SINGAPORE: Triad in Trouble

Centuries ago the Triad Society was a kind of Chinese freemasonry whose aim was “to obey Heaven and act righteously,” but the Singapore offshoot of Triad has degenerated in recent years into a Crime Incorporated of young toughs who terrorize the city. The occupying Japanese temporarily checked the Triad during World War II by lopping off fingers for even the smallest thefts, but today the Triad boasts a small army of extortionists and pimps, gunmen and gamblers, organized in four cadres identifiable only by number and their tattooed insignia on the backs of the Triad’s 10,000 initiates.

Their main business is extortion. Prying protection money from taxi drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, housewives and small schoolchildren alike, they rake in as much as $350,000 a month. Cambridge-educated Lee Kuan Yew, becoming independent Singapore’s first Prime Minister last June, set out on a crime cleanup, but even so, all forms of lawlessness have increased in Singapore this year, and already there have been 55 murders, v. 38 all last year. A month ago, when Triad hoodlums kidnaped Chinese Millionaire Chia Yee Soh and got a fat ransom for his return, Lee and his Cabinet declared all-out war on the gangs.

The Prime Minister’s first bold move was a 16-day amnesty offer to Triad hoodlums who wanted to go straight. If they would confess past misdeeds, their testimony would not be used against them as evidence; the police would make every effort to protect them from predictable Triad reprisals; most important of all, they would not be subject to the sweeping new powers that Lee’s government was giving the police, which in effect deprive all known criminals of habeas corpus. Confessions from suspicious crooks were few at first, but under constant radio and press warnings to “give up now or face annihilation,” more than 800 of Singapore’s hoodlums and small fry finally turned themselves in, 200 on the last day of the amnesty last week.

Promptly at midnight that night, aided by invaluable information gained from the 800 confessions, Singapore’s British-trained police force of 5,000 went into action. While British troops garrisoned in Singapore mounted roadblocks in “purely coincidental military exercises,” police swooped down on known Triad hideouts, within 48 hours had 60 gangsters behind bars. Lee plans to impose curfews on all known gang-dominated quarters of the city, to make the streets of Singapore safe to walk again.