COMMENT | Botak Chin - crime, punishment and posterity

COMMENT | In 2006, the artist Wong Hoy Cheong produced "Chronicles of Crime", a series of black-and-white images depicting infamous Malaysian crimes. In an interview with Susan Acret of the Asia Arts Archive, Wong explains that crime “regarding migration and movements of people, is universal. It is something people despise but yet they are deeply fascinated by its presence.”

Wong’s models loosely portray their outlaw muses. In one, a bald man is seated beneath a barred window, a plate of food untouched before him. "Last Supper" loosely depicts the very end of the life of Wong Swee Chin – better known as Botak Chin – awaiting the noose. There is much that one assumes about him – a bald-headed Robin Hood character, robbing the rich and helping the poor. The romantic image being portrayed is inaccurate; for instance, Botak Chin had a head full of hair.

Now compare this with another one from the collection of the New Straits Times. He is being marched down the steps of the courthouse in 1980 as a man condemned to the gallows, flanked by police officers on all sides as reporters crowd around. He has just pleaded guilty under the Internal Security Act. He is defiant, still a young man at this point despite the few years spent in Pudu Gaol after his arrest, the state’s “monopoly on violence” being exercised. He will be hanged the next year, his career of crime brought to an end, instructing that his ashes be thrown into the drain.

Regardless, he keeps a dubious place of honour in popular memory, as both a Robin Hood and brutal gangster. In official memory, he is memorialised in the Police Museum, where a display of the weapons seized from Botak Chin’s gang following his arrest in 1976 is prominent - a shotgun with shells, a .38 Luger, .32 and .25 Beretta and a .38 Walther. Other police success stories are commemorated, including the killing of Bentong Kali but Botak Chin’s gang takes a certain strange pride/notoriety of place.

A brief look at his career, synthesised from recollections between Najib Abdul Razak and retired officer Kenny Woodworth and Bernama - in 1969, after eight armed robberies, Wong Swee Chin was sentenced to seven years in prison, but at this time he had yet to use firearms in the robberies – just ...