Bo Guagua (above), the preppy son of Chinese politician Bo Xilai and wife Gu (below), got help gaining admittance to an elite prep school from the connected Brit, who may have been killed over embezzlement. (Facebook)
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For more than a decade, a silver-maned British businessman name Neil Heywood had been working in China, a consultant who introduced Western companies to the nation’s rich business opportunities.
It was mid-November, and the well-born Brit was ordered to a meeting in the southwestern city of Chongqing by representatives of the city’s party boss — nothing necessarily unusual there, he spent years cultivating relationships with the Communist nations’s political aristocracy.
Alone in his hotel room, Heywood reportedly tried to call his usual contacts to find out where the meeting would be held.
No one picked up their phone. So he waited.
The next day, Neil Heywood was found dead.
His demise has triggered one of the biggest political scandals to hit China in decades — one that has already toppled a rising star in the Communist government.
The international murder mystery is the very embodiment of the famous quote by leader Mao Zedong: “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”
Heywood, 41 was the typical Englishman abroad — a Jaguar-driving charmer in crumpled linen suits, trailed by a constant cloud of tobacco smoke.
Despite being born in the affluent district of Kensington, he regaled in roughing it — at one point in his life he made fishing nets in Florida, stayed in hostels in England and crossed the Atlantic in a small boat.
When he arrived in China in the early 1990s, he met Bo Xilai, then the mayor of the northeast port city of Dalian, and his glamorous wife, Gu Kailai, 53, a sharp-dressed lawyer descended from one of the country’s most famous generals.
Heywood is said to have eased the passage of Bo’s son, Bo Guagua, into Harrow, an elite British private school and Heywood’s alma mater.
The playboy son — known for embarrassing his family by posing on Facebook with lipstick on his kisser — is now 24 and a graduate student at Harvard.
Gu spent a good deal of time in England when her son attended school there.
In 2000, she formed a nebulous company called Adad Limited, an outfit registered in Dorset — close to where Heywood lived. The company, now defunct, existed to provide “other service activities,” according to Bloomberg News.
Her husband’s rise to power was steady. The so-called “princeling” was the son of Bo Yibo, one of the Eight Elders of the Communist Party. From Dalian, he moved to Chongqing, where he was a party boss who led a 10-month crackdown on organized crime.
The populist leader harkened to the days of Mao and the cult of personality — anathema under the shadowy rule of Hu Jintao, described as “China’s Silent Ruler.”
Bo wanted a more equitable development in a country where inequality still prevails, and he made a Western-style push for higher office — unheard of in China.
“Ninety-five percent of us common people support Bo,” a woman told the Los Angeles Times. Private business owners grumbled that his crackdown on crime was a way to snatch private wealth and distribute it back to the people. Reformers cheered.
Yet even as he railed against the accumulation of private wealth, Bo’s wife — and family members — are awash in it.
Bloomberg reported that Gu’s five sisters control a network of businesses from China to the Carribbean worth over $126 million. Her eldest sister, Gu Wangjiang, 64, owns a staggering $114 million in shares of an eastern China printing company.
She and another sister serve as director of several other companies, including some with offshore registry records.
Bo’s older brother, Bo Xiyong, has reportedly served under an assumed name as executive director of China Everbright Holdings, a state-owned company that controls one of China’s major banks and other businesses.
Heywood’s death may have faded in the city of 32 million had it not been for Wang Lijun, the former deputy mayor and police chief of Chongqing known as “RoboCop” and “Crazy Wang.”
Heywood’s family was initially told there would be no investigation or autopsy.
Their son’s body was cremated in a municipal crematorium.
The Chongqing police claimed his death was caused by a heart attack triggered by the overconsumption of alcohol — unusual, some who knew him told British papers, considering Heywood was not a heavy drinker.
But he was a chain smoker, and his 64-year-old father reportedly died of a heart attack over cocktails at his London home in 2004.
Crazy Wang was Bo’s muscle in the crime-busting initiative that netted close to 5,000 arrests, including mob bosses, and 13 executions.
In late January, Wang went to Bo with suspicions he had about Bo’s wife’s involvement in Heywood’s death.
Wang reportedly told Bo that Gu believed Heywood had abused or stolen money from Bo’s family.
The police chief was promptly fired and briefly sought refuge in the US consulate in Chengdu.
At the consulate, he accused Gu of poisoning Heywood — an astonishing accusation that compelled the Foreign Office to urge Chinese officials to reopen the case, which was classified this week as an “intentional homicide.”
Gu is now in custody while the murder is investigated.
And a Chinese official admitted to supplying deadly potassium cyanide to Gu, the Sunday Times of London reported, citing leaks to Chinese web sites.
Xia Deliang, a former Communist party district leader in Chongqing reportedly confessed to government probers last week, and was arrested.
Zhang Xiaojun, a servant in Bo’s home in Chonqing, is also being detained — lending credence to the theory that authorities suspect the crime may have taken place there.
Authorities have yet to release the name of the hotel. And Heywood’s widow, Wang Lulu, is now desperately trying to flee the country, according to reports.
Those who knew Gu are incredulous.
“I have trouble believing she would murder anybody,” said Ed Byrne, a Denver lawyer who met Gu in 1996 when she hired him to represent Chinese companies in a bankruptcy case in America.
“She was very charismatic. She just had that spark — some people have it, and some people would like to figure out how to get it,” he told The Post.
Byrne knew Gu as Horus Kai, a name she used in foreign business dealings.
Horus, the falcon deity that is the ancient Egyptian god of war, sun, and sky, may have suited her husband even better, the lawyer said.
“I didn’t get the same sense of toughness from her,” Byrne said.
Her English was polished, matching the tailoring of her clothes. She was akin to the Jackie Kennedy of China, Byrne said. She certainly stood out inside an austere courthouse in Mobile, Ala. “She was like a fashion plate,” he recalled.
After their case was won, Bo and Gu — who wrote a book about the whole affair called “Winning a Lawsuit in the US” — invited their legal team back to China, and Gu acted as the tour guide.
“She was trying to explain to us how the same word in the Chinese language could have different meanings . . . depending on the intonation.”
How close Heywood was to Bo before his death remains murky.
Gu was reportedly the godmother to Heywood’s 11-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son.
Some say they fell out of touch over the past few years, as Gu’s mental and physical health reportedly declined and Bo’s power strengthened. Others speculate that Heywood may have had an affair with the lute-playing diva.
The night before his death, Heywood sensed something was amiss, telling a friend that he was “in trouble,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Gu had reportedly become increasingly neurotic after a corruption probe in 2007, and at one point ordered Heywood to divorce his wife and take a vow of loyalty — which he refused.
Her increasing paranoia may have been triggered by the fact that the Mandarin-speaking Brit worked as a sometime consultant for Hakluyt & Co. — an intelligence firm founded by retired officers of the British intelligence service MI6. His family rejected any claims that their son was a spy, according to Reuters.
Heywood tried to take precautions.
He reportedly approached British authorities in 2010 about applying for citizenship for his wife. The British Embassy would only confirm that the family was offered consular “protection.”
He stashed documents with information about Bo’s overseas investments with a lawyer in Britain, according to reports.
Gu is said to have known about the documents and was certain there was a rat in the family’s inner circle.
It was Heywood’s “insurance policy,” in the event something happened to him.
He may have been onto something. The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, blasted unnamed officials it says have used friends, children, wives and mistresses to stash their wealth overseas.
“Some even go through a variety of channels to clandestinely gain a foreign identity or dual nationality,” the paper said.
Whatever genial past Heywood, Bo and Gu once shared now seemed as vaporous as the ribbons of fog swirling in the air that mid-November night.
In the end, the Communist Party maverick’s fall was swift and decisive.
Bo was booted as party chief last month, and this week suspended from his remaining posts on the Central Committee and the Politburo last week.
The People’s Daily said in a fiery editorial that Bo’s actions “have seriously violated the party’s discipline, caused damage to the party and to the country, and harmed the image of the party and the country.”
The paper claims that Bo’s family was on good terms with Heywood but had a conflict over “economic interests.”
“Bo Xilai was a bold experimenter who was like a catfish stirring up China’s stagnant political pond. His enemies couldn’t catch him until now,” a source, who knows Bo and his family, told Reuters.
Experts said Heywood’s death could be the match stick that scorches top Communist Party officials.
“It’s a bare-knuckled fight for power,” said Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China.”
Bo is now backed into a corner like a “dangerous animal,” Chang said.
With Heywood’s death, Bo may have a “corpse in his closet,” he added. But Bo knows where the “bodies are buried” of China’s Communist Party, already rife with infighting.
“If they can’t defeat Bo once and for all he very well may rise up and strike his enemies,” Chang told The Post.
“Bo’s enemies want to drive him into the ground and teach him a lesson that no one should be a populist and rock the boat. But that could destabilize the party. The Communist Party is fracturing.”
And the United States could find itself facing a new threat, he warned.
That’s because as the party splinters, the People’s Liberation Army rises, he said.
China’s flag officers became power brokers a decade ago after they settled a tug-of-war between current leader Hu Jintao and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who tried to hold onto his post as chairman of the Central Military Commission, the author noted.
A decade later, Bo took a page out of Hu’s playbook and sought the military’s support in February once things got prickly with party chiefs in Beijing after Wang Lijun fled to the consulate.
This time around, military influence looks like it will expand even more, Chang said.
And as the army gains more influence, it is implementing its own policies. The ongoing standoff in the South China Sea with the Philippines looks like the result of a more confident Chinese military — which could fill the void created by a ruptured Communist Party, he noted.
“This means we have a much greater chance of a confrontation with Beijing,” Chang said. “I predict that this will splinter the Communist Party in such a serious fashion that it’s possible the Communist Party will fail. It’s that serious.”