KELVIN CHAN, TIM SULLIVAN, AP
MACAU (AP) — The heavy-set man got out of a Macau taxi one night last September, heading to the lobby bar at one of the city's most expensive hotels. The bar at the Wynn Macau is a quiet place, where the women are often in evening dresses and the gamblers can relax with $300 Cuban cigars. He was dressed casually, nondescript really. There were no bodyguards, no flashy women. It wasn't what you'd expect for a man once tipped to be the next dictator of North Korea.
But by that night, Kim Jong Nam had spent years in exile, gambling and drinking and arranging the occasional business deal as he traveled across Asia and Europe. His fortunes had apparently declined in recent years, and he'd moved his family from a luxurious seafront condominium complex in Macau to a more affordable apartment building. When he bumped into a friend outside the Wynn he was looking for company.
"He wanted us to join him because he didn't want to drink alone," said an insider in Macau's gambling industry who was introduced to Kim that night by a mutual friend. In a city awash in new money and Chinese gamblers flaunting their wealth, Kim was low-key and polite, making no mention of his powerful family.
"It just seemed odd that the son of a dictator would just be — you wouldn't know him from an average dude on the street," said the insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, not wanting to alienate the city-state's gambling fraternity, where privacy is deeply valued.
Kim's outwardly easygoing lifestyle hid the fact that by then he'd known for years that his younger half-brother, now the ruler of North Korea, had ordered him hunted down, South Korean intelligence officials say.
On a Monday morning in mid-February, a few steps past a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop in the cavernous budget terminal at Kuala Lumpur's airport, that order was apparently carried out. A pair of women who Malaysian police say were recruited by a team of North Koreans approached Kim as he walked through the terminal. He was heading back to Macau, returning home on AirAsia's 10:50 a.m. flight.
At least one of the women suddenly wiped a powerful toxin on Kim's face, smearing him with VX nerve agent before quickly walking away. Minutes later, after walking to the airport's medical clinic, Kim went into convulsions. A few minutes after that, as an ambulance rushed him to a hospital, Kim Jong Nam died. He was 45 years old.
___
Kim's mother was one of North Korea's most famous movie stars. His father was the dictator-prince of North Korea, a deeply isolated country where the same family has been in power since 1948 and the rulers are worshipped in all-encompassing cults of personality.
But Kim Jong Nam's grandfather, the founding ruler Kim Il Sung, didn't approve of his mother, and refused to allow his parents to marry. So Kim spent his childhood in luxurious isolation, hidden from his grandfather, shuttled among Pyongyang mansions and watched over by platoons of bodyguards. When his mother fell ill, reportedly suffering from depression, she was sent to Moscow for treatment and Kim was raised by his maternal aunt.