Abstract
The Big Circle Boys (BCB) have undertaken various illicit activities in Canada for profit. Initially they were pickpockets in the 1980s. In the 1990s they conducted credit card counterfeiting through trial and error and also entered the drug trade; the Chan brothers were prominent in these. In the 1980s, they were involved in sporadic and violent crimes mostly clustered around the Chinatowns of Toronto and Vancouver. The BCB capitalised on the violent reputation of the first-generation BCB. A few BCB were involved in coercive activities such as extortion and loansharking locally in Ontario and British Columbia provinces. They were not able to corrupt officials or influence politics. There was at least one case of collaboration with a terrorist group for profit. The BCB have not been involved in traditional organised crime as an organised criminal group or a mafia.
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- 1.
Examples of those who would qualify to be included in O1’s reference above for having engaged in illegal luxury automobile exportation in the early 1990s include Ho and Tao Chuk Fong (Tao). The operational details of their activities are to be examined in Volume II where individual BCB actors are introduced through their roles in heroin operations.
- 2.
It is important to note that of the four criminal activities that broke the Canadian record of seizures and arrests during their respective periods, three of them were controlled by the Chan family. The exceptions were human smuggling in Project Overflight operated by Tsang Chiu Sing, whose cell appeared to have been operated independently from the drug cells, and heroin in Project E-Congee ran by Lee, who was the only major competitor that became prominent by the mid-1990s as the Chans were headed towards demise in the late 1990s.
- 3.
- 4.
The main cases are Projects Organic II and Organize (see Sect. 5.3; Jamieson 2002) for automobile theft and smuggling rings related to credit card counterfeiting as well as the Ye Yong Long (AGC FC 2016: January 11) and Wu Yi Feng (IRB 2008) cases for money laundering activities related to drug trafficking.
- 5.
There were two other less publicised cases in 1990 and 1991 involving BCB groups led by Tse Chi Lap and Li Tat Xing. Tse Chi Lap later became a top heroin importer, next only to Chan Kwok Keung and Lee See Chun in reputation. He was arrested in 1998 in the US and received a long custodial sentence upon conviction. Li Tat Xing became implicated in several heroin importation cases, including an unknown case in 1993 together with the Huang Rui Qiang (a prominent importer), and Project Luen Hop in 1994.
- 6.
Information contained in this paragraph and in the list of bullet points below were extracted from a 300-page MSc thesis in Economic Crime Management by Jamieson (2002).
- 7.
Based on this principle, they were able to diversify into other activities along the lines of counterfeiting technology during the same period of committing credit card fraud (R4 2008): ‘Similarly later on they were involved in counterfeit money. They made use of the technologies here, the color printers and all that, but not as much as credit cards.’
- 8.
This point is made with the awareness that some second-generation BCB, as mentioned in Chapter 3, have had their own toughening experience, such as travelling to Hong Kong to commit armed robberies and return to China immediately afterward in order to finance their journey to Canada.
- 9.
Although he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and ordered to be deported afterward, he fought his deportation order until 1997, during which time he became a mid-level heroin distributor for Lee’s supply.
- 10.
His wife, Jenny Chow, was able to remain in Canada since his deportation. She cultivated a close friendship with other BCB including the Chans in the 1990s, but remained relatively discreet and ran a massage parlour. In March 2010, she was arrested on charges of trafficking ATS drugs in Project El Mirador along with eight other co-conspirators, one of whom was Cheng Ling, a prominent partner of the Chans in the 1990s in credit card counterfeiting schemes.
- 11.
Two alleged BCB cases in Ontario that could potentially qualify as localised coercive activities are loan-sharking rackets run by Ng Kar Kit in out-of-town casinos (including Casino Rama) and a prostitution ring operated by Chu Wai Hing. However, due to insufficient first-hand data, it is difficult to gain further insight into these cases other than news reports or to establish any possible connections to other BCB individuals or cells. For these reasons, they have been excluded from the discussion. For case details, see Schneider (2009: 490–91) for the arrest of Ng Kar Kit and accomplices in 2001; also see Suthibhasilp et al. (2000) for the take-down of brothels run by Chu Wai Hing.
- 12.
Many of the court documents pertaining to this case had wrongly stated Lai Wa’s name as Sen Wa. This was not uncommon due to confusion caused by the many similar spelling and phonetics of Chinese names when mentioned in the courts. Cross-checking of names in databases was especially difficult as the transcription of proceedings was mostly typewritten before sweeping computerisation of records took place in the mid-1990s. In this case, Lai Wah’s name was corroborated by an article in the Vancouver Sun (cited above).
- 13.
Yuk Wah’s precise role in Project Dragon was also not known, though the authorities were certain of his drug trade position as a wholesaler with his own supply from China. He had arrived in Canada two years earlier than Kwok Chung, and had also established a working relationship with the local gangs, as evident from his collaboration with Steven Wong and Kim Nang, but was evidently unable to maintain a lasting working relationship with them.
- 14.
As Kwok Chung and Yuk Wah were the only recognised BCB in these cases, with the former having had direct involvement, he was likely the one with wider sphere of influence over the gangs.
- 15.
There appears to be two errors in this statement, if the author’s cross-referencing effort proves valid: what O1 (IRB 2008) meant to state was that the terrorist group was Hezbollah and not Hamas (and, as O1 later self-corrected, the attack targeted the Israeli embassy rather than the US embassy).
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Chung, A. (2019). BCB Activities 1: Non-Drug Related. In: Chinese Criminal Entrepreneurs in Canada, Volume I. Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05132-7_5
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