China is a country of great legends and myths. 3,500 years of written history, and 3,500 years of oral history before it have produced a wealth of stories and characters. Oh so often these tales blur the line between fiction and reality, from the Jade Emperor who ascended from the throne of China to the throne of heaven itself, to Chang’e who supposedly lived among us as a mortal, before drinking the Elixir of Immortality and ascending to become the Goddess of the Moon. But not all of China’s legendary figures are quite so old, nor quite so mythical, and from time to time a figure in China will arise whose exploits reach such unthinkable heights, reach a point of such brazen absurdity and excessiveness, that we may be inclined to conflate their stories with these legends of old in which the line between myth and history begins to blur.
Today we will be examining one of these modern legends, but let me reassure you ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing mythical about his tale, despite our focus today reaching degrees of absurdity and excessiveness that would surely make the Jade Emperor himself green with envy; a young peasant boy who subjugated the entirety of Hong Kong’s underworld and placed it under his command, a man who put history’s largest ever drug smuggling operation under his boot and made it his own, a man to whom even the Governor of Hong Kong himself grovelled at his feet in desperate pleas for his aid, a man who netted himself over half a BILLION dollars — and who did all of this while wearing a police man’s uniform… and got away with it completely scott free.
This is the story of history’s most corrupt police officer: Lui Lok, The Five Hundred Million Dollar Detective.
Early Life
As often is the case with the lesser explored figures of criminal history, remarkably little is known about Lui Lok’s early life. The little that I, George, your humble writer and researcher for today have been able to uncover comes mostly from his police record, which I was able to access while researching today’s video, and a few supplementary tidbits that journalists have uncovered about him over the years.
With that in mind, our story today begins just over the border from Hong Kong among the sharp inclines and placid countryside of Guangdong Province on the Chinese mainland, in the sleep little village of Xinnan, where on the 16th of May 1920, the little bundle of joy that was baby Lui Lok was born.
At any other period in history the newborn Lui Lok would have had plenty for us to envy; a loving family, a modest but largely content life in a sleepy little Chinese village, a perfectly wholesome, if admittedly meagre start in life. But unfortunately for our newborn Lui Lok, the 1920s were not a wholesome period in Chinese history, as this period was defined above all else by the seemingly endless conflict of the Guomindang Nationalist Government and various provincial warlords, all of whom were fighting it out for control of the decomposing and rotten corpse of the once mighty Qing Empire.
The fighting would soon come to sleepy Xinnan with the onset of the Guangdong Guangxi War, a localised conflict between Sun Yat Sen’s Constitutional Protection Junta and the Old Guangxi Clique headed by Lu Rongting which broke out in 1920, the year of Lui Lok’s birth, and rather than be dragged into this conflict that frankly, gave the Lui’s little to gain and everything to lose as they were naught but humble farmers, and so they decided to leave their old lives behind and sneak over the border into British occupied Hong Kong, which sat only a short hundred or so kilometres away to the south west, reasoning that the comparative safety and prosperity of the British colony could only be an improvement for the family.
We do not know exactly when they made the move, but we do know where they ended up — Cheung Chau Island. Even today the sleepy little island has a population little more than 23,000, a number that was even smaller in Lui Lok’s days, so rather than the culture shock of a country boy being thrown into the big city that one might expect as a result of a move to Hong Kong, in all likelihood Lui Lok’s life changed remarkably little following the move: living in the same type of small country home as he had before, receiving the same modest localised education as would have done before, and living pretty much in the middle of nowhere as he had done before — with the only notable change being that his family now farmed fish rather than rice.
But this was no life for a growing Lui Lok. To his now adolescent self this sort of quiet sleepy life was the dictionary definition of hell. He wanted to see the world, to experience some excitement, some danger — ANYTHING beyond the drab mundanity of sitting on a Sampan and staring at fish for the rest of his days… and as luck would have it, thanks to his parents’ most fortuitous relocation, the excitement he so desperately desired was only a short ferry ride away.
As such he found himself in Hong Kong proper, where he took on any and all work he could get his hands on, having stints as a shoe-shiner, a postman, and eventually a rickshaw driver. But such professions would be little more than an adolescent deviation for the young Lui Lok, who in 1940 found his true calling when he enlisted with the Royal Hong Kong Police Force — where he got a pay rise, a smart uniform, a revolver on his waist, and a healthy and steady supply of crims to deal with, what more could a young man seeking excitement and adventure need?
Unfortunately for Lui Lok, the cruel hand of fate was preparing to hand him significantly more than he bargained for, because his native Guangdong Province had recently fallen to the unrelenting expansionist hunger of the Imperial Japanese Army, a monster whos hunger for new territory was insatiable, and now had its eyes firmly set on Hong Kong…
Lui Lok and the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong
Lui Lok’s wartime service is by far and away the most elusive part of his story. He rarely publicly discussed his activities during these years, so as a result all we really have to go on is passing references to him in surviving documentation and the occasional war diary. So with that in mind let us frame this chapter as a more widely focused exploration of the roles and activities of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force during the Japanese occupation, and slot in Lui Lok’s activities as and where we can.
I, George, appreciate that this approach initially may not seem particularly pertinent to today’s video — after all, why would we choose to focus so specifically on the Japanese Invasion of Hong Kong if sources for our subject matter’s activities are so sporadic? Well bare with me, because as much as we do only have limited sources to go on for this chapter, I believe that Lui Lok’s experiences during the war, which occurred during his later formative years are absolutely pivotal in understanding the brutal pragmatist he would eventually grow to become and therefore are essential for us to be able to come to an informed understanding of Lui Lok’s most interesting quality: his grey and murky morality, and by taking a step back and having a slightly broader focus for this chapter we are able to get a general feel for the events and emotions of the period, even when Lui Lok himself might not have been directly involved. So with that said, let’s get into it!
The Japanese Invasion of Hong Kong began on the 8th of December 1941 when 30,000 Imperial Japanese troops surged into Kowloon from their positions in occupied Guangdong. The British willingness to defend Hong Kong is a surprisingly contentious point in historiography, with some claiming that the British made every possible effort to defend what was a relatively small and remote colony, and others claiming that the colony was all but abandoned in favour of attempting to save more strategically important colonies such as British Malaya and Singapore — the rubber plantations of which were significantly more vital to the British war effort than Hong Kong’s trade ports. Personally, I, George, fall somewhere between these two extremes, with my time spent rummaging through the National Archives in Kew, London showing that in the mid 1930’s the prevailing attitude to Hong Kong’s defence was to abandon it, as demonstrated by the 1936 Hong Kong Defence Scheme, but that this attitude eroded away as war loomed ever nearer, as later documentation shows a proactive effort to reinforce Hong Kong with all the heavy artillery, small arms, and supplementary troops that could be mustered from across the British Empire.
What is not a contentious point however, is to claim that these efforts, however large or small they may have been were a monumental failure, as the Hong Kong garrison proved woefully unprepared for the relatively modest Japanese forces that would eventually take the colony 17 days after the invasion. Right up until the 8th of December 1941 the British still anticipated the bulk of the Japanese forces to attempt to take Hong Kong by sea, and thusly the majority of those newly imported heavy guns, as well as the majority of Hong Kong’s interwar defences were pointed out to the ocean — from where the Japanese never came, thus rendering the herculean effort that had gone into their construction and procurement all but null and void.
Some effort had been given to the defence of Hong Kong by land however, even if it was something of an afterthought, and as a result ‘Gin Drinkers Line’, a line of defensive military fortifications that ran across the width of Kowloon had been constructed in the years 1936-1938. Now don’t get the wrong impression, a series of defensive military fortifications it may have been, but a Maginot Line it was not, rather than an impregnable wall of concrete, it was a more humble affair, consisting largely of trenches and anti tank traps, with more solid concrete fortifications focuses around key choke points. Not only was it lacking in construction however, it was also chronically lacking in manpower, as few, if any of the fortifications were fully manned when the Japanese came, for example, Shing Mun Redoubt, a relatively substantial bunker in the East of Kowloon was able to hold 120 defenders, but was manned by only 30 during the invasion.
The British Government was fully aware of this chronic shortage in manpower, and made efforts to attempt to reinforce Hong Kong at the last minute, which saw 1,975 Canadian soldiers from the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers arrive in Hong Kong shortly before the invasion. The vast majority of the last minute boost in manpower however came from inside Hong Kong, as National Revolutionary Army escapees from the mainland, as well as officers from the Royal Hong Kong Police were drafted en masse to help man Hong Kong’s defences.
This was actually quite the prudent move, because contrary to how we might typically imagine a police force, the Royal Hong Kong Police of the time was unusually heavily armed and well versed in combat owing to its peacetime role as an anti piracy force. So well armed were they, that it proved to be a contentious point between Sir Mark Aitchison Young, then the Governor of Hong Kong and the British Government, as surviving documentation from the National Archives shows that the former CONSTANTLY requested more and more, as well as bigger and bigger guns, a request to which the latter, albeit kicking and screaming, usually acquiesced. Thanks to this bickering being committed to writing however, that means we, as modern onlookers, are able to have a reasonable idea of the type of hardware that Lui Lok would have carried into battle.
He of course would have had his trusty service revolver, most likely a Mk III or Mk IV Webley. Likely however, he also carried something a bit more substantial, as the Royal Hong Kong Police procured a significant amount of Pattern 1914 Enfield, Lee–Metford, and even a few obsolete Martini-Henry rifles, as well as several Thompson submachine guns. Likely however it would have been one of the aforementioned rifles he carried, as he was only a Patrol Sub Unit beat officer at this point, and submachine guns were reserved almost exclusively for maritime anti piracy units.
It is impossible to precisely pinpoint Lui Lok’s exact movements and actions during the Battle of Hong Kong, but we are able to make a reasonable guess, as the movements and actions of his improvised unit are reasonably well documented. The Sha Tin Precinct, to which Lui Lok was assigned at the onset of hostilities initially assisted with the British attempts to hold the eastern portion of Gin Drinker’s Line. A valiant attempt was made to resist the Japanese assault, but it was ultimately futile, the overstretched, underprepared, and undermanned Gin Drinker’s Line gradually became more porous as the Japanese penetrated it across several points, and by the 11th of September, only three days after the initial Japanese assault, the line had totally collapsed and British forces were in full retreat down to the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula.
The heroic efforts of the Royal Hong Kong Police and the colony’s other defenders came to naught. By the morning of the 13th of December the Kowloon Peninsula had been completely overrun by the Imperial Japanese Forces, the British forces had been thoroughly routed and all military forces which were still on their feet had been evacuated to Hong Kong Island in a last ditch effort to attempt to hold out until reinforcements could arrive, while the police, and therefore Lui Lok were ordered to abandon the fight and remain behind to attempt to maintain some semblance of peace and order in Japanese occupied Kowloon. But these reinforcements would never come, as a two pronged amphibious assault by the numerically and technologically superior Japanese forces quickly routed the last of the Imperial British defenders, who surrendered on Christmas Day 1941, putting Hong Kong firmly under Japanese control for the foreseeable future.
The Royal Hong Kong Police was immediately disbanded and Hong Kong was placed under direct martial law, and accordingly the Japanese military police occupied former Royal Hong Kong Police Force installations. In January 1942 a new Japanese administered police force, the Kempeitai was established. This new force drew its recruits exclusively from Hong Kong Indian and Chinese former police officers, with European former officers being barred from service and kept in prison camps across Hong Kong. Uptake was very limited, and generally begrudging when it was accepted however, on account of the absolutely horrific human rights abuses that the Japanese inflicted upon Hong Kong; including the random use of Chinese citizens for bayonet and shooting practice, in addition to many random and arbitrary beheadings committed at the cruel whims of the Japanese occupiers.
Rather than join the Kempeitai, far more of the surviving Chinese and Indian Royal Hong Kong Police officers joined one of the various anti-Japanese resistance groups active in Hong Kong, and it is here that we find our next reference to Lui Lok, who’s name pops up from time to time in the history of the East River Column, a large Communist resistance group active all across occupied China, and whose numbers in Hong Kong peaked at around 6,000.
Sadly those passing references are the only sources we have for Lui Lok’s activities in those years, so we know nothing of exactly when and how he joined up with them, or how he interacted with other members of the group, but we do know some operations he was involved with. The most notable of which was an assault on the Tai Po Kempeitai Police Station on the 5th August 1942. As one of the most major settlements of the Eastern New Territories Tai Po was used as a staging post for Japanese anti partisan troops, and one particularly successful anti partisan raid had left its cells particularly full, and with the prisoners inside facing immediate torture and imminent execution it was deceided that the time had come to level the place.
East River Column troops approached in the dead of night, cut the phone lines, and then proceeded to turn the tables on the Japanese occupation troops, exacting exactly the brutal deaths upon them that they had been planning for their Chinese prisoners. By the time word reached the Japanese and a counter attack had been mustered it was too late: their troops were dead, their police station had been razed to the ground, and their prisoners had been rescued. We do not know exactly what role Lui Lok took in this operation, we simply know that he was present “during the Assault.”
He also assisted with the rescuing of Allied pilots who either crashed into, or bailed out over Hong Kong. We know of at least one occasion for sure, when he was assisted with the rescue of Lieutenant Donald W. Kerr, whose P-40 Warhawk was shot down on the 11th of February 1944 while on a mission to bomb Kai Tak Airport, which had been turned into a Japanese Airbase.
Lui Lok, along with other members of the East River Column successfully managed to evade the 1,000 Japanese soldiers which were dispatched to find him, and smuggle him back to free China.
We ultimately don’t know how Lui Lok felt about his wartime experiences, because as we stated at the beginning of this chapter it was a period of his life he was always reluctant to discuss publicly. It is however very hard to imagine that this was a period he looked back on fondly, and I am sure you don’t need me to tell you that war, conflict, and combat, don’t tend to exactly be the most emotionally uplifting experience irregardless of how well or badly it may go for you, and not only did Lui Lok have to deal with the stress and trauma of combat itself, he also had to endure the absolute brutality of the Japanese occupation — his friends, loved ones, and countrymen being subject to events so horrific that they would make even strong stomached Nurremburg prosecutors feel queasy and uneasy.
If I, George, may play armchair psychologist for a moment, I firmly believe that these experiences directly moulded Lui Lok into the corrupt pragmatist he would eventually become and instilled the values that would carry him forward later in life: a burning hatred of rapists and murderers, a want to secure his own safety and position regardless of immediate morality, a willingness to employ violence when it got the job done, but also a man who loved, cherished, and protected those close to him… I believe you can see the foundations of it all in his wartime experiences.
But that’s enough moral pontificating for now, with the tale of Lui Lok’s wartime experiences behind us we can move onto the really exciting and absurd part of today’s video… corruption.
Post War Career
As you have probably ascertained from the previous chapters, from our limited sources it appears as though Lui Lok’s early career was quite the commendable one: a poor lad who joined the Royal Hong Kong Police simply to enrich his own lot in life, but found himself having quite the action packed, if not outright heroic early career as he was forced into the role of an anti-Japanese partisan.
But that state of affairs would not last forever. On the Second of September 1945 Emperor Hirohito, with his once mighty and seemingly indomitable Empire laying in absolute ruin, signed an unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri. This naturally brought about the end of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, whose garrison formally surrendered to British Rear Admiral Sir Cecil Halliday Jepson Harcourt on the 16th of September 1945, and thus Hong Kong was once again returned to British sovereignty once again.
The ousting of Hong Kong’s new colonial overlords in favour of the old ones brought some degree of normality back to the territory, as the old British colonial institutions returned en masse to pick up where they left off nearly four years prior. Chief among these returning institutions of course was the Royal Hong Kong Police
The police themselves would face significant reform in the post war period. The pre war Commissioner of Police John Pennefather-Evans, who had survived internment in Stanley Prisoner Camp had occupied his time detained by drafting a plan for a top down restructuring of the police force, one which stressed equality in recruitment and promotion for local officers and a reduction in recruitment of European constables. It is hotly debated how much of this seemingly progressively intended new face of Hong Kong Policing actually filtered its way down to reality, but it certainly didn’t harm the career prospects of Lui Lok, who answered the call to return to service, and on account of his exemplary wartime service was promoted to Detective in 1946. This made him something of a trailblazer, as he was in fact one of the first native Chinese Hong Kongers to hold such a position, as prior, non-white officers had been all but excluded from senior inspectorate roles, and confined to junior rank and file positions.
From available sources, by which I mean third hand office gossip from interviewed Royal Hong Kong Police Force veterans whose early stage careers happened to overlap with the late stage careers of officers contemporary to Lui Lok, so take this with an ever so slight pinch of salt, Lui Lok was a man torn in the early post war years, between an ambition to be an upstanding and exemplary police officer beyond reproach, and the brutal pragmatism instilled in him by up to nearly four years fighting as an anti-Japanese partisan.
His new role as a Detective within the Criminal Investigation Department naturally exposed him to the very worst that Hong Kong’s criminal class could offer: murders, people traffickers, rapists, and of course, many, many triads. At first he handled these like a model police officer: treating suspected rapists with nothing but dignity during their arrest, and the delusional shrieks of innocence of a murder suspect who was caught covered in blood, knife still in hand, next to the body, simply flowing off of Lui Lok like water off a duck’s back. But his fellow officers began to notice a change in him, like all officers when the police cap was removed at quitting time Lui Lok would rant to get the stress of the day off of his chest, but as time went on these rants became longer, more fiery, more vitriolic, and eventually violent, as he would begin punching and smashing his locker to vent his frustration.
It was only a matter of time until Lui Lok’s calm and collected veneer completely collapsed, and the newly forged brutal pragmatist that lay within came out in force. We ultimately don’t know exactly when this transition happened, as neither the eye witness testimony, nor the documentary evidence to say so appears to have survive, but from the veterans interviewed for the completion of this script, we can roughly place it to the late 1940s — as from this point, stories and rumours of the brutal pragmatism that made Lui Lok famous begin to appear in earnest.
One such incident occurred on the 7th of May 1949, when two British Marine Police Inspectors, and one Chinese detective were murdered. This particularly grisly incident saw two Chinese sailors, who had been on guard duty while their ship unloaded in Hong Kong Harbour take their issued weapons to Mirs Bay, and subsequently use them to commander, and subsequently murder most of the crew of a Royal Hong Kong Police Maritime Patrol Vessel, most of whom had been on break and asleep. They then forced the coxswain, the sole surviving crew member to take the vessel into Chinese waters at gunpoint, where they were met by 16 Chinese pirates with whom they were conspiring with, who then murdered the sole remaining crew member, and stole the modest supply of firearms on board. They then dumped the bodies of the crew overboard, and planned to return to Hong Kong Harbour, abandon the vessel, and return to their cargo ship with no one any the wiser they had even abandoned their posts for a time.
They would not get away with it however, because they had been spotted; the sailors attack had taken place just before the crew of the Patrol Vessel were due to be relieved, and that backup crew, having found their ship completely missing, with no sign of the crew, and command being unaware of any ongoing incident that could have been occupying them, naturally assumed foul play, and a search was immediately launched.
It did not take them long to be found: a Royal Hong Kong Police Force Patrol Vessel leaving Chinese waters, which they were strictly speaking forbidden to enter would have been suspicious at any time, much less when a vessel was missing and unaccounted for in unusual circumstances. The vessel was shadowed, and its hijackers allowed to disembark, at which point they were arrested. The charge in question was made obvious by the blood streaks and smears which covered the inside of the vessel: three counts of murder a piece.
This brought the suspects into the scope of Lui Lok, who had been assigned as lead detective on the case, and unfortunately for them, as if the killing of three police officers alone wasn’t enough to invoke the full breadth and extent of his newfound pragmatic brutality, the fact that the Chinese detective had purportedly been a close friend and associate of Lui Lok certainly was, and the ensuing screams from torture could be heard throughout the police station. As for the ultimate fate of the three men in his custody… we have absolutely no idea — but the fact that the case never made it to trial, and that all references to the three men completely vanish certainly gives us a very strong hint…
Secondary to the emergence of Lui Lok’s willingness to use violence, torture, and various other methods of extra-judicial punishment, was the emergence of his willingness to see policing much more pragmatically: so long as he kept the real evil scumbags at bay — murderers, rapists, and the like what was the harm if some low level minor crime ultimately continued? After all, where was the victim in crimes such as gambling, pornography, drugs, and organised prostitution he apparently reasoned? These were all consensual activities, so no victim, no foul.
If anything, he went on to reason, keeping these elements on a lead rather than cracking down on them could even help the overall safety of Hong Kong — he would know who the people were running them, he could build relationships with them, stop them from getting too excessive, it was in fact, the righteous and virtuous thing to do to overlook such petty crimes, by his logic anyway, and if this was to continue… well then what was the harm in taking a little cut for himself? He was a police officer, he worked hard, all he would be doing would be taking cash which would otherwise end up in the pockets of gangsters.
Now of course ladies and gentlemen in the audience, you and me alike can see the deep, chasm like flaws in this logic, and I don’t want you to think for a second that I, George, as the writer of today’s piece am advocating for this approach, quite the opposite in fact — I am simply telling you Lui Lok’s logic as it was told to me by his contemporary officers. You, me, and Simon can certainly no doubt see the flaws in his logic: even if we concede that these crimes were fully consensual by all parties, which in the case of post World War II Hong Kong’s pornography and prostitution industry is almost certainly a bogus claim, the proceeds of these rackets ultimately funded the triads and other serious criminals, the very ones Lui Lok claimed, and certainly appeared to hate with a burning passion. Whether or not this hypocrisy was known to him, or was simply subconscious cognitive dissonance, we ultimately don’t know.
What we do know however, at least to a certain degree, is the process by which he began to dip his toes into this world of corruption. Much like the emergence of his violent side however, we do not have specific dates or key incidents we can point to as to be able to mark his transition, instead, from interviews with surviving Royal Hong Kong Police Force veterans we are able to highlight key incidents which clearly show a change in his temperament.
One such example, which once again is third hand office gossip from a veteran officer who was starting his career with the force as Lui Lok was ending his, so take it for what it is, comes from 1952, when Lui Lok was stationed at the Sham Shui Po Police Station. The officer, who for obviously understandable reasons wished to remain anonymous described going out on patrol with Lui Lok, how he would “pay a visit” to all the local organised criminals in the area, at face value to investigate leads, conduct in criminal outreach, and all the other perfectly above board activities that would normally take investigators into such dens of depravity.
But something was amiss… they began with an illegal porno store on Ki Lung street. The establishment was hidden in a back alley, and would have been completely unknown and undetectable to anyone who simply happened to be passing… but Lui Lok knew exactly where it was — so far so normal, he likely had good intelligence, or had visited the place before. What was less normal was how Lui Lok simply strided up to the door of the store without announcing his presence and strutted inside without a sense of hesitancy or concern about him. Even this wasn’t too weird, our interviewed officer went on to reason, Lui Lok was a war hero after all, perhaps he just had a mighty set of steel testicles on him and wasn’t the slightest bit phased by the dangerous prospect he was marching into — perfectly reasonable.
The reality of the situation finally dawned on the accompanying officer when Lui Lok then proceeded to head right up to the owner of the store, his face plastered with an ear to ear smile and greeted him as a welcome and valued friend. Lui Lok and the owner then joked around for a while, making small talk about the wife and how good business was going, until soon enough a little brown envelope appeared, one that was stuffed to the point of brimming with cash… It was Lui Lok’s cut! Him and the owner then shook hands and cordially parted ways. The accompanying officer then just had time to pick his shocked jaw up off the floor, before his palm was crossed with silver by Lui Lok — a handful of notes supposedly to thank him for his understanding, but the officer was no fool, he know what Lui Lok was doing, he was trying to both buy his loyalty, and make him complicit in the corruption so he wouldn’t go singing to the higher ups.
This story of the illegal porno shop on Ki Lung Street is archetypal of how Lui Lok began building his wealth and power in the early days of his corruption: one by one befriending every illicit enterprise in his jurisdiction, and taking a cut of their profits in exchange for promises of mutual back scratching. This undoubtedly made him a very wealthy man, and netted him many millions of Hong Kong dollars… but it is hardly the stuff of a ‘500 Million Dollar Detective’ now is it? To reach those heights he would need to climb the ranks of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, after which he would gain influence over more territory and be able to offer significantly more meaningful goodies to his criminal comrades. Fortunately however, Lui Lok was nothing if not fortuitous, and over the coming years fate would hand him several opportunities to climb that ladder very nicely indeed.
Maintaining Power and Crushing the 14K Triad
Contrary to the impression you may have gotten from the end of our previous chapter, Lui Lok’s rise to prominence as a secondary bystander in Hong Kong’s criminal underworld was far from a smooth process that saw him smoothly shoot to the top. Along the way he encountered many hurdles; it could be a criminal who objected to the size of his cut, or another criminal who stuck so firmly to the old triad ideals that they objected to the very idea of working with a police officer, or even something as simple as a murderous criminal who took intrinsic objection to him, and consequently found themselves with an overwhelming urge to remove Lui Lok’s head from his neck, whatever the objection, and whatever peril it posed, Lui Lok handled it in the exact same manner — by crushing it.
There are many smaller examples we could discuss to highlight this approach, such as a triad who specialised in the production of illegal pornography, who upon realising, and then voicing his objection to Lui Lok’s cut of his business mysteriously suddenly found every single one of his runners arrested and every single one of his vans stopped and searched, or another triad who insulted and slighted Lui Lok, only to subsequently find his car ablaze in the street after some miscreant took it upon themselves to throw a petrol bomb at it, or the triad who boldly declared that he was sick and tired of Lui Lok’s meddling in his business, and declared his intention to satisfy his grievance by shooting him in the face, and a few days later disappeared, never to be seen again.
But instead, let us highlight Lui Lok’s approach to keeping his criminal compatriots loyal by focusing on my, Georges, personal favourite story. This story takes us back to 1955, a time when Lui Lok’s influence over the criminal underworld of Hong Kong was certainly very pronounced and deep rooted, but had yet to reach the truly absurd excesses it would later reach. At this time Lui Lok had very cordial relations with most of the big triad families of Hong Kong — He Shenghe, the Big Four, and the Chaozhou all knew the deal and were generally very content with it: there was plenty of mutual back scratching, and everyone made plenty of money as a result, with the only real problems to arise from these families typically being individual, and usually low level triads, who for one reason or another incurred the ire of Lui Lok, at which point either their superiors, or Lui Lok himself would see that they faced some degree of retribution for their naughty, profit disrupting ideas.
One triad family however, proved to be less willing to get on board, and proved to be a consistent thorn in the side of Lui Lok as a result — the 14K triad. In his eyes, they were taking far too long to learn their place, never being satisfied and always asking for more from him, things that even Lui Lok at that time couldn’t manage, such as the keys to a Royal Hong Kong Police Force armoury that they wanted to raid, case files to disappear from the Chief of Police’s drawer, and perhaps the most egregious of all in Lui Lok’s eyes… a reduction in the size of his cut — PERISH THE THOUGHT.
Lui Lok apparently hit a point where he snapped, was unwilling to negotiate and compromise any further, and subsequently he wrote the whole 14K triad off as a lost cause… if they wouldn’t get in line, they would be wiped out, and as a police officer, he had everything he needed at his disposal to do exactly that. Following this realisation Lui Lok opened up his evidence locker, and pulled out all the evidence of their criminality that he had previously buried, took it in hand, and headed up to Arthur Maxwell, the then Commissioner of Police’s office. When inside he slammed his evidence on the desk, and told Maxwell all about this evil and vicious gang, which was rapidly becoming an intolerable and no longer permissible threat to public safety, they had to be crushed, and now, he pleaded! And wouldn’t you know it, Lui Lok was such a damned fine police officer, he just so happened to know the names and details of every single member of the 14K in Hong Kong, all he needed was the greenlight, and he would launch an operation to see them all behind bars with all available haste.
Presented with such a horrific slew of evidence, as well as the testimony of the VERY TRUSTWORTHY AND NOT AT ALL CORRUPT officer before him there was nothing Maxwell could do but accept Lui Lok’s proposal, and consequently he granted him permission to launch his operation. But an operation of this size would be no simple task, it would require perfect timing, perfect precision, and have to be perfectly executed to have any chance of success: if arrests were too staggered the 14K would soon enough realise they were being targeted and disappear before they could all be arrested. Ideally he needed an opportunity to grab them all at the same time, and after consulting with the few members of the 14K he felt he could depend upon to be loyal and tight lipped, just such an opportunity presented itself: a grand feast being held at Chun Tok School in Diamond Hill, then a village on the northern outskirts of the metropolitan mass of Kowloon.
Several weeks later that very feast came about, and the stage was set for the 14K to be well and truly crushed. Inside the school looked perfectly normal, or as normal as a triad party can look anyway — everyone was happy, booze aplenty was flowing, and everyone was having a great time occupying themselves with the sort of demonitisable activities that triads occupy themselves with. The only thing that ruined this otherwise perfect scene was a notable number of empty seats and absentees at what would otherwise be an occasion that saw the school packed to the rafters. No doubt the attendees thought this was odd, and certainly eyebrows were raised, but any considerations to the empty chairs appear to have quickly disappeared once the booze started flowing.
Outside the school things appeared equally normal, but if you looked closely into the distance, the eagle eyed observer would notice the figure of a single man staring towards the school through a pair of binoculars — not something wants to see at any time of the day. But far from being the type of foul agent engaging in an activity that would see him placed on the ‘Not on Normal Courtyard Exercise’ list, this man was staring at the school for a good reason: to tell Lui Lok when the party was in full swing so they could pounce.
That message was sent a little after 11pm — when the steady flow of people to the school’s balcony became sufficiently wobbly to show clear intoxication, and thus imply the police would face minimal resistance. A convoy of vans then poured from the Kowloon East Police Operational Base and made their way to the school, taking it slow and steady so as to not alert anyone to their imminent arrival. As a result of this meticulous planning, the attendees must have been most surprised a few minutes later when the door to the gym hall was violently kicked open, and through it swaggered none other than Lui Lok, who had a cocked Sterling Submachine Gun casually resting in his arms.
He apparently informed everyone present that they had been very naughty boys indeed, and that they were all under arrest, a claim which was followed up by an immediate torrent of armed uniformed officers into the building, who duly placed everyone under arrest and carted them away — the 14K triad had been decapitated in one swoop. Back at the station the interrogations began, and there was much finger pointing at Lui Lok, everyone was very quick to point out that he was on the fiddle, a triad in all but name himself who should be in the cells with them — but for some reason, these claims never seem to have found their way to court!
Now, if you are big on your Chinese crime dear viewers, you will probably be fully aware that this was not the end of the 14K triad, as they still remain highly active to this day — so what gives? Well to answer that question, let us go back to those empty seats that I mentioned earlier in this chapter, their vacancy was no accident, and neither was my mentioning of them, because viewers, put yourself in Lui Lok’s position, what would be even better for your corrupt crime fighting career than a completely obliterated 14K triad… a 14K triad that was completely bent around your finger of course!
Those empty seats were due to be filled by the various elements of the 14K that were loyal to Lui Lok, the Hung Kwan’s who always paid on time without quibble, the Fu Shan Chu’s who were always willing to work with Lui Lok, and were just as incensed by their comrades meddling as the big man himself. They were all ADVISED not to attend that banquet by Lui Lok… how fortuitous! And with the rest of the triad completely decapitated, who was now left to rise up and rebuild the organisation? Only dependable triads Lui Lok knew he could control… we can say what we like about Lui Lok, but we have to concede that this was a simply masterful play by him.
The best part of this story however, is that because Lui Lok sold this operation as a righteous crusade of sorts, one in which he would delve into the belly of the beast and tear out its heart because he was just such a great guy like that — he was showered with praise and accolades for his role in ‘destroying’ the 14K, and even promoted the following year, thanks in no small part to his role in this operation.
With that promotion Lui Lok found his position greater than it had ever been: he had climbed the ladders of the force to the point that he was free to act all but completely at his own behest, to conduct his corrupt capers with total freedom, because if he was out of the station for extended periods — what senior British officer wouldn’t think he wasn’t out there doing something heroic and policey.
But ultimately he was still a little fish in a big pond. He had entire districts of Hong Kong under his command, in which every single criminal knew who the boss was, and paid their dues accordingly. But the Hong Kong underworld of the day was much bigger than that — and it would take more than total control of a few districts to make him the ‘The Five Hundred Million Dollar Inspector’ that he would become. He needed an opportunity that would send him into the big leagues, something that would send him rocketing up the Royal Hong Kong Police ladder even further, and thus give him opportunities to extend his influence over even more criminals, and even more districts of Hong Kong…
And luckily for him, that opportunity was just around the corner.
The Double Ten Riots
The ‘Double Ten’ Riots of October 1956 proved to be a pivotal moment in Lui Lok’s rise to power, as they provided the impetus for the already very corrupt, but ultimately mid level police officer to rocket up through the ranks, and gain the reach and freedom he needed to being conducting his corruption on a frankly absurd scale.
October always proved to be tense in post-war Hong Kong, and 1956 was no different. The flames of the Chinese Civil War had only burnt out 7 years prior, and the embers of this conflict continued to glow red hot among Hong Kong’s 2.5 million strong Chinese population, who were still fiercely divided between fiercely loyal pro Communist and pro Nationalist camps. The month of October was always a natural flashpoint for these tensions, as the Communist People’s Republic of China celebrated its national day on the 1st of October, and the Nationalist Republic of China celebrated its own on the 10th of October. Typically disruption was relatively mild, lots of flag waving across Hong Kong, a few drunken brawls, and maybe the smashing of a shop window or two… but this was not the case in 1956, thanks to the meddling of the British Colonial authorities.
On the 10th of October, the Republic of China’s national day, an unknown colonial bureaucrat saw fit to march into Tsuen Wan, then a fiercely nationalist stronghold, and begin tearing down the many Republican flags that adored the town’s streets. This, understandably, was taken RATHER badly by Tsuen Wan’s residents, who began blocking access to their flags. The aforementioned anonymous colonial bureaucrat completely failed to read the tensions brewing, and continued on with his scheme regardless, having his men push their way through the crowds and continuing to tear down the flags. Then at some point, while a flag was at its tearing point being pulled between the colonial authorities and the increasingly angry crowd, a punch was thrown by someone, then a punch was thrown back, and this violence continued to escalate until a mass brawl had erupted in central Tsuen Wan.
Having finally become aware of the full extent of their cock up, the colonial authorities retreated immediately while the violence was still limited to just the furious residents’ fists, but it was too little too late. Pandora’s box had been opened, and it would prove no small matter to close it once again. A desperate call was made for police backup, but by the time a response was sent the violence had fully engulfed Tsuen Wan. Any symbol of colonial authority: phone boxes, post boxes, and any sign or building displaying English text was being uprooted, smashed, and burned, as well as any property or person judged to be sympathetic to the Chinese communists.
Police had some initial success in quelling the riot with batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas, but as night fell and the rioters regrouped they found themselves pushed from Tsuen Wan in the face of an unrelenting barrage of rocks and other improvised missiles. As the police fled from Tsuen Wan the riots spread behind them, and by morning the whole of Kowloon was engulfed in fierce violence. Eventually the riots engulfed the European enclaves on the peninsula, and Europeans began being dragged from their cars and beaten while their cars were burned.
By the next morning the colonial government had all but lost control of Kowloon’s streets. In the early hours of the 11th of October on Nathan Road Swiss Vice Consul Fritz Ernst, along with his wife were dragged from their car, beaten, doused with petrol, and set on fire. Fritz himself managed to survive, but his wife eventually died of her injuries. This was the breaking point for the Colonial Authorities, who mobilised the military, and mustered every available police officer ready to crush these riots.
But before the streets of Hong Kong descended into a bloodbath, Colonial Secretary Edgeworth B. David had an idea: give command of the situation to a native Chinese officer, and see if he couldn’t find some way to defuse the situation. But who would they pick for such an unenviable task I wonder? It would have to be someone senior enough to be capable of dictating the full strategic situation, someone who knew the full ins and outs of normal Chinese society, someone who understood the Chinese underworld would be handy too… now ladies and gentlemen of the audience, who do we know who fits that bill?
And thus, Lui Lok, found himself handed the keys to the castle, and with them the complete authority to handle this situation however he saw fit. He was given 24 hours, and if the riots weren’t in decline by that point, the tanks would be rolling in. It was but a simple task, he reassured Colonial Secretary David, all he needed was a big bag full of cash…
Faced with little other option David acquiesced, and Lok was presented with his big bag of cash. The plan was simple Lok went on to explain: split the cash four ways, and ferry it to the four big triads of Hong Kong’s underworld to buy their support, then they would fight the riots from within as the government continued to push against the front face of the riots, which, god willing would completely break and disperse them. David agreed, and Lok raced off in the early hours of the morning in an unmarked car to pay some of his old acquaintances a quick little visit. First the the 14K, then He Shenghe, followed by the Big Four, then finally the Chaozhou Gang — Lui Lok’s pre-established connections with them all saw him race through the door of each family and granted an immediate audience with them all, after which they were all paid off and brought on board with his scheme.
Lui Lok knew it would take time to for word of the scheme to filter down to the various underlings of Hong Kong’s triads, so then he took the time to gather the government’s forces, instructing everyone to prepare for several coordinated major assaults on the riots key locations early in the afternoon. Soon enough it was time, and at 1pm the Royal Hong Kong Police, their lines thickened by additional reinforcements from the military and prison service began advancing across all fronts while delivering a relentless barrage of tear gas, batons and rubber bullets. The rioters soon crumbled, their numbers weakened by the fear of triad reprisal, and those few strong willed enough to remain proved unable to mount any kind of meaningful defence against the renewed police onslaught. Of particular note was the crackdown in Tsuen Wan, where a group of six Saracen Armoured Personnel Carriers, personally commanded by Lui Lok himself pushed through the rioters at go time, before disembarking at Lei Cheng Uk Estate, the very heart and origin point of the riots, to supposedly cut the metaphoric head off of the snake.
This plan worked perfectly, and by the close of the 12th of October the riots were totally quelled and suppressed. Naturally, Lui Lok himself was highly lauded for his role in suppressing the riots and earned himself another promotion, before he was then transferred to Tsuen Wan.
But hold your horses ladies and gentlemen — because if you thought this chapter was going to be some kind of high point in Lui Lok’s career, where he displayed the utmost professionalism and dedication to his role in stark contrast to the corrupt colossus he was rapidly becoming — hold your horses! Because like his crushing of the 14K triad — his crushing of the Double Ten Riots was a well orchestrated and planned publicity stunt, one designed to win himself maximum brownie points from the Colonial Authorities, and ensure the further strengthening and progression of his career.
Ask yourselves a question ladies and gentlemen in the audience — what was the point of the armoured car charge he personally led to the very heart of the riots? It’s not like the riots were an organised movement with a convenient central headquarters, and that cutting the head off the snake would lead to the collapse of the rest of the unrest. If anything, such a move would only be a detriment to the overall effort, as it would take vital officers and equipment away from the frontlines, only to leave them isolated and cut off from support if the plan to crush the rest of the unrest failed… So why did he do it?
The answer… is glory. Lui Lok wanted a heroic set piece of himself personally grasping the proverbial bull by the horns and beating it into submission, and he certainly got that!
This of course was great for Lui Lok’s corrupt criminal catching career, as he now had unfettered access to significant parts of the city and their criminal underworlds, as well as a glowing, heroic reputation that would ensure colonial authorities would always see him in a positive light and provide some padding against any allegations of corruption that might ever come his way — and it goes without saying, of course a healthy share of that big bag of cash went straight into his pocket.
But still, there was more to come. What we have seen so far has certainly been absurd, the manner in which Lui Lok played the game and spread his corrupt influence all over Hong Kong was certainly a great effort, and one which netted him vast riches as he continued to take his devious dividends from the Hong Kong underworld. But still, it isn’t really the stuff of a Five Hundred Million Dollar Inspector is it? To really enter the big boy leagues Lui Lok would have to not just take a cut of mundane and routine criminal activities, but make himself a vital and essential partner of some truly unsavoury types, and as luck would have it, that is exactly what happened when he became with acquainted with an entrepreneurial young Hong Kong lad by the name of Wu Xi Hao — a man who would grow to become (possibly) history’s biggest ever drug baron.
Wu Xi Hao
It is likely that we will never know the full extent of Lui Lok’s corruption. That fact he got away with his crimes completely scot free means that we lack the lynchpin source upon which these videos often rely on — a court case, wherein all of the nitty gritty details of the case are uncovered, and duly presented to the public, following which humble Youtube script smiths such as myself can do what we do best.
Now, I know what you are thinking, Lui Lok and his wife Choi Chun had eight little Lui’s over the course of their marriage — surely one of them must have come forward at some point with some juicy details? Alas, no. FOR SOME REASON they appear to be remarkably tight lipped about the details of their lavishly wealthy lifestyles, and their almost unbelievably corrupt father who absolutely had nothing to do with the aforementioned lifestyle, they promise, 1,000%, for realsies, and asking about it appears to be a good way to get smashed in the face with a Chanel handbag.
We can hear your despair through the screen viewers! Oh — to be so close to such juicy details, but still so far, truly few greater tragedies have ever befallen mankind. But despair not dear viewers, because our video has a saviour — the absolute Giga Chad’s of the Hong Kong Police Data Access Department, who are more than happy to share everything they have on file regarding their long disgraced detective.
Let us all down tools and have a quick round of applause for these Cantonese Kings, for without their indomitable openness and willingness to tolerate my constant barrage of questions, this script, and indeed my past scripts, would likely be big piles of crap. This means that thanks to the questions they have answered, as well as the questions of those who have come before me, I have been able to piece together the story of Lui Lok’s corruption when it was at its real, absurd peak. So let’s dally no further and get into it!
With that in mind, let us use Lui Lok’s interactions with one Wu Xi Hao as a case study to typify the power and money he accrued in the later stage of his career. Wu Xi Hao was Hong Kong’s, and possibly the entire world’s (depending on who you ask) biggest ever drug baron, and the two had many interactions over the years…
Wu Xi Hao was born and raised in Dahao, Shantou City, Guangdong, but soon found himself drawn to Hong Kong, where the going rate for unskilled labour could be as much as six times that of the mainland at that time. He made the move in 1962, and soon found himself drawn to the criminal underworld on account of his continually climbing material aspirations, which soon went beyond that which could be provided by a career on the straight and narrow. He began small time at first, dipping his toes into a criminal career by running an illegal lottery, but soon expanded into the drug trade when the profitability of his lottery was found to be wanting.
This was a career move which reaped serious dividends for Wu Xi Hao. He cut Hong Kong’s four big triad families; 14K, Heshenghe, Big Four and the Chaozhou Gang into his criminal enterprise, giving them all a cut of his profits in exchange for their blessing to operate, and any up and comers who began to step on his toes… mysteriously disappeared. This pragmatic and (literally) cut-throat approach to business soon saw him rise to the top of the criminal underworld, and soon enough Wu Xi Hao was running one of the biggest drug smuggling operations in Hong Kong, all based out of a lavish office in Chungking Mansions, Tsim Tsa Tsui.
Few criminals can make it to these lavish heights without attracting the attention of the police, and indeed Wu Xi Hao was no exception, but his first serious confrontation with the law did not play out quite how he probably anticipated…
It all went down on a typically hot and humid August afternoon back in 1965. Wu Xi Hao was just returning from a hard day’s work doing whatever it is drug barons do: making drugs, selling drugs, moving drugs — all the wholesome family friendly activities that drug barons typically fill their days with. The hot weather had left him in a very short tempered and irritable mood, and all he wanted to do now was return to his nice and cool air conditioned office, sink back into his comfy executive chair… and relax. What he certainly didn’t want was to be told upon his return that a police officer was sitting waiting for him in his office.
Time slowed to a crawl for Wu Xi Hao, as he stood completely frozen by panic. He began to hastily consider his options. The rational half of his brain told him his fate was sealed, if the police were here this brazenly he was almost certainly done for and headed for a jail cell, so he should walk in with his head held high and accept his fate. The emotional half of his brain had a very different idea, and reminded him of the gentle indent of a pistol that pushed against his waist.
Eventually he chose neither option, and simply found himself drifting into his office with absolutely no idea what to do.
He was shocked by the image that greeted him. A police officer — a Detective Superintendent no less sat in HIS chair, with his feet up on HIS desk, smoking one of HIS cigars. The detective ordered him to sit down across from him, and perplexed by the sheer oddity of the situation, Wu Xi Hao did exactly that without question.
You’ve probably guessed who that officer was by now — it was our boy, Lui Lok, who went on to explain every detail of Wu Xi Hao’s own operation to him, and commend him on the progress he had made. Lui closed this ultimate display of big PP energy by going on to explain that Wu had forgotten to pay off Hong Kong’s most terrifying and powerful crime lord — himself. Lui presented Wu with a simple option — cut him into the operation right here and now, or he would shit on him from such a height, that Xu would think that God himself had taken a crap on him. Seeing little other option but to bend the knee, Wu Xi Hao did the sensible thing and cut Lui Lok into his business.
Much to Wu Xi Hao’s surprise however, Lui Lok proved to be much more than a silent business partner who wanted a cut for the small investment of not breaking his legs. Lui Lok instead took on a proactive role in his organisation, and offered him the fullest protection and support that his law enforcement contacts could provide. This opened up new markets for Wu Xi Hao domestically as now his Hong Kong criminal rivals would all find themselves arrested, tortured, and some say even killed when they grew too large.
This partnership with Lui Lok also revolutionised Wu Xi Hao’s overseas trade, because his support suddenly gave Wu Xi Hao near unrestricted access to Hong Kong’s enormous port, allowing him to move product all across Asia all but completely unopposed — which quickly made him one of THE WORLDS biggest drug barons over the coming decade, with some sources even saying he became the richest drug lord in history. Eventually he even stopped paying his protection money to the 14K, Heshenghe, Big Four and the Chaozhou Gang… now the tables had turned and THEY had to pay Wu Xi Hao for permission to operate in HIS city.
Lui Lok, despite all of his power, was not omnipotent however, and try as he may he was unable to completely keep the law off of Wu Xi Hao’s back. From time to time a senior officer, or the colonial government would get a bee in their bonnet about that whole “hArD dRuGs aRe dEsTRoYiNg SoCIeTy” thing and demand action — leading to some absolutely incredible, and frankly hilarious scenes, where Lui Lok found himself having to act shocked as he walked around recently raided drug facilities that he himself had been in only hours earlier. A scene we can all relate too truely — who among us hasn’t had a side hustle we’ve tried to keep on the downlow!
The relationship with Wu Xi Hao brought the peak of Lui Lok’s power and influence. Finally, after years, his corruption had grown to such an extent that near as damn it the entirety of Hong Kong’s underworld, including potentially history’s richest ever drug baron, was in his pocket, and he was getting a cut of the lot. He now truly was the The Five Hundred Million Dollar Inspector. As catchy as this name is, however, adjusted for inflation we really should be calling Lui Lok the 3.8 BILLION dollar detective — a figure that truly contextualises how absurdly large his wealth had become as his power continued to grow in the territory.
All good things must come to an end however, and what good Hollywood-esque drug baron tale would be complete without the monumental fall from grace right as the protagonist holds the world in the palm of his hands? But for Wu Xi Hao his downfall would not see him letting an M16 rip on the balcony of his mansion while he was gunned down by a disenfranchised business partner, nor fall into a nose-candy fuelled paranoia that led to him turning on his friends and his empire collapsing, instead it was quite the comparatively mundane affair.
It happened on the 12th of November 1974. Wu Xi Hao was overseeing what was for him a relatively routine and normal shipment: 20 tons of heroin from Thailand into Hong Kong. He had done this a thousand times before, and wasn’t even considering the possibility of something going wrong. For him, the shipping of a whole container openly and brazenly stuffed to the point of almost rupturing with heroin had become an affair as mundane as a grocery run, one that had been so consistently successful that he had long stopped fretting and stressing over it.
He had flown out to Thailand to inspect the goods, so all he had to do now was fly back, meet it at the Port of Hong Kong, distribute it to his lackeys, and he would be laughing all the way to the bank. Little did he know however, he had been sold out. This was hardly the first time that one of his minions had turned on him, but again, that wasn’t something that inspired any stress. Anyone who tried to turn him into the police had to go through Lui Lok, who passed their name onto Wu Xi Hao, and soon enough both the testimony, as well as the gangster who had proclaimed it mysteriously disappeared before any damage could be caused.
But today his guardian angel did not have his back. The finger pointing file never landed on Lui’s desk, and thus the traitor in Wu Xi Hao’s ranks was never revealed to him. For once, the information had found its way to where it needed to go, and he was walking right into a trap.
He opened up his container full of Heroin, and was instantly pounced upon by two dozen officers of Hong Kong’s Special Duties Unit. They appeared from around corners, out of surrounding containers, and from the rooftops, and tackled and arrested Xu Xi Hao and his comrades before he had even a second to react: Asia’s, and possibly the world’s biggest drug baron had been brought down without firing a single shot.
But where was Lui Lok? Where was Xu Xi Hao’s Guangdong-ian guardian angel.
That we will get to in good time. But before we do, let’s take the time to examine another side of Lui Lok’s complicated morality and see what late career, colossally corrupt Lui Lok was like when he actually had to do some police work.
The Murder of Shi Li Juan
For me, George, what makes the story of Lui Lok so fascinating, besides the sheer absurdity of it, is the, at least as I perceive it, grey and unclear morality of the man. For example, there are plenty of corrupt and evil police officers in history who I feel we can all point to, and agree unanimously that they are foul, loathsome, evil people. For example, there is Wayne Couzens who raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021 while serving as a police officer with the British Metropolitian Police, and John Baughman, who murdered several people whilst serving with the American Cook’s County Police Department after World War II — I don’t think its a controversial statement to wholly condemn these people, and wish them a most unpleasant time burning down in hell.
But yet, when it comes to Lui Lok, who almost certainly killed more people, or was at least directly responsible for more deaths than both Wayne Couzens and John Baughman combined, I, George, find myself more reluctant to give such a full and whole condemnation. As far as I was able to ascertain in my research for this video, he only ever killed, brutalised, and tortured hardened criminals — those who refused his offer of reigning in the extremities of their criminality in exchange for his protection, and caught-red-handed violent criminals who invoked his ire. Was this ideal?
Would I hold such behaviour up as a laudable ideal? Absolutely not, but in the context of colonial Hong Kong, which was a VERY different place to the safe and prospering metropolis we know it as today, for me at least, this may not have been the most cardinal sin in light of the wider context.
Complicating the moral equation still further, seems to be the fact that Lui Lok actually seemed to take his duties to the law abiding people of Hong Kong relatively seriously, as much as a corrupt police officer can do anyway, and as such throughout his records you find countless examples of instances where he went above and beyond to bring the perpetrators of the most foul and wicked crimes to justice — without any monetary motivation to himself.
A great example of this is the murder of Shi Lijuan. The story begins on the 10th of December 1961. Shi Lijuan and her husband Zhou Hanhua had been staying in a guest house at number 35 Argyle Street, Mong Kok.
Check out was supposed to be at 3pm — that time came and went, and understandably eager to get the room turned around for his next guests, the hotel manager, Wang Yu made his way over to their room to hurry the couple along and send them on their way a little after 4:30pm. At this point, let us hand the story over to Wang Yu himself, whose police statement I was able to gain access too while researching this script:
“(I knocked) and no one answered the door. I knocked a few more times, getting ever louder as I did and still there was no answer. Then I pushed my ear to the door to try to figure out if they were inside and I couldn’t hear anything at all, so I assumed that the guests had already left and just not checked out properly, so I opened up the door with a spare key and went inside to get on with cleaning.
The curtains were drawn and the lights were off, so I turned the lights on and much to my surprise someone was sleeping under the duvet. I then opened the curtains and started telling him quite loudly that they had overslept, and it was time to wake up and leave, but there was no response. I poked them to try and wake them up, and when that still didn’t get a response I pulled the duvet back, which had been fully covering them.
Under the quilt was a naked woman, and it was immediately obvious that something horrible had happened. Her neck was tied tightly with a scarf, and she was stone cold. It was obvious that she was dead, so I immediately called the police.”
It was at this point that Lui Lok enters the story, as it was he, alongside a couple of uniformed officers, who were sent to respond to the incident. He initially photographed the crime scene with his fellow officers, and then began his initial investigations as his colleagues prepared the body for transportation to the Yau Ma Tei Police Station mortuary. After first confirming the victim as 16 year old Shi Lijuan using her recovered Hong Kong Identity Card and the hotel’s check in sheet, he then asked Wang Yu to provide him his version of events. Wang Yu described this initial interaction with Lui Lok in his later interview notes, and perhaps surprisingly described him as a calm, patient, and caring man, one who went out of his way to reassure him, and make sure that he was alright following the scene he was unfortunate enough to have witnessed.
Back at Yau Ma Tei Shi Li Juan’s autopsy began to unravel the true horror that had occurred on Argyle Street. Removing the scarf around her neck revealed two full circles of strangulation marks around her neck, otherwise her external injuries were found to be minimal. An internal investigation revealed several small needle like bleeding points on her heart, but absolutely no sign of heart disease which might otherwise explain them. Furthermore no trace of poison was found in her stomach, but it was found that she had had sex shortly before her death, which was placed at roughly 6am of the day she was discovered by Wang Yu.
This myriad of clues then found its way to Lui Lok’s desk, who had insisted on leading the investigation. His initial investigation of the room hadn’t uncovered much else to go on, a few cigarette butts, the lipstick staining of which matched that worn by Shi Li Jian, and the notable absence of her clothes and personal belongings, which he assumed had been removed by the killer.
Fortunately he didn’t need much more evidence to begin making some solid hypothesis’; a sweep for fingerprints revealed that only Wang Yu, Shi Li Jian, and a third other person had been inside of the room prior to the police’s arrival. Furthermore Wang Yu’s alibi was watertight, as he clocked on for work several hours after Shi Li Jian was murdered, leaving the only other suspect as the other man who checked in with her — mercifully his identity was at least easy to deduce, thanks to Hong Kong’s laws on recording the Hong Kong Identity Card details of everyone who checks into a hotel — a man by the name of Zhou Han Hua.
The search was then on to track down and bring in Zhou Han Hua, but in the meantime Lui Lok immediately brought Wang Yu into the station for an interview, and asked him to recount everything he could recall about Han Hua while the memories were still fresh. Wang Yu recalled the distant and impersonal interactions between Zhou Han Hua and Shi Li Jian — akin to that of a prostitute and a client while checking in, besides that, the only interaction he had with him was shortly after he clocked onto his shift, when Zhou Han Hua checked out early, but paid to extend the room till 3pm, as he claimed “his girlfriend needed to sleep in.”
A further investigation into Shi Li Jian by Lui Lok revealed Wang Yu’s speculation regarding her being a prostitute to be correct. She was a poor girl, who lived in a cramped apartment on To Kwa Wan Road, Kowloon city with her 70 year old adoptive father alongside her brother and sister. Her father was unable to work on account of an old workplace injury, hence their poor situation. The young Shi Li Jian did all she could to abet her family’s situation, balancing her studies with work from the age of 14, initially working as a dancer in Yuen Long before moving to a different venue in Portland Street, Mong Kok.
If you know anything about Hong Kong, you will know the reputation of Portland Street, a street that at night becomes a very easy place to find prostitutes. The situation was a thousand fold worse back in the 1960’s however, so desperate for money for her family, it wasn’t long until Shi Li Jian found herself on the corners of Portland Street, desperately trying to earn more cash than she otherwise could from her job as a dancer. It was through this that she came into contact with Zhou Han Hua, and came to find herself in that hotel room in Argyle Street.
Fortunately however, Zhou Han Hua himself would soon be in contact with Lui Lok, as on account of his being a paramedic, he was incredibly easy to track down and subsequently arrest. Now, bare with us here ladies and gentlemen, because this next part of the story is pieced together from scraps of contemporary office gossip told to me by Royal Hong Kong Police Force veterans interviewed for the completion of this script, so a few details may be off everso, but it should do absolutely fine for our purposes today!
APPARENTLY Lui Lok started by calmly asking Zhou Han Hua a simple question: what do you believe happened to Shi Li Jian? To which Han Hua responded by spinning a web of lies intended to distance himself from the murder — claiming that Li Jian was formerly his cohabiting girlfriend, and they broke up 18 months prior after an absolutely nuclear argument, adding further that on the night of her murder they only met up to “rekindle” their relationship one last time, before they went their separate ways once and for all. He went on to claim that he left her asleep in the early hours of the morning, perfectly alive and well and he had no idea what happened to her from then on… From this we can certainly deduce that Zhou Han Hua was not an intelligent man — because as per his story, the barely 16 year old Shi Li Jian would have been 14 years old at the time of the so called ‘relationship’, and given his age of 29 at the time, this admission alone would earn him 10 years mandatory.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lui Lok was not particularly pleased with this initial answer when he knew he had him banged to rights, and now Zhou Han Hua had well and truly fully exhausted the well of Lui Lok’s good graces. In an instant Lui Lok’s calm and placid veneer disappeared, and was replaced with one of pure hate for the blatantly guilty man before him; his finger fell on the stop button of the tape recorder to his side, before it was promptly sent flying into the wall of the interview room, along with the table, and everything else that had been scattered across it, as a now blindly furious Lui Lok took the most direct route available to getting his hands on Zhou Han Hua. He then apparently started beating him with his hands, repeatedly and viciously, furiously scorning him the whole time for daring to not only kill such a young girl, but to then have the audacity to lie to his face about it. After several minutes Han Hua was given a momentary reprieve from the physical assault, but only so that Lui Lok could take the time to draw his Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver from his belt, and push the muzzle firmly into Han Hua’s temple, before asking him to carefully think of a really good reason why he shouldn’t just save the judge some time and pull the trigger then and there.
Whatever reason he came up with, it apparently was good enough to spare his life — for now. But it wasn’t good enough to convince Lui Lok of the merits of his testimony, as it was decided that Zhou Han Hua needed a few days to think REALLY HARD about exactly how he wanted to word his confession, and of course, over these few days Lui Lok and his other officers would pop in from time to time to make sure he was thinking hard enough! Soon enough, on January the 19th 1962 Lui Lok decided thatZhou Han Hua had had long enough to THINK his confession over, and he was formally charged with Shi Li Jian’s murder.
For those interested in how the trial went, it began in the Hong Kong High Court on the 26th of February 1962, and the jury retired to deliberate a little over a week later on the 2nd of March 1962. It took barely two and a half hours to return a verdict, at which point the judge donned his black veil and said the words we all want to hear: “Now this court will take you to prison, where you will be hanged with a rope until dead. After your death, the government will bury your body immediately.
May God have mercy on your soul.” But to bring it back to the main point of this chapter. The murder of Shi Li Jian and Lui Lok’s response thereto, for me anyway, is the perfect demonstration of exactly why he is such a morally hard to decipher figure.
Yes, he probably killed some criminals. Yes, he collaborated with criminals. Yes, he skimmed a VERY generous portion of the top for himself.
But he seemingly did only kill serious criminals, his collaboration with Hong Kong’s triads seemingly kept the worst of crime in check, and above all else, when push came to shove, he did indeed seem to have a sense of justice, and a will to protect the innocent law abiding citizens he served, even if the law did end up as bent as a slinky from doing so… was he really that bad? I shall save my own answer to that for the end of the show — although eagle eared listeners have probably already figured out exactly where I fall on that question — but pay it some heed as we continue! Retirement A chapter such as this would normally be called “The Downfall”, the part of the story where today’s criminal finally pushed it too far and got what was coming to them as their hard built empire came collapsing down around them, the part of the story where Tony Montanna got high on too much of his own supply, and went out in a blaze of nose candy fuelled violence, or where Henry Hill overdoes the vitamin c, and in his paranoia goes scrambling frantically to the police before his old friends can kill him.
But sadly, in today’s video we don’t get to have such a neat and tidy rise and fall arc, for Lui Lok’s story does not end with such a neat and tidy hollywood-esque closure where he finally gets what is coming to him and has to bare responsibility for his actions. Instead, as we stated at the start of today’s video, he totally got away with it, completely scott free, so a title as dramatic “The Downfall” hardly feels appropriate, instead, let us call the closing arc of Lui Lok’s story what it is — his retirement. I, George, really wish I had a more dramatic narrative I could spin for the end of Lui Lok’s corrupt career, but it really was a retirement.
He left the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1968, with there being two conflicting stories as to his motivations, the first being that an unknown senior police officer, one who couldn’t be paid off had taken major objection to Lui Lok’s activities the year before, and sensing that his time may well be up, he retired from the force and got out while the going was good. The second explanation is much more mundane, that he had already made more money than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes, so simply took early retirement so that he could put his feet up and enjoy doing a bit of hard earned f*ck all. I was unable to confirm either of these stories as being the true version during the research of this script, so let me share with you my vaguely educated guess; the vibe I get from having researched Lui Lok off and on for six months.
I suspect that the truth is somewhere between these two stories. The amount of officers on his payroll was certainly profound, but by no means total and all encompassing, and it is certainly logical that most, if not all by the book officers would have severely objected to his antics, and Lui Lok was certainly no fool, he was no doubt acutely aware that his racket couldn’t last forever and that soon enough the hand of fate would clench into a fist and strike him down, thus motivating him to get out of the force while the going was good and fully enjoy the lavish lifestyle afforded to him by his vast riches. Whatever the reason why he did it, his retirement in 1968 saw him totally withdraw from the Hong Kong underworld, and the vast criminal mechanism of which he had been a core cog simply pressed on without him — with his former criminal comrades simply now keeping a larger cut, at the cost of no longer having his profound protection from within the police.
But we already know he completely got away with his crimes… how? How could such an absurdly wealthy police officer, whose corruption was by then the worst kept secret in Hong Kong go on to live the rest of his days in unmolested peace? Surely the colonial authorities would be absolutely chomping at the bit at the prospect of Lui Lok facing some justice and being able to claw back some of his ill gotten riches?
To answer that question, let’s bring this chapter to a close and now look at the aftermath of his retirement and the final, much more peaceful arc of his life. Aftermath A recurring theme of our Hong Kong stories here on the Casual Criminalist is how much the city has transformed in the last century, as I, George, endeavour to share the many brutal, and oftentimes ridiculous criminal tales that the city has to offer, but at the same time reassure you all that these stories were exceptional even by the standards of their day, and have absolutely no relation to modern Hong Kong, which is one of the safest, and most prosperous places on earth. With that in mind let us take this opportunity to clarify a few potentially contentious points that may emerge as a result of the video thus far, and go on to discuss the radical transformation the Royal Hong Kong Police underwent to make sure that another Lui Lok couldn’t happen.
The first point I would like to clarify is one that often appears in sloppily written popular histories of policing in Hong Kong: the notion that corruption in the colonial police force was unique to Hong Kong’s Chinese and ethnic minority (by which I mean not white police officers). This notion is of course absolute nonsense, I am sure that you, our audience, as the worldly and enlightened people that you are don’t need me to tell you that someone’s race has no bearing on their predisposition for corruption — but alas, thanks to a half century of shoddy scholarship it is a notion we should take the effort to debunk here and now. For every one Lui Lok, there were plenty of Chinese officers who were an absolute credit to the uniform, who did their duty with the utmost professionalism and consideration.
Equally Hong Kong’s white officers had plenty of corruption scandals of their own. With a pertinent example being Peter Godber, a senior officer stationed at Wan Chai Police Station and later at Kai Tak Airport police station. Before his retirement in 1973, he had amassed at least 4.3 million dollars in overseas bank accounts, using the exact same backhanded deal cutting as Lui Lok.
It was no secret that Godber had wealth significantly beyond that which his means should facilitate, so he had a bullseye painted on his forehead when a renewed effort was made to clamp down on police corruption. The Anti-Corruption Branch investigated his wealth and ordered him to explain his source of income.Godber’s response was for his wife to immediately leave Hong Kong, before he then used his police airport pass to bypass Immigration and Passport checks and walked onto a plane for London. Godber’s escape led to a large and intense public outcry over the integrity and quality of the police’s self-investigation and called for reforms in the government’s anti-corruption efforts.
Those calls for reform were successful and resulted in the formation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption on the 15th of February 1974, which itself was preceded by the strengthening of the 1948 Prevention of Corruption Ordinance in 1971, long before the Peter Godber scandal. This revision of the 1948 Law created new offences, imposed heavier penalties and granted stronger investigative powers — powers that would be used to their fullest with the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Then, finally, at long last, with the formation of an effective anti corruption body that actually had the powers to do its job, Hong Kong’s “Wild West of the East” days slowly began to be confined to the pages of history.
But what of Lui Lok? Would the newfound teeth of Hong Kong’s anti-corruption authorities finally mean that he would face some consequences for his actions? Of course not, we already know how this story ends!
To all intents and purposes he got away with it absolutely scott free. He immigrated from (or fled depending upon who you ask) Hong Kong in 1973, the same year as Peter Godber, and found his way to Taiwan — a place that ever so conveniently did not have an extradition treaty with Hong Kong, so when a warrant for his arrest was issued back in Hong Kong in 1976, he was firmly settled in a luxury apartment in Taipei, with his feet up, sipping baiju — presumably out of a coconut with a little umbrella in it for maximum cliche value. Eventually he found his way to Canada, although it is unclear exactly when, with the most common dates being either 1974 or 1976.
From then, he lived out his days in completely unmolested peace, jetting between Taiwan and Canada whenever the fancy took him — but presumably avoiding flights that connected in Hong Kong! Conveniently, and almost certainly by Lui Lok’s design, extradition between Hong Kong and Canada just so happened to be wavy and unclear enough for Lui Lok to never have to worry about the mounties putting his door through and carting him back to Hong Kong to face justice. Naturally, the Hong Kong Government was none too happy about the fact that Lui Lok had slipped through their fingers, and if they couldn’t get their hands on the man himself, they would be damned if they couldn’t get their hands on his vast assets — which lest we forget by the time of his fleeing Hong Kong were estimated at around half a BILLION dollars, or 3.8 BILLION dollars adjusted for inflation.
Unfortunately for the Hong Kong Government, Lui Lok was no fool, and had spent his initial retirement moving as much of his wealth overseas as possible, and that which he couldn’t move overseas — particularly profitable properties he was reluctant to sell and the like was hidden in a vast network of legally grey subsidiary companies, and holdings of his friends and family that the Hong Kong Government found difficult to touch. They managed to retrieve some after an exhaustive legal effort: an undisclosed amount allegedly in the ‘millions’ in 1976, and a further ten million dollars in 1986 — but that was it. Naturally, these numbers were just pissing in the ocean for Lui Lok, and as such he managed to maintain control over the overwhelming majority of his embezzled fortune.
As for his life after Hong Kong, details about the rest of his life are incredibly few and far between because shockingly, for some reason, he was never particularly forthcoming when it came to interviews and requests for information. From what little information we can scrape together however, he appears to have dedicated himself to his family, and very comfortably settled into the role as a wholesome grandfather, using his ill gotten gains to provide for his family, and making sure that every one of his descendents got to enjoy the best education, the best opportunities, and be thoroughly spoiled by their loving grandfather while growing up. His only daughter ended up in Taiwan, although whether she was born and raised there, or emigrated there of her own accord is unclear, but she now works as a senior civil servant for the Taiwanese government.
He also had seven sons, all of whom appear to still be living in Canada, living perfectly normal lives. As for the man himself, he passed away due to gastric cancer on the 13th of May 2010 at the ripe old age of 89. He had a typical Christian burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burnaby, Canada, as part of a service which was attended by over eighty of his close friends and family.
Then, finally, with the gentle patting down of top soil over his casket, the story of Lui Lok, The Five Hundred Million Dollar Inspector, history’s most corrupt police officer, came to an end. With his story finished we can now focus on the really fascinating part of Lui Lok’s story — that being the question of his morality; was he a bad man? Normally here on the Casual Criminalist this is a question so blatantly apparent that we don’t need to dedicate any script space to it, but then again, the story of Lui Lok is far from an average case here on the Casual Criminalist, where we typically focus on horrific and violent murderers, of whom I am happy to assume we all agree are long overdue an extended jaunt burning down in hell, but as for Lui Lok, I do not find such an immediate and wholesale condemnation forthcoming.
This is not to say I believe he was a good man, far from it in fact, and I have no doubt that were his heart to find its way to Anubis’ scales it would prove weighty indeed, but he certainly was not a WHOLLY bad man, and absolutely had his redeeming qualities: he was a war hero who fought to free his countrymen from the barbaric Japanese jackboot, and when faced with horrific violent crime, he clearly took his responsibilities as a police officer very seriously, too seriously in fact in light of the torturing. Add to this the fact that innocent people never appear to have been on the receiving end of his violence and brutality, that pleasure being seemingly reserved solely for serious criminals — the matter of his morality gets greyer still. I ultimately do not have an answer for this, such deep philosophical questions are severely above my paygrade as a humble youtube wordsmith, this is just some fodder for thought.
This question gets harder still when we reframe it not as one of black and white morality, but instead look at is a question of whether or not he was a net good for Hong Kong. Sure, he might have been involved in some incredibly immoral criminal organisations, but we have to look at this in the context of the Hong Kong of the time, which far from the safe and modern metropolis we know it as today, was a somewhat of a barely controlled hell hole in this colonial period, sure, he took a SUBSTANTIAL cut for his troubles, but his methods helped to keep a lid on the worst criminal excesses of the time, ensuring a swift and violent reprisal for many who took their criminal activities too far. In this regard, begrudgingly, although it brings me no pleasure to have to say so, I have to concede to the notion that he probably was a net positive for Hong Kong, despite his many, MANY shortcomings.
But these are just my gut feelings, it is by no means an objective declaration into the truth of the matter — so I ask our audience, as well as Simon himself, what do you think? How would you weigh up Lui Lok’s morality? Cultural Impact You, our dear and beloved audience will probably not be surprised to hear that a story as absurd and outlandish as Lui Lok’s has been ripe pickings for the media, who have turned his story (with varying degrees of accuracy) into countless movies and television series — so this is a great opportunity for me, George, to plug some Hong Kong movies which I think you all will love.
In particular I recommend Lee Rock I & II, both of which were released in 1991. They are both pretty loose adaptations of the story but are fantastic movies, and in my opinion some of renowned Hong Kong Handsome Man Andy Lau’s best roles. If you fancy something a bit more left field, I firmly recommend the 1998 series Old Time Buddy: To Catch a Thief… It’s a romantic comedy based on police corruption… because why not!
Very fun and well worth a watch. Dismembered Appendices By a country mile, this video has been by far the most difficult video that I, George, have ever written for the Casual Criminalist. Writing about Hong Kong crime is always surprisingly difficult.
Topics often have little written about them, forcing me to take a more academic approach to the production of my scripts: using what is written in popular and social media as a springboard to my research, and then collaborating and building upon that initial narrative by trawling through physical archives, using old newspaper and media reporting, and employing freedom of information requests to not piece the story together, but to provide the level of depth that we expect on this channel. But for Lui Lok however, the researching and writing of his script proved to be even more difficult than usual, because despite his big footprint on Hong Kong popular culture, there is comparatively nothing written about him. We persevered and got it done however, even if it did take a very, very long time to complete this script — about six months to be exact!
As a consequence however this does mean that my research methodology changed rather significantly for this video — I started with what I could find in newspaper clippings and books, which gave me a vague skeleton of his life, but otherwise I have largely had to depend upon the testimony of Royal Hong Kong Police Force veterans, as well as the Hong Kong Police Archives themselves, both of which I am fortunate enough to be well acquainted with thanks to my day job. This video simply wouldn’t have been possible without their assistance, so let’s all now down tools, and have a round of applause for those absolute GIGA CHADS. A note on terminology.
Strictly speaking for large parts of this video my referring to the colonial police force of Hong Kong as the ‘Royal Hong Kong Police’ was incorrect, as the ‘Hong Kong Police Force’, as the organisation was known for most of its colonial history was only awarded the royal charter by Queen Elizabeth II, and thus gained the ‘Royal’ title in 1969, as recognition for the forces suppression of the 1967 Riots. This of course, means that I am strictly speaking incorrect for large parts of the video, but as the timeline of today’s video covers the time in which the ‘Royal’ title was awarded, I opted to stick for a single name for the force to keep things simple and prevent confusion, and opted for the name with which the force possessed at the end of today’s story. In some ways I’m almost disappointed with how the story of Lui Lok ended (he says as if he has some power to change history).
We have gotten so used to Hong Kong crime stories with some kind of great emotional payoff, an arrest, a trial etc. That to now have a story that just… ends… where our protagonist goes off into the sunset to gayly live out his days in peace feels almost uncompleted. But really, it is this that makes this story so absurd, and so amazing to write about: he did all of this absurd stuff — and somehow totally got away with it — and where else could such a story happen but Hong Kong.
Hong Kong always has a habit of seemingly doing things bigger, grander, and frankly a bit crazier than the rest of the world, and it’s one of the many reasons why I love the place so much. Key Takeaways Lui Lok, a Hong Kong police detective, amassed roughly $500 million through corruption while controlling the city’s criminal underworld from the 1940s to 1960s. He rose from a wartime resistance fighter against Japanese occupation to become one of the first Chinese detectives in the colonial police force.
Lui Lok crushed rival triads and orchestrated mass arrests while secretly protecting loyal criminal factions who paid him tribute. He partnered with Wu Xi Hao, possibly history’s largest drug smuggler, using police power to eliminate rivals and secure port access for heroin shipments. Lui Lok retired in 1968, fled to Taiwan and Canada in 1973, and died peacefully in 2010 at age 89 without ever facing prosecution.
Frequently Asked Questions Who was Lui Lok and why was he called ‘The Five Hundred Million Dollar Inspector’? Lui Lok was a Hong Kong police officer who became history’s most corrupt police officer, amassing over half a billion dollars (approximately $500 million, or $3.8 billion adjusted for inflation) through corruption. He earned this nickname due to the staggering amount of wealth he accumulated while serving in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, where he built a vast corrupt empire by taking cuts from criminal enterprises, collaborating with triads, and protecting drug operations.
Where and when was Lui Lok born, and why did his family move to Hong Kong? Lui Lok was born on May 16, 1920, in the village of Xinnan in Guangdong Province, China. His family moved to Hong Kong in 1920 due to the outbreak of the Guangdong-Guangxi War, seeking the comparative safety and prosperity of the British colony.
They settled on Cheung Chau Island, where they transitioned from farming rice to farming fish. What role did Lui Lok play during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong? During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong (1941-1945), Lui Lok initially served with the Royal Hong Kong Police Force defending Hong Kong, then joined the East River Column, a Communist resistance group.
He participated in operations including the August 5, 1942 assault on the Tai Po Kempeitai Police Station and helped rescue Allied pilots, including Lieutenant Donald W. Kerr in February 1944. He rarely discussed this period publicly.
How did Lui Lok rise through the ranks of the Hong Kong police? Lui Lok rose through the ranks through a combination of genuine competence, strategic corruption, and carefully orchestrated publicity stunts. He was promoted to Detective in 1946 for his wartime service, becoming one of the first native Chinese officers in such a role.
He gained further promotions through operations like the 1955 raid that ‘crushed’ the 14K triad (while actually installing loyal members in leadership) and his handling of the 1956 Double Ten Riots, where he used police funds to pay off triads to help suppress the unrest while cultivating a heroic public image. What was Lui Lok’s relationship with the 14K triad, and how did he manipulate it? Lui Lok initially had conflict with the 14K triad because they refused to accept his terms and demanded things he wouldn’t provide, including a reduction in his cut.
In 1955, he orchestrated their downfall by gathering evidence he had previously buried, convincing Commissioner Arthur Maxwell to authorize a mass arrest, and then raiding a 14K feast at Chun Tok School. However, he warned loyal 14K members not to attend, allowing them to rebuild the organization under his control after the leadership was arrested. Who was Wu Xi Hao and what was his relationship with Lui Lok?
Wu Xi Hao was Hong Kong’s and possibly the world’s biggest drug baron. Lui Lok confronted him in 1965, demanding a cut of his drug operation in exchange for protection. Their partnership allowed Wu Xi Hao to expand dramatically—rivals were arrested or killed, and he gained near-unrestricted access to Hong Kong’s port for international smuggling.
Eventually Wu Xi Hao became so powerful that the triads had to pay him rather than vice versa. This relationship represented the peak of Lui Lok’s corrupt power and wealth accumulation. How did Lui Lok handle the 1956 Double Ten Riots?
During the October 1956 Double Ten Riots, which began when colonial authorities tore down Nationalist flags in Tsuen Wan, Colonial Secretary Edgeworth B. David gave Lui Lok 24 hours and a large sum of cash to resolve the situation. Lui Lok split the cash four ways, paying off the 14K, He Shenghe, the Big Four, and the Chaozhou Gang triads to suppress the riots from within while police attacked from without.
He personally led an armored car charge to Lei Cheng Uk Estate for dramatic effect. The riots were quelled, Lui Lok received another promotion, and much of the government cash went into his own pocket. How did Lui Lok’s corruption work in practice at the local level?
At the local level, Lui Lok’s corruption operated through systematic relationship-building with criminal enterprises. An exemplar incident from 1952 at Sham Shui Po Police Station describes him visiting an illegal pornography shop on Ki Lung Street, greeting the owner as a friend, receiving a cash-stuffed envelope as his ‘cut,’ and then sharing some with a junior officer to ensure complicity. He applied this model across his jurisdiction—befriending illicit businesses, taking regular cuts, and offering protection in exchange.
How did Lui Lok avoid prosecution and what happened after he retired? Lui Lok retired from the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1968, either because a senior officer had discovered his activities or simply because he had amassed enough wealth. He fled Hong Kong in 1973 (the same year as fellow corrupt officer Peter Godber) and settled in Taiwan, which had no extradition treaty with Hong Kong.
When a warrant was issued in 1976, he was safely established there. He later moved to Canada (either 1974 or 1976), living between Taiwan and Canada. The Hong Kong government recovered only small amounts of his estimated $500 million fortune—millions in 1976 and $10 million in 1986.
He died of gastric cancer on May 13, 2010, in Canada at age 89, having never faced justice. What reforms in Hong Kong policing were triggered by corruption scandals like Lui Lok’s? The exposure of corruption scandals, particularly Peter Godber’s 1973 escape to London while under investigation for amassing $4.3 million, led to public outcry and demands for reform.
This resulted in the strengthening of the 1948 Prevention of Corruption Ordinance in 1971 and ultimately the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption on February 15, 1974. These reforms granted stronger investigative powers and heavier penalties, gradually ending Hong Kong’s era of systemic police corruption.
Key Takeaways
- Lui Lok, a Hong Kong police detective, amassed roughly $500 million through corruption while controlling the city’s criminal underworld from the 1940s to 1960s.
- He rose from a wartime resistance fighter against Japanese occupation to become one of the first Chinese detectives in the colonial police force.
- Lui Lok crushed rival triads and orchestrated mass arrests while secretly protecting loyal criminal factions who paid him tribute.
- He partnered with Wu Xi Hao, possibly history’s largest drug smuggler, using police power to eliminate rivals and secure port access for heroin shipments.
- Lui Lok retired in 1968, fled to Taiwan and Canada in 1973, and died peacefully in 2010 at age 89 without ever facing prosecution.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Lui Lok and why was he called ‘The Five Hundred Million Dollar Inspector’?
Lui Lok was a Hong Kong police officer who became history’s most corrupt police officer, amassing over half a billion dollars (approximately $500 million, or $3.8 billion adjusted for inflation) through corruption. He earned this nickname due to the staggering amount of wealth he accumulated while serving in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, where he built a vast corrupt empire by taking cuts from criminal enterprises, collaborating with triads, and protecting drug operations.
Where and when was Lui Lok born, and why did his family move to Hong Kong?
Lui Lok was born on May 16, 1920, in the village of Xinnan in Guangdong Province, China. His family moved to Hong Kong in 1920 due to the outbreak of the Guangdong-Guangxi War, seeking the comparative safety and prosperity of the British colony. They settled on Cheung Chau Island, where they transitioned from farming rice to farming fish.
What role did Lui Lok play during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong?
During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong (1941-1945), Lui Lok initially served with the Royal Hong Kong Police Force defending Hong Kong, then joined the East River Column, a Communist resistance group. He participated in operations including the August 5, 1942 assault on the Tai Po Kempeitai Police Station and helped rescue Allied pilots, including Lieutenant Donald W. Kerr in February 1944. He rarely discussed this period publicly.
How did Lui Lok rise through the ranks of the Hong Kong police?
Lui Lok rose through the ranks through a combination of genuine competence, strategic corruption, and carefully orchestrated publicity stunts. He was promoted to Detective in 1946 for his wartime service, becoming one of the first native Chinese officers in such a role. He gained further promotions through operations like the 1955 raid that ‘crushed’ the 14K triad (while actually installing loyal members in leadership) and his handling of the 1956 Double Ten Riots, where he used police funds to pay off triads to help suppress the unrest while cultivating a heroic public image.
What was Lui Lok’s relationship with the 14K triad, and how did he manipulate it?
Lui Lok initially had conflict with the 14K triad because they refused to accept his terms and demanded things he wouldn’t provide, including a reduction in his cut. In 1955, he orchestrated their downfall by gathering evidence he had previously buried, convincing Commissioner Arthur Maxwell to authorize a mass arrest, and then raiding a 14K feast at Chun Tok School. However, he warned loyal 14K members not to attend, allowing them to rebuild the organization under his control after the leadership was arrested.
Who was Wu Xi Hao and what was his relationship with Lui Lok?
Wu Xi Hao was Hong Kong’s and possibly the world’s biggest drug baron. Lui Lok confronted him in 1965, demanding a cut of his drug operation in exchange for protection. Their partnership allowed Wu Xi Hao to expand dramatically—rivals were arrested or killed, and he gained near-unrestricted access to Hong Kong’s port for international smuggling. Eventually Wu Xi Hao became so powerful that the triads had to pay him rather than vice versa.
This relationship represented the peak of Lui Lok’s corrupt power and wealth accumulation.
How did Lui Lok handle the 1956 Double Ten Riots?
During the October 1956 Double Ten Riots, which began when colonial authorities tore down Nationalist flags in Tsuen Wan, Colonial Secretary Edgeworth B. David gave Lui Lok 24 hours and a large sum of cash to resolve the situation. Lui Lok split the cash four ways, paying off the 14K, He Shenghe, the Big Four, and the Chaozhou Gang triads to suppress the riots from within while police attacked from without. He personally led an armored car charge to Lei Cheng Uk Estate for dramatic effect.
The riots were quelled, Lui Lok received another promotion, and much of the government cash went into his own pocket.
How did Lui Lok’s corruption work in practice at the local level?
At the local level, Lui Lok’s corruption operated through systematic relationship-building with criminal enterprises. An exemplar incident from 1952 at Sham Shui Po Police Station describes him visiting an illegal pornography shop on Ki Lung Street, greeting the owner as a friend, receiving a cash-stuffed envelope as his ‘cut,’ and then sharing some with a junior officer to ensure complicity. He applied this model across his jurisdiction—befriending illicit businesses, taking regular cuts, and offering protection in exchange.
How did Lui Lok avoid prosecution and what happened after he retired?
Lui Lok retired from the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1968, either because a senior officer had discovered his activities or simply because he had amassed enough wealth. He fled Hong Kong in 1973 (the same year as fellow corrupt officer Peter Godber) and settled in Taiwan, which had no extradition treaty with Hong Kong. When a warrant was issued in 1976, he was safely established there. He later moved to Canada (either 1974 or 1976), living between Taiwan and Canada.
The Hong Kong government recovered only small amounts of his estimated $500 million fortune—millions in 1976 and $10 million in 1986. He died of gastric cancer on May 13, 2010, in Canada at age 89, having never faced justice.
What reforms in Hong Kong policing were triggered by corruption scandals like Lui Lok’s?
The exposure of corruption scandals, particularly Peter Godber’s 1973 escape to London while under investigation for amassing $4.3 million, led to public outcry and demands for reform. This resulted in the strengthening of the 1948 Prevention of Corruption Ordinance in 1971 and ultimately the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption on February 15, 1974. These reforms granted stronger investigative powers and heavier penalties, gradually ending Hong Kong’s era of systemic police corruption.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Five Hundred Million Dollar Inspector: History’s Most Corrupt Police Officer
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
