In Search of Lil' Kim

By Austin Ramzy

The plush chairs in the lobby of Macau's Mandarin Oriental Hotel are filled with a cadre of journalists looking distinctly slovenly in their luxurious surroundings. Tripods poke out from underneath couches, cameras rest on tables, and reporters crane their necks to stare down the corridors. The object of the press pack's Friday-night stakeout is not the Prime Minister of Portugal, here on a two-day visit to his country's former colony. Instead, we're hoping to catch a glimpse of a man known for getting busted trying to sneak into Japan to visit Tokyo Disneyland and for his reported ability to drink 10 boilermakers in a sitting. That would be Kim Jong Nam, eldest son of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

The South China Morning Post reported the previous day that the 35-year-old was living large in the Chinese territory an hour's ferry ride from Hong Kong. Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun even ran a picture of Kim's distinctively pudgy progeny standing on a Macau street sporting sunglasses, a man purse and a smile on his face. As the Dear Leader's firstborn son, Jong Nam was once considered his father's probable successor. But after the 2001 Disney debacle, when he was stopped at Narita International Airport with a forged Dominican passport and then deported to China, Jong Nam has apparently fallen from favor. That didn't diminish the interest of the media, especially in Japan. "North Korea is a No. 1 concern for us," says Tsuyoshi Ikeda, a news director for Nippon Television, puffing a cigarette in the Mandarin's lobby. "So it's important that we watch them."

That's easier said than done in a throbbing boomtown like Macau. In 2002 the Chinese government lifted a 40-year monopoly on casinos in Macau, prompting a gambling-and-tourism explosion that brought a record 22 million visitors to the territory last year. Fueled by punters from mainland China, it has surpassed the Las Vegas Strip as the world's biggest gambling center. As it has grown, Macau has begun to shed its image as a shady place that handles illicit international finance. When the U.S. Treasury Department in 2005 named Macau's Banco Delta Asia a "willing pawn" in money laundering for Pyongyang, regulators in Macau agreed to freeze $24 million in North Korean funds held by the bank. Given the crackdown, it may well have been embarrassing for a potential heir of the nuclear-armed hermit kingdom's ruler to pop up in the territory.

And pop up again. Days after the Macau sighting reports, Japan's TBS television broadcast footage of a man believed to be Kim Jong Nam walking to a cab. He was wearing a powder blue sport coat and pink shirt and drinking a green beverage from a bottle. "Are you staying at the Mandarin hotel?" the reporter asked. "I cannot tell you," the man replied. "My privacy."

Like most of the other reporters, we missed that encounter, so we return to the Mandarin.

An agitated TV cameraman from a Japanese network sits on the edge of a couch. "Have you seen him?" I ask. "If I had seen him, I wouldn't be here," he snaps. So we head out again, popping our heads into every club and casino we see. At the Grand Emperor Hotel, its entrance fronted by two gilded carriages, we ride an escalator to the amplified din of jangling coins broadcast through the sound system. I doubt Jong Nam is really here, but on a floor of slot machines, I ask hotel staff to page Mr. Kim. The woman behind the desk stares at me blankly. "I'm sorry, sir," she says. "I can't turn off the music."

The next morning we head for an apartment that the younger Kim keeps for his family, at least, that is, according a report in South Korea's Chosun Ilbo. It's in an exclusive waterfront development, but save for a sunflower image painted on its tile wall, "his" place looks identical to those around it. We ring the doorbell, but no one shows. A security guard gives us a dirty look, so we buzz off. Our options dwindling, we decide to call off our search. Perhaps we should have followed the lead of Nippon Television's Norihisa Kabaya, whom we ran into earlier. He was patrolling a boardwalk near the black sand of Hac Sa beach, video camera rolling while his interpreter waved a blown-up photograph of the smiling Kim Jong Nam. "Have you seen this man?" the interpreter asked us. We have, but only in pictures.

With reporting by Ishaan Tharoor/Macau