The Asian drug kingpin we are going to talk
about today has been compared not only to
El Chapo, but also the infamous Pablo Escobar.
It’s said he’s made billions of dollars
exporting mostly crystal methamphetamine around
the world, working with the likes of Japan's
Yakuza and numerous gangs from Australia and
other countries.
This man lives a lifestyle worthy of an underworld
billionaire, owning a private jet of course,
maybe even a few, but also gambling away millions
of dollars at a time in casinos.
He is rightly paranoid and it’s said won’t
go many places without his bodyguard team
which consists of eight Thai kick boxers.
He is a very wanted man, but until recently
not many people had heard about this guy.
Today we’ll take a closer look at him.
His real name is Tse Chi Lop, and while he
has Canadian citizenship he was actually born
in China.
It’s said this man created a drug syndicate
that goes by the name “The Company”, and
this group of sketchy people flood the world’s
streets with not just vast amounts of “ice”,
but also other drugs such as heroin, ketamine
and MDMA, aka Ecstasy or Molly.
Even though you might not have heard the name
before, he’s currently being hunted down
by law enforcement agencies spanning the globe.
That’s why he’s sometimes called Asia’s
Most Wanted Man.
His empire consists of lots of people across
a large syndicate, and the members might hail
from any number of countries including Hong
Kong, Macau, Taiwan, mainland China, Malaysia,
Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
There might be a lot of people involved, but
its Tse Chi Lop who is said to be right at
the top.
This is some big enterprise, and according
to members of law enforcement the syndicate
is actually more sophisticated than the drug
outfits working in Latin America.
We know that he was born in Guangzhou in 1963,
but emigrated to Canada in 1988.
It’s said he grew up in China during the
Cultural Revolution.
At that time some of Mao’s Red Guard that
had found themselves in prison formed a gang
called the Big Circle Gang.
It seems that Tse became part of this and
later moved to Hong Kong.
We don’t know much about his past, but it
seems he was involved in drug trafficking
as early as the 90s.
Late in that decade he was arrested for conspiracy
to traffic heroin, and after that he was extradited
to the USA.
There he served nine years in the federal
correctional institution in Elkton in Ohio.
During the 90s much of the world’s opium
was produced in a place sometimes referred
to as the Golden Triangle.
This is the place where the countries of Myanmar,
Thailand, and Laos all meet.
It’s said that Tse could have been looking
at a life sentence then for his part in the
trafficking of drugs, but he pleaded to the
court for leniency.
He told them that his parents were old and
needed taking care of and that his son was
sick.
He told the court he was sorry for what he
had done and assured them that when he got
out he would open a restaurant and avoid criminality
forever.
That was a lie, though, and it seems he just
became a bigger trafficker when he got out.
After he was released it’s not clear just
how quick he started making contact with his
friends in Asia again, but it’s reported
that he moved back to Canada and sometime
later registered a company in Hong Kong called
“China Peace Investment Group Company Ltd.”
That is a far cry from a restaurant.
Some investigators said he basically picked
up where he left off, and through this company
he started making connections in the underworld
again.
His way of conducting the business of trafficking
drugs was appealing to other gangs, seeing
that his policy was if the drugs got stopped
at any point by police they’d be replaced
with another shipment at no extra cost.
That was something his customers just couldn’t
turn their noses up at.
His popularity with drug dealers, though,
was the reason his name popped up with law
enforcement.
In 2011, Australian police were onto a group
of dealers importing heroin and meth.
They knew some drugs were about to enter Australia.
The shipment was only a few kilos, so the
cops decided that instead of arresting the
men importing the drugs, they’d put them
under surveillance to try and find out where
the drugs were coming from.
They were watched and their phones were tapped.
When more drugs were sent and then intercepted,
the Australian gang who were being watched
asked their trafficker for more of the stuff,
with the same deal not reneged on, which was
more drugs but at no extra cost.
It seems that the traffickers in Hong Kong
became frustrated as more drugs were seized
in Australia.
Why was this happening time and again with
one gang?
They called for a meeting in Hong Kong with
two Australian gang members, but because those
gangs were under surveillance, the Australian
cops had the Hong Kong police follow the two
men.
One of the men at that meeting in Hong Kong
was Tse Chi Lop.
It seems that at first police weren’t aware
he was such a big deal, and came across as
a family man with a business to run.
But as time went by and they followed him
around, they witnessed his luxurious lifestyle
and the fact that he didn’t go many places
without his group of trained bodyguards.
They knew they were onto something, or someone,
big.
Some of the ways he liked to spend his growing
fortune was to rent out expensive hotels and
resorts, flying in people from other places
on his private jets.
He was fond of betting in some of Asia’s
casinos and put big money down on horse races.
One investigator believes that in Macau in
just one night he lost $66 million in a casino.
He was of course watched more closely since
he was evidently making insane amounts of
cash.
It wasn’t until one man was stopped at an
airport in Yangon that there was a big breakthrough.
This was a man that had been seen by one of
the anti-narcotic officers that was working
on Tse’s case.
The man kept quiet, but then his phone was
searched.
On that phone was a video, and it showed someone
being burned on his feet with a blowtorch
and also being electrocuted with a cattle
prod.
He was of course screaming.
In the video a sign could be seen somewhere
in the background and in Chinese script it
read, “Loyalty to the Heavens.”
This was something the Hong Kong triads liked
to say to foster loyalty among members.
It turned out that this guy being tortured
had told the gang that he had to throw 300
kilos of their meth from a boat because he
thought law enforcement were going to get
him.
The torturers wanted to know if this was true.
The video was also used to show other mules
or anyone working for the triads what might
happen to them if they lose drugs.
That phone contained a lot of other information,
what investigators called “an Aladdin’s
Cave of intel.”
Some of that intel showed how vast amounts
of meth was being made in Myanmar and being
trafficked around the world.
But one photo on that phone was seen by an
officer who said he had seen the face before,
and of course it was Tse Chi Lop.
The intel police found on the phone was then
cross-referenced with another database containing
a large cache of information relating to Asian
drug trafficking groups.
Investigators discovered information on the
phone that linked it to large drug busts and
the names of drug traffickers.
This information soon led investigators to
believe that there weren’t lots of small
gangs working in this business, but one syndicate
that was working together.
They figured out where the drugs were being
made, how they were moved, and the massive
amounts of money that was being made.
After this they could watch the operations
more closely.
It was complicated because it involved so
many people over many countries, but arrests
were made and large amounts of drugs were
seized.
This was only a couple of years ago.
Investigators said this syndicate ran things
expertly, with one law enforcement official
saying, “The power this network possesses
is unimaginable.”
Some key players were arrested while others
went into hiding.
Millions of dollars of cash was also seized.
It’s reported that in 2018 the Asia-Pacific
methamphetamine trade was worth a staggering
$61.4 billion, but that’s shot up from $15
billion just five years earlier.
This is why our man has become so incredibly
rich and has just lately hit the headlines.
It’s well-known that a lot of the meth is
produced in the country of Myanmar and then
makes its way to other nations.
One of the reasons it can be made there so
easily is that some of the labs are controlled
by ethnic armed groups.
There ketamine might also be made, and while
the Golden Triangle these days is not as infamous
as it once was for opium production, it still
goes on there.
Police say the MDMA that the syndicate traffics
is made in Europe, and the syndicate also
traffics cocaine that is said to come from
Latin America.
How do these drugs move?
Well, reports say repurposed fishing ships
can carry vast amounts of drugs and they are
used a lot, but sometimes the stuff moves
from Myanmar into Thailand and then elsewhere.
If you follow the news about Thailand sometimes
the police find massive shipments of drugs
that were stopped around the north of the
country near the Myanmar border.
When busts have been made, the syndicate just
evolves and finds other ways to move drugs.
This has been going on for years.
It’s just something we don’t hear about
a lot.
Much of the media attention and even Hollywood
attention has been focused on drug lords from
Latin America.
Right now something called Operation Kungur
is going on, and that is being led by police
in Australia but consists of other agencies
working in North America, Asia and Europe.
It’s said to be the biggest operation ever
to go after an Asian drug syndicate.
That operation doesn’t state all the cases
it has on Tse, but he’s said to have been
involved in 13 of the cases.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,
aka DEA, has also said that Tse is the man
in the big chair.
This is what a person speaking for the united
nations office on drugs and crime said about
Tse, ““Tse Chi Lop is in the league of
El Chapo or maybe Pablo Escobar.
The word kingpin often gets thrown around,
but there is no doubt it applies here.”
It was Reuters that first published the big
story about this man, and during its investigation
the news agency interviewed law enforcement
from around the world, as well as looked at
court filings and intelligence reports.
Reuters even talked to people in Myanmar’s
Shan State where it’s said so-called “super
labs” are busy making lots and lots of meth.
These guys are Breaking Bad on an unprecedented
scale.
Reuters said that the drug syndicate is truly
transnational and involves a lot of big players,
and it’s not just Tse that comes from Canada.
Three other suspected drug traffickers working
in the syndicate are said to come from that
country.
Reuters wrote, “The syndicate is enormously
wealthy, disciplined and sophisticated - in
many ways more sophisticated than any Latin
American cartel.”
The collaborators involved in moving all this
meth include Chinese gangs that work all over
Asia, but also include biker gangs that come
from Australia.
It seems unlike gangs in Latin America, the
groups work mostly in harmony, rather than
constantly waging wars against each other.
The money is just too good and so they try
and function more like a global corporation,
embracing good business practices rather than
murdering one another.
They obviously torture people, though, if
things go missing.
One of the major differences with Tse and
the drug kingpins he has been compared to,
is that he keeps a low profile.
While he does seem to spend extravagantly,
you won’t find him dealing in violence or
having people write songs about him – such
has been the case with some Latin American
drug lords.
In the past, police have struggled with catching
Asian drug lords, such as the man known as
Khun Sa who ran a massive opium trafficking
operation from the Golden Triangle in the
70s up until the 90s.
Police say that many of the leading gang members
that are part of this syndicate have been
operating for years, maybe decades, and they
are still at work today.
Tse Chi Lop according to officials is still
“running one of the biggest drug trafficking
syndicates in history.”
Nonetheless, we imagine most of you hadn’t
heard of him until today.
He might not go down as one of the most feared
drug lords, but he certainly seems to have
run an operation that was so slick it astounded
law enforcement.
His whereabouts, of course, are currently
unknown.
What do you think?
If he was caught, will the drug trade suddenly
stop, or will someone else take over?
How do you ever stop the flow of drugs?
Tell us what you think in the comments.
Now go watch “Insane Way El Chapo Escaped
Prison”
