'YOU WANT YOUR money? Well, here's your money. Take a good look at it, because that's as close as you're ever going to get,' rants Mel Gibson in manic-eyed Mad Max mode. The movie is Ransom. He plays an airline magnate whose son has been kidnapped by a rogue cop. Instead of forking over the requisite millions, however, Gibson goes on television with a suitcase stuffed full of cash and offers it to anyone prepared to kill the kidnappers.
'Pure Hollywood,' laughs Bob McAuley, a former member of Hong Kong's elite police anti-terrorist squad and now managing director of Kroll Associates' Asian operations department. 'That's certainly not a tactic we'd be advising any of our clients to take.' For the likes of McAuley, there is no shortage of clients. Kidnapping is the growth industry of the criminal world, with about 1,500 cases worldwide in 1998, jumping to more than 1,800 last year. More and more businessmen and celebrities are taking the threat of kidnapping seriously, proving a bonanza for security companies like Kroll and Pinkerton.
Hong Kong is no stranger to high-profile kidnappings. A week of hell for acclaimed actress Sylvia Chang Ai-chia came to an end last Wednesday when her nine-year-old son Oscar was rescued from alleged kidnappers in a dawn police raid on a Mongkok hotel. Tsang Yiu-tung, 20, Yuen Lee-man, 20, and Leung Man-kwong, 21, have been charged with jointly detaining a person with intent to hold him for ransom. Oscar allegedly was snatched in Kowloon Tong on July 6.
Of course, the crime was elevated to a virtual art form by the late, Ferrari-loving Big Spender, Cheung Tze-keung. Even he would have struggled to spend the $1.38 billion and $600 million demanded for the respective snatchings of tycoons Victor Li Tzar-kuoi and Walter Kwok Ping-sheung, whose families coughed up without informing the police - much to the chagrin of the authorities. Cheung was executed on the mainland in 1998 for a string of crimes. Sidekick Wu Man was sentenced to 13 years in prison in Guangzhou this week for his part in kidnapping Kwok, who was stripped to his underwear and kept in a wooden box for six days.
Then there was Teddy Wang Teh-heui, kidnapped in 1983 and again in 1990. The first abduction left him $11 million out of pocket, the second almost certainly cost him his life. He hasn't been seen since he was whisked away by armed men outside his plush Peak mansion and a ransom of US$60 million ($467 million) demanded.
In August 1998, one of the gang members told the Court of First Instance that Wang was tossed into the sea as their boat was pursued by mainland border guards.