A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel Read online

  Another story involved a mob leader who refused to cooperate with police during interrogation. Wang realized that the mafia leader’s wife had also been detained and nobody was looking after his two children. Wang lobbied the court to grant parole to the leader’s wife, allowing her to care for their children. At the same time, he hired a special chef to prepare halal food for the mafia leader, a Muslim, who was allegedly touched by Wang’s compassion and freely answered Wang’s questions and confessed to his crimes. Wang ordered a new suit for the mafia leader before sending him to the execution ground: “You used to be a somebody in the city,” Wang was quoted as saying. “I want you to look decent when you leave this world.”

  Wang’s life stories were later adapted into a nationally broadcast TV series, The Iron-Blooded Police Spirit. The director, who invited Wang to the set, described to a Chinese newspaper his first impression of Wang: “When he appeared, the room suddenly became smaller because of his physique and powerful presence. He sucked the air out of the room.”

  Initially, Wang was cast to play himself in the TV drama, but many did not feel it appropriate. Zhou Lijun, who penned the movie, said Wang was a born performer who had a flair for drama. As part of his research, Zhou followed Wang for ten days and went on an antipornography sweep with Wang one night:

  Wang put me on the passenger seat of his Mitsubishi jeep and he personally drove me over to Tieling. The jeep looked very unique. Large characters—“Chinese Criminal Police”—were painted on both sides of the jeep. Wang told me the characters were copies of his own calligraphy and he had applied for a patent for those handwritten characters. The top of the jeep was equipped with eight high-voltage search lights, four in the front and four at the back. The jeep sped through the darkness and Wang didn’t even bother to slow down when we crossed a railway track. My head bumped against the top of the vehicle several times as I held on tightly. His colleagues lagged way behind. Upon arrival, Wang issued some simple instructions and within minutes, his subordinates dispersed and went directly to their targets—hair salons, karaoke bars and massage parlors. While raiding a hair salon, police found no sign of anything shady. But Wang ordered the detention of a young man with dyed yellow hair. “A man with hair like that can’t be any good,” he barked.

  Wang’s high-profile anticrime campaigns worked. Official statistics showed that crime rates went down dramatically in Tieling. According to a police officer in Tieling, Wang enjoyed tremendous support from the lower ranks of society, such as the tricycle cabdrivers, many of whom were laid-off state workers and were easy targets for gang members who extorted protection money from them. Wang initiated a citywide crackdown and each time a gang member was caught bullying a cabdriver, the offender would be asked to pay a heavy fine and police would distribute the money on the spot to tricycle cabdrivers as compensation. A popular story has it that Wang walked home one night and one tricycle cabdriver recognized him and insisted on driving him home. Wang politely declined and kept on. A few minutes later, he noticed that a dozen tricycles were silently escorting him.

  There is a tendency toward propaganda among China’s officialdom, and public stories about Wang were probably embellished by the state media, if they happened at all, or by his supporters who aimed to bolster his populist appeal. Still, there is no denying that many ordinary people in Tieling revered him. In an article posted on 360doc.com, the author, who identified himself as a resident from Tieling, compared Wang Lijun to Bao Zheng, a legendary official and judge in China’s Song Dynasty, who was known for defending the rights of the ordinary people and who used a guillotine given to him by the emperor to execute criminals.

  Wang’s tough tactics against mobsters made him many enemies among local crime syndicates, which at one time were said to have put a bounty on his head and allegedly threatened his wife and daughter. On his blog, Wang posted a line frequently quoted by the media: “Fellow fighters and comrades, if I die someday, don’t shed tears or feel sad for me. A policeman’s profession means death and sacrifice.”

  Wang’s enemies were not limited to gang members; he also had many detractors among his colleagues, including the deputy director, who had first brought him into the police force.

  In March 1999, a tricycle cab driver was struck by Wang’s car and claimed that Wang beat him up—after the cab driver and his passenger laid the blame on the police chief. He later sued Wang for assault. The court dismissed the case for lack of evidence. Four months later, Wang was taken to court again on charges that he had used torture during an interrogation, causing the death of a woman who had been caught selling fake watches on the street. Even though this case was also dropped for lack of evidence, the Municipal Committee for Inspection Discipline received anonymous letters accusing Wang of systematically using torture to extract confessions. Similar complaints also reached the Ministry of Public Security, which was planning to award Wang a medal. The award was postponed until Wang cleared his name four months later.

  Wang dug around and found out that his close friend and former mentor, the deputy director of the public security bureau, was behind the anonymous-letter campaigns against him. He struck back and had his mentor arrested and jailed for two years.

  By the end of 2002, Wang’s reputation had soared. The provincial police department offered Wang a temporary assignment in Panjin, an oil-producing city, to tackle “oil rats”—organized-crime rings that stole crude oil from the production facilities and were causing the government huge economic losses.

  During his investigation, Wang realized that the real enemies lay within the party and the government. Different crime rings sought political and legal protection by bribing senior party officials, judges, and public security officials with money and luxury cars. Oftentimes the local police bureau became the security branch of certain mafia groups. Law enforcement officers engaged in drug trafficking, gun sales, prostitution, and extortion. In one instance, the deputy chief of a local public security bureau tipped off his own brother, who was a notorious oil rat, and helped him escape when police closed in on him. In addition, government officials received bribes and awarded lucrative construction contracts to companies with mafia connections.

  To root out the problem, Wang transferred police officers from other regions and organized special teams to conduct internal investigations, purging eight officials with mafia connections, including the city’s deputy police director, several local bureau chiefs, and heads of the special criminal investigation unit. Once the bad apples were cleared out, Wang began focusing on the external enemies, and within a short time, he broke up six key crime organizations, arresting 211 suspects.

  It was in Panjin that Wang became acquainted with Zhou Yongkang, one of his mentors who would play a decisive role in his political career. Zhou had served as mayor of Panjin before becoming a powerful Politburo Standing Committee member and chairman of the Party’s Central Politics and Law Commission, which oversees China’s law enforcement and judicial activities. One unsubstantiated story has it that many of Zhou’s former friends, who were targeted by Wang for their involvement in the “oil rat” scandals, reached out to Zhou for help. Zhou intervened, urging Wang to end the campaign before implicating more people. Wang is said to have agreed and stopped pursuing Zhou’s former friends. As a gesture of gratitude, Zhou’s godson allegedly invited Wang to Zhou’s home in Beijing, where he befriended many of Zhou’s close friends.

  Such powerful political connections further boosted his confidence. In May 2003, the provincial government ordered police chiefs to swap cities. Wang left Tieling—where he had worked for twenty-two years, cracking approximately 8,300 criminal cases and arresting nearly 3,000 criminals—and assumed the top post in public security in Jinzhou, a similar-size city about 190 miles away. Two weeks after his arrival, a grisly murder case occurred: a serial rapist broke into residences and over the course of four months raped five women, brutally murdering two of them. Wang mobilized nearly 2,000 people to work on the case and set u
p a process that held each policeman accountable for each phase of the investigation. Fifty-three days later, a suspect with a prior criminal history was caught and confessed to the crimes.

  At a ceremony on the morning of July 23, the city honored the policemen who helped crack the case. In the afternoon, Wang gathered all the officers together for another ceremony, where he announced penalties for thirteen officers accused of negligence. A local bureau chief was fired for failure to locate the suspect, who lived only a few hundred yards from the branch office. While police officers cried foul, residents applauded Wang’s efficiency. He soon became a household name in Jinzhou and was elected deputy mayor the next year. Ironically, both in Tieling and Jinzhou, police officers who had been fired or jailed gained back their jobs soon after Wang Lijun left. His reform programs, such as combining patrol and traffic police into one unit to improve police efficiency, were rolled back. His successors saw his sweeping measures as too radical.

  In June 2008, Wang was transferred from the city of Jinzhou to Chongqing, one of the four mega cities that fall under the direct control of the central government. He took up the deputy police chief’s position. For Wang, it was a career milestone.

  “PROFESSOR WANG LIJUN”

  IN CHONGQING, known in the West as Chungking, Wang’s political career took a meteoric rise. He moved from a city of 3 million people to one with 32 million, and within three years he jumped three bureaucratic levels: from deputy police chief to police chief and deputy mayor.

  How did Wang end up in the politically important Chongqing in the first place? Who made the connection between Wang and Bo? There are several competing narratives, I found; this detail is critical to understanding the Bo–Wang partnership in Chongqing and their eventual break.

  A popular version indicates that Wang came to Bo Xilai’s attention in 2007, when his wife, Gu Kailai, suspected that someone had slipped a mix of lead and mercury into the capsule of her daily herbal medicine and attempted to poison her. Xu Ming, a billionaire businessman in Dalian and a friend of the Bos, contacted Wang Lijun, who had by then become a celebrity in China’s northeast due to the popular TV drama based on his life. Xu invited Wang to handle the investigation. Wang solved the case in a matter of days and had Bo’s family driver and a helper arrested. In 2008, one year after Bo’s appointment as the party secretary of Chongqing, he was concerned that organized crime was rampant and considered the then-police chief, a protégé of President Hu Jintao, untrustworthy and incompetent. As an outsider without many local connections, he needed to boost his team with his own people. Bo’s wife strongly recommended Wang Lijun.

  A businessperson well connected with the Ministry of Public Security argued that Zhou Yongkang, chairman of the party’s Central Politics and Law Commission, was the one who made the official connection between Wang and Bo. Zhou Yongkang, who is featured later in the book, owed Wang a favor—the anti-crime hero released several of Zhou’s friends who had been arrested during the 2002 crackdown on “oil rats” in Panjin. The two became close friends after Zhou was made minister of public security. “All the key personnel changes had to be approved by Zhou,” said the businessman. “Otherwise, it would have been administratively impossible for Wang to make that big career leap.”

  Regardless of how the two met, officials in Chongqing say Bo and Wang hit it off. Bo, on multiple private and public occasions, played up Wang’s credentials and his fearlessness. For Wang, the son of a railway worker, one would assume he cherished the honor of working with a prominent princeling and a rising political star capable of opening up a new world for him.

  The honeymoon was sweet. Wang started out as deputy chief of the city’s public security bureau. Nine months later, Bo made good on his initial promise and appointed Wang bureau chief.

  Wang did not disappoint either. In the first year, he embarked on what he called a “thorough social investigation.” He disguised himself as a cabdriver, visiting different neighborhoods and talking to residents. As in other parts of China, Chongqing was plagued with rising crime rates. In some areas, prostitution and illegal gambling dens were operating just a short distance from police stations.

  On the early morning of June 3, 2009, a forty-four-year-old man named Li Minghang—neighbors described him to police as a polite and mysterious renter in a dilapidated housing development with a fancy Scottish name, Edinburg—was gunned down outside his apartment. Subsequent police investigations revealed the tenant, who drove a BMW, was a drug trafficker. He had been killed by a mobster in a dispute over illicit profit. The incident grabbed national headlines and posed a challenge for the Bo administration.

  Wang’s special investigative team soon captured three suspects who had allegedly plotted the shooting in Edinburg. Based on the suspects’ confessions and tips provided by residents, Wang arrested more than fifty suspected of gunrunning, drug trafficking, and gambling. The two chief suspects were found guilty and executed in six months. The swift resolution proved to be politically popular. Riding on the success of the case, Wang also mobilized hundreds of armed policemen to wipe out several illegal ammunition and gun manufacturing facilities hidden inside the mountains outside Chongqing. In response to the overwhelming public support for such initiatives, Bo instructed Wang to launch a citywide da hei, or “Smashing Black” campaign against the mobsters terrorizing the city. At a conference for police, Wang declared in his usual dramatic style, “We’ll stir up a storm and generate an avalanche.”

  Wang’s yearlong campaign targeting mafia organizations involved 10,000 police broken up into 329 investigative teams. State media reported that nearly 5,000 people were taken into police custody and among them, 3,273 of them were prosecuted. The court convicted 520 people, with 65 executed or given life imprisonment. In the same time period, police successfully cracked 4,172 previously unsolved cases and broke up 128 crime rings. However, a recently released Chongqing government white paper showed a much smaller number of arrests. The media’s exaggerated figures probably spooked many senior leaders in Beijing, who feared that Bo could expand his program nation-wide—and threaten their political and financial interests—if he joined the Politburo Standing Committee.

  Over the course of the campaign, Wang also targeted police officers who, he said, were working with criminals. “We are supposed to attack the underworld, but some in the police force are more corrupt and dangerous than the mobsters,” Wang told the Chinese state media. In addition, a policeman in Chongqing remembered receiving a short notice about a meeting one morning:

  We walked into the auditorium and saw the entrance guarded by fully armed policemen. People could smell blood. Wang stood on the stage and read off the names from a list. Most of the people on the list were in leadership positions and have been found taking bribes or collaborating with criminals. Each time a name was called, Wang would announce the charges and follow them with an order, “You are under arrest.” At the end of the meeting, seven officers were handcuffed and taken away on the spot.

  By the end of 2010, more than 1,000 police officers and government officials had been charged with corruption and abuse of power, including many high-ranking officials, such as Zhang Tao, vice president of the Chongqing People’s High Court, who received the death penalty, later commuted, and Wu Xiaoqing, a senior court official; prison officials claimed he committed suicide while in jail awaiting trial.

  The arrest and trial of Wen Qiang, the head of Chongqing’s justice bureau, galvanized the nation. Wen, a veteran police officer of thirty-eight years, was deputy chief of the Chongqing public security bureau before Wang. Ironically, Wang and Wen, who are three years apart in age, shared oddly parallel lives. Born in 1956, Wen grew up in Sichuan’s Bai county—a poverty-stricken region—and farmed rice paddies as a teenager. He was recruited by the Luzhou Police Academy in 1977 and became a junior police officer in his hometown. As with Wang, Wen was said to be dedicated and fearless, and was promoted to deputy chief of the Chongqing public security bureau at the ag
e of thirty-eight. He had received numerous medals and awards for cracking difficult criminal cases. In 2000, while Wang was hailed in the north as an anticrime hero, Wen earned a similar title in the southwest after capturing Zhang Jun, who was dubbed as China’s number-one “bandit” and “monstrous murderer.” Zhang had traversed the country for eight years with three partners, stealing 6 million yuan in jewelry and cash and killing twenty-eight people. Despite the nationwide manhunt, Zhang and his partners, who were well-trained in special military skills, evaded police.

  Wen was under tremendous pressure to capture Zhang after the bandit and his two partners seized an armored truck in front of a bank in Changde city in the nearby Hunan province on September 1, 2000, killing two guards and two cashiers while snatching two micro-submachine guns. A witness inside the bank pushed the alarm, forcing them to flee, so Zhang stopped a taxi, shot the driver, and fled empty-handed. Despite his indiscriminate killing sprees, the seemingly invincible Zhang was deemed a hero by many, who applauded him for killing mostly corrupt officials. Some female college students even wrote him love letters.

  Wen had studied and tracked Zhang for six years. Two weeks after the failed armored car heist, Wen zeroed in and captured him with a girlfriend at his hideout in a small town not far from Chongqing. After Zhang was wrestled to the ground, Wen had a picture taken, with one foot ostensibly trampling Zhang’s face. On April 21, 2001, Zhang was executed. A novelist wrote a book about Wen’s legendary career, much as Wang’s story had been told to the wider populace of China through a TV drama.