Blood Lust Read online

  BLOOD LUST

  ALEX JOSEY

  © 2011 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited

  The Tenth Man—Gold Bar Murders first published in 1973; The Murder of a Beauty Queen first published in 1984; both books first published by Times Books International.

  Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions

  An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

  1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196

  Design concept and illustrations by Lock Hong Liang

  Images by stock.xchng and Julia Starr

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  eISBN: 978-981-4351-84-3

  Contents

  The Tenth Man-Gold Bar Murders

  Foreword

  The Tenth Man

  The Gold Bars- Triple Murder Case

  The Lust for Gold

  The Inquiry

  The Trials

  The Judges’ Decision

  The Appeal

  Who Owns the Gold Bar?

  Missing Money

  The Overlords

  Afterthought

  Has Gold a Future?

  The Murder of a Beauty Queen

  Foreword

  Who’s Who

  Introduction

  The Jean Sinnappa Murder Case

  Murder- A Definition by Justice Azmi

  The Trial

  The Perjurer

  The Preliminary Inquiry

  A Reporter Interviews Dr. Warnasurya

  The Tenth Man-Gold Bar Murders

  Foreword

  There are three main elements

  in this non-fictional story:

  Gold, murder and smuggling.

  Murder is as old as history. Man discovered gold a long time ago but valued it little at the beginning. Today, men scheme, cheat, rob and kill to possess it, especially when the dull yellow, malleable metal is in the form of bars or coins.

  How much gold remains to be discovered in the earth (and the oceans) is not known and cannot even be properly estimated, though calculations have been made about reserves in existing gold-fields. One thing is for sure: and that is that gold (like oil) cannot forever be squeezed or sucked out of the old rocks or picked out of the rivers: there must be a limit. For gold-lovers, however, there is the comforting thought that gold (unlike oil) is almost indestructible. Whereas most oil is burnt soon after discovery, gold for thousands of years has been treasured, hoarded and constantly used. Most of the thousands of tonnes of gold ever found still exist. Gold cannot be burnt. If lost or mislaid it is inevitably discovered again by someone or other, sooner or later. Slight particles of gold might be ‘worn away’, but the Egyptians have preserved gold ornaments, even gold chairs, for thousands of years. In Singapore for a long time, the Consul for Saudi Arabia used a dinner set, plates, spoons, goblets, made entirely of gold.

  Gold continues to turn up in the most unlikely places. In June 1980, gold was officially stated to have been found in Kelantan, in Malaysia. Across the other side of the world, in Brazil, about the same time, Deoclides Alberto de Limia, a prospector who’d been searching for gold for 40 years dug up a nugget weighing almost seven kilos in the Sierra Pelada gold-field in Para State. Twenty thousand gold-diggers promptly converged on the gold-field which was hopefully renamed Sierra Forada (Golden Sierra). Mr Deoclides Alberto de limia sold his nugget for 42 million cruzeiros (then SGD$186,000).

  Twice gold was believed to have been discovered, once in Malaya and again in Singapore. The first time was in 1853 when a group of Europeans dug deep at the foot of Mount Ophir. Several of the diggers died from malaria. No trace of gold was found. Twelve years later there was a rumour that gold had been found when a hill in Tanjong Pagar was blasted during construction work. The report proved to be false.

  Smuggling, the third element in this wide-ranging story, is as old as the tax which the smugglers scheme to evade, as old as the law which forbids the export or import of the goods they smuggle across the frontiers. Throughout history the evasion of taxes and the flaunting of customs rules have irritated governments and profited smugglers. In 1736, the British made smuggling a felony, a crime which could be punished by a long prison sentence, or death. Smuggling was a dangerous game to play, though history has clothed it with romantic references to old caves in which brave smugglers stored their booty.

  Nowadays in most countries, including Singapore, smuggling means the forfeiture of the seized goods, a heavy fine, and perhaps a jail sentence. Much depends upon the goods smuggled. There is no need for anyone to smuggle gold into or out of Singapore. The law has been changed since the date of the murder described in this book. But if you are caught smuggling a certain amount of heroin into Singapore (and many other countries) the mandatory sentence is death. Several men and women smugglers have been found with heroin in their possession, and have been hanged.

  Being a world famous port, a centre of communications, Singapore has known many types of smugglers. Fifty years or so ago, when the export of rubber was restricted, planters and dealers were tempted to smuggle out more than the quota permitted. They did not consider themselves criminals, although they were breaking the law. Tin smugglers who illegally export ore from Malaysia and Indonesia to Singapore for re-export, likewise look upon themselves more as speculators than law-breakers, whereas they are, of course, engaged in the worldwide illegal business of smuggling.

  Old-time smuggling is often associated in people’s minds with bootlegging, the term applied to the smuggling of illicit liquor. Bootlegging is an old name which goes back to the days when a smuggler concealed a bottle or two of brandy or wine in his large sea-boots. The term bootlegging was revived in the 20th century when alcohol was smuggled into the United States of America during the period of prohibition. In the end there was nothing romantic about it: bootlegging became a degenerate, large-scale industry and racket which afforded equal opportunity for the smuggling of poisonous concoctions peddled under false labels, and drugs and narcotics.

  Involved in this story of gold, smuggling and murder is a man who smuggled gold bars out of Singapore, and his beautiful daughter who later smuggled drugs to London. The man was murdered in Singapore by a gang of greedy men. The girl was sent to jail for 14 years by a British judge who described her as being ‘little less than an assassin’.

  Like the tenth man who betrayed the other nine members of the gang which killed the gold s
muggler and now has to live the rest of his days with a troubled conscience, the murdered man’s daughter also faces a future darkened by the thoughts she must have from time to time, of the lives she helped to ruin with drugs.

  The Tenth Man

  VIETNAM WAS IN TURMOIL. A bitter, costly war was raging between communist guerrillas, and American and allied forces. In South Vietnam, Saigon, the capital city, had become the most active black market in the world. Millions of American dollars were in circulation. People began to think that gold was safer than American dollar bills. By 1970, many Vietnamese were convinced that the Americans could not beat the guerrillas from Hanoi; they feared that in these circumstances neither the currency of South Vietnam nor the American dollar would be worth very much. The far-seeing in Saigon and elsewhere started to accumulate gold. Few of the thousand Vietnamese later to receive worldwide publicity as ‘boat people’ fleeing from oppressive communist rule after the North Vietnamese had taken over the whole of the country, could have believed that their very lives would depend upon their gold savings. All they were intent upon then, in the early 70s, was to turn their assets into gold. American dollars accumulated on the black market and in soldiers’ brothels, must be turned into gold bars as quickly as possible. How? Saigon gold merchants were besieged. The sale of gold bars in Vietnam was forbidden. The demand for gold was intense. Shady enterprising businessmen knew that the answer was to smuggle gold in from places like Singapore where the metal was sold freely to non-residents. Ships’ captains and aircraft pilots were tempted by generous commissions to become smugglers. Millions of American dollars changed hands. South Vietnam’s privately held stockpile of gold bars grew higher each month. Many of the boat people would never have left Vietnam had they not been able to buy their freedom with these gold bars.

  This is the story of the murder of a Singapore gold merchant and his two employees: they sold gold to the Vietnamese. They were robbed in Singapore of 120 gold bars intended for Saigon. The plotters knew they had to silence them forever, to prevent them seeking vengeance. Ten men were involved in the robbery and were responsible for the cold-blooded murder of three innocent men. Nine of them were found guilty and seven were hanged, two escaping the gallows because of their extreme youth. To save his own neck, the tenth man told all. He was a close friend of the chief plotter. He betrayed him, not for gold, but for his own life. The police detained him under a law introduced to keep suspected secret society gangsters in jail indefinitely without trial. In due course, the tenth man will be released (he might already be free). He will then have to live with his troubled conscience, for not only did he betray his friend, he also took an active part in murdering three men.

  The Gold Bars- Triple Murder Case

  The house in the Singapore suburb known as Serangoon Gardens, where the Chou brothers lived, was quiet and in darkness. The Christmas decorations, the paperchains and the sprigs of holly had been taken down, for it was now near midnight on 29 December 1971. Only the Christmas tree in the corner, fairy lights twinkling, remained. At the special request of the children, this symbol of the festival that called for goodwill towards all men, remained. “Just for a few more days, grandma,” they had pleaded. They were asleep now. So was their grandmother and their young aunt. Their mother lived in another house. They lived with their father, David Chou, and his brother, Andrew. David and his wife were divorced.

  In the kitchen and in the backyard, 10 men went quietly about their business. They talked in whispers. They were preparing to murder three men. The backyard led from the kitchen. It had a concrete floor and a roof but was open on three sides. Most of the gang did not know the three men they were to kill. They had been told they were to be beaten and killed and their bodies thrown into a deep well. The gangsters were to be paid $20,000 for the job. What most of the gang did not know was that the three men would be bringing 120 gold bars to the house. The gold bars then were worth about $500,000. By the time the murderers were hanged, three years later, the value of the gold bars had increased to over a million and a half dollars.

  Five minutes after the three businessmen handed over the gold bars, they were dead. Doctors gave evidence that they probably lived two minutes after intense pressure was applied to their windpipes. Andrew Chou had stipulated that the men were to be strangled. The job, he said, had to be clean and quiet.

  David later told the Court: “I went straight to my bedroom to check if my children were asleep. I opened the door and found them asleep. I shut the door. I opened the door of my mother’s bedroom. She was asleep. So was my sister.” He came back to the backyard and saw the gang carrying two bodies to a car. Still fearful that his mother would wake up, David helped to carry the third body. He was anxious for the gang to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He helped to take the gold bars to another car. Later, he helped Andrew and Augustine Ang wash the backyard to get rid of the bloodstains. Then he went to bed. He told the Court: “Soon after 6:30 am the next morning, I went to the backyard to feed my fishes and to hang up the bird cages.” Everything seemed normal. The children were still asleep. The lights on the Christmas tree twinkled ...

  In another part of Singapore, a distraught wife was searching for her missing husband. He had not come home. She knew he had gone to deliver gold to the Chous’. At 2:30 am, they had told her over the telephone that he never reached them. Where was he? What had happened to him? Not until hours later was she to know that her husband and two others had been murdered, their beaten bodies thrown into the fringe of the jungle off Bedok.

  This case was to be known as ‘The Gold Bars: Triple Murder’. Few murder plots seem to have been so badly organised. The idea of the robbery and murder was conceived by Andrew Chou. He worked for Air Vietnam and helped the crews smuggle gold to Saigon. His job was to receive the gold from dealers in Singapore, hand it over to the flight crew, and to receive from them American dollars in exchange. Chou then passed the money over to the Singapore gold dealers. He handled hundreds of thousands of dollars and a great deal of gold. For this work he was paid a commission both by the flight crew and by the gold dealers. On one occasion, a large sum of money from Saigon was missing. The travel bag, stuffed with American dollars, was picked up by another airport worker, and Chou had some difficulty in getting it back. In fact, he never succeeded in getting all of it back. In consequence, some of the Singapore gold dealers lost faith in him. They stopped sending out gold through Chou. This angered him. He decided to seize the next lot intended for Saigon, and to murder the men bringing it to his house. He asked a friend, Augustine Ang, a gangster, to arrange for a mob killing. The job should be quiet and clean, insisted Chou. He promised $20,000 for the job.

  In their defence, the Chou brothers and the gangsters swore they never intended to murder the three men. They said the plan was to rob them of the gold, then kidnap them and hold them until the gold was sold. Andrew Chou said Augustine thought up this idea. Augustine had argued that the gold dealer would never report the robbery to the police because he would then have to confess that he was engaged in gold smuggling. When Andrew protested that the dealer would come looking for him, Augustine said that it would perhaps be better if they did not sell all the gold after the robbery. Some could be held back so that Andrew could negotiate with the dealer. Andrew argued that the dealer, being a businessman, would negotiate for the best he could get out of a bad situation. What happened if, instead, the gold dealer sent gangsters to beat him up? Augustine assured Andrew that his own gangster connections would be waiting for them. He was confident the gold dealer would negotiate, would try to buy back his missing gold.

  Andrew told the Court that, in the end, he agreed with Augustine’s plan. There was to be no violence. He said he left Augustine to arrange for some gangsters to be at his house to rob the dealer and to tie up and kidnap the three men. As proof of his insistence that there should be no violence, Andrew told the Judges that, on the night of the robbery, when the gangsters arrived, he went into the ki
tchen and removed a tray containing knives from the table and put it on the top of a cabinet. He wanted to make sure that none of the gangsters, or Augustine, could have access to them. He searched them to satisfy himself none of them carried knives or weapons. He stressed that the three men with the gold were not to be seriously hurt. They were to be attacked when Augustine started to count the gold bars, but they were not to be killed, just tied up and bundled into a car.

  One of the glaring weaknesses of this story, which the Judges refused to believe, was that at no time did the Chou brothers, or anyone else, explain just where the three men were to be held, or for how long, or how, and by whom, the negotiations were to be conducted.

  Another weakness of the plot, even if it was, as Chou and the gangsters claimed, a kidnap and not a murder plot, was the serious possibility that someone in the house that night, their mother, their sister, or David’s two young daughters, might have awakened and witnessed the terrifying scene of a gang beating up three men. David, in fact, told the Court he was most worried about this. He said that even while the gold dealer was on his way to the house with the gold bars, David tried to persuade his brother and Augustine to call the whole thing off. Augustine and Andrew were getting things ready, pieces of nylon rope and pieces of cloth with which to tie up and gag the three victims.

  “Andrew took the pieces of cloth and rope and put them under the food cover on the dining table. I asked Andrew not to be involved. What if Mother should wake up? She would faint from shock if she saw the men being robbed in our home! Augustine and Andrew seemed adamant to carry out the robbery. I was confused, unhappy and upset. Andrew told me all I had to do was to help Augustine catch one man. I did not have to be involved in the robbery.” With a grim sense of humour, Augustine told David not to worry. After all, he did not have to go down the street to help him catch the man. The man was coming to the house! Andrew argued with his brother that the quicker the three men were out of the house the less the risk of their mother getting up. David should help Augustine catch one man so that the three victims could be taken away from the house as quickly as possible. “I agreed. I had no choice,” said David.