Over the weekend, The Financial Times had an interesting article about Chinese justice [Tom Mitchell, China link emerges in case of Irish gangster, Financial Times, Noverber 30/December 2 2013] which tells more about China than the Chinese media controls would normally allow. The story concerns a Hong Kong investigator named Danny Tsang Chi-fai who helped Ireland catch a drug dealer/counterfeiter named Paul Meehan, or Dr. Coke, as he was known in the papers.
The Irish were investigating a less well-known area of counterfeit cigarettes, and the article mentions that 1 in 7 cigarettes sold in Ireland is counterfeit. That seems like a lot of counterfeiting, but my only experience with that sort of thing was helping with an investigation of smuggling real cigarettes from North Carolina into New York, which is hardly in the ball park with the scale of this. The EU is saying they have 10 billion euros worth of them imported each year.
Along the way, the Irish police found guns, cocaine, grenades, heroin, and a little bit of marijuana in with the cigarettes and changed their priority on the investigation. They got help on the investigation from Tsang, who was apparently getting paid by someone else, probably a cigarette manufacturer, though a small company, Douglas Consulting, now closed up [See Lana Lamb, Hong Kong private eye 'abandoned' by Northern Irish police, South China Morning Post, 3 December 2013].
So, here we have a private investigator, running an investigation on counterfeit cigarettes, working for the Irish police (and others) and he is arrested and charged with dealing in counterfeit cigarettes and put in jail for 10 years. The Chinese benefit from puffing the story that Tsang was abandoned by the Irish Police, who would be hard-pressed to get him out of jail, to discourage others from helping with these types of investigations. These kinds of investigations cause trouble for local political leaders who have counterfeit cigarette operations in their towns, among the thousands of things being counterfeited in China.
Politics, family and crime are mixed in China in ways that encourage a local police official to arrest an investigator to keep others from following behind and ruining a good thing. In my first book, I compared this kind of conduct to the HBO series The Sopranos. They are more like the mafia than any business in the West. Tsang must have stepped on some big toes to get 10 years for a crime he was not involved in. His company is now out of business, but you can bet the business of counterfeit cigarettes is not. Amazon books:
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