Somewhere in Xindian, Taiwan, there is an informal open air temple with just one statue inside. It’s a gold colored statue of a middle-aged taxi driver. He’s bald but has thick, furry eyebrows, and his expression is rather hapless, naïve and good natured. His hands grip his waist. He wears pressed slacks and a buttoned shirt. There’s something Steinbeckian about such a stolidly proletarian figure.
He doesn’t have the look of a criminal, but crime wasn’t his profession, which must be why he was caught after committing the first one.
He’s the golden image of Li Shi Ke, Taiwan’s first post-war bank robber, the first one to rob the coffers of the Kuomintang’s republic.
It was the eighties, and everyone around him was getting rich. He knew because he drove them; they were people who didn’t seem particularly clever, well connected, or special, people just like him, but they had made millions seemingly overnight. But he didn’t know how to do it himself or take advantage of all the easy money floating around. Year after year passed by, but he was still a taxi driver. Why?
He had a next door neighbor in the squatter’s settlement where he lived, with most of the other Chinese born KMT dependents, not the officers, but the foot soldiers. Theirs was a collection of tin roof shacks, some made of brick walls loosely mortared in place with glutinous rice starch, some concrete, most just tin all over. There were powerlines everywhere, and the alleys were narrow. Still, you could make a cozy spot for yourself in a little house with a low roof, and if you lived next to people from your own county, Shandong, in Li She Ke’s case, then the neighborhood could have a bit of a village feel. Shacks were even titled, despite their shoddy look. His neighbors were a small family with a little daughter in elementary school. They weren’t getting rich either, and they complained about having to take care of a girl. She’d probably need to go to work right after junior high school, then she was finished. It was lucky so far that they hadn’t sold her to another family, which some people did when they couldn’t afford their children. She’d probably have to marry as soon as possible to another neighborhood guy, and she’d be selling green onion pancakes on the corner, having to wake up early and work late, skin ruined by the frying oil. But she was so cute and sweet and playful. There wasn’t any balance to it, the essence of justice. One side was weighing so heavily that sentimentality dripped over, but it was all true. That overflow of misery created a tension that required adjustment.
Then there was Li Shi Ke’s own story. A middle school graduate from Shandong who’d been in the military, fighting first the Japanese and then the Communists with the KMT, then taken over to Taiwan with them. So he, like many he knew – but what difference how many? – had sacrificed his youthful energy to one glorious war and another hopeless one, a youth he could have used in trying to accumulate riches, but now he was worse off for it. He hadn’t been taken care of and in fact, he’d been tossed out like a disposable toy. This gross injustice would have to be corrected somehow, and he’d have to do it.
It may not have been methodical at first. Drawing on his wartime experience, he built for himself some kind of homemade gun. Then he went to the embassy of the Holy See, where he killed a guard and stole his much better gun. Since no one was around to see, and he had no personal connection to the guard and stole nothing else noteworthy, he wasn’t caught, and the murder was forgotten about. Something about the time as well, made these things easier to sweep under the rug. When incidents were deemed embarrassing, powerful people tended to have them covered up.
His next two years were spent planning the heist. He visited many banks before settling on the Land Bank in the city center, near the downtown area. It was busy doling out cash to all the other banks, so most of the guards there were occupied with the armored cars outside the building, accompanying them to the other banks, leaving the interior undefended.
He went there many times before the attack, mostly just changing big bills into smaller bills, change for his little vendor’s stall, he told them. He didn’t even open an account.
The day of the heist, he wore a wig and a surgical mask.
“This money belongs to the government, but your life is your property. I’m here for $10 million,” he said and then shot a clerk in the leg. He hopped over the counter, collected five million on his own and escaped.
The police couldn’t find him for a long time, even though he flaunted his new wealth in his own place, buying a new tv and other electronics, visiting the red light district in Wanhua as often as he wanted.
Another taxi driver fitting his description was picked up by the police and tortured into a false confession. One night, around three in the morning, the police reported that he had broken out of their car and jumped off of a bridge into the Xindian river, where he drowned. Why was he being taken out in their car when he had already been jailed? How could he have escaped? The story was impossible, obviously, but it had to be accepted at face value and written into the report. The much more likely story was that he had been tortured and beaten until he died, an accidental killing, and then tossed into the river at a time when no one else would be around in order to cover it up and avoid trouble. The police were like that in those days.
In the meantime, Li Shi Ke had stuffed four million dollars into a paper bag (it probably didn’t seem as casual as he believed that it did) and asked his neighbor to hold onto it in his house.
His neighbor, thinking that the situation was suspicious, reported it to the police, who waltzed through the squatter’s settlement, found Li Shi Ke at home, and arrested him.
When asked about what he wanted the money for, he said that the money was for his neighbor’s daughter to use to go to college and study abroad. She was always so cute and nice, and he wanted her to have a better future.
The reward for turning him in was two million. The bag held four million.
He was executed after a brief trial, the execution carried out swiftly, even televised. They tied his hands behind his back and force fed him a bottle of wine and some meat. They did that to all of the prisoners before execution so that they would be senseless to it. His expression in his last photo is sort of open, guileless.
If no one turned on him, there’d be no way to know that he had done it. That was the crux of every police capture, every midnight execution, kneeling, shot by a pistol in the back of the head. If there was some neighborhood solidarity, then the masses would be a monolith, impenetrable. Isn’t that why politicians always want to tear down slums?
That was the essence of White Terror. It wasn’t fear of the police or the authorities, but it was suspicion of family, neighbors, children. Anyone with a slight grievance. White Terror was alienation.
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