Advertisement
What has former 14K triad boss ‘Broken Tooth’ Wan Kuok-koi been up to since leaving prison?
- Released from jail in 2012, the notorious Macau gangster was named alongside Carrie Lam in last year’s US Treasury sanctions as a ‘threat to global order’. Why?
Reading Time:8 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
6
Within weeks of his release from a Macau prison built specifically to hold him, triad boss Wan Kuok-koi, whose rise and fall in the 1990s made headlines around the world, was back in the game.
Advertisement
After walking out of jail on December 1, 2012, the man better known by his gangland nickname, “Broken Tooth’’ – and whose crimes include murder, car-bombing, arms smuggling, money laundering, human trafficking, the leadership of a criminal organisation and racketeering – was able to ease back into “acceptable’’ casino society in Macau.
No one was surprised he had returned to his literal old stomping grounds, but how he managed to set himself up as a “legitimate’’ businessman in several Asian countries remained a mystery.
Advertisement
Then on December 9, 2020, amid simmering Sino-US tensions, Wan found himself on a list of individuals sanctioned by the United States’ Treasury Department as an alleged threat to global order, in the company of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and others. The move by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), under its implementation of the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, described Wan as a “corrupt actor’’.
Advertisement