“Betting parlors on Mott Street and Baxter and Division?” Mike said. “They were all illegal. The locals played for tens of thousands of dollars—dominoes, thirteen-card poker, even mah-jongg. The Ghost Shadows offered them protection from the police—at the cost of about twenty thousand a week back then, so it was real money—and then roughed them up when they didn’t make payments.”
“Murdered them,” I said, “if your father was involved.”
“Yeah. Roughing up in the first degree,” Mike said. “There was a five-year period in the eighties when there was a trail of thirty rival gang members and a handful of bystanders killed. They had a hand in everything that happened in and around Canal Street.”
Mercer snapped his fingers and pointed at Mike. “You started thinking of Kwan because basically what he was trying to do to the late Wolf Savage was extortion. Big-time extortion.”
“You know, it’s one of those weird word-association things,” Mike said. “Why does Kwan’s name keep coming up in this case?”
I stopped chewing.
“He and his brothers have turned a respectable generations-old family business into a shady global operation. What once was export-import generations ago is now this concept of the Kwans finding the cheapest labor, much of it in Asia and India, to steal production away from many of the high-end fashion houses. They go low-scale and increase the risks for half the people who work for them, in places that have no regulations on the working conditions of the labor force. The Kwans were pushing hard to drive the Savages out of contention—so, yes, extortion was part of it,” Mike went on. “Then, why is George Kwan cozy enough with Battaglia that the DA goes to the guy’s town house—which is guarded like a fortress—in the middle of the afternoon?”
“And why does Battaglia lose his marbles when he thinks he sees me talking to Kwan at the museum?” I said.
“Then we get the tip about Battaglia and the Order of Saint Hubertus,” Mike continued, making connections, “that led to Alex remembering the DA being honored at the Animals Without Borders dinner.”
“Which Kwan Enterprises also supported,” Mercer said. “So Deirdre mentions the man’s name, and calls him a ghost—”
“And all I can think of is the bad old days in Chinatown,wondering whether any of the gang leaders my father locked up—like Wing Yeung Kwan—were the ancestor ghost shadows of our man George.”
“Any sign that he’s into the gambling business?” Mercer asked.
“The Chinese gambling industry was shut down when the big casinos were opened in Connecticut by Native Americans,” Mike said. “But the minute Deirdre Wright said the word ‘ghost’ in describing George Kwan, I started thinking of the Chinese and criminal enterprise. The Ghost Shadows actually went international.”
“From Canal Street?” Mercer said.
“The last murder rap my father nailed against them was for fleecing investors for millions of dollars in a phony international bullion-trading company,” Mike said. “The head of the enterprise set up a bogus firm in Hong Kong to do business in Chinatown as the Evergreen Bullion Company—to buy and sell gold on the open market. Instead, it was all phony trades, fake confirmation slips, and a huge commission for trading.”
“I bet all the investors were immigrants—from his own country,” Mercer said.
“Yup. That’s why most of them wouldn’t go to the police, because so many were here illegally,” Mike said. “The Ghost Shadows were extremely opportunistic. When they saw a way to make money, they jumped on it. My father handled the murders that happened when the Green Dragons tried to get a cut of the business.”
He paused and looked at Mercer.
“Sort of reminds me of what I know about Kwan Enterprises,” Mike went on, “sensing a weakness in the fashion industry and filling the gap with a dangerously cheap overseas operation.”
Mike stopped talking when the waiters came to the table with our dinners.
“That’s a bit of a reach,” I said.
“We’ve got nothing at the moment. I’ll give you that. That’s when I start stretching for ideas,” Mike said. “Why didn’t your boss tell you he had a relationship with the man when Kwan surfaced in the Wolf Savage investigation?”
“Obviously, I can’t answer that. I wasn’t supposed to be working on the case,” I said. “I don’t know if word ever got to him, before the case was solved—just an hour before Battaglia was killed—that we met Kwan the week before.”
“How did Kwan figure in that one?” Vickee asked. “Tell me more about his business.”
“Kwan Enterprises is an investment holding company that’s headquartered in Hong Kong, just like the phony bullion business was.” I sat quietly, letting Mike tell the backstory. “For several generations, it was a trading company, concentrating on the export of porcelain and jade and silk, until the UN imposed a trade embargo on China.”
“Got that,” Vickee said.
“Then, according to my research about the family last week,” Mike added, “almost everyone in the Asian export business stepped over the line into smuggling a century ago.”
“Smuggling their goods?”
“Sure. These operations had been around for decades before that in the nineteenth century, and suddenly the US government banned a lot of the products being imported. Many of the Chinese resorted to smuggling, as a way for their businesses to survive.”
“That’s what Kwan Enterprises did?” Vickee asked.
“While a lot of Asian companies buckled and went under, the Kwans were more nimble,” Mike said. “They got involved in some illegal export work, but then shifted their interest to the apparel industry, outsourcing the production of goods to the cheapest labor markets around the world.”
“They’re a trading group,” Vickee said. “That’s not criminal.”
“It’s ugly, though,” Mike said. “It’s a lot like slave labor.”
Vickee responded to those last two words. “That’s different.”
“Think Bangladesh or some remote part of China,” he said. “Unsafe facilities. Places where buildings collapse on workers, or they get trapped by fires, or child labor is used. That’s Kwan Enterprises.”
“I’ve got the image,” she said. “So how do you know the DA had something to do with him?”
“We didn’t,” Mike said. “We chanced on Kwan when we crashed a business meeting at the offices of Wolf Savage’s company. So Coop and I decided to follow him to his town house on East Seventy-Eighth Street, in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Did he meet with you then?” Vickee asked. “Did you talk to him?”
“No,” Mike said. “I tried to get in the house, but his security guards wouldn’t let me. So I got back into the car with Coop.”
“You couldn’t get past security either?” Vickee asked, turning to me.
“I’m the one who wasn’t supposed to be there,” I said, giving her a sheepish grin. “And lucky for me I didn’t try to take on the guards when Mike was turned away, because the person who emerged from the town house was none other than Paul Battaglia.”
Vickee put down her fork. “Strange bedfellows, especially in the middle of the Savage homicide investigation.”
“You bet,” I said.
“And Battaglia never told you or Mike about his relationship to Kwan,” she asked her husband, “even though he knew you were working the case?”