The Fu Tak Iam Story
Adrian Fu
Fu Tak Iam Foundation: 2018
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I always have reservations when people’s testimonials are completely certain,” Fátima Cid, a Macau resident, tells me after I ask her about the time a man was shot dead at point-blank range right in front of her. At first, Fátima isn’t sure if this happened in 1998 or 1999. A few things stayed with her, though: the body falling down, the fact that she didn’t hear the shot and the unexpected colour of the blood (pink). Another thing Fátima remembers is the murderer “calmly going up the road” — the one that leads to the police headquarters, no less.

In those days, a person being shot dead in broad daylight was not uncommon in Macau. The man she saw brutally murdered was a high official in the Gambling Inspectorate. Two days later, a marine police officer was shot dead during morning rush hour, when he was driving his four-year-old daughter to school. By the end of 1998, Macau, then home to some 420,000 people, had counted thirty murders, up from twenty-nine in 1997 and twenty-one in 1996. Still, 1999 would be the bloodiest, with forty-two.

On 20 December of that year, Macau, the first and last European colony in Asia, was to become a Special Administrative Region of China. Long considered an odd no man’s land, constantly under dispute, Macau was witnessing a brutal turf war between local triads seeking to control the casinos, for decades the pillar of the economy.

• Tags: Fu Tak Iam, Hugo Pinto, Issue 16, Macau