Free Whitey's Payback by T. J. English

citizens are fearful and uncooperative.”
    Tong’s office on the ninth floor of the Harbor Building overlooks Hong Kong’s port, which hosts a colorful panorama of ferries, junks, sampans, and other seagoing vessels. Gulls sweep the shoreline looking for morsels amid a constant swirl along the docks. The harbor is the world’s second busiest, after Rotterdam, with as many as 5,000 craft passing through each day. For Tong and other lawmen, it is a continuing nightmare.
    Shipments of China white are smuggled through Hong Kong’s port every day. Fishing trawlers chug up the coast from Thailand and off-load the dope in the South China Sea. Small junks bring the contraband to Hong Kong’s container terminals, where triad members see that it is unloaded. This pattern was first established a century ago, when the British government systematically foisted tons of opium on an unsuspecting Chinese populace, creating millions of addicts. “Today,” says Tong, “the heroin trade is carryout.”
    It would be inaccurate to say that triads control the heroin business. An individual Chinese entrepreneur in the United States can initiate a major deal, whether he is member of a triad or not. It is unlikely, however, that the deal will proceed as smoothly as he would like without some help from the triads. A well-known code phrase or secret handshake associated with the Sun Yee On, 14K, or Wo Hop To triads can consummate a deal. Triad connections move the dope from Hong Kong to Europe and the United States.
    The loosely structured manner in which triad affiliations enhance large-scale dope transactions has perplexed some Westerners. Trained on a generation of caporegime , consigliere , and capo di tutti capi , American law enforcement has had a hard time grasping the opaque ways triads operate internationally.
    At the street level, of course, the triads function much like criminal mobs everywhere: Gangsters enforce their will through fear and intimidation, and group loyalty is brutally upheld. Unlike the American Mafia, though, which has a rigid corporate structure, upper-echelon triad members are free to initiate criminal projects on their own and use their affiliations as they see fit. “It’s more in the nature of a brotherhood like the Freemasons than a Mafia family,” says a senior officer with the Hong Kong police.
    Over the years, triads have firmly established their role as an integral part of free-market capitalism, but they can play the other side of the fence as well. In the face of competition from American and European expatriates, for instance, some Chinese businessmen have exploited the triad mystique while espousing the belief that it represents a sacred historical tradition.
    But that game is just about over. Now that they face the prospect of a hostile government at the century’s end, triad members are eager to make one final big killing under the old regime. To do so, they are pushing their drug trade with extraordinary vigor. It is, quite literally, their passport to the world.
    In New York City’s Chinatown, the prospect of Hong Kong’s impending change in status has already begun to reshape the community’s traditional boundaries. Elaborate triad-run smuggling networks, in which illegal aliens pay huge fees to be shuttled through Canada and Central America, are flourishing as never before. Adjacent neighborhoods like Little Italy, once a Mafia stronghold, have been pressured by immigrants from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and other Asian ports of call.
    For many years, Chinatown’s ruling structure has remained the same. Tongs (business associations) dole out jobs and housing to loyal members. Violent street gangs, allegedly controlled by the tongs, uphold territorial boundaries. Whether or not an infusion of triad gangsters will unsettle this balance of power is a source of much debate.
    According to Leung in Hong Kong, one triad has already begun to stake its claim. On frequent visits to New York, he says,