SEONGNAM, South Korea—Three potential whistleblowers are dead in “mafia”-linked scandals threatening to engulf one of the two leading contenders in a tight race to become South Korea’s next president.
The ruling party’s candidate for the top job is suspected of profiting immensely from a multi-million-dollar real estate swindle, which allegedly included members of organized crime in his hometown of Seongnam.
Three men who may have had access to damning information about Lee Jae-myung’s murky past as mayor of Seongnam have dropped dead in little more than two months.
Just weeks before the crucial presidential election, a veil of silence has descended on this sprawling city on the southern fringes of metropolitan Seoul.
Family members of the three executives who carried with them the secrets of a massive real estate deal have not spoken publicly, and other insiders have gone quiet.
“People are afraid to talk,” Jang Young-ha, a lawyer who has followed Lee for years, told The Daily Beast.
Aides to Lee, who was mayor of this glittering city of 1 million people for nearly eight years, denounced as “fake news” any relationship between Lee, the mysterious deaths and the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars into secret coffers.
Chung Sung-Jun/Getty
What is definitely not manufactured, however, is the startling fact that two of the top people at the Seongnam Development Corporation committed suicide in December just before they were to be interrogated for their roles in bribes related to the massive real estate project over which Lee held sway. Then, last month, a third man died of a heart attack after saying that a local company had forked over enormous sums to cover Lee’s legal fees in an entirely different case, in which he was accused of lying when he denied having anything to do with his older brother committed to a mental hospital years ago.
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