Singapore's own private investigator?
Taken from http://www.harmonsingh.com.sg/interview.htm
Triads to trysts KARI HUUS - MSNBC (17/9/97) After mopping up Singapore’s mobsters, a top detective turns his sights on wayward husbands and corporate crime . | ||||
SINGAPORE — When Harmon Singh was still a fresh-faced recruit in short pants, he had already tapped the wrath of Singapore’s underworld. In 1961, following an informant’s tip, the 21-year-old police detective walked right into an ambush of thugs, who flung acid in his face — a favored form of revenge in Asia. “My shirt was mostly burned, my pants were burned, my body was burning,” says Singh. But he grabbed the nearest guy, and hung on. “I told myself, my dear friend, if I die, he’ll jolly well die with me … I never let him go.” | ||||
![]() | EVEN THOUGH SINGH was nearly blinded from the incident, and has scars from many others scrapes, you can’t miss a certain note of nostalgia when he talks about his thug-busting days. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, dozens of criminal gangs, splinter gangs and women’s gangs, like the fierce Red Butterflies, operated in this city-state. The mob ran opium dens, prostitution, gambling dens, smuggling and robbery rackets. Singh has written an entirebook of his pursuit of criminals, including a high-speed chase that started on motorcycles and continued in the back of a moving garbage truck, antics that won him the nickname “Danger Man” in the local press. | |||
END OF AN ERA To some extent, Singh put himself out of business. By the time he retired and started a private agency in 1981, the city had little gangster activity — it has, in fact, very little crime at all. And the government is known for its Draconian laws to keep it that way. | ||||
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These days, commercial work helps pay the bills. In Singapore, says Singh, it’s fairly common to investigate employees and discover that they have set up a competing company on the side, and use their jobs mainly to divert good clients away from their employer. Singh also takes cases to follow salespeople who stray outside their assigned territory because they are selling for two companies at the same time. He also lists intellectual property rights investigation and insurance claims investigation on his business card. But what really keeps Singh’s phones ringing is infidelity. “Mmmmhmmm… yes darling. OK,” he says, nearly whispering into the phone, while checking one of his two beepers. “Mmmmhmmm. We’ll let you know.” The 58-year-old is immaculate in his lily white shirt and pants, and 14 knuckle-dusting gold rings. In a tiny office near Singapore’s Cricket Club, Singh is surrounded by the plaques and awards given to him for syndicate cracking. But in the new Singapore, the gumshoe has tapped a much deeper well. Seventy-five percent of his clients are women who want to know what their husbands are really up to when they work late. “Matrimonial work” is booming in Singapore. Not that affairs are on the rise, necessarily — who’s to say? — but women have more money, better academic backgrounds and less patience for hanky-panky these days, according to Singh. He has 60 people on the streets who spend most of their time tracking down husbands or doing background checks on prospective grooms. And Singh is just one — albeit the most famous — of the dozens of agencies that handle marital investigations in a country with just 3 million people. Taken from http://www.sk.com.sg/credentials.html Awards & CertificationsSK Investigation Services has been awarded the Outstanding Organisation 2011 award. Whereby from 300, only a selected 200 organisations in South East Asia are selected to receive this award. We are also proud to received the 2010 Successful Entrepreneur Top 100 Platinum Category recipient in Singapore. Mr. Lawrence Koh is nominated by the United State of "American Biographical Institute's" and carried the title of Order of International Ambassadors, 2011 MAN OF THE YEAR and ABI Fellow, which is one of the World's Leading Biographical Reference Publishers and Authorities on Global Contemporary Achievement. |