He is Asia’s most-wanted man. He is protected by a guard of Thai kickboxers. He flies by private jet. Police say that he once lost US$66 million in a single night at a Macau casino.
Tse Chi Lop, a Canadian national born in China, is suspected of leading a vast multinational drug trafficking syndicate formed out of an alliance of five of Asia’s triad groups, according to law enforcement officials.
Its members call it simply “The Company.” Police, in a nod to one of Tse’s nicknames, have dubbed it Sam Gor, Cantonese for “Brother Number Three.”
Illustration: Mountain People
The syndicate, law enforcers believe, is funneling tonnes of methamphetamine, heroin and ketamine to at least a dozen countries from Japan in North Asia to New Zealand in the South Pacific.
Meth — a highly addictive drug with devastating physical and mental effects on long-term users — is its main business, they say.
In what it calls a conservative estimate, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) puts the Sam Gor syndicate’s meth revenue last year at US$8 billion a year, but says it could be as high as US$17.7 billion. The agency estimates that the cartel, which often conceals its drugs in packets of tea, has a 40 percent to 70 percent share of the wholesale regional meth market that has expanded at least fourfold in the past five years.
This unprecedented boom in meth production has triggered an unprecedented response, Reuters has learned. Tse, 55, is the prime target of Operation Kungur, a sprawling, previously unreported counter-narcotics investigation.
Led by the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Operation Kungur involves about 20 agencies from Asia, North America and Europe. It is by far the biggest ever international effort to combat Asian drug trafficking syndicates, law enforcement agents involved in the investigation say.
It encompasses authorities from Myanmar, China, Thailand, Japan, the US and Canada. Taiwan, while not formally part of the operation, is assisting in the investigation.
A document containing AFP profiles of the operation’s top 19 syndicate targets, reviewed by Reuters, identifies Tse as the leader of the syndicate.
According to the document, the organization has “been connected with or directly involved in at least 13 cases” of drug trafficking since January 2015. The document does not provide specific details of the cases.
A Taiwanese law enforcement flow chart identifies Tse as the “Multinational CEO” of the syndicate. A US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) intelligence document shared with regional government agencies shows that Tse is “believed to be” the leader of the Sam Gor syndicate.
Police have not publicly identified Tse as the suspected boss of the trafficking group.
Some investigators say that the scope of the syndicate’s operation puts Tse, as the suspected leader, on par with Latin America’s most legendary narco-traffickers.
“Tse Chi Lop is in the league of El Chapo or maybe Pablo Escobar,” said Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific representative for UNODC. “The word kingpin often gets thrown around, but there is no doubt it applies here.”
Reuters was unable to contact Tse Chi Lop.
In response to questions from Reuters, the AFP, the DEA and the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau in Taipei said they would not comment on investigations.
During the past year, Reuters crisscrossed the Asia-Pacific to uncover the story of Tse and his Sam Gor network. This included interviews with more than two dozen law enforcement officials from eight countries, and reviews of intelligence reports from police and anti-narcotics agencies, court filings and other documents.
Reuters spoke to militia leaders in Myanmar’s Shan State, the heart of Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, where the syndicate is suspected of mass producing drugs in so-called super-labs.
Reporters also visited the Thai compound of one of the syndicate’s alleged drug lords.
What emerges is a portrait of an organization that is truly transnational. Four of the 19 Sam Gor syndicate leaders on the AFP list are Canadian citizens, including Tse, whom police often refer to as “T1” — the top target. Others hail from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam and China.
The syndicate is enormously wealthy, disciplined and sophisticated — in many ways more sophisticated than any Latin American cartel, anti-narcotics officials say.
Sam Gor supplies a bigger, more dispersed drug market and collaborates with a more diverse range of local crime groups than the Latin cartels do, including Japan’s Yakuza, Australia’s biker gangs and ethnic Chinese gangs across Southeast Asia.
The crime network is also less prone to uncontrolled outbreaks of internecine violence than the Latin cartels, police say. The money is so big that long-standing, blood-soaked rivalries among Asian crime groups have been set aside in a united pursuit of gargantuan profits.
“The crime groups in Southeast Asia and the Far East operate with seamless efficiency,” one veteran Western anti-drugs official said. “They function like a global corporation.”
Like most of the law enforcement agents Reuters interviewed, the investigator spoke on condition of anonymity.
In addition to the contrasts between their drug operations, there is another, more personal, difference between Tse Chi Lop and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman or Pablo Escobar.
The jailed Mexican cartel boss and the deceased Colombian cocaine trafficker have been feted in song and on screen for their extravagant lifestyles and extreme violence. Precious little has been revealed about Tse’s life and career. Unlike the Latin drug lords, Tse is relatively discreet — and still free.
A TRIP, A TRAP
Tse Chi Lop was born in Guangdong Province and grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution. Amid the bloody purges, forced labor camps and mass starvation, a group of imprisoned members of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Red Guard in Guangzhou formed a triad-like criminal enterprise called the Big Circle Gang.
Tse later became a member of the group, police say, and like many of his Big Circle Gang brethren moved to Hong Kong, then further afield as they sought sanctuaries for their criminal activities. He arrived in Canada in 1988.
In the 1990s, Tse shuttled between North America, Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asia, an Asia-based senior AFP investigator said. He rose to become a mid-ranking member of a smuggling ring that sourced heroin from the Golden Triangle, the lawless opium-producing region where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand, China and Laos meet.
In 1998, according to court records, Tse was arraigned on drug-trafficking charges in the Eastern District Court of New York. He was found guilty of conspiracy to import heroin into the US, the records show. A potential life sentence hung over his head.
Through a petition filed by his lawyer in 2000, Tse begged for leniency.
His ailing parents needed constant care, he explained. His 12-year-old son had a lung disorder. His wife was overwhelmed. If freed, vowed Tse, he would open a restaurant. He expressed “great sorrow” for his crime, court records show.
The entreaties appear to have worked: Tse was sentenced to nine years in prison, spent mostly at the federal correctional institution in Elkton, Ohio. His remorse might have waned.
After he was freed in 2006, police say he returned to Canada, where he was supposed to be under supervised release for the next four years. It is unclear when Tse returned to his old haunts in Asia. Corporate records show that Tse and his wife registered a business, the China Peace Investment Group Co, in Hong Kong in 2011.
Police suspect Tse quickly returned to the drug game.
He “picked up where he left off,” the senior AFP investigator said.
Tse tapped connections in China, Hong Kong, Macau and the Golden Triangle, and adopted a business model that proved irresistible to his customers, law enforcers say. If one of his drug deliveries was intercepted by police, it was replaced at no extra cost, or deposits were returned to the buyers.
His policy of guaranteeing his drug deliveries was good for business, but it also put him on the radar of police. In 2011, AFP officers cracked a group in Melbourne importing heroin and meth.
The amounts were not huge — dozens of kilos. So, rather than arrest the Australian drug dealers, police put them under surveillance, tapping their phones and observing them closely for more than a year. To the frustration of the Australian drug cell, their illicit product kept getting intercepted. They wanted the seized drugs replaced by the syndicate.
The syndicate bosses in Hong Kong were irate — their other drug rings in Australia were collecting their narcotics and selling them without incident. In 2013, as the patience of the syndicate leaders wore thin, they summoned the leader of the Melbourne cell to Hong Kong for talks. There, Hong Kong police watched the Australian meet two men.
One of the men was Tse Chi Lop. He had the center-parted hair and casual fashion sense of a typical middle-aged Chinese family man, one AFP agent said. Further surveillance showed Tse was a big spender with a keen regard for his personal security.
At home and abroad, he was protected by a guard of Thai kickboxers, three AFP investigators said. Up to eight worked for him at a time, and they were regularly rotated as part of his security protocol.
Tse would host lavish birthday parties each year at resorts and five-star hotels, flying in his family and entourage in private jets. On one occasion, he stayed at a resort in Thailand for a month, hosting visitors poolside in shorts and a T-shirt, according to a member of the task force investigating the syndicate.
Tse was a frequent visitor to Asia’s casinos and fond of betting on horses, especially on English races.
“We believe he lost 60 million euros [about US$66 million] in one night on the tables in Macau,” the senior Asia-based AFP investigator said.
As the investigation into Tse deepened, police suspected that the Canadian was the major trafficker supplying Australia with meth and heroin, with a lucrative sideline in MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy. The true scale and breadth of the Sam Gor syndicate only became apparent in late 2016, police say, when a young Taiwanese man entered Yangon International Airport in Myanmar with a bag of white powder strapped to each of his thighs
‘ALADDIN’S CAVE OF INTEL’
Tsai Cheng-tse was heading home to Taiwan, walking through the airport with a Jimmy Choo leather bag and two mobile phones. It was the morning of Nov. 15, 2016, and Tsai seemed nervous, picking at his blistered hands.
This tic aroused suspicion, said a former Myanmar police commander who oversaw the investigation.
“His hands were bad because he had been handling the drugs,” the commander said. “Methamphetamine is very toxic.”
Tsai was stopped and searched. Taped to each of his thighs was a small bag containing 80g of ketamine, a powerful tranquilizer that doubles as a party drug.
“We were very fortunate to arrest him. Actually, it was an accident,” the commander said.
Burmese police, tipped off by the DEA, had been monitoring Tsai, but they had lost track of him. Airport police had no idea who he was.
Tsai told airport police the bag on his thigh contained a “pesticide or vitamin for flowers and plants,” according to court records from his trial for ketamine trafficking in Myanmar. A friend, Tsai said, had given it to him to pass on to his father.
Tsai’s flight was about to leave and there was no drug test for ketamine at the airport, the commander said.
Unimpressed with the explanation, police held him overnight. The next day, anti-narcotic officers turned up at the airport. One recognized him from surveillance work he had been conducting.
Still, Tsai refused to talk. Police say that videos they later found on one of his phones might have explained his silence. The videos showed a crying and bound man, and at least three assailants taking turns burning his feet with a blowtorch and shocking him with a cattle prod.
In the videos, one investigator said, a sign could be seen with Chinese calligraphy saying “Loyalty to the Heavens.”
The banner was a “triad-related sign,” he added.
The tortured man, according to two AFP officers who viewed the video, claimed to have thrown 300kg of meth from a boat because he mistakenly believed a fast-approaching vessel was a law enforcement boat. The torturers were testing the veracity of the victim’s claims.
By filming and sharing the videos, triad members were sending a message about the price of disloyalty, the officers said.
Reuters has not seen the video.
The torture videos were just one of the items allegedly found in Tsai’s two iPhones. The alleged Taiwanese trafficker was a diligent chronicler of the drug syndicate’s activities, but sloppy when it came to information security. Inside the phones, police say, was a huge photo and video gallery, social media conversations, and logs of thousands of calls and text messages.
They were “an Aladdin’s Cave of intel,” said one AFP commander based in North Asia.
For at least two months prior to his arrest, Tsai allegedly travelled around Myanmar cobbling together a huge meth deal for the syndicate, according to a PowerPoint presentation by the Drug Enforcement Division of the Burmese police outlining its investigation.
One telling discovery: a screenshot of a slip from an international courier company recording the delivery of two consignments of packaging, manufactured to hold loose-leaf Chinese tea, to a Yangon address.
Since at least 2012, tea packets, often containing 1kg of crystal meth each, had been cropping up in drug busts across the Asia-Pacific region.
Two days after Tsai’s arrest, Burmese police raided a Yangon address, where they seized 622kg of ketamine. That evening, they captured 1.1 tonnes of crystal meth at a Yangon jetty. The interception of the drugs was a coup.
Even so, Burmese police were frustrated. Nine people were arrested, but other than Tsai they were lower-level members of the syndicate, including couriers and a driver. Tsai still was not talking.
Then came a major breakthrough. Swiping through the gallery of photos and videos on Tsai’s phones, an AFP investigator based in Yangon noticed a familiar face from an intelligence briefing he had attended on Asian drug traffickers about a year earlier.
“This one stuck out because it was Canadian,” he recalled. “I said: ‘Fuck, I know who you are!’”
It was Tse Chi Lop.
The Burmese police invited the AFP to send a team of intelligence analysts to Yangon in early 2017. They went to work on Tsai’s phones.
Australia had been a profitable drug market for Asian crime gangs since the end of the Vietnam War. For at least a decade, the AFP had fed all its historic files on drug cases, large and small, into a database.
A senior Chinese counter-narcotics agent described the database, which includes a trove of names, chemical signatures of seized drugs, phone metadata and surveillance intel, as the most impressive cache of intelligence on Asian drug trafficking groups in the region.
The AFP analysts cross-referenced the contents of Tsai’s phones with the database. They discovered photos related to three big consignments of crystal meth that were intercepted in China, Japan and New Zealand in 2016, according to investigators and Burmese police documents.
A team of Chinese anti-narcotics officials later connected photos, telephone numbers and addresses in Tsai’s phones to other meth busts in China.
For regional counter-narcotics police, the revelations upended their assumption that the drugs were being trafficked by different crime groups. It became clear the shipments were the work of just one organization.
A senior Chinese anti-narcotics agent said they believed Tsai was “one of the members of a mega-syndicate,” which had been involved in multiple “drugs cases, smuggling and manufacturing, within this region.”
Tsai was found not guilty in the ketamine case, but is still in jail in Yangon, where he is on trial for drug trafficking charges related to the meth seizures. Reuters was unable to contact Tsai’s lawyer.
METH PARADISE
During his time in Myanmar, Tsai is suspected of traversing the country, testing drug samples, organizing couriers and obtaining a fishing boat to transport the illicit cargo to a bigger vessel in international waters, according to police and the Myanmar PowerPoint document.
His phones contained pictures of the vehicles to be used to transport the meth, the spot where the meth was to be dropped off, and the fishing boat.
The police reconstruction of Tsai’s dealings in Myanmar led to another major revelation: The epicenter of meth production had shifted from China’s southern provinces to Shan State in Myanmar’s northeastern borderlands.
Operating in China had provided the Sam Gor syndicate with easy access to precursor ingredients, such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, that were smuggled out of pharmaceutical, chemical and paint factories in the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone. Shan gave Sam Gor the freedom to operate largely unimpeded by law enforcement.
Armed groups in semi-autonomous regions like Shan State have long controlled large tracts of territory and used drug revenues to finance their frequent battles with the military. A series of detentes brokered by the Burmese government with rebel groups over the years has brought relative calm to the region — and allowed illicit drug activities to flourish.
“Production facilities can be hidden from law enforcement and other prying eyes but insulated from disruptive violence,” analyst Richard Horsey wrote in a paper this year for the International Crisis Group. “Drug production and profits are now so vast that they dwarf the formal sector of Shan state.”
Myanmar’s government and police did not respond to questions from Reuters.
Additional reporting by Reuters staff
This is part one of a two-part article. Part two will appear in tomorrow’s edition.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
Within Taiwan’s education system exists a long-standing and deep-rooted culture of falsification. In the past month, a large number of “ghost signatures” — signatures using the names of deceased people — appeared on recall petitions submitted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) against Democratic Progressive Party legislators Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) and Wu Pei-yi (吳沛憶). An investigation revealed a high degree of overlap between the deceased signatories and the KMT’s membership roster. It also showed that documents had been forged. However, that culture of cheating and fabrication did not just appear out of thin air — it is linked to the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS