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Triads to trysts
KARI HUUS - MSNBC (17/9/97)
After mopping up Singapore’s mobsters, a top detective turns
his sights on wayward husbands and corporate crime
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SINGAPORE
— When Harmon Singh was still a fresh-faced recruit in short pants,
he had
already tapped the wrath of Singapore’s underworld. In 1961, following
an informant’s tip,
the 21-year-old police detective walked right into an ambush of thugs,
who flung acid in his
face — a favored form of revenge in Asia. “My shirt was mostly
burned, my pants were burned,
my body was burning,” says Singh. But he grabbed the nearest guy,
and hung on. “I told myself,
my dear friend, if I die, he’ll jolly well die with me … I never
let him go.”
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EVEN
THOUGH SINGH was nearly blinded from the incident, and has scars from
many
others scrapes, you can’t miss a certain note of nostalgia when he
talks about his
thug-busting days.
In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s,
dozens of criminal gangs, splinter gangs and women’s
gangs, like the fierce Red Butterflies, operated in this city-state. The
mob ran opium dens,
prostitution, gambling dens, smuggling and robbery rackets. Singh has
written an entire
book of his pursuit of criminals, including
a high-speed chase that started on motorcycles
and continued in the back of a moving garbage truck, antics that won him
the nickname
“Danger Man” in the local press.
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END OF AN ERA
To some extent, Singh put himself out
of business. By the time he retired and started a private
agency in 1981, the city had little gangster activity — it has, in
fact, very little crime at all. And the
government is known for its Draconian laws to keep it that way. |
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 KARI
HUUS / MSNBC
| Harmon Singh standing in front of newspaper reports
on his 38 years as an investigator |
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These days, commercial work
helps pay the bills. In Singapore, says Singh, it’s fairly common
to investigate employees and discover that they have set up a competing
company on the side,
and use their jobs mainly to divert good clients away from their employer.
Singh also takes cases
to follow salespeople who stray outside their assigned territory because
they are selling for two
companies at the same time. He also lists intellectual property rights
investigation and insurance
claims investigation on his business card.
But what really keeps Singh’s
phones ringing is infidelity. “Mmmmhmmm… yes darling.
OK,” he says, nearly whispering into the phone, while checking one
of his two beepers.
“Mmmmhmmm. We’ll let you know.” The 58-year-old is immaculate
in his lily white shirt
and pants, and 14 knuckle-dusting gold rings. In a tiny office near Singapore’s
Cricket Club,
Singh is surrounded by the plaques and awards given to him for syndicate
cracking.
But in the new Singapore, the gumshoe has tapped a much deeper well. Seventy-five
percent of his clients are women who want to know what their husbands
are really up to
when they work late.
“Matrimonial work”
is booming in Singapore. Not that affairs are on the rise,
necessarily — who’s to say? — but women have more money,
better academic backgrounds
and less patience for hanky-panky these days, according to Singh. He has
60 people on
the streets who spend most of their time tracking down husbands or doing
background
checks on prospective grooms. And Singh is just one — albeit the
most famous —
of the dozens of agencies that handle marital investigations in a country
with just 3
million people.
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