How Triad gangs link bright lights of Hong Kong to the streets of the West Midlands

At night there is a bustle, urgency and energy about Temple Street not matched by the shopping heart on Park Street, Walsall. Its heartbeat is faster. Much faster.

Yet it was a divide bridged by the world’s most ruthless and feared criminal organisations as its foot soldiers attempted to gain sway in the underworld by unprecedented savagery.

The Triads succeeded, say former detectives and gangland experts. Those first pioneers spread the syndicate’s tentacles to the UK.

They are here, among us. They are part of an increasingly international criminal portfolio that includes urban gangs, Albanian mobsters, the Russian mafia and even Cosa Nostra.

They are here carrying the initiation marks and scars of the order’s more modern incarnations, the Wo Shing Wo and Wo On Lok factions. But the first tentative steps towards UK conquest were made by one of the oldest and most infamous brotherhoods, 14K Triad.

They are unseen and secretive, but the Tongs and Triads are here, among us, gradually tightening their grip since first arriving in Birmingham, London and Liverpool’s post-war Chinese quarters.

And an orgy of street violence across the Irish Sea 45 years ago provided blood-stained proof the Triads menace had spread to Walsall.

When the pitch battle on Dublin’s Middle Abbey Street had subsided, two lay dead, another blinded for life, many more injured. One report of the riot alleged severed fingers were found at the scene. A newspaper likened the scene to an abattoir.

Crowds who had gathered outside the city’s Adelphi and Curzon cinemas on that warm July evening scattered in panic as a power struggle between rival Triad gangs broke into terrifying turf war. Armed mobsters hacked, slashed and stabbed rivals, with the arsenal of weapons later recovered including a .22 rifle, meat cleavers, kitchen knives and meat cleavers.

“It was much worse than any Kung Fu movie we’ve ever shown,” the Curzon’s manageress told reporters. In fact, many bystanders initially believed a Kung Fu movie was being filmed: “It wasn’t until I saw the blood gushing from someone’s throat that I realised this was for real,” said one witness.

The addresses of some of those allegedly taking part in the rampage surprised detectives, they turned the investigation’s focus to the West Midlands. Kieran Fagan, former Irish Times reporter turned author, revealed.

One was from Walsall, two others had Birmingham connections.

The Triads are among us, here in the West Midlands, and they have walked in the shadows of our towns and cities for years.

At first, a meagre number of mobsters chanced their arm in Britain’s illicit red light and drug industries. A trickle.

The 1974 launch of the Independent Commission Against Corruption of Hong Kong – introduced to weed out police officers whose palms had been greased by Triads – put the squeeze on gangs on their home turf.