Asia’s most-wanted man is a Canadian national born in China, who is suspected of leading a vast multinational drug trafficking syndicate formed out of an alliance of five of Asia’s triad groups.
Its members call it simply “The Company,” while police, in a nod to one of Tse Chi Lop’s nicknames, have dubbed it Sam Gor, Cantonese for “Brother Number Three.”
Along the road to the village of Loikan in Myanmar’s Shan State, there is evidence of drug-fueled prosperity.
The two-lane road skirts a deep ravine known as the “Valley of Death,” where ethnic Kachin rebels from the Kaung Kha paramilitary group clashed for decades with Myanmar’s army. Now, high-end sport utility vehicles thunder past trucks carrying building materials and workers.
The Kaung Kha militia’s immaculate and expansive new headquarters sits on a plateau nestled between the steep green hills of the jagged Loi Sam Sip range. About 6km away, near Loikan village, was a sprawling drug facility carved out of thick forest.
Police and locals say the complex churned out vast quantities of methamphetamine, heroin, ketamine and a cheaper form of meth that is mixed with caffeine called yaba tablets.
When it was raided early last year, security forces seized more than 200,000 liters of precursor chemicals, as well as 10,000kg of caffeine and 73,550kg of sodium hydroxide — all substances used in drug production.
The Loikan facility was “very likely” to have been the source of much of the Sam Gor syndicate’s meth, an Australian Federal Police (AFP) investigator in Yangon said.
One person in Loikan described how workers from the lab would come down from the hills. The men, like most of the villagers, were ethnic Chinese, but they dressed better than the locals, had foreign accents and had a foul smell about them.
“I asked them once, ‘Why don’t you bathe?’” the person said. “They said they did, but there was nothing they could do about the smell.”
Meth lab managers and chemists are mostly Taiwanese, Thai police say. So, too, are many of the crime network’s couriers and boat crews who transport the drugs across the Asia-Pacific.
Shan’s super-labs produce the purest crystal meth in the world, a senior Chinese counter-narcotics official said, adding: “They can take it slow and spread [the meth] out on the ground and let it dry.”
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates the Asia-Pacific retail market for meth is worth between US$30.3 and US$61.4 billion annually.
The business model for meth is “very different” to heroin, UNODC Southeast Asia and Pacific representative Jeremy Douglas said.
“Inputs are relatively cheap, a large workforce is not needed, the price per kilo is higher and profits are therefore far, far higher,” he said.
The wholesale price of a kilogram of crystal meth produced in northeastern Myanmar is as little as US$1,800, according to a UNODC report citing the China National Narcotics Control Commission.
Average retail prices for crystal meth, according to the UN agency, are equivalent to US$70,500 per kilogram in Thailand, US$298,000 in Australia and US$588,000 in Japan. For the Japanese market, that is more than a 300-fold mark-up.
The money the syndicate is making “means that if they lose 10 tonnes and one goes through, they still make a big profit,” the Chinese agent said. “They can afford failure. It doesn’t matter.”
An analysis of the cellphones confiscated from Tsai Cheng-tse, a young Taiwanese man arrested at Yangon International Airport in Myanmar in late 2016 with two bags strapped to his thighs, each containing 80g of ketamine, was continuing to provide leads.
On them, police say they found the GPS coordinates of the pick-up point in the Andaman Sea where fishing boats laden with Burmese meth were meeting drug motherships capable of being at sea for weeks.
One of the motherships was a Taiwanese trawler called the Shun de Man 66, according to a Taiwanese law enforcement document.
The vessel was already at sea when, in early July 2017, Joshua Joseph Smith walked into a marine broker in the Western Australian capital of Perth and paid A$350,000 (US$238,780 at the current exchange rate) for the MV Valkoista, a fishing charter boat.
Smith, who was in his mid-40s and hailed from the east coast of Australia, inquired about sea sickness tablets. According to local media, he did not have a fishing license at the time.
After buying the boat on July 7, Smith set the Valkoista on a course straight from the marina to meet the Shun De Man 66 in the Indian Ocean, an AFP police commander said.
Following the rendezvous, the Valkoista then sailed to the remote Western Australian port city of Geraldton on July 11, where its crew was seen “unloading a lot of packages” into a van, the commander said.
Investigators checked closed-circuit television footage and hotel, plane and car hire records. The phones of some of the Australian drug traffickers were tapped.
It soon became apparent, police say, that some of Smith’s alleged co-conspirators were members of an ethnic Lebanese underworld gang, as well as the Hells Angels and Comanchero motorcycle gangs.
As they put together their deal to import 1.2 tonnes of meth into Australia, Smith’s associates met with Sam Gor syndicate members in Bangkok in August 2017, according to a copy of an AFP document. The Australians reconvened in Perth a month later.
On Nov. 27, 2017, the Shun De Man 66 set sail again, this time from Singapore. The vessel headed north into the Andaman Sea to rendezvous with a smaller boat bringing the meth from Myanmar before heading to the Indian Ocean.
The Indonesian navy watched and the AFP listened.
When the Shun De Man 66 finally met again with the Valkoista in international waters off the West Australian coast on Dec. 19, 2017, an Asian voice could be heard shouting “money, money,” according to the commander and local media reports.
The Valkoista arrived in Geraldton following a two-day return journey in rough seas. The men unloaded the drugs in the pre-dawn dark. Masked members of the AFP and Western Australian police moved in with assault weapons and seized the drugs and the men.
Smith pleaded guilty to importing a commercial quantity of an illegal drug. Some of his alleged associates are still on trial.
The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau in Taipei said it had “worked together with our counterparts on the investigation” of the Shun De Man 66 and that this had led to the “substantial seizure of illicit narcotics” by the Australian authorities in December 2017.
The bureau said it was “aware that Taiwanese syndicates have participated in maritime drug trafficking in [the] Asia-Pacific region,” and was working “collaboratively and closely with our counterparts to disrupt these syndicates and cross-border drug trafficking.”
As the investigation into the syndicate deepened, police concluded that crime groups from across the region had undergone a kind of mega-merger to form Sam Gor. The members include the three biggest Hong Kong and Macau triads, who spent much of the 1990s in open warfare: 14K, Wo Shing Wo and Sun Yee On. The other two are the Big Circle Gang, Tse’s original triad, and the Bamboo Union, based in Taiwan.
“The syndicate has a lot of money and there is a vast market to tap,” said Jay Li Chien-chih, a Taiwanese police senior colonel who has been stationed in Southeast Asia for a decade. “The power this network possesses is unimaginable.”
Investigators have had wins. In February last year, police busted the Loikan super-lab, where they found enough tea-branded packaging for 10 tonnes of meth. Sam Gor often conceals its drugs in packets of tea, according to UNODC.
The Shun De Man 66 was intercepted that month by the Indonesian navy with more than 1 tonne of meth aboard.
In March last year, a key Sam Gor lieutenant was arrested in Cambodia and extradited to Myanmar. In December, the compound of Sue Songkittikul, a suspected syndicate operations chief, was raided in Thailand.
Located near the border with Myanmar, the moat-ringed compound had a small meth lab, which police suspected was used to experiment with new recipes; a powerful radio tower with a 100km range; and an underground tunnel from the main house to the back of the property.
Sue was not there, but property and money from 38 bank accounts linked to him and totaling some US$9 million were seized during the investigation. Sue is still at large.
However, the flow of drugs leaving the Golden Triangle for the wider Asia-Pacific seems to have increased. Seizures of crystal meth and yaba rose about 50 percent last year to 126 tonnes in East and Southeast Asia. At the same time, prices for the drugs fell in most countries.
This pattern of falling prices and rising seizures, the UNODC said in a report released in March, “suggested the supply of the drug had expanded.”
In the Sam Gor syndicate, police face a nimble and elusive adversary. When authorities had success stopping the drug motherships, police said, Sam Gor switched to hiding its product in shipping containers. When Thailand stopped much of the meth coming directly across the border from Myanmar by truck, the syndicate re-routed deliveries through Laos and Vietnam.
Over the years, police have had little success in taking down Asia’s drug lords. The last time a top-level Asian narcotics kingpin was successfully prosecuted and imprisoned for more than a short period was in the mid-1970s.
That was when Ng Sik-ho, a wily Hong Kong drug trafficker known as Limpy Ho, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for smuggling more than 20 tonnes of opium and morphine, according to court records.
So far, Tse has avoided Limpy Ho’s fate. He is being tracked, and all the signs are he knows it, counter-narcotics agents say. Despite the heat, some police say they believe he is continuing his drug operations, unfazed.
Additional reporting by Reuters staff
This is part two of a two-part article. Part one appeared in yesterday’s edition.
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