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At first, Lai lived it up in Canada, buying a luxury mansion in Vancouver and indulging in gambling jaunts across the country. He visited the Niagara Casino in Ontario more than 30 times, becoming a VIP member. Then, in May 2000, four members of a Chinese business delegation walked through the lobby of Vancouver's glitzy Delta Hotel on their way to a secret meeting with him. It turned out that three of these delegates were not businessmen at all but members of the 4-20 investigation team; the other was Lai's older brother Lai Shuiqiang, who Chinese authorities claim had run Lai's cigarette-smuggling business. Shuiqiang had been in jail for several months before his trip to Canada, and the 4-20 team thought his presence might persuade Lai to return home, sparing the rest of the family from heavier sentences.
Lai met with the negotiators three times and even paid their hotel and cell phone bills. But he ultimately decided not to strike a deal with the Chinese government. "In China, the Communist Party controls everything, including the law," says Lai. "I wasn't going to be tricked." A couple of weeks later, he applied for political asylum in Canada. Back in China, Shuiqiang was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment. Another of Lai's brothers, Lai Changtu, and four of his nephews were also jailed, as were his wife's parents and two of her siblings.
With many of his bank accounts frozen and legal fees piling up, Lai was soon forced to trade in his grand Vancouver house for a more modest apartment. In the fall of 2000, the Canadian authorities clamped down further, charging Lai and his wife with immigration violations. The alleged emperor of Chinese crime, the purported Al Capone of smugglers, was now confined to limited house arrest.
Three years after lai's ignominious escape, Xiamen has lost its once vaunted momentum. Just a few years ago, the city was throttling so fast into the future that some of the town's traffic lights were fixed with countdown clocks so drivers could accelerate the moment the light changed. But now, with dozens of police, customs and mayoral staff in jail, Xiamen has become a pariah in the eyes of domestic and foreign investors. Yuanhua, it turned out, was intertwined with hundreds of local companies from tour agencies to flower shops, and the 4-20 dragnet has closed down a myriad of firms, leaving Xiamen in a deep funk. Taxi drivers complain that petrol costs 20% more now that the smuggled stuff is no longer available. And in the center of town, where Lai planned to build his 88-story skyscraper, a lake of stagnant water now festers.
To recover some of the losses, government officials have tried auctioning Lai's holdings, including the five-star Yuanhua International Hotel and the Forbidden City film studio. But so far, there have been no takers for his major holdings. The Red Chamber reopened briefly as an anticorruption museum last year but was quickly shuttered when tourists seemed to take its opulence as an inspiration instead of a warning. Xiamen residents are bitter that their city has been targeted, when, they say, corruption is equally rampant in other Chinese cities. Indeed, even Beijing admits that smuggling is hardly limited to Xiamen or Fujian; when the top 10 multinational corporations in Shanghai were polled earlier this year, they counted China's smuggling and pirated goods problem as their biggest corporate headache. "The crackdown has been too complete," grumbles the owner of a struggling import-export company in Xiamen. "There's no one left to do business with anymore." Says a local employee of the People's Daily, the official state newspaper: "Only the government thinks smuggling is stealing. The rest of us just think it's the way business is done in Fujian province."
Meanwhile, in Lai's hometown Shaocuo, Lai Changbiao, once the most swashbuckling of the Lai siblings, passes most of his time alone in a darkened room. Changbiao was involved in a barroom fight in 1999 and a bodyguard smashed a bottle of Hennessy XO over his head. He fell into a coma and is now a paraplegic. At first, Lai sent his older brother to the best hospital in Beijing for therapy, but money has run out. So Changbiao uses an old cooking-oil bottle filled with water as a weight to exercise his atrophied limbs. "Please tell my brother I am fine," he whispers, tears falling across his face and down the jagged scar running from his temple to the back of his head. "Tell him I am praying for him every day."
Sitting in his Vancouver apartment, Lai accepts the message from his ailing brother with a slow nod of the head. Beside him, his wife sniffles softly. The once proud Lai clan has been ravaged—two brothers in jail, one partially paralyzed, one under limited house arrest an ocean away. Lai is currently permitted to venture out for only a couple of hours a day. Mostly, he restricts his jaunts to shopping at the Taiwanese grocery down the street, picking up food for the evening stir-fry. Occasionally, people approach him he says, and express their support: "They tell me to believe in Canada because they would never send me back to my death." But in June, Lai's request for refugee status was denied. Now, his lawyers are applying for a judicial review of the decision—a process that could take up to two years to wend its way through Canada's courts.
Until then, Lai plans to stay with his wife and three children in their cramped Vancouver apartment with its gray walls and scant furnishings. It's a gloomy place, scarcely brightened by a smattering of family photos, some crystal animals in a display cabinet, a huge TV and a plastic fruit bowl on the dining room table. The Canadian police have raided it several times, seizing stacks of documents and adding to Lai's bleak sense that this home is no castle.
Still, the Lai family is trying its best to make a go of immigrant life. Lai's two younger kids are learning English at a local public school, though his eldest child, 18-year-old Kenny, has announced that he doesn't want to go to school anymore. "I want to give my children hope," says Lai's wife Zeng, who takes a daily dose of antidepressants. "But I have lost hope myself." Lai fingers his favorite memento, a gold lighter from the Niagara Casino, where he's now barred. "It is all a tragedy," he says. "Who would have thought it would turn out like this?" The question lingers in the silence, and Lai shakes his head quietly with the air of a man who has gambled everything and lost.