The Brutal Human Trafficking Syndicates of Southeast Asia
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Where we dive deep into the world of transnational criminal organizations and gangs and things of that nature with me, Danny Gould. And me, Sean Williams. This is the intro where we banter to show you that we're just normal guys having a good time. And we're all friends here. You, me, the viewers, all of us. We're all buds. Yeah, we're just down the pub having a couple of beers, right? Talking about organized crime, as everyone does. Just telling a story, you know? Yeah.

You're like an old friend. Exactly. And today we're going to be talking about the Rohingya and the human trafficking syndicates of Southeast Asia. Okay, that's pretty deep conversation for the pub. But yeah, I'm in. I'm in. Yeah, it's a bit depressing, I think, for pub conversation at this moment. Yeah, but I mean, I'm sure you're going to make it all kinds of interesting for us. So looking forward to it. That's the hope, right? Yeah.

Yeah, it's always the hope. It's always the hope. So today we're going to start with a story actually from my days of reporting and a life lesson as well. Okay, good. Philosophy and a good story. I like it. Yeah. So, I mean, every now and then, if you really play your cards wrong, you may find yourself running down the streets of downtown Bangkok, fearful that a mobster has sent his soldiers after you.

Yeah, that sounds like you've done something wrong somewhere. Oh, you have. Anyway, January 2016...

I am working for Vice News, which I've been doing for a couple of years. It was kind of the last days of it being a scrappy balls to the wall outlet before it kind of changed into something entirely different. And I was in Bangkok after bouncing around Burma and southern Thailand for three weeks investigating a story about the Rohingya, slavery, human trafficking, corruption, massacres, you know, fun stuff like that.

Yeah, just lighthearted, you know, everyday casual stuff. Right. And it's a story that I've been looking into for years, ever since I went on a reporting trip. First in 2013 in the summer. We'll dive into all that a bit later. But right then, I was in a hotel room in Bangkok preparing to interview a human trafficker.

known for being particularly ruthless. The kind of person who regularly had desperate people killed, turned people into slaves, had people tortured, and made millions doing it. Sounds like a pretty good contact. And a nice guy, too. I mean, hopefully a good interview, right? I'm sure. I'm sure. So the thing about...

Like huge international criminals is they're not always hulking imposing figures with tattoos on their neck or slicked hair, sharp dress, cutthroat looking businessmen. Sometimes they're just relatively dumpy old guys who look like an out of sorts uncle, someone with too much ear hair, but with a conspicuously expensive watch.

So take a look at the photo the next time there's a big mafia bust, and some of these guys might look terrifying, but there's others you wouldn't think twice of if you pass them on the street. And Anwar was one of those types. He's rumored to be one of the biggest human traffickers in Thailand, ferrying Rohingya from Burma into horrific situations in Thailand and Malaysia.

You know, a real scumbag who was tied in with all sorts of other mafiosos, government officials, military, police, and all that sort of stuff. A source I spoke to like four days ago told me that Anwar used to text him photos of dead bodies as a threat. Like, so we're talking that level of, you know, of human being.

Yeah, I've got the silent treatment and pretty much nothing else. I'm not on his level. Yeah, no, he's a bad person. But I was going to interview him. And the catch was that he wasn't going to know it. Surreptitiously interviewing dangerous people is not an ideal situation. And we did some serious prep work and put some serious thought into how we were going to do it and if we should do it. But there's only so much you can do. And we didn't have a big budget. Vice did have some cool gear. I think there was like a budding camera or a glasses camera.

But it was owned by HBO Vice at that point. And Vice News, which wasn't on HBO back then, kind of got treated like the bastard stepchild. Wait, so HBO Vice, they're the big guys. And Vice News are just like the office pissants or something? What's going on there? Well, I mean, we were like the scrappy underlings who were just on digital. Did we do better work? I like that. Most people say yes. But that's another conversation for another day. We'll save that for like the AMAs.

So, yeah, anyway, the HBO folks, they would constantly exploit us for our contacts and stories to make their pieces. But, you know, we were doing really good work for a tenth of their budget. And when it came down to shooting something that was risking our lives, the equipment manager didn't think it warranted the use of the good equipment.

So we were forced to buy this shitty secret recording pen for a couple hundred bucks last minute to use. And the thing was like as thick as a cucumber, the kind of thing spies on 60s TV shows use. And this is important to mention now because I'm using a storytelling tactic called foreshadowing. Okay, thank you. I've got my notepad out writing down these notes. I'm here to teach as much as anything else, you know? So...

We arrange it with this guy to meet him at his restaurant in downtown Bangkok in an area called Sukhumvit, which is chock full of bars and restaurants, massage parlors, tourists go there, everyone. You know, it's Bangkok. So I know people are probably asking, how do you arrange something like this? But it's actually kind of easy.

A lot of times people like this take on this community leader role or try to make themselves out to be community leaders, speaking for their people, functioning as some sort of grassroots NGO, as a thinly veiled cover of sorts. There's also a big distinction between traffickers and smugglers, and sometimes they try to frame themselves as smugglers, but we'll get into that a bit later. Anyway, Anwar was one of those types, so we arranged to meet him under the pretense of discussing this or that when it came to trafficking and, you know, everything like that.

Yeah, I keep saying we, and I was working with another reporter, producer who was really well-connected, and he's kind of the one who took care of all these arrangements. So we together enter the restaurant, which is a big Middle Eastern-style joint, walked up to the second floor, and outside on a spacious balcony, this rows of chairs set up like stadium seating, and men are watching a soccer game. My colleague who had connected with him previously approached Anwar briefly to say hi, and we sat down to watch the game and wait for him to make himself available.

Now, I need to point out again that the pen microphone was just a giant piece of crap and you couldn't tell when it was on or whether or not you had it turned on or off, whether it was recording, where it was facing. So I kept going to the bathroom to play with it and try to make sure it was working properly. But soon I got pretty frustrated with it.

He probably thought you had like IBS or a coke habit or something at this point, right? I mean, I'll take it. You know, it's better than the other. It works. Yeah. So I hand off the responsibility to my colleague who at some point I quietly explain my frustration and I'm just infuriated. And he's kind of the bigger man decided he would take it on and he would be the one to figure it out and sort of put it in the front pocket of a shirt. And you have to understand too, that we're nearing the end of a three week reporting trip, just running around, uh,

messed up places in Southeast Asia. And by this point, we're both going a little bit mad. And there had been definitely some rocky moments where I'd flipped out once or twice on him when he didn't deserve it. So we just really needed this thing to work, but we're both kind of at our wit's end. So finally, Anwar motions us to come over and we go sit with him in the restaurant. It's me and my partner, and we're sitting across from him at a regular rectangle restaurant table, you know, like normal restaurant table.

and slowly start talking about the trafficking networks, etc.,

And this guy, he's not a moron, right? He's not going to incriminate himself to two white guys sitting with him in a restaurant, even if he doesn't know he's being recorded. So I really forget the gist of the conversation, but I think we were doing one of those reporter tricks where you frame it. So one of the rivals who's a bad guy is telling us this guy is also a bad guy. And we're saying stuff like, you know, I think you're a pretty swell dude, but this other guy is telling me you're a giant scumbag who loves to do crime. I definitely don't think you are, but, but maybe what would you say to him?

Yeah, not a huge amount, I would imagine. Yeah, I mean, like, look, if you want to go balls to the wall against people like this, like, have at it, but I really prefer this method of questioning. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm, like, up to the task of facing down a, like, murderer and people smuggling. I just, I want to keep all my fingers, you know? Fair, yeah. So...

As this is going on, I can kind of see my colleague getting a bit unsure of himself. The pen is in his front pocket, and I can tell at this point he's unsure if he's getting the stuff on film or not, if the pen is working the right way, if it's filming the right way. So he takes it out as he's asking Anwar if he minds if he jots down some notes or two. And Anwar's kind of looking at him quizzically but doesn't seem to mind.

My colleague takes the notepad out. He's haphazardly jotting down gibberish, but the pen doesn't work and he's kind of tapping on it. And the thing just, it just falls apart. It just cracks wide open. And you can easily tell it's not just a pen, that it's a recording device. I mean, it doesn't even work as a pen. It's pretty, it's pretty awful, this thing. We just, we did not have the resources. And Alwar just, he goes sort of calmly, I can't talk to you anymore.

And we both are kind of dumbstruck and just, you know, barely utter out the word why. And the answer is because you're recording me. You're recording me right now. And we just stammer and stutter. And by then he's already walked off. Ouch. Yeah. One thing about doing this kind of work, whether it's talking to dangerous people or just moving around war zones, is you kind of discover how you operate during times of complete chaos or stress. And some people panic. Some people leap into action. Some people get scared.

I mostly just freeze in a way that allows me to give the aura of calmness when in reality, I'm really just not sure what to do. But I think it's actually like a helpful fight or flight response, all things considered, because if you lean into fight or flight, you can get yourself in trouble. Yeah, I think that's like a journalistic thing, right? It's not really going to be a good idea to leap out at someone or run away. You've got to kind of toe that line pretty well. I just kind of sit there, you know, and it's worked for me so far.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're alive. So yeah, there's something. Yeah. So I, you know, that's what happens. And we just sort of calmly sit there. I think we muttered fuck to ourselves a few times and we walk out of the restaurant into Bangkok's busy streets. It's nighttime. It's crowded. We're just not sure if we're in any danger. We're slowly and then more fast walking, jogging,

Maybe sprinting, checking behind us, you know, breaking into these half-hearted sprints back to our hotel. We get back to the hotel. I think at this point it's like 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock in the morning. And I call our main source out there who's thoroughly knowledgeable about Anwar and tapped into everything. Expecting him to calmly be like, oh, you know, you'll be fine. Don't worry about it. But instead he's like,

man, like, I don't know. He's, he's a pretty dangerous guy. You, you might want to be really careful. So we end up, no, I do. No, no. I thought he would like be like, Oh no, it's fine. But he was not like, it's fine. Appreciate honesty in this. Yeah. Yeah. We ended up switching hotels in the middle of the night and just laying low the next couple of days, which are, were our last days in the country anyway. And to be honest, I think we were 99% in the clear. Um,

But, you know, he probably assumed we were some sort of Western law enforcement agency. Even if not, it's a pretty big deal to go after two Western journalists or NGO workers in the middle of Bangkok. But either way, I think the moral of the story is, fuck that guy who wouldn't give us the good equipment.

And, um, yeah, that's, that's what it comes down to. I mean, are we going to get a bonus episode on a vice at some point? I'm really enjoying this inside baseball on, on this, uh, this outfit. I mean, if, if the people want it, you know, I will, uh, I will, I will dive deep. We will do it. I'm pushing. I'm pushing hard. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, I had done a couple of reporting trips out to this part of the world on this topic first in 2013 with the help of a grant from the International Center for Journalists alongside this badass photographer named Andrew Stambridge whose work you should all look up. And then again in 2016 when I was on this trip for Vice, I made a pretty great documentary, if I do say so myself, called Left 4 Dead. That's on YouTube.

where we dive deep into the trafficking groups and explore the whole operation and definitely go watch it if you want to see more information about what you're about to learn right now. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I can vouch for it. Thank you, man. So you may have seen news footage a few years ago of all these rickety, falling apart ships stranded at sea off the coast of Thailand with all these desperate people on them. And none of these countries allowing them to dock and wondered, you know, who the hell would do something like this?

Well, today we're going to break that down and get to the bottom of the vicious human trafficking syndicates that operate in Southeast Asia, mostly as it applies to the trafficking of Rohingya out of Bangladesh, Burma, and into countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Some of our shows are about famous gangsters and the kind of capers they got up to, and this is going to be something a little different, I sense, right? Yeah, I think this is going to be more about this phenomenon that exists. It's huge, and it's part of organized crime, especially on a global level. And I think it's important to understand, even if we don't have a single character that we're going to be following. Totally, totally.

And look, I've covered all manners of crime and warfare over the last decade or so. I spent a lot of time reading about this stuff, researching it, which is why I'm such a pleasant person. But while reporting on this story, I was just blown away by the savagery and just the callousness of the people involved. It's vicious. And we need to start off by explaining who the Rohingya are and how they ended up being caught in the crosshairs of these people.

They're an ethnic minority who are or were mostly concentrated on the southwest edge of Burma in a province called Rakhine State and across the border in Bangladesh. They're Muslims, and Burma is a majority Buddhist country. So you can kind of see where this is going. Yeah. I mean, it's probably good to mention that, you know, this kind of communal violence happens with every religion, even Buddhism, right? I think a lot of people in the States or UK or wherever don't really get how

kind of crazy that uh division or like the hatred is in burma right they're gonna get it if they listen to this but yeah it's it's i mean it's buddhists it's monks that are sometimes behind this thing buddhist monks so it's pretty it's pretty dark you know and i think part of the goal for the show was that we wanted to be irreverent but you know have a comical side but it's kind of hard to do when i keep choosing topics that have quote ethnic cleansing at the center of them

Yeah, that's a two-word description that's not going to get a huge amount of laughs from the offset, but I'm keen to hear what you got. Yeah. The Rohingya have been there for hundreds of years.

But they're still seen as outsiders by the Burmese government and the Rakhine people. Rakhine people are actually their own ethnic minority concentrated in the country that have fought an insurrection against the government. But that's a whole other story. Burma is made up of many different ethnic groups, tribes, many of whom have fought or are currently fighting an insurrection against the government. There's just like various, various different groups out there. And I know, Sean, you reported there as well, and you're familiar with some of them.

Yeah, I was there at the start of this year, actually. And I mean, it's crazy how divided up that place is. Like you would need permits to go from village to village sometimes, like tribes and ethnic groups and militant organizations. They like differ from town to town. It's almost impossible to like travel around there as you would do a normal country. And the borderlands there are just awesome.

All sorts of crazy. You have all these ethnic militias, drug trafficking, drug manufacturing, all sorts of stuff coming in from Bangladesh, child prostitution, you know, exotic animal poaching and all sorts of just insanity there. The Golden Triangle where Lao and Burma and Thailand meet is just this

hotbed of drugs, sex, trafficking, all kinds of crazy shit. And it's been going on for a long time, actually. Yeah. Yeah. It's all across the borders there too with, with Bangladesh and obviously anyway, Burma has been a brutal dictatorship for decades, but the country starts to open up a bit in the last decade or so, which is allowing more freedom. And that's when the racism and Islamophobia really ramp up targeting the Rohingya. Despite having been there for generations, if not hundreds of years, it's,

They're seen by the Rakhine Buddhists as being unwanted interlopers from Bangladesh, not true Burmese citizens and worst of all, Muslims. The people fear they're going to come over and spread Islam and force out Buddhism from the country. And they point to what happened in Afghanistan and all sorts of other stuff like that. You know, lots of war on terror type of things. As the country opened up, you started to see an increase of the typical the jihadis are coming to get us propaganda.

To be fair, this tension goes back decades, way before the current war on terror rhetoric, and some of it even built up from World War II when they fought on opposing sides. And there's been sporadic attacks and pogroms forcing Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh for generations. In 1982, the Burmese government passes a citizenship law that effectively makes the Rohingya in Burma stateless. Bangladesh doesn't really like them there either. They're basically the most unwanted people on the planet, and we'll see more of that going forward.

So fast forward to 2011, 2012, like I said, Burma had been horribly repressive, closed off country for decades, like North Korean style. And it starts opening up a bit. 2012 is really when they have this turn. Aung San Suu Kyi gets involved. You know, there's elections. The country's going to change. Tourists come in and now there's a freeish press and the internet, it explodes. People can actually talk. And of course, what's the first thing everyone who just gets the internet uses it for? Uh,

Exactly. Pornography. Yes. But what's the second? God, tell me, tell me. Racism. Ah, okay. Not quite as nice. It's just built on pornography and racism. Yeah.

Uh, in, in friends of mine tell me that that's the case. Yeah. Yeah. I guess for a while, like social media was built on like Instagram and Facebook on, on 19 year old girls sharing their vacation photos, but it has since been eclipsed by racism. And I think some healthy, you know, amounts of pornography as well. Okay. The world's getting worse then? Just theory, just theories of, of, of the internet with, with Danny Gold. Okay, great. Anyway, moving on. Um,

Vicious anti-Rohingya sentiment starts to spread, some say with the complicity and participation of the government and security forces. There's a famous Buddhist monk, Ashin Rawatu, who I've actually interviewed twice, who gets famous for it and becomes a sort of celebrity. He does speaking tours around the country, doing everything he can to incite violence. He's passing out DVDs of his talks, you know, pamphlets, all that sort of old school stuff.

fomenting ethnic cleansing tactics. Actually, it's worth mentioning as well, like there's all kinds of religious fanatics in Burma. Like there's Christian militias as well trying to drive out the Muslims again. It's just this like real radical bent to all of these different groups in the country. It's coming from all directions at all times. It's a really mad place.

Hey, to be fair, I mean, in the States, we have our own, we have our own, you know, religious fundamentalists as well. So I'm not going to pass judgment on Burma here. Yeah, they're everywhere. Those guys, those guys get into every country. And after Ashwin Murata does all this stuff, the violence really kicks off in 2012, I think at the end of the summer into the fall, when an incident occurs with a group of Rohingya being accused of raping a Buddhist woman.

The government facilitate the attacks. Riots happen. Dozens are killed. And 140,000 or so Rohingya end up in these squalid, internally displaced persons camps. Well, they're kind of more like internment camps. Their villages are destroyed and thousands more flee to Bangladesh. In 2013, it was the first time I visited these camps and they're just like forsaken, hopeless places. You feel like you're at the end of the earth and the Rohingya are just these mostly peaceful, poor people that have nothing going for them.

And they're just in this desperate, hopeless situation and no one seems to care. The UN has called them the most persecuted people on earth, but I think it's more that they're just completely unwanted. It's like a real modern tragedy, right, there in India. It's such an awful situation and no one really seems to care enough to do anything major about it.

Yeah, there's just not many efforts. I mean, there's obviously NGOs and some government officials from various countries that are speaking up, but they're just really tread upon, you know? Yeah, really sad. So what you have now is this substantial population in a desperate situation without any sort of authority figure or force looking out for them. And that's a picture-perfect situation for all sorts of criminal activity, but especially for big transnational human trafficking syndicates.

What happens when you leave people in a place with no hope? They're going to want to get the fuck out by any means necessary. So we're going to fast forward to 2015, then we'll come back. We'll bounce all around. April 30th, 2015. The Thai authorities announced they discovered a mass grave near the southern border of Malaysia. 38 bodies are found. More of these mass graves start popping up. It's really, really grisly. And a police informant I interviewed in 2016 had this quote.

After they had unearthed some more graves, and he says, in the mountain, there will be many graves. If we walk in the mountain, we will just walk on the dead bodies. A month later, Malaysia finds 139 graves and the remnants of 28 trafficking camps. Just bodies upon bodies, most of them Rohingya.

All of these graves and trafficking camps are there because of these crime syndicates who have connections in Burma, Thailand, Malaysia with government officials, police, military, as well as various Southeast Asian mafias that are all interconnected. So, I mean, you don't have to go to the basement of a pizzeria like these groups are out there.

Yeah, they're real. The real groups are out there. According to the NGO Fortify Rights, who I've worked with a ton and who a lot of this info comes from, about 170,000 Rohingya took to the sea to be trafficked between 2012 and 2015. And sure, these are desperately poor people, so maybe you're thinking there isn't a lot of money involved, but very wrong. Each year, there was 50 to 100 million earned as profits. Each ship could earn a trafficker up to $50,000, and each trafficked person had the potential to earn the trafficker $2,000.

So multiply that by 170,000 and that's a lot of fucking money to be made. And the local wages aren't going to be doing much there, right? So it's an incredible amount of money for a guy from Burma to be making. Yeah, I mean, Burma and Bangladesh are incredibly poor countries. I think Malaysia and Thailand are doing much better, but it's a lot. I mean, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars here. Wow.

But just to add to this, trafficking in Southeast Asia wasn't new in 2012. And there were some Bangladeshi nationals trafficked in these ships. But we're going to focus on the Rohingya because, you know, they're the majority of the situation. Here's Fortify summarizing the situation better than anyone. Quote, preying largely on the desperation of Rohingya to escape persecution in Myanmar, traffickers lured men, women and children into ships with promises of safety and security in Malaysia.

Instead of finding safety and security, traffickers held people captive in deplorable conditions of human trafficking ships at sea and in human trafficking camps on the Malaysian-Thailand border. Traffickers gave their captives three options. Buy their release, be sold into further exploitation, slavery, or die. So these graves start getting discovered. The press descends on Thailand and Malaysia. And there's a real problem here because this was known about but ignored because nobody cared.

But when you have international news showing shallow graves, it's just, it's not a good look. You know, no Instagram influencers looking for like the perfect turquoise water in the background are going to fly to one of your resorts. If there's, you know, mass graves lying around. Yeah. Was someone just think of the influencers for once? You got it. You got to win over the influencers and,

There's a list that rates countries based on trafficking, and this threatens to get Thailand and Malaysia downgraded, and the Thai authorities are just being made to look incompetent, and it's embarrassing for them. And the U.S. is turning on the pressure now. The international community is applying some pressure.

By now, the heat is turning up on the traffickers, right? And what do they do? They just abandon the boats like at sea. It's the wildest thing. You have these ghost ships full of these people, maybe 5,000, 6,000 people in total, just pinging around the sea, the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal. And it's insane.

There's video footage of it, and still none of the countries want to take them in. Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia. There's fishermen and other people giving them stuff, helping them come in. There's also airdrops of food and water and stuff like that. But they're kind of just like, oh, not my problem. People just don't want the Rohingya that much. Meanwhile, international news is just playing these images, and everyone is like, what in the actual fuck is happening right now? And that's still... I mean, there's still situations like that going on right now. These ships eventually made it in, but...

Um, yeah, just it's dark, man. Like, how does that happen? Wild. Just stranded, stranded at sea. Such a failure on everyone's heart. And who are these traffickers? They're these rich big boss man figures, usually orchestrating things from Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur, working with high level military and police. Everything is just tied in. The operations themselves are actually quite complex. And they're a web of these transnational mafias that

Like I said, headquartered in these capital cities, but they've got Thai, Malay, Bangladesh, Burmese members involved. Most disturbing of all, some pretty high-level Rohingya members. Anwar is a Rohingya. And that's one of those things that blew my mind, but obviously it shouldn't have, that someone could be doing these sorts of things to their own people who were just being oppressed as all hell.

So Anwar himself is a Rohingya and he's like selling people to their deaths from his own group that are persecuted by every country in the region. Jesus, this is so dark, man. Yeah, it's, I mean, I guess it really shouldn't come as a surprise, right? The Italian mafia, La Cosa Nostra, they start off extorting their own villagers, poor shopkeepers. It's just the name of the game. That's how a lot of these groups get going is going after their own people.

But yeah, for some reason, when I learned that, it's just like, it's just disturbing, man. That's awful. Yeah. So the traffickers, these wealthy investors, they'll purchase a large boat. Some of them are actually former fishing boats. And these boats are sent to the western coast of Rakhine State, where they anchor offshore in international waters close to a city called Sitwe or another city called Mongda, which are two major Rohingya areas, which are right near the water.

The ship captain or other operatives within the syndicates contact local brokers in Rohingya communities who round up and recruit people to fill the boat. These are people in the camps, they're men on the ground, and they're paid by commission. And they tell these desperate people that they'll travel safely to Malaysia while they'll have a job waiting. So they're the front line of the trafficking orgs, like the agents. One mid-level trafficker broke it down to fortify rights. This is a quote again. The main trafficking company is in Malaysia.

The head of the syndicate needs, let's say, 1,000 people from Myanmar or Bangladesh in order to send the ship. He hires someone from Rakhine State. The main trafficker in Malaysia is from our Rohingya community. There are big traffickers on the ship, too. They will call the onshore brokers and say, if you can send 10 people, you will get $2,000 U.S., so try to find the people. The onshore trafficker is the agent of the traffickers.

He doesn't know anything. He really needs the money, so he will persuade them any way he can. Let's say there is a young person who is responsible for managing cows. He only knows about cows. The trafficker goes to him and says, what are you doing for a living? What is your salary? Do you want to go with me? You will get $2,000 per month. You will go on a ship. As soon as you go on the ship, your family will get money, US $520. And when you get to Malaysia, you will have great opportunities. My uncle has a big project and needs thousands of workers. He

The boy in Sitwe earns 21 US dollars per month. And in Malaysia, he thinks he will get 2000. So he thinks, OK, I'm going.

So you kind of like silo everything, right? You kind of like incentivize people at different levels to carry out stuff. You kind of trickle down the payments. Like you keep everything kind of broken up and yet connected at the same time. I think I went into this in the Nigerian one as well. It kind of keeps everything separate so people can't be caught. And then it makes people, you know, have to do your bidding because if they don't, then someone else is going to know. It's kind of just like a giant Ponzi scheme in a way, right?

Yeah, in a way. I mean, I kind of don't buy that these guys on the ground don't know what's going on. By now, everyone has heard these stories and I've been in the camps and you can interview some people who managed to escape and they will show you the scars and they've been beaten. So it is, I mean, some of them might just be aware that it's a terrible situation by now. But yeah, I mean, that's trafficking, right? It's deception on every level. Yeah, yeah. The Rohingya, the traffic, they're gathered on these small rickety boats. I've gone and seen them. They're just right there at the docks. Maybe they fit a few dozen people crammed on.

And payments are made to local authorities so they can get through. It's not hard to get evidence, too, of complicity. Like an activist in Yangon shared with me a phone call he recorded of someone in the Navy talking about how much they're paid to let the ships leave. Remember, they want the Rohingya gone, right? So they're not really going to care too much in the first place. Why would they stop them? If they can get paid, too, then why not? So on the phone call, the guy's like, yeah, 500 bucks, let them through, all good. And that's how it happens.

I'm guessing the Burmese police aren't getting a lot of money, right? Yeah, no, I sincerely doubt. I can't speak to what their actual salary is, but I'm going to go ahead and doubt that. Yeah, you can go ahead and send us some figures on the email after this. Please correct me. The small boats, they keep going back and forth and back and forth until the big boat, which is maybe 20 miles away, is dangerously overpacked. And if you're the first group to board, you could actually get stuck on those boats until the ship fills up, which takes weeks.

Once they get on, everything is taken from them. Sometimes, and this is one of the craziest things I've ever heard, they're given different colored bracelets when they get on the ship, and each color represents a different trafficker because some of the traffickers go in together on ships. So if a forhinga is wearing a green bracelet on the ship, they're now owned by the trafficker who was assigned the color green.

Because the syndicates, you know, they share the boats, but the people are actually owned by the different traffickers. Do I have to repeat that again? Like, do people understand how completely insane that is?

So these guys are wearing bracelets like those charity bands that people wear now. This is like the darkest festival entrance I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah. This is so dark, man. It's to signify who they're owned by. Yeah, it is. And it's like those, you know, I think it was the Livestrong, the Lance Armstrong ones that were, it's those sort of bracelets. Who's worse? The traffickers, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to be clear. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Yeah.

Once the large boats are full, they make their way to Thai waters and dock throughout the southern provinces near the Malaysian border to unload their property, which are the people. And this part of the sea, it's really wild. There's all these jungles and tiny islands and inlets. It's kind of lawless at times and hard to patrol. I mean, sure, there's beautiful vacation spots probably like a dozen miles away. But there's pirates and illegal fishing boats and all that stuff. And also the Thai authorities themselves are, you know, they're getting paid off too.

I just want to put out a call that all of the influencers that are on European beaches, they should go there. And do what? Well, they wouldn't be in Europe for a start, but they could get nice pictures, right? If they don't get picked up by the pirates or the traffickers. It is beautiful. Actually, the area where the movie The Beach was filmed is right there. And that is a movie that I will defend as being great until the day I die.

probably the worst opinion i've heard on this uh podcast i just i don't understand how anyone can can dislike them i'm just confused i'm starting to i'm starting to doubt your trustworthiness as a source but uh yeah carry on i mean how it's young leo what more do you want i'm on board with young leo i'm not on board with the beach it's terrible this might be the end of this podcast um

In some cases, vehicles that are operated by Thai officials are alleged to actually have escorted the trafficking chips onto Thailand. In some other cases, Thai immigration authorities are said to have even taken Rohingya into custody and then just sold them back to the traffickers. Like everyone was in on it. BBC reporter Jonathan Head does this report in 2015 down there. He's tagging along with a local man who was kind of a vigilante. And he says, the local man, the whole community is involved in this business.

everybody knows about the camps it's because of the money which yeah i mean yeah yeah yeah traffickers hire everyone they hire people to keep watch of the camps to carry food for the rohingya they are around all the houses here hiring people so this is like not just this cottage industry crime that's going on right this is sustaining whole economies whole communities at this point right

I mean, I don't know how much. I think there's definitely money being made. I don't know if that's actually sustaining these communities a ton, but there's people, there's locals making money in these small villages. Yeah, it could be supporting like a small village. Yeah, yeah. This is a quote from Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights. Once these ships made their way to Thailand en route to Malaysia, usually this human cargo, and they were regarded as human cargo, would be herded into these remote camps in the jungle, held in the situation of captivity, and they would essentially be held for ransom.

They'd be handed a telephone and they'd be told, you need to raise $2,000 for your freedom or we will either kill you or you will die here. Another option would be to sell them off to a situation of slave labor. This was a cold, calculated business in the trade of human beings, men, women, and children. They were making so much money that they had little regard for their human cargo that was dying, and in some cases, in large numbers.

These camps are effectively brutal internment camps, gulags, concentration camps, like slave camps. People are held in bamboo cages. I don't even know how to describe them. You know, they were starved, they were beaten, raped, and they would have the victims call up their relatives just saying they need their ransom money and then beat them while they were on the phone with their family members to show how serious they were. Jesus Christ.

And, you know, like I've said, I've covered a lot of violence and conflict and I just, the savagery of this, it really just blew me away. Sometimes on the ships, they would just toss people over. Wow. Yeah. Like human life has been devalued in this so massively. Yeah.

These trafficking victims are shuffled to different camps, hidden in the jungle and swamplands and in the mountains, sometimes over the border into Malaysia, back and forth, avoiding any sort of law enforcement. Southern Thailand, like the real tip along the border, it's a weird place. It's 300 miles long. There's been a decades-long low-level guerrilla war insurrection fought there for decades by Islamic separatists who attacked the police and the military.

You have all sorts of illicit trade. You have Malaysians coming in from their strict country over the border to party, to get fucked up, to smoke Thai meth, sleep with prostitutes, get drunk. And sometimes the Islamic separatists blow up the party bars there. It's nuts. Borderlands. Borderlands. Borderlands. You know, I remember we used to take college trips to Montreal when I was 18 so you could go get drunk and...

you know, giant strip clubs and good drugs, but America is a relatively liberal place. Imagine you live in a super strict country and just across the border is, is Thailand. You know, you're going to wild out, but to be fair, you know,

Australian and British backpackers are kind of far more, you know, I want to use the word wild, but euphemistic. They're kind of like a backward step in evolution. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that. Yeah, wild is definitely a euphemism. I mean, every country's got these guys, right? Like Americans in Cancun, Israelis in Goa, the Russians in Turkey, the Brits, well, just about everywhere, unfortunately. But yeah, we've all got them. The Brits all across Europe and Southeast Asia and pretty much anywhere else. And yeah, everywhere, everywhere.

Yeah, border towns. I mean, especially where one country is strict and the other is looser. I remember this one time, God, maybe 20 years ago, I crossed into Ethiopia from Sudan. And that border is, I mean, Sudan is, you know, extremely strict, but

Islamic law and Ethiopia is just like a free for all. So Sudan's the kind of place where they'll give you an honest price in the market right off the bat because no one will dare ever cheat you. And the only way to get booze in Khartoum is, is to go. And this is, I don't know if it's true or not. We never, we never tried it. Go to a Chinese restaurant and speak in code about getting tea in a teapot. But yeah,

You know, you cross the border into Ethiopia and it's just brothels and booze and cothouses and dudes with too much gold jewelry just eyeing you. It's just real weird. I just, I love borderlands, man. I would like to know if any listeners can tell us what is the like biggest difference between two countries on a border, right? I mean, the one that you're describing is pretty nuts, but I bet there's one that's like even wilder between conservatives and liberalism, stuff like that.

That's a really good, I mean, it's got to be like North Korea and any other country, right? Yeah, actually. Yeah. Fair enough. We might just do that. Sudan, Ethiopia was, was pretty big. So, but yeah, anyway, back to the horrible trafficking situation.

Once the ransoms are paid, they're finally released. Sometimes if they can't get a ransom payment, they're sold off at a cut rate to a trafficker in Malaysia, and the cycle just starts again. Sometimes the women are sold into forced marriages or domestic servitude, and sometimes they're just killed. Sometimes the modern-day slavery happens on Thai fishing boats, and the AP actually won a Pulitzer a few years ago.

for their expose on slavery in the Thai fishing industry, though it wasn't specifically related to Rohingya. And The Guardian later did a story with Emmanuel Stokes, a fantastic reporter, and Chris Kelly, where they talked about the Rohingya being sold for $900 to fishing boats. Thai fishing is a $7.3 billion industry. It's the third most valuable seafood exports in the world, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation.

And it's operated by these really low wage workers and forced laborers from Laos, Cambodia, Burma. It's been going on since the 90s. And the Thai fishing industry has actually been hit hard by declining seafood stocks and new regulations. So, you know, forced labor. Since the AP investigation, the EU and U.S. have apparently been putting a lot of pressure on the Thais to clean it up. And you have 25,000 fishing licenses that have been removed from 2015 to 2017. And some of those boats and those captains, guess what they did? Uh.

Um, nothing good, I'm going to guess. Repurpose the boats for human trafficking. So back to Thailand, Malaysia, 2015, graves popping up, ties are embarrassed. It's time to make some arrests to see a fix. 103 people are arrested, including military officials. It starts the largest human trafficking trial in all of Southeast Asia, goes through to 2017. 60 or so people are convicted, including an army general who reportedly made a million dollars off it all.

two provincial politicians, police. Another big boss convicted is the chief legal advisor of Thailand's Democrat Party, who has close links to the military and royal establishment, according to Andrew Marshall of Reuters. Okay, so this is up and down everywhere, this business now. This is not just like...

Not just gangsters getting involved in this crime. It's absolutely everyone from politics to public servants, everyone. Well, the gangsters run it, but these people are roped in or bribed or, you know, they're on the periphery. The trial had a ton of issues with intimidation and threats against interpreters, witnesses, and even police investigators, like real mafia stuff. One of the guys convicted a different Anwar. There were 26 bodies found in one of his camps, shallow graves. He got 94 years.

By all accounts, this slowed the trafficking down a bit. The networks are put on the fritz, but not totally disrupted. According to experts like Fortify and people I talked to, they didn't get the real big fish. Whoa, what did real big fish have to do with it?

Scott, Jesus. I don't know, but I'm ready for third wave Scott. I just want to put that out there right now. I'm not sure if I want him to go and do human trafficking instead, but I don't know. Anyway, our informant, the same one who spoke about the bodies on the mountains, told me, quote, yes, maybe they negotiated with the local authorities to hide evidences. Maybe they gave a bribe.

Also, some of the human traffickers, those who are the big investors, they also have links with some government officials. They do business so these government officials, they protect their business. I also interviewed this smuggler, and I want to be clear about the difference between smugglers and traffickers. Traffickers do things by force, by violence or by deception, whereas smugglers, you know,

You know, they are generally hired by people. Now, not all of them are good. Some of them are terrible people. But people who also smuggled, you know, Jews out of Nazi Germany, they were smugglers as well. Right. So there can be smugglers that are honorable, that are decent people. I mean, they're still making money, obviously. But but, you know, there's a big difference between smugglers and traffickers.

This informant, when I met him, it was super weird. He was hiding out. He was super paranoid, just like in a shitty apartment block. He said he had helped the police and informed on the trafficking camps. Also said they hadn't arrested the main trafficker. He told us, quote, everything is illegal from the bottom up. We can't control it anymore. The corruption is so widespread that the senior police investigator on the case fled Thailand fearing for his life. Major General Pawin Pongsiran said,

was seeking political asylum in Australia after implicating top officials in the Thai government, military, and police force involved in human trafficking. In 2017, though, something else happens. The Burmese army just goes completely unhinged and starts violently, ethnically cleansing Myanmar of Rohingya, burning down villages, murdering, raping, just committing full-scale atrocities and war crimes. 700,000 Rohingya flee into Bangladesh, turning the area known as Cox's Bazaar into the largest concentration of refugees in the world.

They're already a healthy amount of Rohingya there, but now estimates put it at a million. And Bangladesh is hardly a country that's equipped to deal with a million refugees coming over into its borders, right? I mean, people should really check out these camps. I mean, they're so cramped, claustrophobic. They're dystopian places, right? I mean, and I guess you've got COVID tearing through the camps now. I mean, they're just these awful, awful places, right?

Yeah, and they flood and there's rains and diseases. It's an awful place. And there are some Rohingya that have been there for years and years. The thing is, Bangladesh, it doesn't ethnically cleanse them, but it also treats them pretty poorly as well. It doesn't welcome them. I think at one point there was a plan to put a bunch of them on like an island in the middle of nowhere. They don't kick them out right away, but they don't just make it easy or welcoming.

So, yeah, now you have even more people in a desperate situation who have lost the little things they once had. And what's going to happen is it's going to get worse. The Times of London had an article in 2018 about gang wars and militants in the camps, which is typical. And I should say there are – there is like a small Rohingya separatist group, but it's pretty ineffective. And there have been in the past. ARSA is what their acronym is, but they haven't really done much. They're not a threat. And I don't even –

I kind of almost didn't want to mention them because the Burmese government plays them up as this gigantic threat like they're Al-Qaeda when they're really pretty much nothing. Yeah, and the Burmese government does that with a lot of groups, right? You've got Chinese-backed Wah in the east and you've got Christian militants in the north and you've got all these groups that are kind of like some of them are hand in glove with the government themselves. It's just a big racket. I mean, everything's just kind of simmering and nothing really feels like it's a real war going on there.

To be fair, the Wa are incredibly badass and people should be scared of them. And I think we should do an episode on them at some point. We should definitely do an episode on the Wa. I actually spent some time up in Wa this year so I could...

Yeah, I could tell you some stories about those guys. They're pretty nuts. There's a quote in Bertrand Lindner's book about Burma where he talks about the Wa. And I guess someone was going around trying to organize some of the tribes into a central government thing and give them schooling and health or whatever. And the Wa just turned them down. And there's this quote where they're just like,

We are dirty, wild people. We do not want your schools or your healthcare or anything like that. We are the law. And it just, I'm paraphrasing and getting it wrong, but it's along those lines and it rules. Yeah, we are Borg. We are one. So, you know, when you leave these people to fester, you have that many people crammed into an area, many of them desperate. It's fertile grounds for black markets, drugs, prostitution, and trafficking. And there's no better natural resource than

Yeah.

January 2020, Bangladeshi police break up a trafficking ring, which was taking young women and girls to Malaysia through India for sex trafficking purposes. March of 2020, there's a shootout and police kill eight Rohingya gangsters suspected of being involved with the drug and human trafficking. April of 2020. I think it's worth mentioning as well at this point that like,

This drug industry is gigantic. It's the biggest in the world. It's bigger than the Mexican cartels. I think it was something like $60 billion is being pumped out of that region every year in all directions. This is like huge, huge industry. And we're going to get into that in a couple episodes because Sean's been there and has done the legwork, man. Yeah. I'm really excited for that.

It's going to be fun. Being out there wasn't so much fun at times, but yeah, the podcast is going to be a lot better. Yeah. It's a hard place to report that whole area. It's the hardest place I've ever been by a mile, actually. That's not easy. April 2020, 400 people, Rohingya, are rescued from a boat that had been abandoned at sea for months. According to Rafiqul, whose name I'm probably mispronouncing, Islam for IPS News, 32 people had already died on it. And according to a local crime reporter, he quotes...

About 350 people are trafficked from Cox's Bazaar on every trip, and there are six to seven trips per month. About 1,500 to 2,000 people on average are being trafficked to Malaysia every month, he told IPS. He also said some of the traffickers have local agents that seek to ID the pretty girls. They tell the story of a young woman, quote, 2019, when a man called her mobile and introduced himself as a Rohingya named Jubair. He was living in Malaysia. He told the young girl he wanted to marry her.

What the girl in her family did not know then was that he was part of a human trafficking syndicate. Joubert may not have been his real name. The parents agree to it. They're looking for a better life. And that's such a big part of trafficking, whether it's men being promised a job or women, a husband that can take care of them. It's all done under, you know, false pretenses with the promise of a better life. And it's just so fucking dark, man, because you're giving hopeless people hope.

an opportunity or what they think is an opportunity. And then you're just putting them into a far worse situation. And, you know, these women are sold into prostitution or forced marriages. Yeah, I think we got into that in the Nigeria one as well, right? All these women that are sold into sex slavery all over Europe. I mean, it's happening everywhere. It's really awful stuff. Fortify writes in 2014 at a phone call between two Rohingya traffickers in Bangkok and a Rohingya trafficker overseeing a human trafficking camp in southern Thailand.

On the call, the Bangkok-based traffickers negotiated for the purchase of two women from the camp. And at the outset of the call, the trafficker in the camp explained that he was working for a Rohingya human trafficker from Sitwe, Rakhine State, Myanmar, who is in control of a camp in southern Thailand with two women. The Bangkok trafficker offered $780 for a Rohingya woman, and the camp-based trafficker replied with a non-negotiable counteroffer of $937, saying his boss won't let him go lower. The old, you know, blame it on the boss trick.

The guys in Bangkok are asking whether or not the woman is beautiful. And the guard replies, you can see them first. If you want to take one or two, that is your decision. She is very beautiful, very beautiful. A Thai guard in the camp wants to marry her. Gross. So you have these girls from these camps being trafficked into prostitution, forced marriages. So, you know, 2020, we have boats being abandoned at sea again, especially now with the coronavirus and the borders actually shut. You have girls being trafficked into prostitution, forced marriages, prostitution.

The Guardian in February actually quoted a Rohingya activist as saying the networks are back up and moving. Again, the same ones from 2015 who had played it cool for a while. And I mean, who knows what's going to happen with the coronavirus, but my prediction is it won't be good.

So yeah, that is our episode for today. Next time, definitely going to do a subject that doesn't involve ethnic cleansing. And I have not been back to Bangkok yet. And if I do end up going soon, I probably will keep an eye out, but I'm sure I'll be fine. Yeah, I'll probably just like get a better pen from maybe the guys at HBO could help you out, right? I will. The anger till the day I die, my friend. I will have my vengeance. It's warranted. Yeah, I feel you.

Uh, but yeah, thank you for joining us on the underworld podcast. We are slowly getting the hang of this thing. Please subscribe on, um, what is it? Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, uh, the other ones. So actually if you're, if you like us, just subscribe on all of them. Just do it all. Yeah. Yeah. Take your, take your friends' phones, take your parents' phones, subscribe on their phones, you know, help us out here. Uh, go to the Patreon underworld podcast, uh,

Wait, patreon.com slash underworld podcast. Give us money. Sean has really bad gambling debts. He's in it to the worst kind of people with the worst kind of trouble. And we, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta help him out. I've got about, yeah, I've got about a week. I've got about a week. So help me out guys. Uh, but yeah, thanks again for, for tuning in and, uh, peace out.