This is a true story and although most of the details of the original tycoon kidnappings in Hong Kong are in the public domain, I’ll be selective in the details as most of the events have become the stuff of legends in many lunchtimes, including mine. With the probable exception of the individual behind it all; most of the people involved at that time are still alive, so I’m going to change a few of the details in the telling of this for privacy and legal reasons. It’s a long post, so you might want to put your feet up for it.
Back in 1997 I was 32 years old and living in Far North Queensland, Australia, occasionally teaching scuba diving and taking tourists on 4WD tours around the Rainforest. I say occasionally, because it was during the wet season and there wasn’t a great deal of work around and as lovely as it was, walking barefoot along Port Douglas’s Four Mile Beach didn’t pay the bills. And yes, this is what it looks like…
A busy day down at the beach…
Very late in the day, I received a phone call from an old friend, whom I will call ‘Frank’ after Frank Farmer, Whitney’s minder in the movies. Unlike Frank Farmer, who was very straight, this Frank wasn’t and he’d obviously just left what was probably a succession of bars and didn’t sound too sober. Hearing his slurred voice was a very pleasant surprise. My eyes quickly widened when I heard what he had to say. Frank had some work for me, it was in Hong Kong and he wanted me there the day after tomorrow…
Not too long before, Frank had left the Special Duties Unit (SDU) of the Royal Hong Kong Police (RHKP) and joined a new company that was operating in the corporate security sphere. A new client had approached them asking for help, as a person in his social circle had recently been kidnapped and ransomed for a lot of money (reportedly in excess of USD70M). Franks company was quickly hired to protect several of the worried tycoons and they needed some extra manpower.
I don’t want to give the criminal behind the kidnappings any more space here than necessary, but it would benefit the reader to know that there was one person who was – and I don’t want to use the word ‘the mastermind’ because that might infer some kind of admiration for him, but he did have the motivation and ambition to do what he did, but the very act of kidnapping and especially the way he did it, didn’t leave my colleagues and I with any respect towards him, other than a kind of a professional appreciation. He lived life very large before he was ultimately caught and reportedly executed, across the border in China with a bullet in the back of his head. But, he’s a part of this, so here goes.
Before he was caught, the gangster, known as ‘Big Spender’ had sequestered several people, but after the original victim, he was rather cheekily threatening to target a number of others and he was demanding $1, 000, 000 a month each from Hong Kong’s ten richest men NOT to kidnap them. My client had approached Frank’s company and asked them to protect him and his family.
The reason why Hong Kong’s elite were so scared of being kidnapped by him was largely because of his methods. His first victim was taken on his way home from his mistresses apartment up on the peak late at night. They had stopped his car and bundled him into another vehicle, with nothing heard from him for over two weeks. It was his family who received the call demanding the cash over the weekend and they opened the bank to get the cash out. It transpired that he’d been kept in a coffin sized crate the whole time. The crate had been buried underground with only a plastic drainpipe to the surface and once a day they’d pass food and water down the pipe, without ever speaking to him.
Those two weeks almost totally deprived of all sensation with insufficient food, water and lying in his own filth left the victim with lasting physical and mental health problems. Those who knew him say that he was never the same again and certainly, it had major ramifications for his family and business.
There was also another reason why the elite had good reasons to be worried and that was because they literally had billions of undeclared dollars that was stashed in banks in Hong Kong and if they had to hand tens of millions over, without it even denting their fortunes, they would have to answer a lot of questions from the media and the authorities.
For me, I didn’t have billions stashed away and the offer of work was very good news at just the right time, but the knowledge that I had at least three months overseas was tempered with the sobering realisation that I’d be leaving behind my wife and son, who was just three years old. My morning walks with him on my shoulders, through the sugar cane fields down to the beach, pointing out the Flying Fox colonies in the paperbark trees and snakes lurking in the undergrowth, became even more special and I knew that I was going to really miss them.
On the sartorial front, there was another concern as Frank had reminded me that I’d need smart business attire each day. That did worry me a bit as I only had the one suit, two decent shirts and a tie, very little money and no opportunity to buy more. I literally hadn’t worn footwear, unless I was going for a run, for a couple of years and so, as I thought about the administrative details, I brushed off the light green tropical mould that furred my black brogues and polished them to a high gloss. I also figured that as HK tailors could knock a suit up overnight, I could probably get another if I needed one, when I had been paid.
The aforementioned suit was a good quality, dark blue wool affair that I had purchased in Hong Kong from Marks and Spencers some time before as a wedding suit. [side note – I got married in Hong Kong in 1989 after an exhausting month of bar crawling with Frank and his mates from the Police, leaving for Australia with lifelong memories and $20 in our pockets] Of course, I hadn’t worn it for many years but luckily it still fitted and the moths hadn’t got to it. I didn’t get there the ‘day after tomorrow’ as was initially demanded, but I did get there four days later, after having borrowed the air fare from the ever generous Frank.
The job that I had flown out there for was to take over a close protection team that was ‘securing’ one of the local tycoons against kidnap. A full time team leader had already been selected, but he was in the process of leaving his job in the Police and wouldn’t be available for three months. And so, within 48 hours of arriving in Hong Kong, I was running three close protection teams, one for the client, a smaller one for his wife and basic one for his children, who were actually at boarding school most of the time. A small team of specialist ex Police and Gurkhas would mind the family and the residences.
My team had three armoured BMW’s at our disposal that I discovered would protect the occupants against all but the heaviest bullets and were resistant to hand grenades, small to medium mines and even poison gas! (more of that later). The local company drivers had been flown out to Bavaria and had been trained in handling the half a million dollar beasts, reportedly marvelling at the speeds they were allowed to drive at there, having hardly been able to get a car into fourth gear in HK.
One of the very nice (and expensive) 7 series high security Beemers
My home for the duration of the contract was to be the New World Harbour View, a well known five star hotel, overlooking Victoria harbour. All the expenses were going to be picked up by the tycoon and I was told to eat in the hotel, whenever possible to ‘keep expenses down’ I’m not quite sure how much money could be saved by my eating in a five star hotel, rather than a noodle store downtown, but that was the instruction, so I went at it with a will when I had the chance. There were four very good restaurants in the hotel and over three months, I estimated that I had eaten every single item on every menu (except for sharks fin soup) at least twice, whilst I was there.
A few years teaching scuba diving in paradise had helped me forget how busy and noisy cities were. I really wasn’t very good with crowds anymore and the days proved to be long and were unsurprisingly stressful, with very little downtime. After picking the client up from his home each day at around 07.00 and taking him to the office; sometimes via a hotel for a business breakfast and I would usually rush back to the hotel for a workout, wash my kit, shower and have breakfast before heading back to the small ‘ready room’ near his office to wait for any movements.
There were always two to three ‘out of office’ meetings during the day and usually at least one function each evening and all of them at the smartest of hotels and most amazing of houses. The higher up on the peak the houses were, the richer the inhabitants were. It was clear that there was several generations of wealth that had gone into that kind of property, either that or some very ruthless business dealings. Probably a bit of both.
Bodyguarding, or Close Protection as it’s mainly called in ‘peacetime’ is all about counter surveillance and anticipating and hopefully avoiding an attack before it happens. Sadly, unlike in the movies, you cannot legally go out loaded for bear, intending to shoot your way out of an incident, so you have to be smarter than the bad guys. We knew, through the office staff what meetings we had to ‘advance’ – which in bodyguard speak, is to travel to and check out each venue for lurking bad guys before we brought the client there.
An attacker will always look for patterns in behaviour to exploit and ‘choke points’ (places where a route narrows significantly slows, or stops traffic) in regularly travelled routes and so we had to avoid setting patterns, but as you can imagine, it’s difficult to vary fixed times, such as your departure from the house, your arrival at work, the time you leave for lunch, return from lunch, go to the gym and arrive home etc., so I tried every method to vary the routes taken, keep as many of his movements as random as I could and not set patterns, but that was almost impossible in a small city like Hong Kong. When you’re doing a job like this your head really does have to be on a swivel with your senses attuned for threats that could literally materialise out of nowhere and being at that high level of awareness day after day was exhausting.
Before long it was obvious that my nightly habit, after being dropped off back at my hotel at around 23.00hrs, of washing my shirt, jocks and socks in the sink and pressing my suit by hand, just wasn’t sustainable when sleep was the main priority. More than once, I had woken up on the way to the bathroom floor, with the soapy socks still on my hands and although I always polished my own shoes, I resigned to having the laundry done in the hotel overnight with my suit being dry cleaned every other night. I didn’t look at the price as it was all covered by the boss and thankfully, the proverbial Chinese laundry never failed me, with someone knocking on the door at around 05.15 each morning with my clean and pressed clothes on hangers.
One morning, I came down in the lift with two very large and imposing colleagues, who were staying in the hotel on similar tasks, but for another client. The door opened and standing right in front of us was Murray, the red Wiggle. His usual googley eyes widened even further as he saw three of us in front of him and he was frozen to the spot. The three of us, all of whom had kids and knew who he was, automatically did the wiggles ‘hand gesture‘ to him and he broke out into a broad grin as we stepped past him.
Some nights, after a really hectic day, I was just too hyped up to go to sleep and so I wandered out of the hotel and into one of the many pubs in Wan Chai. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Wan Chai, it’s the old red light area that at that time was full of neon lights, bar girls and drunken ex pats. It still is, but with markedly fewer expats and more eastern European hookers. If you were down on the strip just before midnight, you’d see the bar girls coming ‘on shift’ and hoping to make enough money to keep their families fed, they would burn Joss Paper in the shape of dollar bills, cars and luxury watches. All hoping that riches would come to them in this world, or the next. I would occasionally pick up the notes blowing down the road and deposit them in the nearest brazier myself, in the hope that there would be another day without an incident.
Several guys in the industry were doing similar jobs to me in HK for high net worth individuals and we swapped intelligence and compared stories over a couple of beers; this meant that although there were plenty of 24 hour tailors, I never did get around to having a second suit made, preferring to using the little down time I had to eat, drink and sleep, rather than stand around in a tailors shop.
We did have some issues with the BMW’s in the beginning, in that the aircon in the cars kept failing. Within a couple of minutes, there was a blast of cold fresh air, but it was annoying that a brand new and very expensive car would malfunction like that. Given that the client had three of them, he did have a little pull in the service department and so BMW flew two of their engineers out from Bavaria to find out what the problem was. After a few hours, their verdict was that the pollution in Hong Kong was such that the cars system thought that there was poison gas outside of the car and it had cut off the ventilation and switched automatically to the cylinder of pure O2 in the boot to save the lives of the people in the car! The mistaken reading for the gas came from the benchmark of pure German mountain air compared to that of the environment around the (not so) fragrant harbour and the car felt that it was under attack!.
In my first weeks in the role, I had been shadowing the guy running the team before I took over. Tim* was a very serious former US Navy Seal with a carefully hidden sense of humour, but we got along well and during our handover, we had stood together in so many doorways on the Peak ‘waiting for Whitney’ that we had learned where many of the potential kidnap targets lived and what they did in their spare time. Not all of their ‘hobbies’ were reputable, mind you, but you don’t ever talk about that. Seeing how they lived and how they treated their staff was certainly an eyeopener into how the ‘other half’ lives and I still shake my head when I think about some of the things I have seen.
*Not his real name
It was hard not to make value judgements of the people you were looking after but you never gossiped about them. There was also an unwritten rule that when you were having a few beers with the other operators, that you were never too specific when you spoke about your client, but it certainly sounded like I had been allocated a decent man. His son, who was overseas at boarding school most of the time was back in the colony on holidays and I ran him around to few of his old school friends houses. They were heavily stage managed visits, with staff fluttering around all of the time and it was hard to get a read on what kind of a young man he was.
One morning I picked him up from their house before heading to the office to collect his father. I was taking the two of them to lunch at a hotel they owned in Kowloon and he wanted to look smart but was struggling with his tie. I sat in the back with him and tied him a full Windsor knot, which he seemed to really like. We chatted about his school, which was, of course, one of the most exclusive public schools in England and I found out he was actually a really nice guy, which I think was a credit to his parents. I struggled with forming an opinion of his father at first as he didn’t do small talk, but an experience with the two of them that day really impressed me.
We had to go to a very downmarket area in Kowloon before lunch and the boss explained that the building we were visiting was owned by a friend of his. It was an old factory that should really have been condemned, but it still had several small businesses operating out of it. There were live wires running over the ceilings, what smelt like raw sewerage running across the floors and flames lighting up the gloom in several of the rooms. Surprisingly good cooking smells came out of one very dingy room and the boss noted ‘fish balls – very tasty, but you don’t want to see them being made!’ He was taking us to the area where the workers lived and I’d heard about them, but I’d never seen the ‘cage dwellers’ before. In Hong Kong, where the poorest of the poor lived from hand to mouth and a lot of them still had an opium problem, despite it having been illegal for many years; the cage dwellers rented small cages to sleep in, not much bigger than their bodies, with their meagre belongings hanging inside the wire for security. The cages were all around the walls of the rooms and in some cases, they were four high, with small step ladders made from old pallets for them to climb up and down.
The client turned to his son, who was as wide eyed as I was and told him that although he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, not everyone was and this was where real people lived and died. He explained that his son was going to spend the next two days working with an outreach program that one of the churches he sponsored ran and that he’d be helping to feed some of these people. His son was silent all the way to lunch and his father shot up in my estimation from then on.
Late one evening in Wan Chai, the topic of conversation over a few too many beers was the amount of money that the kidnapper and his gang had reportedly taken over the months of his spree to date. We totted up at least USD250Million in ransoms that we knew of and of course, all of that was paid to him in cash. One victims family even had a bank open its vaults on a Sunday morning and they withdrew over $70M in cash to pay a ransom. We heard that it took two trucks to carry it all. By the time we’d had few more beers, we joked that we were in the wrong jobs and instead of protecting them, we should actually be kidnapping the tycoons!
One night, just before my colleague Tim left Hong Kong, we were coming down from a house party on the Peak in the Beemer. The two of us sat in the back flanking the client and scanning the dark and almost deserted roads ahead for suspicious movements. What most people don’t realise is that not far from the neon lit streets of central Hong Kong, there are pockets of secondary jungle, that remain from the originally cleared forest slopes and during the ‘advance’ of the route prior to our arrival earlier in the evening, we’d noticed that there was a old water tower just set back in the jungle with a small parking bay for city vehicles to service the utility.
This time, my eyes were drawn to a point some 200 metres down the road and I could see that there was a truck parked in the dark bay, but with its interior light on. It occurred to me that it was too late for government workers to be out and at the same time, only a short distance beyond it, I saw the occupant of an illegally parked SUV that was pulled over by the side of the road, sit up quickly and start his car. Tim noticed the same thing and I muttered ‘stand by, stand by’ as we both pushed the client back in his seat, linking arms across his chest, preparing for what I was sure would be the truck ramming us and shortly afterwards, sledge hammers smashing against the armoured glass as they tried to grab the client. In these kind of cases, kidnappers have no interest in taking the bodyguard as you’re just an inconvenience to them, so you just know that its not going to end well for you.
I leaned forward to slap our oblivious driver on his shoulder and shout ‘drive, drive, drive’ and he did, slamming his foot to the floor. The cars monster V12 engine propelling us forward like a scalded cat. The driver of the truck panicked and tried to turn his interior light off at the same time as putting the truck into gear and in his hurry, he stalled half way out onto the road. I looked at his angry face screaming obscenities at us as we passed him and then switched my attention to the blocking car that was trying to pull out and close off both lanes in front of us. Our driver, who by this time, was well aware as to what was going on, quickly drove on the inside of the blocking car and mounting the pavement, pulled around the rear of the SUV. The inside of the heavily armoured car was probably the safest place in Hong Kong at that moment, but it didn’t feel like it as despite the upgraded suspension, the centrifugal force of swerving around the SUV caused us to speed wobble several times before he gained full control again and got us on the way back to the residence.
We calmed the client down by getting our own heartbeats under control and quietly discussing how the attempt had gone wrong. The client, I suspect was doing some mental maths, working out that the money he’d spent on protection had, in this case, been well invested! I quickly contacted the other close protection teams operating locally for our company to alert them that there had been a ‘contact’ with the kidnappers but that we were fine; just in case the bad guys had more than one team out that night. After seeing the client safely home, we were dropped off back at the hotel. That night, in a certain Wan Chai bar, there was full turn out of the other team leaders and there was a thorough and liquid debrief. The next day was a Sunday and thankfully, the only movement was taking the client to three different Church services, all sponsored by him and then on to a tennis game at one of his homes. After which, I stood down for the day.
Coming up to Christmas I had found myself with several black tie functions to attend with the client and so I skipped the gym one morning and got the driver to take me to one of the very glitzy malls nearby and I splashed out on a dinner suit. It cost me the equivalent of two weeks wages back in Australia and I felt pretty guilty for spending the money. Luckily, it fitted me straight off the peg and I was sure that I’d blend in at one of the many fundraising balls that I’d have to attend. I didn’t blend in of course, as the only fit looking Europeans there who were around my age, were clearly there as security and everybody knew it! It was around that time that I had occasion to run the bosses wife to some charity and social functions during the day. I knew that the client was busy in meetings and wasn’t going to leave his own building so there was no chance of him slipping out without me but I knew that some protectees try that, just for fun and end up getting into serious trouble. Luckily for me, he wasn’t that adventurous.
The bosses wife was a young, very smart US trained lawyer and although she didn’t have to work for a living of course; she was active on the Hong Kong social scene and was always organising for a worthy cause. She also happened to be attractive and had a sharp eye for any imagined breach of protocol by ‘the help’
Tim had made a point of warning me that when I opened the car door for her to get out (that’s not just a fluff move by the way, it’s actually so you can shove the protectee back in the car and quickly shut the door if there’s an incident) to make sure that I was looking outwards so that there was no chance of her thinking that I was staring at her (admittedly very long) legs. Aside from the fact that it would have been counter productive professionally, as you always need to be looking outwards for threats, I was very aware of protocol before I met her and I hoped that basic good manners would carry me through as I wasn’t in the habit of ‘sneaking a peek’ in any case.
It was impossible not to feel like a bit of a fashion accessory at times, but the bosses wife understood that I wasn’t there to be a shopping assistant and besides, the stores literally came to her. She did mention casually one day that she would have ‘one of her people’ look at some suit options for me as I think that she had realised that me wearing the same blue suit all the time, wasn’t just a fashion choice… I felt that I had always got on well enough with her and her husband to have a frank conversation as I took them to a function on the peak over what form her protection would take when the full time team leader took over. She confided that although she realised that she had to have the security cover, she herself had no fear of being kidnapped. I asked her why and she smiled when she answered that the wives weren’t really a target for kidnap because their husbands would tell the kidnappers to keep them! The boss, very unwisely in my view, kept quiet…
It was around that time that the media was frothing at the mouth over the fact that although several tycoons had allegedly been kidnapped for huge ransoms, not one of them had reported the crime to the Police. Because the kidnappings had not been reported, there was legally ‘nothing to investigate‘ although the media obviously knew what had happened; how much had reportedly been paid and even who was behind it. They became desperate to get pictures of the *gweilo’s being paid to protect Hong Kong’s richest men and it became a secondary game of cat and mouse to avoid being snapped by Hong Kong’s paparazzi.
*Foreign devils
My predecessor Tim was snapped one day trailing the boss as he walked through one of the shopping malls he owned, but far from being embarrassed by the media attention, he went out and bought several copies of the magazine as souvenirs. I was feeling quite proud that I’d managed to avoid the attentions of the media but one morning, thanks to a rookie error, we arrived at the clients office and took the lift from the secure basement up to the private executive floor. One of the sneaky reporters obviously had a lookout near the car park entrance who tipped him off and he had legitimately entered the guarded lobby floor and was waiting by the lifts as we we were coming up. He’d pressed the lobby button and it opened, right in front of him.
One of the things you do when in a lift with a protectee is to stand right in front of the door, just in case something like this happens. He was holding a small camera up to his eye as the door opened and other than that, it was clear that apart from being an annoyance, he wasn’t an immediate threat. The panicking lift attendant did a little dance on the spot and pressed several buttons other than he one he wanted, which was the door close button… Luckily, I knew exactly where it was and without breaking eye contact, I wished him good morning in Cantonese and pressed the button, closing the door. I noticed that the client was staring into the corner in order to avoid being photographed, but he thanked me for quickly closing the door. The next thing I did was designate that lift as a VIP lift, and I had a technician program that lift to go directly from the secure basement to the executive floor.
A couple of days later there was an article in one of the most popular English language newspapers, that discussed how outrageous it was that everyone knew what was going on and in order to protect themselves, the tycoons had to pay for gweilo security rather than rely on Hong Kong’s own very effective Police Force. This of course, stemmed from the fact that the alleged crimes hadn’t been reported. Another Cantonese language magazine covered the same story but unfortunately, the shot taken from the lift lobby had made it into the magazine. The reporter had kindly noted how ‘cool and calm’ I was when the lift door had opened on me and mentioned that I had watched him intently as the door closed… The secretaries in the clients office giggled at the sensationalist tone of the article and also thought that it was a nice picture of my blue suit, but they were of course, being sarcastic as they hadn’t seen me wearing anything else since I had been there. Unfortunately, this also meant that the bad guys had probably seen my picture and they could associate me with the potential target.
That proved to be the case when about two months into my contract, I had to take the client to a breakfast meeting at the Hong Kong Club in Central. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s right next door to the Cenotaph between the Chater and Connaught roads. Connaught road at that time had some major road works and traffic was moving quite slowly, so a lot of cars had decided to take Chater road as a short cut. Consequently, it was also quite congested. Jackson road, the small one way street cutting between the two main thoroughfares was a prized dawdling place for limo’s and it was so crowded, I had to keep my driver circling the block.
The Hong Kong Club. They do a good fried breakfast.
On this particular day, the weather was quite good and I spent a few minutes watching the scene outside the club. It wasn’t just for the hell of it, as counter surveillance is a very important part of the job. In the military its called looking for ‘combat indicators’ such as no women and children on the streets in what is usually a busy market, or windows shuttered when they’d normally be open. Essentially, you’re looking for the absence of the ordinary and it was the same way that Tim and I had noticed the truck parked at night, with the blocking car down the road automatically, as their presence was unusual and by rights, they shouldn’t have been there.
In Central Hong Kong that day, the combat indicators were people not dressed appropriately to be in this very dressy part of town or the vehicle that looked out of place among the BMW’s, occasional Rolls Royce’s and Mercedes. On this occasion, lo and behold, I saw a small covered flat bed truck across the road, lurking outside the public library, that looked suspiciously like the one that had tried to ram us up on Barker road.
As I walked towards it, the driver made the mistake of looking directly at me and made eye contact. I couldn’t believe it, as it was the same driver as before! He wouldn’t have recognised me from Barker Road, as I had been sitting inside a darkened car the last time, but I certainly recognised him and the way he looked at me this time made me realise that he knew exactly who I was and what I was doing. He’d probably been shown the picture from the magazine and been briefed that if he saw me, the target wouldn’t be far behind. The driver had the decency to look away quickly, but he knew he’d been made. If my heart hadn’t been beating so hard, I might have smiled.
I knew that the Police would move the truck along before too long as he was on double yellow lines, but I had to buy some time before we went out on the pavement, so I headed back inside and checked on the client. I knew he didn’t like to spend more than an hour sitting still anywhere, so I stood on the other side of the room but in his line of sight, so that if he looked up, he’d know I was there. We had an agreement that if he was within five minutes of wanting to make a move, he’d give me a nod, but this time he made eye contact and shook his head. I called the driver to find out where he was and I told him to stay there. Next, I went back outside to see if the truck was still there and it wasn’t, but there was a dark SUV with heavily tinted windows parked in front of the club that hadn’t been there a few minutes before. That wasn’t unusual in itself, but most vehicles picking up and dropping off at the club were in and out in seconds.
In the past, the kidnappers MO had been to intercept the victims at night on a quiet road, or as they came out of their homes. They knew that if they came out hard in the middle of the city, the resulting hue and cry from the Police would be such that they’d be lucky if they made it out of Central alive, as Franks old mob would have hunted them down. I had a quick word with the doorman at the club and he promised to find out whose it was. “He’s not a member Sir” was the answer and I resolved to keep a wary eye on the vehicle. The client then appeared without warning behind me and told me he’d finished earlier than he’d thought, which left me with a real problem as we were on the pavement, with no car waiting and a suspicious vehicle opposite us. I called our driver Sam, who was luckily just out of sight alongside Chater Gardens and he quickly pulled out and turned across the traffic to a chorus of blaring horns and the screeching of tyres.
The situation was now critical, as whoever was in the SUV could literally rush out and take the client by force, so we retreated back into the doorway of the club just as the door of the SUV opened just a couple of inches. As no one got out. it became a Mexican stand off, with us not wanting to run to the car and maybe not make it and them not wanting to reveal their hand and rush us when we would have probably have been in the car before they got to us. Out of the corner of my vision, I could see our car forcing its way past the others lining up near the Cenotaph and I mentally measured the distance between us and the SUV, us and the inside of the club and us to the BMW, working out what would be the fastest way to get to safety. If the kidnappers were heavily armed, going back inside the club would be of no help, but if we could get into the car, we’d be safe.
Our driver pulled around the cars in front of him and put two wheels up on the forecourt of the club. As he unlocked the doors on our side from the inside we were still trying not to make things obvious and panic the public, but we rushed across the paving and as gracefully as we could and without making it clear what we were were doing, we jumped inside. The door of the SUV closed and slowly pulled away. I immediately reported the plate number to the Police through our liaison and found out that the plates were false, which didn’t surprise me in the least.
The Hong Kong Police and Special Branch knew exactly where the kidnapper was hiding out and they had him under surveillance in a farming area over the border just outside Shenzen. Big Spender knew better than to set foot back in Hong Kong himself because Franks old team were waiting for him and so he satisfied himself with swanning in and out of Macau gambling Millions on a single spin of the roulette wheel, but he didn’t stop his gang operating there. The intelligence services confirmed through satellite technology, that his followers had been busy, constructing a purpose built jail, complete with watchtowers and a high perimeter fence. They estimated that there were at least six cells for his victims, which suggested to everyone in the know that he was nowhere near done with his activities.
I experienced an awkward moment one day when the bosses wife asked me if I could play golf? I answered ‘not well’ which was the truth. In fact, that was actually dressing it up a little as I am pretty shocking at golf, but she said that it didn’t matter as I could caddy for her. I realised that I would have a couple of days free as the boss had announced that he was going on his annual ‘retreat’ and whilst I thought that it was a bit of an unusual request, it was just within the scope of my job, so I said yes, I’d be her caddy.
The bosses ‘retreat’ was just that and amongst many other things, he owned a country club in China and for just two days out of the year, he helicoptered into the country club, which was just over the border and played cards with a couple of old friends, smoked cigars and drank good wine. I didn’t put two and two together until I overheard the client tell his secretary to have his golf clubs sent to the country club and then it became clear that his wife resented the fact that he was chilling out without her and wanted me to take her over there and make sure that he wasn’t having the wrong kind of fun. He just wasn’t the kind of man to do that sort of thing and I felt really bad for him but also for me because if I did that, I’d ruin the trust that we had between us.
I had to make a difficult call to my employer and tell him what was happening and ask for an intervention. He made the call and my new career as a caddy ended as quickly as it had started. Unfortunately, this also meant that my relationship with the bosses wife became distinctly frosty.
Luckily, my time in the role was coming to an end and I needed to hand over the team to its new leader. As part of the handover with Tim he’d mentioned that there was a bit of a ritual, whereby any senior member of staff who was leaving was summoned to the bosses wife’s office where she would thank them and give them a present from the small room behind her desk. The presents were actually unwanted gifts that had been handed over as she left a function or party and reportedly, some of them had been very valuable. Most of them hadn’t even been unwrapped and she knew, by the status of the host who had provided the gifts just how nice it would be. I have to admit, that I was secretly hoping for a nice watch or something similar.
I had hardly spoken to her since ‘caddygate’ but it was a nice surprise to see her being so friendly as I dropped in to say goodbye. After a cup of tea with her and shaking her hand, she excused herself and went into the gift room. She came out with a small package and with an air of noblesse oblige handed it over. I thanked her and left for my employers office.
Later that day, I sat amongst my colleagues sharing the debrief of the last three months. My employer left the room in order to answer a phone call that turned out to be the clients wife. Apparently she’d just gone through my hotel bills and had discovered that my laundry bill over the last three months had been within $250 of the cost of their daughters new car that they’d bought for her at college in the US! I didn’t feel too bad as I knew that they owned the hotel and could afford it.
And the gift? I expect that the bosses wife had her revenge after all as it was a shoe cleaning kit…
Postcript.
A couple of months later I was in Indonesia, contingency planning for the fall of the Suharto government and a conversation was relayed back to me that had happened in the Hong Kong office of my employer. The man who had taken over the team from me was due some leave and the client had suggested that they bring me back to stand in for him. One of the guys said, “Jerry’s in Jakarta right now” and my employer said “well, we could always send in the blue suit, it knows what to do”…