Young gangs 'looking for victims'

The damaged gates at left and a large skid mark on Bleakhouse Rd give an idea of the kidnappers' desperate departure. Picture / Greg Bowker

Young Chinese looking for quick money could be behind yesterday's kidnapping of an Asian woman, members of the Chinese community believe.

Jim He, secretary of the United Chinese Association of New Zealand, said gangs of young Chinese men were operating in Auckland, looking for rich, vulnerable victims.

"I think there is organised crime, definitely," he said.

"[Gangs] will look for victims who can be easily captured. They will know the rich in an area or know someone who knows the family."

Mr He believed rich, young students were being targeted by Chinese gangs in Auckland "every week" but yesterday's kidnapping was more serious.

"In China people take precautions but in New Zealand there is a lack of education for people on how to protect themselves," he said.

Ron Hoy Fong, past president of the Auckland Ethnic Council, said some young Chinese were borrowing to get to New Zealand, but once they were here they did not have enough to live on.

Mr He said kidnapping and other extortion was still not being reported to police, despite efforts to assure Chinese immigrants that police would help them.

The shame of being targeted and "loss of face" were often behind the reluctance to report crime, he said.

Chinese journalist Lincoln Tan agreed. "I think police are still detached from the Asian community," he said. "There needs to be more grass-roots Asian police officers."

Concerns about organised Asian crime surfaced by 1996, when then Police Commissioner Richard Macdonald told politicians that police were close to losing control of Asian gangs in New Zealand.

He forecast control would be lost in 2001. In 2003, police attributed an increase in reported kidnappings to the rise in students from Asian countries where such crimes were common.

Tactics ranged from kidnappings for large ransoms to standovers, where a group pressured a victim to withdraw money from an ATM or sign over car ownership papers.

Although most of the cases occur in Auckland - which has at least half of the estimated 80,000 Asian students in New Zealand - extortion rings also operated in Hamilton and Christchurch.

Intelligence gathered by the police Asian crime squad at the time found the extortion rackets usually developed out of loosely formed groups of Asian students, many claiming to be members of 14K, the Big Circle Gang and "the Taiwanese Gang".