One Billion Customers - James McGregor [60]
When the investigation began, Lai worked his network furiously. Investigators wanted to find Vice-Minister Li’s mistress, Li Shana, whose testimony would be instrumental in connecting the vice-minister with Lai. Lai was hiding her in one of his Xiamen villas. But Li Shana wouldn’t stop calling her friends, whose phones were tapped by Chinese investigators. Lai moved her twice more, but she kept making calls. Police tracked her to a remote safe house in Henan province and she was taken to Beijing to build the case against Vice-Minister Li.
On June 13, a team of twenty investigators quietly infiltrated Xiamen, only to run into a brick wall. Most of the main suspects they were planning to put under surveillance had already fled the country. Xiamen government officials had been warned the investigators were coming and had their stories prepared. The investigators searched meticulously through Xiamen’s customs declaration documents, but found nothing about Lai’s Yuanhua group. It was clear that Lai knew their every move even before they made it. Shaken, the police retreated to Beijing to reorganize the investigation.
Tipped off to the investigators’ impending arrival, Lai had retreated to Macao, leaving his oldest brother, Lai Shuiqiang, to try to liquidate assets and clean up Yuanhua. As he often did when under stress, Lai sought solace in Macao’s gaudy casinos while continuing to work his contacts in Beijing by phone. He desperately needed his friends in the military and intelligence circles to vouch for him. He still believed that he could escape punishment if central authorities were aware of his work for Chinese intelligence services. He believed that Premier Zhu wanted to stop smuggling without publicly unearthing past smuggling scandals involving the military. He failed to grasp that Zhu needed to implicate high officials if his fight against smuggling was to be successful.
In early August 1999, an army of some three hundred investigators from Beijing descended on Xiamen, taking over the entire Wanshou Guesthouse and arranging for it to be guarded by four hundred soldiers. At the same time, Lai had hit a winning streak in the Macao casinos. Emboldened by his lucky streak, Lai secretly returned to Xiamen on August 9 to figure out what remained of his business empire. While in Xiamen, he got phone calls from two friends—Zhuang Rushun, deputy head of the Fujian province police, and Yang Qianxian, director of Xiamen customs—warning him that Chinese investigators knew he was back and were preparing to arrest him. The port, airport, and major highways out of town were all under close surveillance. Lai ordered one of his drivers to get a plain sedan with tinted windows and pick him up near a highway entrance. They easily passed through a police roadblock on the highway that was checking only luxury cars. They drove straight to Shenzhen, the Chinese city that shares a border with Hong Kong. With the help of police friends, Lai boarded a boat to Hong Kong. A few days later, tipped off by a Hong Kong immigration official that China was arranging to have him arrested in Hong Kong, Lai; his wife, Zeng Mingna; and their three children boarded a plane to Canada.
Canadian Exile
As Lai and his family arrived in Canada, the Chinese government-controlled media exploded with a campaign portraying him as public enemy number one. Using numbers from the Zhu Niuniu report, they accused Lai of smuggling $6.4 billion in goods and avoiding $3.6 billion in taxes and tariffs. Authorities came down very hard on his family, arresting nearly all of his adult relatives. At first, the investigators merely called them in for interrogation and then let