On Apr. 25, sitting in his jail cell facing new racketeering charges, San Francisco’s Chinatown gang boss, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow participated in a symposium on investigative journalism sponsored by UC Berkeley. Chow was arrested on federal charges of money laundering and firearms trafficking along with indicted state senator Leland Yee in March late.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s web site sfgate.com, PBS’s Frontline, with producer Lowell Bergman–who also happens to be a professor of journalism at Berkeley–interviewed Chow about his childhood induction into a Macau crime organization.
The Frontline episode tells the story of how the erstwhile Portuguese colony transformed itself into the gambling capital of China and how Chinese triads were employed as vicious collection agencies targeting individuals who failed to pay gambling debts.
Bergman says that he didn’t discuss Shrimp Boy’s recent indictment, but stayed on the subject at hand. The producer justified using Chow as part of the exposé despite his long list of felonies, including pleading guilty to racketeering charges involving murder for hire, conspiracy to distribute heroin, and arson: “We try to do more than just have reporters talking.”