Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: Crime, Business and Politics in Asia, Silkworm
Books 2002
No one writes about drug crime in Cambodia without recounting the infamous 'Teng
Boonma' incident. Furious that Royal Air Cambodge had asked him for more than $4,500
in excess baggage charges following a flight from Hong Kong to Phnom Penh, Cambodia's
wealthiest man took one of his bodyguard's pistols and blew out the 737's front tire.
Bertil Lintner retells the incident in his opening paragraph of the Cambodia chapter
of Blood Brothers. It's a great story told many times since, but it is also illustrative
of the culture of impunity that surrounds many at the highest levels of Cambodian
society.
Needless to say Boonma was not charged over the incident. He remains a man of influence
in Cambodia, despite being banned from the United States over his alleged links,
which he denies, to the drugs trade.
Critical to Boonma's importance, according to Lintner, are his China connections.
Almost all roads lead to China in Blood Brothers, a state that Lintner argues has
organized crime at its core.
"China is a state that feels it has to engage in criminal activities such as
drug running and the printing of counterfeit dollars to survive," Lintner writes.
"And China needs the underworld to help it steal industrial secrets from more
developed countries, and to influence the politics of what is becoming its main rival,
the United States," he continues. "China's Blood Brothers are part of the
new world disorder, and pose a more profound threat to global security and stability
than the bad old communists - Russian or Chinese - ever did.''
Blood Brothers traces the frighteningly well-connected and well-organized networks
of organized crime from Russia, to Japan, China and throughout Asia, Australia and
the United States and, through the 'Donorgate' scandal of the mid 1990s, all the
way to the Clinton White House.
The book's message is clear. Organized crime in Asia operates in partnership with
secret cliques within political circles across the world. And as another example
shows, it is not just Beijing that flirts with or openly courts organized crime interests.
In March 1996, Interpol traced fake US bills from Thailand to Cambodia. Along with
the Cambodian police they raided an office in Phnom Penh and chased a man from the
office to the North Korean embassy where he remained holed up for several days.
Finally a Mercedes with blacked-out windows emerged from the embassy and sped toward
the Vietnamese border. The authorities followed the car to the final border checkpoint
where a stalemate ensued.
"There it stayed for almost two days and its occupants 'ate, slept, shat and
pissed' in the car," Lintner writes. "Eventually a deal was made [but]
the counterfeiter had to be handed over to the police ... [He] turned out to be Yoshimi
Tanaka, a wanted member of the Japanese Red Army."
Police arrested Tanaka in possession of a North Korean diplomatic passport and $40,000
in fake $100 bills.
Despite the North Korean connection, and the mid-1990s presence of south Asian gun
runners with official connections equipping the region's rebel movements, ethnic
Chinese remain the biggest players in Cambodian organized crime, a fact that has
been noted in Beijing.
The Chinese government, Lintner writes on page 220, asked the Sino-Cambodian Boonma
to "control the smaller gangs and their unruly members" in October 2000.
The request came at a meeting held in Phnom Penh between Boonma and Guo Dongpo, the
director of Beijing's Office of Overseas Chinese Affairs.
The problem of concern to the Chinese authorities stemmed from the activities of
ethnic Chinese gangs, especially those from Taiwan. Chen Chi-li, Taiwan's 'Dry Duck'
and an honorary advisor to Cambodia's Senate President Chea Sim, was of particular
concern.
"Chen and his fellow gangsters had turned Cambodia into a clearing house for
Chinese migrants ... to go to the United States and other western countries,"
Lintner writes.
Not that Beijing was overly concerned with the communities of illegal Chinese immigrants
that sprang up in Cambodia and across Southeast Asia. Rather it was this: "[W]hatever
their destination the suspicion is strong that the Chinese authorities are actually
encouraging people to leave."
The Chinese diaspora remits money to the mainland and exercises influence abroad.
Ted Sioeng, an Indonesian-Chinese tobacco tycoon and business partner of Teng Boonma,
is one such example. Sioeng sat on the board of the Iowa Wesleyan College, the university
that awarded Teng Boonma an honorary doctorate in late 1997, then rescinded it a
few weeks later.
Sioeng also donated enough money to the Clinton campaign to rate a seat next to the
then US president at a Democratic Party function in the mid-1990s. Bill Clinton apparently
kept Sioeng's money but was forced to return $640,000 in campaign funds illegally
donated by Macau-based mobsters.
A US Senate inquiry on the subject concluded that Sioeng "worked or possibly
still works on behalf of the Chinese government".
For a small country like Cambodia, big crime exerts a disproportionate influence.
Lintner writes that following the 1993 election, "the country's fragile democratic
institutions were soon subverted by the wealth of drug kingpins and other crime lords".
If you have trawled the pages of Cambodia's press over the last decade, you've probably
read these stories before. In fact the strength of Lintner's book is not that it
uncovers startling new evidence; rather it connects the reported activities of mobsters
across much of the world in recent decades.
Blood Brothers is a disquieting portrait in which organized crime, with deep roots
into business and politics, forms a global network of power and profit, and a vast
'uncivil society'.
