The Kingpin Behind Asia's Triad Super-Syndicate Cartel : Tse Chi Lop, with Josh Berlinger
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It's August 12th, 1998. And FBI agent Mark Callan is a nervous wreck. He's thousands of miles from home, holed up in a tiny Hong Kong hotel room, waiting for the most important phone call of his career. The last 60 years of Callan's life have led to this moment.

He's gone from probing small-time dealers in front of an unremarkable New York City bodega to heading up a sprawling investigation into a syndicate moving millions of dollars worth of heroin into the U.S. Callan's work has already helped prosecutors indict a curiously mismatched set of suspects. There's a Sicilian mafioso from Montreal, a triad from Toronto, a barber from Long Island, and a convicted kidnapper already serving a life sentence in federal prison. But the man at the top of the food chain is a phantom.

His name is Sei-Chi Lap, and Kalanen has been chasing him for so long that he's become a myth, a character built of whispers and rumors, not flesh and blood. Then, a break. A colleague in Montreal gets wind that Sei is hiding out in China, where he's safe from the FBI. But he's going to Hong Kong for a meeting on August 12th. Kalanen knows he's being handed a gift. Unlike mainland China, Hong Kong has an extradition agreement with Washington.

Someone arrested there can be sent stateside to face trial. So Kalman and the Canadian cop hop on a plane and head west for the Far East. August 12th arrives. It's a typical muggy Hong Kong summer day, the type where shopkeepers blast their air conditioning into the open street to lure customers in. Tse heads to a diner in TST, a neighborhood known for its view of the skyscrapers jutting from the foot of Hong Kong Island.

Without jurisdiction in Hong Kong, Kal-Min is stuck inside. He spends hours nervously waiting in his hotel room. His mind races. He fears for the safety of the Hong Kong cops he's putting in harm's way. He frets about his reputation so the intelligence turn out wrong. But shortly after 6 p.m., Kal-Min gets the phone call he's been waiting for. Tse is behind bars. They got him. Kal-Min finally has his white whale.

Later that evening, the two finally meet face-to-face in a windowless interrogation room. Zay is not what Callan expected. He's in his mid-30s, and he's got a round face and high cheekbones that accentuate a warm and inviting smile. His jet black hair is parted down the middle, and his fashion sense is, to be polite, modest. He's more office space than Scarface. Callan introduces himself and explains that the United States is going to try to extradite Zay on charges of conspiring to import heroin.

Say's response surprises Kalman. He doesn't panic. He doesn't fight. And he doesn't try to cut a deal. He just smiles back. The wheels of justice turn slowly after Say's August arrest. But he's finally extradited to the United States by the end of 1998. Two years later, he pleads guilty to conspiring to import heroin and is sentenced to nine years in prison. For Kalman, it's the cherry on top of an already impressive case. He's worked his way from the street to the top.

But this prison sentence is not the end of Seya's story. Sure, it's the end of one drug network worth millions. But it was also, allegedly, the start of a new one. This time, it's one worth billions. This is The Underworld Podcast. ♪♪

Welcome back to yet another episode of the Underworld Podcast, the radio program where two journalists who have reported on all manners of things across the world, myself, Danny Gold, and my co-host, Sean Williams,

Take you on a journey of organized crime across the globe. Sean is actually not here today. He is on a well-earned vacation in Australia. He is likely getting drunk at 9 a.m. and watching Cricket Live because that's what he does. But he did want me to tell you guys that he loves you all very deeply and that thanks to your ad money and Patreon sponsorship, he can afford bail when he is inevitably arrested for whatever indecency he is going to engage in on this vacation.

As always, you can find bonus episodes by supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com slash underworldpodcast or on iTunes. And now you can even sign up on our Spotify page. Look for a banner there. It'll get the bonuses directly to you there. Also, of course, you can find us on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, you know, rate us, comment, share. You get it.

I am joined today by intrepid freelance journalist and author, direct from Paris, Josh Berlinger. Josh, introduce yourself and tell us what you've got going on. Yeah, thanks for having me, Danny. I am a freelance journalist based here in Paris after five years in Hong Kong with CNN. What I covered in Hong Kong was a little bit of the

Asian methamphetamine crisis and North Korea's march towards nuclear weapons. Now I'm in Paris sort of refocusing a little bit on Europe, but I still have a passion very much for what's happening in Asia. And I'm currently writing a book on Tse-Chi Lopp and his rise to power. Yeah. So we've actually, we've talked about him a bit. I think Sean did some stuff there

But first of all, everyone loves North Korea stuff we've learned from the podcast and Asian methamphetamine. So it's great to have you on because I feel like you're an expert in basically this guy's story. What's so interesting about Sechi Lap? So there's obviously the big sort of headline, the fact that a guy who runs a $17 billion a year

syndicate is and managed to do it from the shadows for so long, that's just a hell of a story. But one of the things I found really fascinating as I did more digging was how his life story just reflects current events at any given time. I don't know if we'll ever know for sure if he was actively trying to exploit geopolitical fissures, but given what so many people have told me about his business acumen, I don't think you can count it out.

So to understand his story, you got to start in Asia in the late 1980s. It's a good time for pro-democracy movements. Marcus is ousted in the Philippines. South Korea is getting closer to free elections. A lot of people actually think Burma is poised to be next. The country had been a totalitarian, one-party state since the early 1960s, but massive protests began to shake the foundations of the government.

Burmese military ended all that with a brutal crackdown, calling in troops from remote corners of the country and violently put down the protests. So the problem with calling back all those troops is it left Burma's jungles under policed. This is a place that provides ideal conditions for growing poppy. In fact, the heroin that comes from these corners of Burma is some of the purest in the world. So a new military junta emerges after the crackdown, and it decides to cut deals with many of the far-off rebels and insurgents rather than fighting them.

Western officials at the time claimed that these groups were granted more autonomy to run their own affairs, and that's basically code to grow and sell drugs, as long as they didn't confront the junta. So the junta denied the allegations at the time, but not many people believed them, and for good reason.

1989 marked the first of several banner years of opium cultivation, and by 1994, Myanmar, the country changed its name in the ensuing years, was responsible for 60% of all opium production worldwide. It's not a coincidence that 1994 was also a brutal year for heroin users in the U.S., especially in New York City, and that's where most of America's addicts lived at the time.

More than 600 died of overdoses that year and thousands more were sent to ERs. Yeah, you know, I think we've talked about like here and there about the heroin that came in from the Golden Triangle. You know, Sean's done an episode, I think, on Vietnam and bringing it in then. And we've also talked about like the rise and fall of different heroin producing regions, you know, across the world, whether it's Afghanistan or Burma or any of that. But it is...

Yeah, I mean, it is just like such a fascinating history of the world when you really look at it. You can kind of explain almost like the 20th century through heroin and where it goes and who's making it and what they're doing with it. But also that those regions of Burma, you know, I've spent some time there reporting on the Rohingya and stuff like that. But you hear all these stories about the various rebel groups. You know, there's so many of them people are looking at right now. Yeah.

this revolution going on there, there, but there's been groups fighting the government for, for decades and decades. I think we actually have a, uh, an episode coming up maybe later this month or next month with Patrick Wynn about the WA, who are one of these groups that I've been fascinated by, uh, for a long time. But where does, what, sorry, go ahead. And for, sorry, just for anyone looking to understand more about the region, Patrick Wynn's book is, um,

is great. I highly recommend it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a new one coming out, Narcotopia, I think, about the wa itself. But his old one, what was it, Shadowlands, is fantastic. We've talked about it before.

Where does, um, where does Sei Chi Lap fit into all this? So a lot of, a lot of the heroin that was made in Myanmar was shipped worldwide via Thailand at the time, often by ethnically Chinese gangs. So Sei was a member of a group called the Big Circle Boys that emerged in China following the Cultural Revolution. So it,

If I were to get into the history, we'd be going on and on and on, so I'm not going to get deep into it. But for those who don't know much about the Cultural Revolution, it was a bloody, years-long, internecine mess where young ideological zealots following Mao Zedong targeted anyone deemed disloyal to him, bourgeois, or insufficiently communist.

So that lasts about a decade, and it takes a really serious toll on China's younger generation. Prospects for a better life after the Cultural Revolution are incredibly dim, so people in the southeastern province of Guangdong, a lot of them flee to Hong Kong, which at the time was a British colony. Hong Kongers saw these new arrivals as basically hillbillies, and they dismissively referred to them as Daihuanjiai. I apologize, I'm not a Cantonese speaker, so I probably didn't pronounce that right.

But Daihuan is Cantonese for Big Circle, which was a nickname for Guangdong's capital, Guangzhou, basically because Guangzhou appears as a red circle on maps. Jai is Cantonese for boys. Big Circle Boys just goes on to become a moniker for immigrants from Guangzhou and Hong Kong who carry out a violent spate of armed robberies throughout the city in the 1970s. Yeah, I think we also talked about this too. Sorry to keep referencing old episodes, but about the...

the sort of new Chinatown gangs of the 1970s in New York City, in Chinatown, who had this sort of like violent war. I think the Ghost Shadows, we did an episode on them. They were one of them. But it was kind of, you know, they were immigrants, I think that came in from Hong Kong, from the slums of Hong Kong. And they, you know, brought this new era of violence to Chinatown that had been quiet for

Uh, for 30 or 40 years, the sort of older gangs had calmed down and gotten more organized and sort of did things under the radar. And they came out and they were just, uh, in your face violence, trying to take over things. Heroin was a big part of it. Uh, and it was just, uh, a very messy situation.

Yeah, the ghost shadows, there's a lot of similarities. And in the book, you know, there's going to be big parts about the ghost shadows and the flying dragons. But because a lot of these kids were immigrants from Hong Kong, effectively what had happened in Chinatown at the time was you had the Tongs, these older benevolent societies that, you know, effectively ran the city, including the criminal underworld.

And they outsourced muscle to these young gangs of new immigrants coming from Hong Kong who, you know, didn't know any better, didn't learn the language and just struggled to get by. And you give kids guns and power and that's what happened.

Back to Tse Chi Lap. Tse was born in Guangzhou, but he's supposedly a member of the gang's second generation. That generation of the gang moved abroad in the 1980s and early 1990s. They were involved in more sophisticated criminal activity, credit card fraud, counterfeiting, things like that.

In North America, the Big Circle Boys were allegedly some of the biggest traffickers of pure heroin from the Golden Triangle. And as I'm sure your readers know, that's the region where me and Mars Poppyfield meets Laos in Thailand. So there's not a lot publicly on say, but here's what I've got.

He was born in Guangzhou in 1961, and he moved to Canada in 1988 with his fiancée. They married the following year, and they had two children together: a daughter in 1990 and a son born with a lung issue the next year. According to a court filing by Tse's wife, they moved to Canada due to what she called the "political situation" in China. It's unclear if she was referring to Hong Kong's handover, which was coming up in '97 or something else. It's a year before Tiananmen Square, so that's out of the question.

She also says that language barrier and lack of a working permit made it difficult for Zadish to find a job. She sort of paints a picture of him as a desperate immigrant doing anything he can to help his family. At one point, he had owned a trading company, and court records show that at another point, he had jobs at Fujifilm and Kodak, but it's not clear if that was in Canada or back in China or somewhere else. Zadish's wife said her husband was only able to find odd jobs in Toronto. At one point, he worked in transportation, earning five bucks an hour.

and then as a dishwasher somewhere else. That's the family story, but you really gotta take it with a grain of salt, because that's what his wife wrote to a judge pleading for leniency. The former cops I talked to in Canada painted a really different picture. Tse was reportedly well-connected with a heroin syndicate in Guangzhou, and his name was surfacing on telephone lines tapped by Toronto police as early as 1990.

One longtime Toronto police officer who worked Chinatown told me that Say would go with a few others to a shooting range in New York, not far from the border, and they'd fire 9mm pistols for target practice. The same former cop said that when police followed Say, he'd recognize the tails and weave in and out of traffic or stop at emergency shoulders to lose them. He'd even drive down off-ramps going the wrong way. The point my source was making was that Say appeared to know what he was doing. So by the time Say's in Canada...

He's much more higher level than guys like Paul Quok or Yang Binggang. He's the guy coordinating big shipments of heroin coming from the Golden Triangle into ports in Vancouver. And he's a big enough deal that

a lot of other people in the heroin world in Canada at that point had heard of him. And that's why his name keeps popping up on wiretaps. Yeah, you know, you can't really take the word of like a wife writing to a judge trying to get leniency, you know? It's kind of like in my crime reporter days, it was always like, you know, he was just starting to get his life together. He was going to go back to school. He was working hard. And then you find out the guy had like a separate gun charge, like literally two weeks earlier. Yeah.

That was always the case. Yeah, and there's a lot of that with the characters in Seiji Lopp's life, in his syndicates, but there's always those little interesting nuggets that help sort of piece together what's true, what's not, and paint a picture of, you know,

So what is, what is Say actually like, this guy who runs possibly the biggest drug syndicate in the world? So this is one of the things that really motivates me behind this story and why I've pushed with an interview with him behind bars, why I keep trying to talk to his lawyers. It's just, there's this fascinating story about this guy who's purportedly not like what you'd imagine a drug dealer is.

So I asked both Mark Calnan and C.C. Scott, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Say's case in the 90s, what they remember about him. It's been 25 years, so a lot of the details have faded, but he made a strong enough impression on both of them that they still recall a fair amount about him. C.C. Scott's impression was pretty similar to Calnan's, which you described in the introduction. She remembers his demeanor as, in her words, unusual, sort of down-to-earth, smart but quiet,

There's always a bit of a worry, like being able to tell how much of this is just cultural differences, but Say does seem to have this unique, silent, disarming, gregariousness to him. I managed to track down a prison guard who worked in the prison where Say was held, and he remembers him as warm and friendly, always trying to shake his hand, but the same sort of caveat was we were talking about with writing to court. He was always suspicious if Say was trying to pull something.

The guard said he was in the U.S. military and served in Korea, and at one point he tried to practice a little Korean with Tse, and Tse knew enough of the language to respond back in Korean to say he didn't speak Korean. I also spoke with a guy from China who served time in prison with Tse stateside. He also said Tse was a pretty nice guy who had a big smile, and he remembered him as humble.

someone who didn't really care about street cred, which he found really interesting because a lot of the other drug dealers in this prison wanted it to be known that they were these big guys. And Say really didn't give a shit about that. Yeah, I feel like that's when you actually are at the top, right? I think most people at the top, again, this is based off reading and whatever else, interviewing people that were like that, they kind of want to appear like they're not like that. The ones who are confident in who they are and what they can get done.

They don't want to draw attention to themselves in a lot of ways. They want to play like they're not the big guys. They're just a businessman, just an entrepreneur, that sort of thing. So I find that it kind of actually, I think, fits a little bit with the profile. But I also just want to draw attention for publishers who may be listening, just how much research you've done and how many people you've spoke to that know this guy, whether it's like a former inmate or prison guard. So publishers, holler at Josh. He obviously...

has the goods. No, I appreciate that. And yeah, I think it's, I think it's a life trait too. I think it goes beyond, you know, I think you're absolutely right. And it goes beyond underworld. I think people at the top of their game in anything, you know, they're confident enough in their, in themselves that they don't need to talk shit. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I mean, there's definitely psychos at the top of things as well that are loud and angry and violent and screaming all the time. But also you have those people who are just, uh,

You know, they're scarier because they don't lose their composure and they speak calmly and they know what's what and they know how to address all kind of situations. You know, that's the thing that like, whether it's like a drug lord or like a powerful CEO, a lot of them just like know how to handle any situation that comes up calmly because...

I think the average person dealing with that would lose their minds and tear their hair out and not be able to sleep. But these people sometimes that rise to the top, they know how to do it. Like they know how to problem solve. And that's a big part of being successful no matter where you are in life, especially if you're going to be a gigantic international drug dealer. But saying all that. Yeah, absolutely. Saying all that. I mean, this guy gets caught. So how does he get caught the first time?

Yeah, so let me preface this with just a couple things. And the first aside I want to make is about the big circle boys. They're not like most gangs. There's not membership. They're not territorial. And they've got no problem partnering with outsiders to make a good deal. And this is very much...

what we were just talking about, you know, with the CEO and sort of business mindset. It's really just all about the money for them. And this is one of the things that really surprised and impressed the FBI agents who took Say down in the 90s. Also, we talked about how Say's story reflects geopolitical trends earlier. I think another reason his story is important for people to know because it's just another searing indictment of the war on drugs in the U.S. criminal justice system in the 80s and 90s. So back to your question about how he got caught with all that out of the way.

The story starts a lot like that scene in Blow when I don't remember the actor's name, but he asks Johnny Depp's character what he knows about cocaine when the two are bunkmates in prison. It's pretty similar here. The story starts in prison. The main characters further down in the syndicate are two guys, one named Yong Bin Gong, who just goes by Gong, and Paul Kwok. Kwok's a Hong Kong-born triad who moved to Toronto in his 20s.

And then he flees Canada in the early 80s to escape an assault charge and heads for New York City's Chinatown, where he actually befriends several members of the Ghost Shadows that we talked about earlier. There, he gets into the heroin business with an older family friend back from Hong Kong, and they're both nabbed by the DEA. Gong's from Malaysia, and he's of Chinese descent.

After a troubled childhood, he moved to New York, joining some of his relatives and working at a family-run Chinese restaurant in Kingston, a small city on the Hudson River Valley. Just to cut in, I spent a lot of time there, and Kingston's great. I wonder what restaurant this is. I wonder if it's Ang's. The Ang family has a really fascinating history. Ang's, this was the Kingston Tea Garden, but Ang's was actually owned by...

the brother of... There were two Ng brothers. The brother who owned the Kingston Tea Garden and then another brother who split off and started Ng. Get out of here! How do you know that? I actually managed to track down the daughter...

of the kidnapping victim and when I was piecing together the story of the kidnapping. Okay, sorry. You're going to get to that in a second. But that's a... I mean, publishers, like, holler at this guy. Come on. Yeah. So there's a really fascinating family history on, you know, the split, why the family split up into two restaurants. You know, they were starting...

how they sort of work their way up from the middle class dream. And then it all sort of comes crashing down with this. So the restaurant Gong worked at was the Kingston Tea Garden, which was run by the brother of the man who founded Ang's. But Gong doesn't last long at the restaurant. And after leaving, he masterminds a plan to kidnap the matriarch of the family that runs the restaurant and ransom her to the gullible husband.

The cops believe the woman was killed at some point in the ordeal, and her body's never been found, even to this day. After all that goes down, Gong fled the country, but he was later arrested in Japan, extradited to the United States, and sentenced to life in prison. Gong and Kwok actually first met in Chinatown, but really grew close in prison, and that's where they hatched their plan.

Paul would use his connections back in Toronto to source heroin from Asia and then bring it stateside, which made sense because it was easier to smuggle drugs into Canada at the time. And this is pre-911, so the northern border was much more porous than it is today. Gong's job was to network in prison to find wholesale buyers, and it was surprisingly easy to coordinate deals.

Mark Calnan, the FBI agent, explained to me at the time, even though prison phone calls are recorded, they're not always monitored, so it's not like someone's listening 24-7. Calnan's investigation started with a tip about someone dealing heroin in front of a bodega in the Bronx. Things get more interesting once he works his way up the food chain to the middlemen. So one of the ethnically Chinese suspects the FBI arrested confessed that he would go pick up heroin at a barbershop on Long Island run by an Italian-American guy named Manny.

Kalnan had worked the FBI's Asian Organized Crime Squad for years by that point, and he'd never heard of ethnic organized crime groups cooperating like this. So he brings up Manny the barber to his boss, and that name rings a bell.

So Calnan's boss goes to his counterpart at the Italian Organized Crime Unit at the FBI's New York office. It turns out they're also investigating a Manny, and it's the same Manny. Calnan ends up partnering with an agent on the Italian squad named Rick Denberger, and the two effectively work the case together and become really good friends. They're still friends today.

So why is Manny the barber involved in all of this? It turns out that a contact of Paul Kwok's was able to strike a deal with the Sicilian crime family in Montreal. The Sicilians agreed to transport the Asian syndicate's heroin across the border on 18-wheelers that were already carrying other cargo down from Canada to New York. I'm assuming the Sicilian family is the Rizzutos?

Yes, it is the Rizzuto. Well, I need to double check, but I'm fairly certain it's the Rizzuto. So the indictments end up including this weird mishmash of people who are like ethnically Chinese or of Italian descent, and they're from all these different countries.

Cal and Denberger and the team figure out who Tsechi Lap is, thanks to some cooperating suspects. But by that point, he's no longer in Canada. And it's only thankful to that lucky break you mentioned in the introduction that the FBI manages to get him. Yeah, so what happens to him now?

you know, after he gets to the States. It's a pretty standard criminal case. He doesn't fight extradition. There's no court records in Hong Kong. He's in the United States within months. CeCe Scott, the federal prosecutor who worked his case, said there was a bit of haggling with the plea deal. She said it felt like Tse wanted to cooperate just enough, no more, no less. Both sides knew he wasn't being completely forthright. It's sort of just the game you play with prosecutors.

Zay eventually gets a nine-year sentence, of which he served six. He was sentenced to a federal prison in Elkton, Ohio, a low-security facility that sits on a hill surrounded by pine trees. Inside, the security precautions aren't overwhelming, according to the former inmates and staff I spoke with.

Most convicts there are either non-violent offenders, people nearing the end of their sentences, getting ready to re-enter society. At the time, Elkton housed around 1,500 inmates, and once again, we're back to that scene in Blow where Johnny Depp's character is asked what he knows about cocaine. Elkton had a very small Cantonese-speaking community, and it included a guy named Lee Chung-Jack, who was also serving a sentence related to heroin trafficking.

I haven't been able to pin down if Lee and Tse knew each other before prison, but it wouldn't surprise me. One of the dealers convicted in Mark Kellman's case is also named in Lee's indictment, so there's overlap in their networks. It's sort of a moot point, though, because San Lee almost certainly would have met each other at Elkton, and that's the start of the Second Empire, at least according to Australian authorities. They allege that after both men were released in 2006, they went into the meth business together.

By 2010, they were calling their syndicate Sam Gore, a nickname for Tse that means brother number three in Cantonese. Its members just call it the company. Sam Gore is believed to be made up of former rival triads who united in the name of making money.

And here there's very much echoes of what the first heroin syndicate did with the Sicilian mafia in Montreal. It also feels a bit like what Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo did with the Guadalajara cartel, for those of your listeners who know Mexico's underworld history. What Samagor did was pretty ingenious. They went to the same jungles where in the 80s they were producing heroin, and instead they set up industrial-scale factories to produce synthetic drugs.

The jungles are still pretty under-policed, and synthetics, I'm sure as your listeners are aware, are much more profitable than drugs that rely on crops, because there's no need to worry about a bad harvest. Sam Gore appeared to make a couple types of synthetic drugs, including the low-quality meth and caffeine pills called Yaba that are everywhere in Southeast Asia, and higher-purity crystal meth that they shipped off to wealthier markets like Australia and Japan.

The strategy was pretty simple. Make enough meth to create an economy of scale and drive down the cost per unit. Flood the market with a cheap and addictive product, get new customers, watch the money pile in. There's also reports that the company operated a bit like Amazon in that they would guarantee free replacements for any shipment that was lost or stolen. That's great. Yeah.

It's insane how good Sam Gore was at this. The syndicate became one of the biggest drug trafficking operations in Asia's history and maybe the world's. The cartel was netting about $17 billion a year, and somehow Sam manages to do all of this in the shadows, only known to his associates and the authorities, until a Reuters piece added his existence to the world in 2019. And

That's crazy. So no one really, I mean, I assume there was probably federal agents or law enforcement tracking him somewhat, but no one really, this Reuters piece just kind of like blows the top off it? Yeah. Yeah. And the crazy thing is, my whole interest in this story, actually, a source had called me like a day or two before the Reuters piece dropped.

and he was like, hey, there's a story about to drop. You're going to be really interested in it. And so I took the call. I was very polite, and he's a really good source. But I hung up the phone, and I was like, it's a competitor story. Like, what can I do? Tip my hat? That's it. And then I read the story, and then there were these gaps. Not gaps in reporting, but there were these...

clues in the reporting about his life in the United States, his life in Canada, his connections to Hong Kong. It felt like there was so much more there. And there were these fascinating nuggets. The man had allegedly dropped, I think it was like $60 million at a casino one night, lost it all, and still managed to stay anonymous. It just...

It was mind boggling. Yeah, it's interesting. I think the world of Asian cartels and these sort of drug lords is huge and brings in a ton of money. But maybe because it's far away from the States, it gets way less attention than say Mexico or Colombia, or maybe they're just much better at staying secretive. Are they out there? Are they posting TikToks and Instagram of like giant bricks and holding gold plated AK-47s? Or do they mostly stay away from that?

No, they mostly stay away from, I mean, you do get that on the lower levels. And part of the reason, say, it was caught is because there was a lower level guy who, in the same core syndicate, who got caught trying to smuggle, I think it was ketamine, through an airport in Myanmar. And they found his phone was just a goldmine of information for law enforcement. And there were videos of, you know, them sort of bawling out. I think there were videos of someone being tortured as well.

But there's a more, there's more emphasis on staying quiet. I think, you know, in Hong, you've had the, Hong Kong had its violent days. You've had, you know, the days of violent cities. And you still have these places in Southeast Asia, these casino cities that are these special economic zones that are, and I know you've done an episode on the Golden Triangle one that's

that are just lawless places, and people do post to the internet there, but...

showing off like that isn't you know they don't leave as much of a trail yeah it's i think it's it's far more under the radar than um than what we see in in latin america or and also i think there's just less less journalists there that are covering it and it's still kind of like uh you know the borderlands in in perma whether it's it's intersecting with um with china or india and those places i've just heard stories about it and it really is just like uh

Yeah, just like a whole different world, although I guess you could say the same for a lot of places in Mexico and Brazil. But it just seems like that just stays...

much more under the radar at least to American eyes and ears. One other thing I think that is interesting to add to that is language. You look at a place like Myanmar, I think there's 130 different officially recognized ethnic groups. There's plenty more unrecognized. There's hundreds of languages spoken in this region, whereas in Latin America, you do have indigenous languages, but

But Spanish is sort of the lingua franca there, and communication is easier. So it's easier for a journalist to go in there and speak Spanish, whereas for most journalists going into that part of the world, you'd need a fixer who speaks one of these languages.

dialects that are spoken in the region, Wa being an example. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited to talk to Patrick about them and just the stories there are crazy. So where is Say Now? You said it was the first arrest. I take it he's been arrested again, yeah? Yeah, he's back behind bars, this time in Australia. And so is Lee Chung-Chak, too. And if they're convicted, they're probably both going to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Zare was arrested in the Netherlands in January 2021 after hopping off a plane from Taiwan. He was supposedly hiding out there after the Reuters article broke. Rumor has it he has connections high up on the island, but I could never stand that up. I was able to figure out that he had worn out his welcome and was effectively deported. And when he was kicked out, Taiwanese authorities just put him on a plane to the Netherlands.

C'est's Dutch lawyer told me, and he tried to argue in court, that Taiwan did this illegally, as Taiwanese law would have required them to deport him back to his home country, unless he agreed otherwise, and he didn't. The lawyer told me that C'est has no connections to the Netherlands, and that he was only sent there because the country's extradition laws make it easy for Australia to level new charges against him, at least easier than it would if he was extradited from Canada.

The argument was interesting, and one of my sources didn't exactly deny it was false, but it fell flat in court. After about two years of legal proceedings, Tse was sent to Australia, and his trial will likely take place sometime this year or next.

Australian authorities have been very tight-lipped about it, but they believe they've got a really solid case against him. And the trial is going to be really, really interesting because it's probably going to shed light on some really important details on how Tse was able to mastermind this empire. So how big was this empire of Sam Gore before he was arrested? So the estimate that the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime gave for most of the 2010s is that meth...

Synthetic drugs were a $30 to $60 billion a year business in Asia, and Sam Gore was responsible for about 17 of that.

What's crazy, well, it's not crazy because I'm sure your listeners know, Sam Gore hasn't really slowed down with Tsitsilop's arrest. They're still pumping out drugs. Synthetic drugs are still a major problem in Asia. And the root causes of drug production, they're under-policing, corruption, lack of treatment, all still exist and they're all still benefiting Sam Gore.

So the syndicate itself has not suffered from the loss of its leader.

So in terms of how else they were making money, most of it was methamphetamine, but were they also pumping out? I mean, were they selling heroin? Was there trafficking? What other stuff were they up to? So most of their money comes from crystal methamphetamine, sending it to far-flung markets because they could produce it for so cheap. They would hire very...

They would hire very advanced chemists, often from Taiwan, and they would, chemists who were smart enough that they could source precursors that were not necessarily controlled or heavily regulated, and turn those into the ingredients you need to make synthetic drugs. They call them precursors just because it's the step before you make the precursors to make the drugs.

And they could create crystal methamphetamine so cheaply that it wouldn't hurt them financially to lose a shipment.

But then they could sell it for, I can't remember the figure, but they could sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Japan, in New Zealand, in Australia. They did Yaba too, but Yaba doesn't really make the money that Crystal Meth makes. In terms of heroin, poppy cultivation was on the downswing for most of the 2010s. It's recently...

spiked up a little bit in the Golden Triangle, but heroin was very much not in the repertoire of Sam Gore. They were very much more focused on

and continue to be very focused on synthetics. And they're making all this in these labs in Burma? Yeah. These are basically just labs that they've built in Myanmar, in these under-policed jungles. Whether they're striking deals with specific armed ethnic groups, whether they've set up their own shop, it's all a bit hazy, but it's the same problem as the 1980s, that there is, you know...

There is not enough law enforcement up there, and it is just effectively ignored and accepted that drug production is part of life up there. And then in terms of what he's arrested for in Australia, or what they issue arrest warrants for, I assume it's just importing or sending massive amounts of meth to Australia? Correct. It's a very specific charge related to one specific incident of sending meth

meth amphetamine to Australia. The charge itself, I think, will carry about 20 years if he's convicted. And as a 60-year-old, it's probably a life sentence. But they're very focused, and it's funny because this is what Mark Kellman was talking about as well. They're very focused on just proving the one charge, and that's their job as prosecutors, as law enforcement. They're not trying to paint a whole picture of...

the Empire itself. They're trying to hammer down how he sent this particular shipment in and what his role was. Like I said, it makes sense, but it's also sort of a shame because from a historical perspective,

you're not going to learn how this happened, and you're not as law enforcement necessarily going to learn how to fix it the next time. Is there anything else you want to leave us with? I think that's it. Do you have any more questions that, you know, I know those answers weren't as well, you know, weren't as...

as the stuff I wrote down, but I'm happy to answer other questions if you've got them. No, no, that was good. That was good. Just tell everyone where they can find you, where they can see your work and everything like that, how they can reach you if they want to. Yeah, if you want to reach out to me, I'm on Twitter at Josh Berlinger, Instagram at J.A. Berlinger, or shoot me an email, joshua.berlinger at gmail.com. Great, man. Thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate having you.

And as always, everyone, patreon.com, Spotify, iTunes for bonus episodes. Until next week. ... ... ...

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