Cut up

The men surrounding the hotel were believed to be triads, so-named for their membership in Chinese secret triad societies. Triads are the world's largest criminal fraternity, and Hong Kong, with four major triad societies and numerous smaller ones, is home to more ethnic Chinese gangsters than anywhere else on earth. One society, the Sun Yee On, has by itself at least 30,000 members, and possibly 60,000. The low estimate is larger than the Hong Kong Police Force, and the high estimate is equal to nearly one out of every fifty males in Hong Kong. (Women can't be triads, but boys as young as 10 are recruited by all the major societies.) Apart from running the rackets in Hong Kong--illegal gambling and prostitution, for instance--triads are active in legitimate enterprises, such as the property market and public transportation. Meanwhile, their powerful influence is felt worldwide in counterfeiting, arms dealing, alien smuggling and money laundering. Hong Kong is a key transit point for the Southeast Asian heroin and methamphetamine that pour into the United States, and triads play a key role in the drugs' transshipment. Triad societies are more loosely structured than Mafia families; the benefit of membership is solidarity, the ease of finding criminal partners and the threat that one's triad brothers can be called upon to perform acts of violence. And triad violence tends to be gruesome because of a tradition of using a meat cleaver, or "chopper"; the chopping off of one or another limb is a trademark triad method of registering disapproval.