A Dying Business

In his Draconic drive to eliminate corruption from South Korea, austere Strong man General Park Chung Hee has cracked down hardest on the nation's smugglers.

Illicit trade in luxury goods used to be one of the nation's biggest businesses, but in the year since Park took power, hundreds of lesser offenders were sentenced to road gangs, and ten ringleaders went on trial for their lives. Last week, in Seoul's Sodaemun prison, the death sentence against a smuggler was carried out for the first time: the hangman's noose was lowered over South Korea's most wanted criminal, surly, burly Han Pil Kook.

Eleven years ago, Han, then 26, was just a disgruntled employee in a government department store in Pyongyang, capital of Red North Korea. He fled south with retreating United Nations troops, found himself in the teeming southern Korean coastal city of Pusan. Like thousands of other jobless refugees, Han opened a tiny store specializing in black-market supplies filched from U.S. military ware houses and PX stores, luxury goods smuggled from Japan. Soon Han muscled his way to the top of the pack, sported a smashed nose and livid knife scars as testimony to his ruthlessness. Not satisfied with being a middleman, he branched out into large-scale smuggling. Han's fleet of speedboats, powered by salvaged aircraft engines and diesel tank motors, easily outdistanced coast guard patrol boats on the short, 40-mile run between South Korean landing coves and the Japanese island of Tsushima; on land, Han's Jeep convoys loaded with booty defiantly traveled without license plates and with their own armed guard. It was a profitable two-way trade: to Japan he ferried Koreans who each paid $150-$300 for the illegal passage; from Japan he smuggled contraband cosmetics, toys, transistor radios, small machinery. By 1960 Han was grossing $500,000 a year. Dozens of customs and police officials were on his payroll.

When General Park's reformers began to get tough, Han fled into the interior. For months he moved from village to village before government agents finally nabbed him. Han's nine colleagues in contraband, still behind bars, will probably also get the death penalty. Promised General Park last week: "We will send all smugglers to the gallows."

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