Big crime busts give distorted view of Chinese as kingpins

Nai Yin Xue murdered his wife and abandoned their daughter. Chinese people are among the most law-abiding in the land. Photo / Paul Estcourt

You may have heard they are heavily involved in, for example, the P trade - and some are - but police say most Chinese people living in New Zealand don't get into trouble.

As with any cultural group, there are bad eggs giving the rest a bad name and some crimes committed by Chinese have hit the headlines in a big way.

Take the badly bungled extortion attempt and murder of Wan Biao, the young man kidnapped by Chinese student peers who was nearly decapitated and whose body was squashed into a suitcase which was found floating in the Waitemata Harbour.

Or little Pumpkin's dad, Nai Yin Xue, who left his wife dead in the boot of a car and then abandoned their daughter at a Melbourne railway station.

Of course, there are plenty of horrible crimes committed by homegrown New Zealanders, too, kidnapping and extortion among them - remember the kidnapping for money of Baby Kahu in 2002?

But often people of Chinese extraction target their own communities in kidnappings and extortion attempts and police are working to educate new immigrants, who are often distrustful of authorities, to come forward and tell them what's going on.

But police are concerned about particular areas of offending involving Chinese people which have influenced the crime scene in New Zealand.

Organised crime is the biggest concern and this is mostly links to drugs - methamphetamine in particular - because of the huge money to be made.

Police assistant commissioner Malcolm Burgess, head of Organised and Financial Crime Agency, is quick to point out that Chinese villains in the drug trade are no different from the villains police see in any other ethnic group.

"There's a tiny group that see an opportunity to take large risks and potentially make large sums of money."

But because China is a big source for precursors for methamphetamine, and for methamphetamine itself, there has been a greater apparent Chinese involvement in that sort of crime, he says.

Millions of dollars are at stake and organised crime in New Zealand has become more organised as a result.

"It's become much more networked and business-focused, if you like, than the old patched mentality.

"Particularly in the adult gangs, we're seeing significant crossoverwith people that might previouslyhave been rivals now becoming business partners because it suitsthem to be business partners."

But this, says Mr Burgess, is because of market forces, not cultural reasons.

Money is the great motivator - groups of people come together, operate to make some money and disband only to form another alliance or business arrangement with someone else and do it all again.

Mr Burgess doubts that New Zealand has any operational Chinese triads, but he says that anyway, triads are a bit like our gangs.

"They network," he says. "Criminals network - they don't need triads or gangs necessarily to do the work any more, they just need like-minded criminals.

"The Asian criminal is just one step in the supply chain. I think because they tend to be involved in the high-profile, big attention-seeking busts where we swoop on a big amount of drug and the offenders are of Asian extraction that probably feeds the perception they are the kingpins in the business - whereas really they are just a link in the supply chain."

Other areas of crime which concern the police include intellectual property issues such as the importing of fake trademarked goods and the fisheries industry, which deals with significant poaching problems.

But again, Mr Burgess says only a tiny minority of Chinese people are involved.

"Overall, Asian people are grossly under-represented in offending levels.

"They're generally law-abiding and they don't show up in our crime stats."

Detective Inspector Bruce Good, who runs Auckland Metro Crime and Operations Support, says that when immigration is opened to any culture, inevitably some specialist criminals also get through.

While there have been crimes such as the selling of fake university degrees and other bogus documents, like Mr Burgess he says the big problem is the drug trade.

Our gangs let Asian criminals run the major risk of importing the drug or ingredients into New Zealand but they still do the bulk of the dealing and distribution.

Networking in the opium and gambling dens of old has given way to the casino or karaoke bars, and the casino in Auckland has been the scene of multimillion-dollar drug rings and money laundering.

The impact of P is huge, on everything from family violence to mental health, but Mr Good says if not China, then someone else would have filled the gap - cocaine still comes here from South America, he says.

"New Zealand needs to grow, it needs to have an increase in population and entrepreneurs and if only a small percentage of those are wrong, are bad for us, well then, that's what we've got."

Crown Solicitor Simon Moore, SC, says the Auckland court scene has changed a lot in recent years because of the big drug cases.

These trials are costly and time-consuming and add to backlogs of other cases. They often involve several defendants who are separately represented and the trial can last months because they almost always involve intercepted communications which have to be interpreted and transcribed for the jury.

But New Zealand reflects a world trend - Australia also grapples with these issues, he says.

And many of the people being prosecuted do not live in New Zealand but are here as visitors or on short-term visas.

"It's important to keep these things in perspective and to appreciate that crime types evolve with time.

"The sense that I certainly have as a prosecutor is that the Chinese community is one which I think can be characterised by lawfulness and as citizens to this country they are an overwhelmingly law-abiding, responsible community."