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THEY’RE OUT
THERE
They
could be anybody. Singh’s people, who are licensed by the government
to work as private investigators, also have other skills — say,
permits to drive taxis or operate cranes. (You never know when you
might need to take a picture through a skyscraper window.) And Singh
keeps a hand in, sometimes employing the disguises he used in the
old days. Sometimes he drives a taxi, a pedicab driver or a street
sweeper. |
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And
there’s a favorite disguise — posing as a vendor in the street
stalls. It worked in the old
days when he was staking out a cinema where gangsters met their contacts
(it turns out that
gangsters like gangster movies) and it still works today.
These days, Singh arms himself
with cameras to bring down the culprit — he always carries
six to capture the indiscretion on film. But one shouldn’t underestimate
the fury of a man caught
with his pants down. In one recent case, Singh photographed a man in a
state of rapture in a
parked car with his girlfriend. The man started his car and began ramming
Singh’s car.
Like any good salesman, Singh preaches
prevention. As he says, it’s better to root out those
skeletons before marriage than after, because divorce is painful —
and expensive. So a growing
part of his work is doing background checks of prospective husbands. For
one client, Singh checked
out about a dozen men before he gave one the thumbs up. “Unfortunately,
she was so happy and
so thrilled, she went and shared the so-called good news with him ...
He dropped her off like a
hot brick.”
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But
the success stories are many, and the rewards for this work are clearly
more than
monetary. On his office walls, among his police commendations, newspaper
clippings and
wise sayings, are dozens of photographs of Singh posing with beautiful
women-starlets,
models and beauty queens — some of whom are former clients. He pulls
out a stack of
letters and begins reading them aloud. “I get a lot of thank-you
cards, hugs and kisses.
To be frank,” he says, “these things keep me going.”
There
are gangs in Singapore today — teen gangs that have adopted the names
of the
syndicates of an earlier era. The government is taking them seriously
— remember,
the government takes everything seriously. But Singh, who has trailed
after some of these
youthful malcontents, has discovered mostly petty theft, small-time drug
use and hormonal
imbalance -a pale imitation of the gangsters he once pursued. “Today’s
so-called gangsters,
to me, are spoiled kids.”
Some of the old gangsters
have moved to other countries. But some are still around, he says,
in money lenders, or running small businesses, more or less on the right
side of the law. Not long
ago, in fact, Singh ran into a couple of old guys he arrested more than
30 years ago, and they invited
him for a drink.
Even if
the police were willing to pay him to pick up some tips, Singh doesn’t
see that there’s
much work for him. “Unfortunately, those kind of gangsters and secret
society members and
criminals are so little,” he says with something that could be mistaken
for regret.
“Singapore is such a nice place.”
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KAIR
HUUS / MSNBC 
