Set to become one of the world's top crime bosses, Wan Kuok-Koi talks of life in Macau's underworld

By JOHN COLMEY /MACAU

t 8:50 in the evening, one of the most powerful Chinese Mafia leaders in Asia is enjoying a typical Portuguese meal of bread, cod and sausage. Suddenly his mobile phone rings. The eight people sitting at the restaurant table fall into a hush as Wan Kuok-Koi, alias Broken Tooth Koi, relays the news that a woman has been shot outside a casino. Then he hangs up, turns to an aide and orders him to "nose around." In minutes the aide returns and reports that the assailant drove away from the scene in a car with license plate MG 6233. "I don't recognize this number," says Wan, dialing his mobile as he talks. Within a half-hour of the shooting, the details are in. After borrowing $39,000 from a loan shark inside the casino, the woman and her husband were hailing a taxi when a gunman walked up and shot her in the face; she miraculously survived. "That's not my business," says Wan, breaking into a relieved grin that displays his nine false teeth. "Whenever something happens here, I always get the blame."

It's just another night in Macau, the deceivingly sleepy, Portuguese-run enclave and gambling mecca on China's southern coast. And just another night in the world of Koi-Goh, or Brother Koi. It is a dark world of corrupt cops and dirty judges, of long-legged Russian and Chinese prostitutes, of assassins on motorcycles called "big-headed Buddhas" and body parts that float up on beaches. Nobody knows this place better than Wan. At 43, he has survived childhood in a Macau shanty town, four prison sentences and a lifetime of street fighting to become, according to senior police officials, the leader of the enclave's most feared Triad, the 14 K, which skims illegal gravy from the legal operations of Macau's nine casinos. The syndicate has more than 10,000 members locally and more than 20 factions globally involved with trafficking everything from arms to illegal immigrants. But with Macau due to follow Hong Kong back to Chinese control in 1999, the Portuguese have all but given up the fight against organized crime. Today Macau has become the Casablanca of the 1990s, a crossroads of international criminals and the money laundering capital of Asia. Says Martin Booth, author of the forthcoming book The Dragon Syndicates: the History of the Triads: "If he survives to take over the casino concessions, Broken Tooth Koi will be one of the most powerful Triad leaders in the world."

He will certainly be the most famous. Next month a Hong Kong company will release Casino, a film loosely based on Wan's rise to power and financed by the Dragonhead himself. As part of a press blitz, Wan told TIME his story during two days of dusk-till-dawn interviews. His tale cast new light on the gang wars that have wracked tiny Macau (pop. 450,000), and on the life of a modern Chinese gangster. Wan doesn't deny what he is but gives out details cautiously. "I cannot be specific," he says. "I do what other gangsters do. You can imagine. Everything but drug trafficking."

Wan's reason for coming out of the shadows, he says, is partly to show the world he is not the monster described in the regional press. "I'm not as serious and heartless as people think," he says. "I am very easy-going and funny." But he has a more sinister motive as well: to provoke a rival in the gambling business named Ng Wai, the owner of Macau's New Century Hotel and a major player in the casino game for more than ten years.

Wan traces the origin of Macau's worst gang wars in this decade back to the late-1980s arrival of Ng. Nicknamed Kai-Sze (Market) Wai, because he once allegedly ran the protection rackets in Hong Kong's Mongkok market, Ng left the former British colony for the Philippines in the mid-1980s. There, with the help of former President Ferdinand Marcos, he entered the casino business. About that time billionaire gambling magnate Stanley Ho, who has held the legal monopoly on Macau's casinos since 1962, won the franchise to run the Philippines' gaming rooms. Though there is no evidence of a deal with Ho, Ng was soon ensconced in Macau and eventually gained control over several of the casinos' "VIP rooms."

With minimum bets starting at $130, the VIP suites are privately managed high-stakes gambling dens just off the main casino halls. Of the roughly $2 billion in revenue reported in 1997 by Ho's flagship, nearly half flowed through the private rooms. Much of the earnings never enter the books, say police in Hong Kong. High rollers usually come on junkets organized by tour operators (read Triad) who meet their clients' every need: travel, rooms, meals, women and protection. Loan sharks hover near every table with cash available for interest that accrues by the day or hour.

According to Triad historian Booth, "the casinos are perfect money laundering machines." A corrupt government official might, for example, bet and lose $300,000. The next week he returns, mysteriously wins $250,000 and goes home with clean money, minus the $50,000 service charge. For years Ho has vehemently denied he allows outsiders to manage VIP rooms, and Wan won't discuss the casino owner. But when Wan opened the Wan Hao VIP Club in the Lisboa Hotel, his card identified him as "director" with an office located in Hong Kong's Ho-owned Shun Tak Center.

The top VIP-room "director" used to be Ng Wai, whom Wan once worked for in the gambling operations. When Ng arrived in Macau in 1987 as an outsider, he had to quickly come to terms with the local gang members, chief among them a 14 K mobster named Mo-Ding Ping. As Ping accumulated enemies, Wan was moved up the 14K ladder by higher powers and asked to neutralize Ping. Known as one of the "seven lucky folks"--Wan has been shot twice and once had his arms chopped so badly with meat cleavers that he still can't straighten his two middle fingers--the gangster accepted the mission. That sparked a year-long war that ended when Ping fled Macau to avoid a murder charge.

Triad conflicts have been part of Macau history for centuries, though the 1990s has been particularly turbulent. There are three main societies--14 K, Shui Fong (Water Room) and Wo Shing Yee (Peace Victory Brotherhood)--and several smaller ones that have divided among themselves criminal spoils arising from the casinos, loan sharking, prostitution, protection rackets, smuggling and more recently horse and greyhound racing. After 1990, the societies tangled not only with each other, but also with criminal syndicates that tried to move in from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.

By 1995 Ng was apparently becoming unhappy with Wan's growing power and high-profile style. According to Wan, his enemies promised the thugs in Macau's Shui Fong, a bigger cut in the VIP rooms if they would kill Wan. That led to a vicious war in 1996 and early 1997 between 14K and Shui Fong. Last spring, an unsigned letter was sent to eight newspapers, presumably from Wan's foes. "Warning," it read. "From this day on it is forbidden to mention Broken Tooth Koi in the press; otherwise bullets will have no eyes, and knives and bullets will have no feelings." This particular conflict ended shortly after the Shui Fong leader bolted to Canada.

As press coverage of the battles began to scare away tourists, the police were still trying to figure out who was fighting whom. Ng temporarily gained the upper hand last year when Wan disappeared in Southeast Asia to escape two arrest warrants. The first one, issued in Macau, was a test of the enclave's new anti-Triad law, which calls for a 12-year sentence for anyone found to be a senior leader. The second warrant, on a charge of drug trafficking, came from China. Wan claims someone bribed judges in Macau and China to order the arrests. But by August, Wan was in the clear. In Macau, a Portuguese judge suddenly found Wan innocent. The judge unexpectedly retired the next day and returned to Portugal. In China, the judge was found guilty of corruption, and charges against Wan there were dropped too.

Back home in Macau, Wan issued a warning that anyone visiting Ng's VIP rooms would become his enemy. Next he pasted posters across the territory accusing Ng of being a drug trafficker. On July 30, three days before Ng's refurbished New Century hotel and casino was due to open, a Triad trio shot up the facade with machine guns, wounding three security officers. In all of 1997, 20 gangland slayings took place. The papers were full of men hunched dead in their cars or lying on the sidewalk under sheets. Now Ng is reportedly holed up inside his heavily fortified New Century. "Fate will not be kind to him" says Wan. "I'm going to wipe him out."

For Broken Tooth Koi, it's all part of the "beautiful war," in which the victors are chosen by the Chinese God of War, Kuan Yu, to whom every true Triad prays for guidance. "But I am a very old-fashioned guy," says Wan. "That means to defend the interests of the society, to fight for your brothers and to uphold the codes of the brotherhood." As for his personal code, he says: "It is better to die than be defeated."

But as he drives himself through the streets of Macau in a 1998 black Nissan President (one of 14 cars he owns) with a Dance Fever CD blasting so loud the windows vibrate, he admits life at the top is lonely. After three broken marriages Wan now loves only the baccarat table, but it doesn't love him back. In one recent ten-minute session he lost $250,000, and he admits the $6 million he earns legally each month from his four VIP rooms doesn't cover his losses. He can often be found dancing by himself in his Heavy Club disco. Sitting with his six-year-old daughter at home in front of a bank of security cameras, Wan swears he will never tell his six children to join the Triad. "No one could follow my path and survive." Undoubtedly, some will try.

--With Reporting by Isabella Ng /Macau