A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel by Wenguang Huang Pin Ho Read Free Book Online Page A

development with a fancy Scottish name, Edinburg—was gunned down outside his apartment. Subsequent police investigations revealed the tenant, who drove a BMW, was a drug trafficker. He had been killed by a mobster in a dispute over illicit profit. The incident grabbed national headlines and posed a challenge for the Bo administration.
    Wang’s special investigative team soon captured three suspects who had allegedly plotted the shooting in Edinburg. Based on the suspects’ confessions and tips provided by residents, Wang arrested more than fifty suspected of gunrunning, drug trafficking, and gambling. The two chief suspects were found guilty and executed in six months. The swift resolution proved to be politically popular. Riding on the success of the case, Wang also mobilized hundreds of armed policemen to wipe out several illegal ammunition and gun manufacturing facilities hidden inside the mountains outside Chongqing. In response to the overwhelming public support for such initiatives, Bo instructed Wang to launch a citywide da hei , or “Smashing Black” campaign against the mobsters terrorizing the city. At a conference for police, Wang declared in his usual dramatic style, “We’ll stir up a storm and generate an avalanche.”
    Wang’s yearlong campaign targeting mafia organizations involved 10,000 police broken up into 329 investigative teams. State media reported that nearly 5,000 people were taken into police custody and among them, 3,273 of them were prosecuted. The court convicted 520 people, with 65 executed or given life imprisonment. In the same time period, police successfully cracked 4,172 previously unsolved cases and broke up 128 crime rings. However, a recently released Chongqing government white paper showed a much smaller number of arrests. The media’s exaggerated figures probably spooked many senior leaders in Beijing, who feared that Bo could expand his program nation-wide—and threaten their political and financial interests—if he joined the Politburo Standing Committee.
    Over the course of the campaign, Wang also targeted police officers who, he said, were working with criminals. “We are supposed toattack the underworld, but some in the police force are more corrupt and dangerous than the mobsters,” Wang told the Chinese state media. In addition, a policeman in Chongqing remembered receiving a short notice about a meeting one morning:
            We walked into the auditorium and saw the entrance guarded by fully armed policemen. People could smell blood. Wang stood on the stage and read off the names from a list. Most of the people on the list were in leadership positions and have been found taking bribes or collaborating with criminals. Each time a name was called, Wang would announce the charges and follow them with an order, “You are under arrest.” At the end of the meeting, seven officers were handcuffed and taken away on the spot.
    By the end of 2010, more than 1,000 police officers and government officials had been charged with corruption and abuse of power, including many high-ranking officials, such as Zhang Tao, vice president of the Chongqing People’s High Court, who received the death penalty, later commuted, and Wu Xiaoqing, a senior court official; prison officials claimed he committed suicide while in jail awaiting trial.
    The arrest and trial of Wen Qiang, the head of Chongqing’s justice bureau, galvanized the nation. Wen, a veteran police officer of thirty-eight years, was deputy chief of the Chongqing public security bureau before Wang. Ironically, Wang and Wen, who are three years apart in age, shared oddly parallel lives. Born in 1956, Wen grew up in Sichuan’s Bai county—a poverty-stricken region—and farmed rice paddies as a teenager. He was recruited by the Luzhou Police Academy in 1977 and became a junior police officer in his hometown. As with Wang, Wen was said to be dedicated and fearless, and was promoted to deputy chief of the Chongqing