Hong Kong smuggling: sea battles, ‘car in a condom case’ and saving refugees recalled by ex-marine police officer
- Les Bird led Hong Kong’s Special Boat Unit in the 1980s, tasked with catching smugglers racing to mainland China in specially designed speedboats
- He also found himself playing the role of welfare officer to tens of thousands of refugees after the Vietnam war, often seeing boats sink before his eyes
The Tolo Channel, a waterway from Ma Liu Shui and out to Mirs Bay in Hong Kong’s northeastern New Territories, is the perfect habitat for smugglers, with a succession of narrow inlets and hidden jetties offering safe havens for loading up contraband and speeding it across the water to mainland China.
In the late 1980s, “big fliers”, or dai fei – grey fibreglass boats specially made to move electronic goods and luxury cars to mainland China and smuggle people into Hong Kong – were the vessels of choice. Capable of 80 knots, with five outboard engines on the stern, containers of extra fuel on the deck and armour-plated bows, they were deadly.
Smuggling was so rampant in the area that a 100-man Special Boat Unit was tasked to chase after the vessels, under the command of British chief inspector Les Bird.
“They wanted to get back to the mainland at all costs,” says Bird, who has recently published a memoir of his career as a Hong Kong Marine police officer from the mid-1970s to the handover in 1997. “With the amount of fuel on board, you just needed a spark for them to go up. Very dangerous, and they would be going at such a speed in the dark. I’m amazed not more people were killed.”
In Bird’s memoir, A Small Band of Men: An Englishman’s Adventures in Hong Kong’s Marine Police, published in paperback by Earnshaw Books, he recalls the tension as they waited in the darkness. Poon deciphered the Chinese radio chatter, and they would listen for the dai fei’s engines.
