IN Macau, myth tends to tower over even the most basic of facts - not least when it comes to the enclave's triads.
While recently-jailed gangster 'Broken Tooth' Wan Kuok-koi was at pains to paint himself as the Godfather of South China - at least until he was arrested, when he changed his picture dramatically - the truth is far more prosaic.
So says Joao Guedes, a former police detective now working as a senior journalist for Macau's Portuguese television station and who is generally regarded as the enclave's eminent expert on Chinese secret societies. Asked about Wan's reputation as kingpin of the 14K triad, Guedes snorts: 'I doubt whether Broken Tooth even knows what [the name] 14K means.' He believes Wan and his ilk simply usurped traditional triad names to gain respectability in the underworld and as a means of browbeating potential extortion victims.
The true number of triad factions and their membership in Macau is anybody's guess. Estimates range between just a handful and several dozen factions, and between about 1,000 and more than 10,000 triad members, out of the 450,000 population.
Guedes says he believes that while Macau's triads might have several thousand members, most of them appear to be inactive 'sleepers', while just several hundred could be regarded as 'full-time' operatives.
Highly inflated membership figures seem to have been bandied about by diverse sources. While some police detectives tend to overstate the number of triad gangsters in order to highlight the difficulty of fighting organised crime, triads themselves are known to inflate their membership numbers to impress rival gangs, scare the general public, and fool the security forces.
Talking up his gang's size and clout was a favourite tactic of Wan, who was last month jailed for 15 years for a raft of gangland crimes. The public prosecution described him as the leader of one of Macau's major triad factions, the 14K.