Gangland's payback

03.09.05
By Catherine Masters


Tam Yam Ah had some telling scars on his face. For a gangster who was shot dead by an assassin you might think scars would be an occupational hazard.

And they probably are. It's just that in Tam's case the wounds were inflicted years ago by his wife.

Former wife, that is. She'd had enough of his beatings and after one thrashing too many she drugged him, tied him up and went for him with a meat cleaver - the same one he had earlier hit her with several times - slicing his head and nearly killing him.

Tam, a Chinese immigrant who started his life in New Zealand in the late 1980s as a market gardener in Otaki, did not bleed to death that time, even though his wife landed nine or 10 blows.

He recovered and carried on the path he had begun in Otaki, extorting money from other Asians in protection rackets as part of a local offshoot of the Hong Kong triad 14K. He was known to threaten people with a meat cleaver.

He was a ruthless career criminal and no one was surprised when a masked assailant shot him in the early hours of July 7 as he was getting out of his BMW in the small carpark behind his karaoke bar in Symonds St, Auckland.

Given the shadowy, dangerous world in which he lived, informants have not been forthcoming.

But this week police revealed that his death may have been an organised hit, with his killer driving up from Wellington.

If it was an organised hit, it may be the first of its kind within Asian crime gangs in New Zealand.

Tam's was a seedy life and his death reflected the violence which he readily dealt out.

It's perhaps surprising he was shot and not killed with a meat cleaver, the weapon he favoured and which is said to be popular among Chinese gangs.

Overseas, it is useful in chopping off fingers to keep up the level of fear and intimidation needed by the triads to keep business profitable - such as when demanding money in return for a kidnapped relative.

Whether triads are active in the traditional manner in New Zealand is debatable, although police say there is no doubt that 14K and other gangs exist here.

Triad is the European name given to structured organised crime gangs in China and Hong Kong which rank members and have a godfather-type character at the top, operating in a similar way way to the Italian mafia.

The Asian Crime Unit in Auckland does not call them triads because of their loose structure here and because the original triads stem back several hundred years and began for a quite different purpose.

They began as underground political groups but now deal in drugs, prostitution, gambling, kidnapping, protection rackets - in anything that makes money.

Tam was 14K - the name stands for 14 Kowloon, a street address in Hong Kong.

He and his former wife, Jai Fong Zhou, were married in New Zealand in 1990. There is some suggestion it may have been an arranged marriage and before long Zhou wanted out.

Tam beat her and raped her often and after being assaulted one day she attacked him with the same cleaver he had wielded on the back of her neck.

She was charged with attempted murder and it is said that if Tam had reached hospital any later he would have died.

It was a sensational case in the early 1990s, not so much for the attack itself but because Zhou was one of the first women in New Zealand courts to be acquitted through the defence of battered women's syndrome.

The then 25-year-old attacked him in her Pt Chevalier flat after he had abused her. She then took an overdose of the sleeping pills she had used to drug him with.

The police found her on the floor with the couple's child. She was bruised and was taken to hospital.

Tam had managed to get free and had flagged a taxi to get to hospital. Although

the Crown said the force Zhou used was totally unreasonable, the jury found in her favour after hearing of continued assaults, rapes and threats to her life and the lives of her family, including the child.

Zhou's defence lawyer, David McNaughton, recalls it as an important case in his career. And he remembers only too well how afraid Zhou was of her husband.

"She was a classic battered wife," McNaughton, says. "He assaulted her, set fire to her apartment, kidnapped her ... just a terrible, terrible bastard.

"She did everything she could to get away from him, but he would always track her down and drag her back in."

There is no doubt in McNaughton's mind that Tam was part of a triad. He bases this on Zhou's fear. "She was absolutely terrified of the guy. He wasn't very big, you know, he didn't look threatening at all - but just one look from him and she would just turn to water. I mean, he was a really bad bastard. I've no doubt about that."

Tam grew up in China in Guangzhou, Canton. He is said to have worked in concreting and tiling before being sponsored by a brother in Otaki and coming to New Zealand in his late teens or early 20s.

It was not long after his arrival that Tam appeared in court.

In 1991, when he was 22, he was charged with demanding, with menaces, $500 from an Otaki market gardening family.

He was one of three Chinese men charged and it was alleged that it was a "triad-related incident".

Tam had dealings in the illegal paua trade, but his specialties were assault and extorting protection money.

At one stage, he was said to be a "red pole", the term for triad foot-soldiers who intimidate and injure.

THE POLICE file on Tam is negligible from 1991 to 1994, and that could be because he was consolidating his position within the group, says Detective Sergeant George Koria, head of the Asian Crime Unit in Auckland. "If you're trying to consolidate you try not to bring attention on yourself, and he could have had a lot of boys running around for him at the time."

From 1994 Tam had a history of regular offending for serious assaults and frauds. He served two and a half years in jail from 1997 and three years from 2001.

Koria says Tam probably used jail for setting up contacts with non-Asian gangs such as the Mongrel Mob and Black Power.

The 2001 jail term followed a meat-cleaver incident at a karaoke bar in central Auckland where Tam was a bouncer.

Lawyer Graeme Newell remembers the "Chinese Chopper" because he defended him.

"He ran down Durham Lane holding a chopper above his head and was seen by the concierge of the City Life apartments running down the hill chasing this guy sort of Hong Kong-style like some sort of bad movie.

"He'd used it on another couple of guys inside before they'd fled ... they were singing Taiwanese when he wanted people to be singing Mandarin."

In his judgment on that case High Court Judge Robert Fisher said the sheer ferocity of Tam's attack was enough to make a group of six or seven men scatter and run. One of the men who was slashed required 27 stitches and was scarred down the left side of his face. The incident had not only terrorised him but had caused him great shame in his own country and led to his girlfriend's family forbidding her to see him.

But not quite everyone condemns Tam. An "old friend from the past" painted a different picture, saying she believed he would have liked to have chosen a different life but did not know how. As a youngster she knew Tam was a gangster - he had told her so, and she had seen him dragging someone out of a karaoke bar.

But Tam was always kind to her and encouraged her to get an education, recognising that she had chances he never had.

When Tam believed he was becoming a bad influence in the woman's life, he backed off.

"I got the impression he wanted to quit at some stage but he didn't think there was anything else he would be good at. Because if you saw the way he dealt with me, you would see he thought there were better things we can do."

The woman says that, in one way, she feels a sense of peace now Tam is dead.

"The life he had was quite harsh by anyone's standards. He's okay [now], it's as if nothing can hurt him now."

She was not surprised to hear of Tam's death. Neither was Koria, who heard on his car radio about the murder of a man "and once I heard the address I knew who the victim was basically without being told".

For all the violence, though, Koria never actually saw Tam in action.

"As much as he was a gangster he was one of these - I don't know what you call it - one of these likeable rogues, I suppose."

Unlike many other hardened criminals who would tell the police to get lost, Tam was always easy to talk to and happy to pass the time of day.

"We could bowl up to the karaoke bar and just talk to him: 'Hello, how are things? What's business like?' Things like that."

And Tam didn't look like a gangster. He was tall at about 1.8m, and thin. But he did look like he could handle himself: "He looked like if you got in a fight he'd be pretty quick with his hands."

He did not stand out from the crowd. "He could walk down the street and you wouldn't notice him, he was that sort of a guy, jeans, T-shirt, whatever it might be."

Koria says there were many rumours about Tam being involved in drugs and standovers, but the problem was getting anyone to come forward and talk to the unit about it. The Asian community is very closed and many crimes are not reported.

Criminologist Greg Newbold says that is because immigrants do not realise they are living in a different policing environment.

But although triads have been here since the 1970s, they are relatively small. "There was a big panic in the 1990s that the triads were going to move in and take over organised crime in New Zealand, but I've said right from the start it will never happen," Newbold says.

"In order for organised crime to get the kind of foothold it's got in Hong Kong you need a corrupt administration ... We haven't got that."

Koria says one of the problems with the gangs here is while there is a hierarchy of sorts it does not take much to jump around different factions.

There is not the same loyalty as there is in gangs such as the Mongrel Mob and Black Power. "It's a very gray line between the different Asian gangs and who's a member of which," Koria says.

Triad members, however, put a lot of thought into what they do. "They've learned from years and years of experience back in their own countries ... how to commit offences without raising the awareness of the local boys."

Although the Asian population in Auckland is growing, Koria does not anticipate a big growth of gangs. But he is worried that there will be an increase in victims and a rise in the number of unreported crimes that are not reported. "At the end of the day you walk up and down Queen St and you look at all the Asian restaurants and I think to myself: How many of them are paying and not telling us?

"Every now and then we'll get information about a certain restaurant paying but you have to sit down with them for days on end to get them to trust you before they'll start telling you anything. That's one of our problems."

Another is that although Tam is dead, there will be others willing to take his place.


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