Word: macao
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Across the river mouth from Hong Kong on the mainland of Red China is the tiny (eleven square miles) Portuguese colony of Macao, whose legitimate industries are the packaging of matches, firecrackers and Sin. Into Macao one day last week came the Portuguese ship Rovuma, with a cargo of iron and steel plates, machine tools and industrial chemicals. That night coolies shifted the Rovuma's freight into motorized junks, which began moving up the Pearl River toward Canton...
Smuggling, for centuries a profitable career in these waters, has been brought to an art by the Communists. Peking maintains an official purchasing agency in Macao called the Nan Kwong Trading Corp. Smugglers get an order from Nan Kwong, then wangle a Macao government import permit, place their order somewhere in Western Europe, and wait for the ships of the Portuguese-owned Companhia National de Navegaçáo to arrive. When the smuggler delivers the goods, profits are enormous...
Secure Smuggling. When the Communists withheld their orders for a couple of months last winter, Macao almost skidded into bankruptcy. Portugal is pledged to enforce the U.N. embargo on strategic materials entering Red China, but the colony of Macao lives in such absolute dependence (even for food and water) on the Communist mainland that it considers it a question of smuggle...
Driving up Macao's Rua Padre Antonio one cool, drizzly morning a few weeks ago, two youths found their way deliberately blocked by a pedicab. At that moment, three men forced themselves into the car and, at pistol point, made the youths drive on to an empty bicycle shop on a lonely street. Here the kidnapers hauled them out, stuck oranges into their mouths, blindfolded, trussed and loaded them into gunny sacks, dumped them into a couple of rickshas. Singing gay Cantonese songs to drown out any possible outcry, the men pulled the rickshas to an empty house...
...kidnapers had chosen their victims carefully. The two youths were members of wealthy and prominent families in Macao: Fu Iam-kin, 14, was the son of multimillionaire Gambling Magnate Fu Tak-iam, and Antonio de Assis Fong, 22, was the son of the manager of Macao's Central Hotel. The kidnapers sent word to the parents demanding ransom of 700,000 Hong Kong dollars ($122,850 U.S.). But they reckoned not on Gambler Fu Tak-iam. He announced that he would not pay ransom for his son because it would set a bad precedent: he has four wives...