When Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Wu’s son was kidnapped for a HK$1.5 million ransom
- Thomas Wu, now managing director of Hopewell Holdings, was the victim of a kidnapping when he was a child
“$1m paid for kidnap victim,” ran a headline in the South China Morning Post on October 2, 1982. “The nine-year-old son of the managing director of Hopewell Holdings Ltd, Mr Gordon Wu, who was kidnapped on Thursday [September 30], has been reunited with his family,” the story said.
The kidnapping involved six people, including the family’s chauffeur, Lau Wing-cheong, who was driving the child – Wu’s eldest son, Thomas Wu Man-sun – home for lunch at about 1pm when their car was intercepted by a white Mitsubishi.
“Two men jumped out of the Mitsubishi and got into Mr Wu’s car. One punched the chauffeur and the other covered the boy’s face with a chloroform-soaked towel […] the boy was then bundled into [a white] van which was driven across the tunnel to Kowloon,” the Post reported on October 4.
On the day of the abduction, Gordon Wu Ying-sheung received a phone call at his villa in Jardine’s Lookout at 6pm, demanding HK$2 million “for the safe return of his son”. Wu paid HK$1.5 million – not the HK$1 million first reported by the Post – and the boy was freed, 12 hours after being taken, with the kidnappers giving him HK$100 for his taxi fare home.
By mid-November, detectives had recovered HK$1.2 million from safe deposit boxes in two banks in Kowloon and by December, the gang involved in the kidnapping had been arrested. A Post story dated March 17, 1983, reported that “[the kidnappers’] initial plan was to take Mrs Wu to a quiet hillside and then strip her and photograph her. The photographs were to be used to blackmail Mr Wu […] but they later changed their minds, thinking it would be less troublesome to kidnap the son.”
