had gotten a vasectomy after his fourth child with his wife, making such
claims impossible.
“He was on drugs,” Henry told me. Henry said that the chairman got
surgery after a car crash in the 1980s. “He [the chairman] was hurt so bad
that he had to take Demerol. It got him hooked.” Demerol is a potent
opioid painkiller.
Henry was chairman of the board of Samsung’s Koryo General Hospital
Foundation from 1981 to 1994. He said that the Korean government
inquired about an alleged supply of Demerol being stored at the hospital for
the Samsung chairman. Henry said the allegations were true, even though
the government didn’t press charges. “We had to supply [Demerol],” he
said. “It’s totally illegal for us.”
These kinds of claims about the Samsung chairman were familiar to
South Koreans. Kim Yong-chul, a former prosecutor who later went to
work for Samsung, wrote in his 2010 memoir, Thinking of Samsung, about
a strange case he brought in court against a drug dealer who set up a
cocaine ring, because the drug dealer thought it would help him land the
business of Chairman Lee.
Then there were the hookers.
In a series of videos that were made public, Chairman Lee sits back in a
recliner chair, the window shades closed, wearing a ragged white T-shirt,
watching a television screen, and pulling from his trademark stack of
DVDs next to him, while he proceeds to pay four women for their sexual
services. One of the women secretly filmed him from a hidden camera
attached to her handbag. In April 2018, three people were convicted for
attempting to blackmail Samsung with the video before it was leaked to the
media. They were each given a prison sentence of three to four years.
One of the journalists who broke the story works for the investigative
website Newstapa. He told me, “I always heard [that] the chairman [was]
this deity.” Recollecting his thoughts when he first saw the leaked video, he
said, “And now we get to see him in the flesh. This is it. This is the
emperor. It’s disillusioning.”
—
WHILE LEE II WAS slow in taking the reins of Samsung Electronics, he
gradually began to rise to the occasion.