Tiger General: The Killing Of Victor Chang - Richard Hall

Victor Chang was a world-renowned heart surgeon. His patients included Fiona Coote (who at 14 was Australia's youngest heart translplant patient) and Kerry Packer. He was the driving force behind the successful heart translplant programme at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, and since his death, the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute has been established to continue his work. Dr. Chang was shot down in a suburban Sydney street on July 4, 1991.

Immediately stories began circulating - and continue to do so to this day - of the doctor's involvement with Triads, that he was being blackmailed and that he was involved in a black market of transplant organs.

This book addresses the rumours and recounts the facts of the crime. It also examines why these stories emerged. It includes the story of Quong Tart, who was a successful Chinese businessman in Sydney last century. He, too, was attacked for money - bludgeoned with an iron bar in his tea shop in the Queen Victoria Building. Unlike Victor Chang, Quong Tart survived. Dr. Chang's murderers were members of a secret society called the Wah Kee - not a powerful Triad, but a clapped-out organization whose power had been on the wane for some years.

The killers were Malaysian, and were it not for the tragic consequences of their actions, their plans to extort money from the wealthy Chinese doctor would resemble pure farce. They chose Victor Chang from a list of wealthy overseas Chinese published in a magazine. Once in Sydney, they slept on the floors of friend's units, and later were three to a room in a Summer Hill boarding house; they had no money, no real plan and no understanding of the differences between extorting people in Malaysia (where it has been common) and in Australia.

The issues raised by this book aim to question just how far Australia has succeeded in becoming a tolerant multicultural society.