In my attempt to find out more the triads, I made the ground rules clear from the start.
I didn't want specifics, I didn't want details and I certainly didn't want names. I just wanted to know how the gangs worked.
I have no idea what Ah Hing's real name is, but I do know that he is being groomed to take over as tai ko - big brother (a term triad members use for their bosses) - in a gang that operates in a small town in northern Malaysia.
We had chosen a room in an old shop house in which to meet. Ah Hing looked like many working class Malaysian Chinese, with heavy jewellery, cheap shoes and spiky hair. His minder collected tattoos.
"We do sell some ecstasy pills and that is how we make a living, me and my friends," he said.
"We do take girls for prostitution, and this is much easier to do than ecstasy because usually the government will not bother us when we do this."

I admit that I am a bad guy, and that I'm a gangster

The triads and Malaysia's other criminal gangs dabble in any number of rackets. Some even smuggle opiated cough syrup.
Dealing drugs in Malaysia carries the death penalty. Hangmen got a pay rise earlier this year - it is an issue the government takes seriously.

Prostitution is easier to get away with, and so is loan sharking or making and peddling fake goods. Malaysia is thought to be the world's largest producer of pirated optical discs.

But Ah Hing runs girls and sells pills. The women cost the gangs between $750 and $2000 each. They are bought and sold like cattle, and the pimps want a return.

"The girls know they have to work to pay back the money we paid to buy them," Ah Hing said.

"We do find girls who refuse to work, and we will keep them in solitary confinement and give them a bad time until they tell me they want to work," he said.

Ancient rituals

The triads have their roots in a 17th Century movement dedicated to restoring China's Ming dynasty to the throne, but over time they degenerated into criminal gangs.

In some places they still have rituals, as Jessica Lau, a well-connected member of the Malaysian Chinese community, found out.
When Ms Lau lived in New Zealand, her neighbour was a Hong Kong triad boss who decided to retire.

"During his very last days as the leader of the triad society, he gathered everybody from his society and in front of leaders from other societies he washed his hands in a gold basin which symbolised that from today onwards he is not going to be involved in the triad society any more, and now he is old and respectable and a free man," she said.

But Malaysia's triads are rather more prosaic than those in Hong Kong. The element of ceremony has gone, and these groups are run as businesses.

Ah Hing referred to his as "our company". It's a pragmatic affair, where deals are reached with the authorities - who set boundaries for crimes they know can never be eliminated.

"If I want to operate on a particular street and ask a politician to ask the authorities not to disturb me, the politician might say: 'It's impossible to have zero arrests, so you can operate on certain hours and we will patrol after those hours' - so it's a win-win situation," Ah Hing said.

If someone crosses him, however, it's most certainly not win-win.

"If someone betrays me personally... I will get a few gang members together and beat him up until he's paralysed or he's a vegetable, but if the matter is really big then they'll be brought before my tai ko for a trial," he said.

"If my tai ko asks us to deal with someone, even if we kill that person, we won't be worried, because if the police arrest us, my tai ko will get me out," he added.

"Last time I was taken in the front door of the [police] lock-up, and right away I walk out of the back door."

Part of society

Most Malaysians have little or nothing to do with the triads. But many poorer people have nowhere else to turn when they need to borrow money.

All too often, Michael Chong, head of public services for the political party the Malaysian Chinese Association, sees what happens when borrowers default on their payments.

"We do have cases where they run away, you know, with the family... and of course we have some cases where they have been assaulted - assaulted in the sense they have to be hospitalised," Mr Chong said.

Ah Hing makes no bones about his world and his life. "I admit that I am a bad guy, and that I'm a gangster," he said.

"So who runs your world?" I asked - to which he gave a simple reply : "The government".

"If the government doesn't want to be a bit lenient with us and if they are strict about everything, then there's no way that I can make a living. There's no work," Ah Hing said.

When the economic downturn of 1998 hit Asia, many Malaysians turned to the triads for work.

It allowed thousand to fill their rice bowls.

That in itself is reason enough for some in power to turn a blind eye to what these gangs do - that and the knowledge that the triads are there to make a living, not to cause trouble.

They may be bad men, but they're also businessmen.

I'm an alumnus of Sam Seng High. I jest although all my (now defunct) alma maters Shaw Road Primary School, San Peng Road Lower Secondary School and Cheras Road Secondary School were located in gangster-infested pockets of Kuala Lumpur. My one abiding memory of the last school was that of a fight between two boys in my class, the teeth of one firmly clamped on a bloody nipple, I can't remember right or left, of the other. Back then, my friends and I used to envy boys from the better schools in KL. Victoria's Institution, for instance, was just a 10-minute walk from San Peng but boy, did their students live in an entirely different world. Not only was it the only school in town to have a swimming pool, but its field was also three times the size of ours. They had a sizeable number of brainiacs, not to mention scions of rich towkays and even royalty. I can't lay claim to having gone to school with anyone remotely blue-blooded but I can definitely boast that some of my old schoolmates were card-carrying members of triad gangs in the city. Some of my friends and I had one nasty worry: How to handle the bad hats in school who would inevitably accost 'fresh meat' along corridors, in toilets or the bus-stops outside. Some demanded protection money, some were out to recruit and yet some others just wanted to rough you up or give you a good old-fashioned fright. I wouldn't recommend the experience but, in retrospect, I probably imbibed some invaluable life lessons then: teamwork (moving around in groups, looking out for one another), negotiation skills (bargaining down a one-time protection fee from RM1 to 50 sen and people management (getting gangsters you know to talk terms with gangsters you don't know). I also picked up some street smarts but, more importantly, I learnt not to be too judgmental about people. For I've learnt that beneath their tough-talking exteriors, some of these 'ruffians' were also teenagers with dreams and insecurities. Sometimes a simple offer of a piece of chewing gum was all that was needed to turn a hostile terroriser into a 'manageable' pal. For instance, after I helped LWK with his English homework, the burly boy made sure no one gave me any grief during my three years in San Peng.

But soon, tragedy strikes...
One day the police came to our school. LWK, the big burly boyman, got beaten to a pulp. His mangled remains was beyond recognition, and told only one clue; gripped tight in his hand, a badge from our school. Till this day, I didn't know who did it. But I knew it's someone from my school. Might even be my friends....my good old friends from Sam Seng high.

Pekeliling

Part 1

Not all who live here truly knew the secrets carried within it. Only those who have toiled here for many many years would have an inkling of what im about to say. Only those of us who have sweated tears in the slums - where unspeakable horrors of crime and murder abound - will understand the darkness of this place. Those who know, always stay clear. And even when pressed for answers they refuse to tell. I dont blame them, for they knew better than to dabble in such things. But still I went deeper for answers...

I’ve had many ghost experiences in my life. Though, I still consider myself lucky to have not seen anything first hand, my friends and fellow housemates, on the other hand, were not so lucky.

This was during our college years back in 2003, we had just moved into a condominium unit situated in the hilly areas of Wangsa Maju, Kuala Lumpur. The house was the lower most unit of the rows and there was an easy access to the swimming pool. The surrounding area around the swimming pool was heavily dense with trees, plants and bushes or better known as secondary forest.

There were 8 of us living in that unit alone and most of us shared rooms. For the first few days since moving in the condominium in Wangsa Maju, only four of us had moved into the house as the rest were yet to arrive back from their hometowns. Nothing much occured or spooked us out except for the fact that doors opened by themselves even though there wasn’t any wind. That incident did creeped us out but we tried to be logical about it and thought maybe the ground wasn’t level seeing that we were living on a hillside.


Things started to get creepy as the weeks and months passed by. My personal experience was pretty creepy. Not being able to sleep one night, I sat outside watching television and playing a guitar in the dim light of the living room. Most of my friends were fast asleep by then as it was 3am and some of them had to go about their business the next morning. I took the decision to sleep outside seeing that my room was pretty stuffy and humid. My two other roommates were fast asleep inside the room I shared with them. I took my pillow and blanket out, arranged the guitar and leaned it against the side of the sofa that I was sleeping on. All of sudden while I was staring blankly, I heard the guitar strings make a sound. I thought it could be a lizard that dropped down, but the strings we’re playing like as if somebody was plucking them. It went on for a minute or so before I took off and slept in my own room, not even looking behind. That, was only the beginning.

The second incident happened to a visiting friend of mine during a house party we had a month after that. My room was empty and everyone else was outside the pool area. I was meanwhile pretty busy mingling around the swimming pool quite far off from the house. After a while, I went to my room to cool down for a bit and when I opened the door I realized my friend was there. The look on his face was pure shock. He looked pale. For a long moment he did not even utter a word and as I made my way in, he just kept staring at me. I asked him what was wrong and he just replied asking me to go out with him. He did not tell me anything for the next few days until I asked again. Apparently he was inside reading magazines with the intention of cooling himself off as well and when he entered the room he looked into the corner (where my bed was) and saw a figure under my blanket, which he immediately thought it was me. He told me he thought I had too much drinks and was probably sleeping it off and he didn’t mind accompanying me. In any case, that was what he thought until the time I entered my room. Who was that figure on my bed?

Nothing particularly interesting happened for a few months after that until one day my room mate who is also my classmate when to class with me looking pale. I asked him what was wrong. He told me not to be spooked out and told me that he woke up in the middle of yesterday night all of a sudden, and looked around the room and as he turned to my direction he saw a huge shadow at the foot of my bed. He had tried to scream to wake everyone up in the room but he said he was not able to utter a single scream and it lasted for quite awhile before he could physically get up.

The last incident that happened was when another friend of mine stayed over in my room. The foot of the bed that he slept on was directly facing the toilet and you could see the bathroom sink and mirror. He related to us that early in the morning around 5am he woke up suddenly and sat up, and to his horror, saw a reflection of an old lady staring at him in the mirror.
Curious, we decided to ask the security guards there about our little apartment, if they had experienced or had any information about anything at all. They weren’t surprised. They said since it was an old and hilly area the place is bound to be dirty. We found out that a few doors down from us, a man had committed suicide half a year ago before we moved in. No one has rented that particular unit or the surrounding unit, including the one we were staying in. All they advised us was not to walk alone at night, as it can get surprisingly dark even with the corridors lighted up.

There were other friends living in units nearby, a bunch of girls to be particular, who had even worse experiences compared to ours. Although I wasn’t around when it happened, one of them was possessed that particular night. And another time, one of them was alone at home in the dark when she heard noises all around. She called for help and luckily us guys we’re just a walk away. On the phone she was crying and telling us she felt she wasn’t alone at home and she couldn’t even see outside the window as it was so dark even though the sun had just set.

We didn’t stick around for long to renew our tenement, both us guys and girls. Frankly we had enough it, as much as we had many fond memories we never forget those incidents and still talk about it till this day.