault parties used bulletproof waistcoats and shields when raiding mobster hideouts. One officer nearly drowned at night while wearing one of the heavier models of body armour when he mistook the green surface of a Chinese fishpond for a green field. On another occasion, a policeman wore more home-made protection made out of newspaper stuffed into his uniform by a loving wife.

  At an early stage, Onraet learned that much Chinese crime was fuelled by their insatiable appetite for gambling, but he was sometimes shocked as to when it took place:

  When I was in China I was once asked by some friends to go and see the execution of some robbers. The execution ground was on a slope running down to a small stream, and on the other side of the stream was another slope whereon the public gathered. In due course half a dozen men were brought out and made to kneel with their heads to the stream. When their heads were cut off, some rolled a few feet, some more, down the slope. There were among the spectators men taking bets on which head would roll furthest!

  Onraet’s knowledge-led success against Chinese gangs saw him rapidly promoted to director of the local Criminal Intelligence Department, or Special Branch. It was then that he turned his attention to communist infiltrators, raiding their printing presses and offices, and closing down bomb-making factories.

  In 1931, when a suspicious-looking French businessman turned up in Singapore, Onraet ran a series of checks on him. Contacts within the French Sûreté revealed that his company did not exist in Paris, and when detectives staked out his office in Singapore, they observed several known communists visiting him.

  A police raid on the offices exposed the true identity of the Frenchman. He was Joseph Ducroux, a renowned communist recruiter. Rifling through his files, they uncovered an international network of communist subversives that included Ho Chi Minh – future leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party – then currently in Hong Kong, and his shadowy accomplice Lai Te.

  Lai Te was a man of mystery to even his closest colleagues. No one knew his real name. Bizarrely, when he joined the Malayan Communist Party, he chose a western name, ‘Wright’, but because of Chinese difficulties pronouncing ‘r’ this became distorted to ‘Lai Te’, which was further mangled to ‘Loi Teck’ or ‘Lighter’. Of Vietnamese background, born sometime around 1900, he claimed to have been trained in both Russia and France as a member of the Communist Party. Certainly, he managed to get himself noticed. In Hong Kong, alongside Ho Chi Minh, he was part of a pan-Asian revolutionary movement.

  As a result of Onraet’s diligence, the communist agents were arrested and an attempt to plant revolution in Singapore was foiled. Onraet received much praise and advanced rapidly to become Inspector-General of the entire Straits Settlements Police Force in 1935. Personally, he was dismayed at the light sentences the communists received; in fact, following the Ducroux affair, Lai Te in particular had been allowed to continue his career within the Malayan Communist Party. But for the moment, Onraet would have to let the mysterious communist carry on with his business as usual.

  Rebuilding the shattered remnants of the MCP, Lai Te proved highly effective as an administrator, eventually becoming its secretary-general. Part of his success was down to his very good luck. Whenever a meeting was raided or senior party members banished, Lai Te managed not to be there. It was partly because he was the last man standing on so many occasions that his position of leadership within the MCP was unrivalled.

  When Japan invaded China, Lai Te expressed solidarity with his communist allies by organising riots against Malaya’s importation of soya beans and other food from Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Despite this open insurrection against the colonial authorities, when Japanese soldiers conquered the colony in 1941, Lai Te realised the only future for the communists was to join with the British imperialists in their underground battle against the common enemy. This decision was to be the making of his small but efficient party.

  Trained in guerrilla warfare by the British, the Malayan communists proved to be willing recruits, mastering quickly the skills of living behind enemy lines, setting explosives and ambushing enemy columns. Known first as the Anti-Japanese Union Force (AJUF) and then the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), it had grown to be 7,000 strong by the end of the war. Lai Te, considering himself more of a political manager than a fighter, stayed in Singapore, where his astonishing good luck allowed him to survive the Japanese occupation.

  Whenever a communist cell was discovered and its members were ruthlessly eliminated by the Ke
mpeitai, the Japanese military police, Lai Te was somewhere else. In 1942, the entire Central Committee of the MCP was arrested by the Japanese, but Lai Te had been delayed on his way to the meeting and avoided imprisonment. A month later, leaders of the MPAJA met in caves north of Kuala Lumpur to discuss their strategy. Lai Te was supposed to be there, but his car had broken down on the way. When he arrived, the Japanese had shot dead 90 of the communist guerrillas in a ferocious gun battle. Good fortune is always valued by the Chinese and Lai Te ruled the MCP without any opposition.

  Not everyone, however, was convinced by the communist leader.

  Chin Peng was a young Chinese revolutionary who had risen through the MCP during their years in the jungle. He recalled meeting Lai Te face-to-face for the first time:

  I noted the Secretary-General’s strong Vietnamese accent. Lai Te was obviously not Chinese. He didn’t look Chinese; he didn’t sound Chinese. To me, he looked almost Eurasian. He was dark and quite small in stature – no more than 1.65 metres. He looked ill.

  At the end of the war, the communists emerged as heroes to the Chinese population of Malaya and were well placed to forge ahead with their political objectives – the eradication of colonial rule. Young radicals like Chin Peng demanded that Lai Te declare war on the British Empire, but Lai stepped back from open conflict. He preferred the more traditional strategy of labour unrest and protests.

  Increasingly frustrated by Lai Te’s caution, some of the young Malayan communists began to ask awkward questions. How was it that Lai Te was able to travel around Japanese-occupied Malaya so easily? How come he had avoided so many disastrous meetings when other communists were arrested or killed by the Japanese? How come, in fact, before the war, he had managed to avoid so many of the raids on their party by the British? Why was Lai Te so very lucky?

  In October 1946, Lai Te was summoned to a meeting of the Central Committee of the Malayan Communist Party in Kuala Lumpur to explain some irregularities in the funding of the party.

  ‘Lai Te duly appeared on the third day for the start of the main meeting,’ recalled Chin Peng. ‘He began by asking for the prepared agenda. He read it without obvious reaction. For a while he attempted to justify his political analysis until he realised he was failing to win over his audience. He then abruptly changed tack and insinuated that the comrade who had presided over the drafting of the agenda was involved in a plot.’

  The accused party member vehemently protested and the strength of his denial unnerved Lai Te, who changed his approach yet again.

  ‘I’m getting old,’ he told his colleagues, ‘and you all know I’ve been unwell for a long time. I would like your permission to take a holiday. Perhaps I could use the time to improve my Chinese language skills.’

  Lai Te then suggested that Chin Peng would make a good leader of the party. As Lai Te heaped praise on the young man, Chin Peng felt uncomfortable and jumped to his feet. He suspected Lai Te of distracting attention from his own precarious situation.

  ‘Before I had finished my outburst,’ said Chin Peng, ‘Lai Te, to the total amazement of everybody, burst into tears. He sat weeping silently at the head of the table, his head cradled in his hands. Through his sobs he repeatedly murmured: “You have misunderstood me … you have misunderstood me.” If his theatrics had been calculated to win sympathy, they were an instant and stunning success.’

  The other party members rounded on Chin Peng and said that their leader should be allowed to rest and go on holiday. But party rumblings continued and, in January 1947, a further meeting was convened in Kuala Lumpur. Lai Te was a meticulous timekeeper and when he failed to turn up, everyone was concerned.

  Chin Peng drove with his colleagues to Lai Te’s home, looking for signs of an accident along the way. Lai Te’s pregnant wife was as surprised as they were when they told her that he had not made the meeting. Fearing something serious might have happened to their party leader, Chin Peng and his comrades began to search the city.

  ‘We were at a loss as to how to begin our investigations,’ he recalled. ‘We had no contacts in the Special Branch. Furthermore, we could scarcely go up to the local police station and report the clandestine leader of the dreaded CPM as “missing, believed kidnapped by the Special Branch”.’

  Suspecting there might be something more to this disappearance, Chin Peng and his closest party members decided it might be safer for them to also disappear for the time being. In fact, Lai Te would never turn up; he had vanished, along with a large chunk of MCP funds.

  In the wake of this scandal, which rocked the Malayan Communist Party, nuggets of information began to surface that revealed the full extent of Lai Te’s deception over two decades. It seems likely that Lai Te’s ‘luck’ had first begun in 1931, as a result of the Ducroux affair. When René Onraet had Ho Chi Minh arrested in Hong Kong, his fellow Vietnamese was pulled in with him. It then appears that the first period of Lai Te’s double life was exposed, as he had been working as a secret agent for the French Indo-Chinese authorities.

  In 1934, realising the potential for an intelligence coup here, Onraet invited Lai Te to Singapore, where he was allowed to continue his career as a communist. His rise to party prominence was helped considerably by informing on his fellow communists and allowing them to be arrested by Onraet’s Special Branch detectives. Right up to the war, the Straits Settlements Police knew exactly what the communists were up to because their agent was running them.

  With the Japanese occupation of Malaya, Lai Te changed sides yet again. Using his contacts within British Intelligence as collateral, he sold his services to the Japanese. Running the MCP, he was perfectly placed to tell them all about their guerrilla activities and see their leaders slaughtered every so often. He gave out just enough information not to have the anti-Japanese movement snuffed out, but enough to keep himself useful to the Kempeitai. After the war, he saw no reason why he could not continue to play his highly successful game of deception.

  Returning to the British, Lai Te promised to keep a lid on communist insurrection. He told them everything they needed to know about the new generation of revolutionaries, and when he finally departed he wiped out their financial resources. It was for this reason that the Malayan Communist Party was in such a weakened state in 1947 and why the Ang Bin Hoey and its Kuomintang allies were in a far superior position. It also explained why the British thought they had no need to join the dubious anti-communist pact proffered by organised crime.

  Having the Communist Party completely under its thumb during this period was a tremendous success for the Singapore Special Branch. But with Lai Te’s hasty departure, it meant they were suddenly plunged into darkness. The party then began to be run by real revolutionaries. Any moderates within the party were immediately regarded with suspicion and the more radical wing took over. These were the men who demanded insurrection against the colonial government.

  Chin Peng took over the MCP and launched his own investigation into Lai Te, learning about his secret deals with the British and Japanese.

  ‘I also uncovered disturbing information about Lai Te’s private life,’ he said, ‘which, remarkably enough, had remained concealed from the rest of us. Miss Jang, a Hakka from Penang, the woman who had addressed the Central Committee the morning Lai Te went missing in Kuala Lumpur, turned out to be the Secretary-General’s fourth wife.

  ‘In Singapore I learned that his first wife, a Vietnamese, was the daughter of a government contractor who had purchased a beachside bungalow in Katong for the family. There was also another beautiful Vietnamese mistress who had lost a hand in an accident. She lived in a flat in the Hill Street area of Singapore, paid for by Lai Te. Our Secretary-General had also provided the capital behind the bar and restaurant she ran in the same district.’

  With information such as this, the financial motive for Lai Te’s life of deception was becoming clearer. Eventually, his good fortune ran out and he was tracked down in Bangkok by Thai communist comrades of Chin Peng. The plan was to kidn
ap and bring him back for questioning, but the snatch went wrong.

  ‘One grabbed him in a headlock,’ recorded Chin. ‘Another lunged for his throat. The man gripping him around the neck applied increased pressure. The struggling form began writhing and contorting. Then he frothed at the mouth, went limp and stopped breathing. At the back of the shop house, the men conveniently discovered some lengths of hessian used for making sacks. They wrapped the body in these and waited for darkness.’

  That night, the body of Lai Te was dumped in the waters of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river. Apparently, shortly after the killing, a senior Special Branch officer flew from Singapore to Bangkok to meet Lai Te. He was there to warn their ex-agent that he was being tailed throughout South-East Asia by vengeful communists and his life was in danger. ‘Obviously, the British were close to the action,’ noted Chin Peng with a smile. ‘But not quite close enough.’

  Having put aside a secret stash of weapons during their time in the jungle fighting the Japanese, the Malayan Communist Party was prepared – and hungry – for an armed confrontation. Their inspiration was Mao Tse-tung’s war in mainland China against the nationalists. In February 1948, Chin Peng attended a communist conference in Calcutta, where the keynote speech was given by a Vietnamese delegate who called for a wave of anti-imperialist campaigns across South-East Asia. Inspired, Chin called up his old MPAJA veterans and that year they struck their first blow against British rule.

  Early on the morning of 16 June, a dozen communists surrounded the estate office of a rubber plantation in the district of Perak in northern Malaya. Inside were the 55-year-old manager, John Allison, and his 21-year-old assistant, Ian Christian. The young man had served as a Gurkha officer before joining the rubber business. The communists asked them for their pistols. Christian didn’t have one, but Allison had one in his bungalow.

  Both men had their hands secured behind their back and were taken to the bungalow, where the gun was found. The manager and his assistant were then marched back to the office, tied to chairs on the verandah and shot in the head and body with a spray of machine-gun bullets. The communists took $1,000 from the office safe, but in order to let the world know that this was not just an ordinary crime, the leader of the execution gang told the chief clerk that their purpose was to kill imperialists: ‘We will kill all Europeans.’ In fact, their killing spree had started earlier that morning, when they had shot dead another estate manager. On both occasions, the killers escaped by bicycle.