The problem was Tommy, whose supercilious contempt for the institutions of government and provocative public remarks made him a particular hate figure.
At the end of 1998, then-president Habibie, desperate to distance himself from the first family before elections took place in 1999, allowed the attorney general to proceed with one small corruption case against Tommy.
He appeared in court in April 1999 before a gallery packed (by Tommy’s henchmen) with supportive young women while Suharto’s youngest son grinned arrogantly at the press.
There followed an Indonesian judicial pantomime in which Tommy was twice cleared of all charges in the lower courts before being found guilty on appeal under the Wahid government in September 2000.
Wahid’s reason for appealing the acquittals may not have been so much the original, relatively minor offence, but the fact that every time Tommy or his brother Bambang was summoned by the state a bomb went off somewhere in Jakarta.
It began to look like Tommy and associates might be resorting to terror and, following a 13 September bombing of the Jakarta stock exchange in which fifteen people died, Wahid wanted him out of circulation.
Tommy was sentenced to eighteen months and offered a special, luxury cell.
He declined and went on the run.
The following July the head of the three-member supreme court panel who had sentenced Tommy was assassinated, and two months after that another supreme court panel overturned Tommy’s jail sentence even while he was still a fugitive from justice.
Following a national and international outcry, Indonesia’s police chief was sacked in November 2001 and, one day later, police miraculously found Tommy.
He was brought to Jakarta police headquarters where the local police chief, perhaps forgetting the scene was being broadcast on live television, greeted him with a hug.
In July 2002, Tommy was sentenced to fifteen years on convictions including ordering the murder of a supreme court judge; prosecutors asked for an unusually light sentence, which was further reduced on appeal, and Tommy left prison in October 2006.
'Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and South East Asia' by Joe Studwell
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042FZVEO