2 Taiwan Gangsters Guilty in Liu Killing, Get Life Terms

Two Taiwanese gangsters were convicted today of the California murder of Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu and were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Both defendants, Chen Chi-li, 41, leader of United Bamboo, Taiwan’s largest underworld gang, and Wu Tun, 35, a gang member, had been subject to the death penalty.

However, Presiding Judge Cheng Chun-chia, who pronounced sentence, said he spared the life of Chen because the gang leader had confessed his crime to investigators. Wu Tun, the judge said, received a life sentence because he killed Liu at Chen’s behest.

Neither defendant was present in court for the five-minute session. Their trial was completed in 4 1/2 hours on April 2.

Liu, a frequent critic of the Taiwanese government, was shot to death Oct. 15 in the garage of his home in Daly City, a San Francisco suburb. Chen and Wu were tried here because the United States has no extradition treaty with Taiwan. A third suspected member of the hit squad, Tung Kuei-sen, 33, is still at large.

A second trial in the murder resumes here Friday when a military court takes up the case of Vice Adm. Wang Hsi-ling, former chief of military intelligence here, and two subordinates, who have been implicated in the killing. Chen said he arranged the murder of Liu on Wang’s orders.

The government here has cited the court proceedings as proof of its determination to “bring the facts to light” in the murder.

However, U.S. authorities in Washington and representatives of Liu’s family here suggest the trials have shed little new light on what always has been a pivotal question in the crime--to what extent were Taiwan government officials involved in the murder of an American citizen on American soil? Liu’s widow, Helen and others have charged that Liu was killed on orders of the Taiwan government in retaliation for his writings.

Chen’s conviction notwithstanding, much of what has happened here in recent weeks has deepened suspicions that the government has been less than fully candid about the role of military intelligence officials in the murder plot.

For example, a key point in a chronology of the case given to foreign reporters by the Taiwan government here last month was that the Jan. 13 detention of the three intelligence officers accused in the murder was prompted by Chen’s implication of them on that same day.

But information that has become available through court proceedings and interviews with U.S. officials since the trial began indicates that investigators learned of the intelligence officials’ alleged involvement as early as November--and failed to immediately pass it on to American police investigating the case.

Government spokesmen as a result have retracted the claim that the intelligence officials were detained on the same day Chen implicated them. However, a notebook kept by Chen that some lawyers here regard as a crucial piece of evidence that would help show how much Taiwan authorities knew about intelligence involvement has not been made public.

Since the arrest of Wang and his lieutenants, the government has consistently claimed that whatever role they may have had in the Liu murder, they were acting on their own, without official sanction or the knowledge of higher government officials. The official indictment of Wang, for example, specifically suggests that he acted for undisclosed personal motives.

Some American officials and Chinese critics of the Taiwan government remain skeptical of such claims. As evidence of their skepticism, they suggest that the government took action against the intelligence officials only after unsuccessfully attempting to avoid disclosure of their involvement.

“Obviously there’s an effort being made . . . to make it look like they’re the ones that broke the case . . . rather than having had their hand forced by the information made available in the United States,” charged Jerome Cohen, a former Harvard law professor who is representing Helen Liu.

Cohen cited the FBI’s investigation of the Liu murder, pressure from the U.S. government and public disclosure of a tape-recorded confession by Chen as key factors in forcing Taiwan to take action against Wang.

Capt. Mike Scott of the Daly City Police Department told The Times that he acquired a copy of the tape recording, which names the intelligence officials, from Chen’s associates in California on Jan. 13. Key portions of its content had been published in Chinese language newspapers in Hong Kong and the United States a few days earlier.

A U.S. State Department official who spoke on condition that he not be identified said that it was the acquisition of this tape that “forced them (the Taiwan authorities) to make the acknowledgement” of the intelligence officials’ involvement.

Albert Ching-Hsiu Lin, director of the division of information and protocol in the Government Information Office, denied that U.S. acquisition of the tape prompted detention of the intelligence officials and the Jan. 15 announcement of their implication in the case.

“No, that’s not true,” Lin said. “We made the decision completely on our own.”

Lin acknowledged, however, that the government information office chronology of developments in the case had been incorrect when it said that Chen Chi-li implicated the three intelligence officials on Jan. 13 and that they were detained the same day. He blamed the mistake on a translation error.

Lin said that Chen actually named the intelligence officials at an earlier date, and that Wang and the others were not detained until later because “it took some time to sort out what was really going on, based on testimony from various sources.”

Lin said he did not know when Chen implicated the intelligence officials or what development prompted their detention in mid-January.

However, Justice Minister Shih Chi-yang told Taiwan’s national legislature on Feb. 26 that Chen Chi-li told investigators on Nov. 23, in a written confession, that he was recruited and trained by the intelligence bureau and ordered to kill Liu.

Chen Chi-li was arrested in a Nov. 12 sweep of gangsters in Taiwan unrelated to the Liu murder. Taiwan officials say they learned almost immediately that Chen was involved in the Liu killing and passed his name on to U.S. authorities on Nov. 17, enabling the Americans to break the case.

Daly City police, however, say any information they received from Taiwan was “insignificant.” They acknowledge that they received information about Chen from Taiwan authorities in mid-November but say that by then they already had identified him as a prime suspect through their own investigation. They add that Taiwan officials said nothing about potential intelligence agency involvement in November.

“Much later (in January) we found out that Chen had made a full confession implicating Wang and the others,” said Daly City Lt. Thomas Reese. “Taiwan never told us about that.”

In late March, the China Times, a leading Taipei newspaper with close ties to the ruling Kuomintang Party, printed what it said was a copy of Chen Chi-li’s Nov. 23 confession, in which the gang leader named Wang as the person who told him to kill Liu, and provides extensive details of his dealings with the Intelligence Bureau.

Notebook Mentioned

According to the paper’s version of Chen Chi-li’s confession, he wrote that during training by the Intelligence Bureau he was given a notebook, and that “this was the notebook discovered by the police at my home later.”

The confession also mentioned that after returning to Taiwan following Liu’s death, Chen inserted a report to the Intelligence Bureau in the notebook.

Cohen, former director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, has called the notebook the most important single piece of evidence in the case. The contents of the notebook and report have not been made public, however, and authorities have not said whether Wang or other officials are named in them.

Not Yet Part of File

Yeh Chien-chao, an attorney for Chen Chi-li, told The Times that the notebook and report are not yet part of the court file, although he requested a week agothat they be added to it.

Yeh also said he will appeal Chen’s conviction.

In Daly City, Helen Liu told a Times reporter that she had mixed feelings about the outcome of Chen’s trial. “On one hand, I believe Chen should have been sentenced to death because this was a well-planned murder,” she said. “But I also think that Chen was just taking orders, and the whole truth never came out.”

One of Helen Liu’s lawyers here, Hsieh Chang-ting, voiced similar sentiments. “I think the court has some political considerations,” he said. “If the true story is made public, for example, it will influence the American-Taiwan relationship, it will influence the image of the government here, and it will influence struggles inside the Koumintang. They may let some part of the truth be public, but they will never let the whole story be public.”

Also contributing to this story was Times staff writer Mark Arax in Los Angeles.