The Murder
Despite it being November in Vancouver, the sidewalk in front of Raymond Huang’s house was almost completely free of leaves. Across the street, fallen foliage piled on the grass and spilled onto the concrete walkway, but the same space on Huang’s side appeared to have been recently– and meticulously– cleared.
Like he had countless times before, Huang steered his car through his neighborhood; the area’s tree-lined streets and walls of perfectly kept shrubs gave away its status as one of the richest in all of Vancouver. Part of the neighborhood’s appeal was how quiet, peaceful and isolated it felt, despite being a short 10 minute drive from downtown.
Huang’s house was really a mansion. 9,000 square feet, six bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, an indoor pool and a wine cellar. Huang and his wife of twenty years had called this home since it was built in 2001. Now, it was 2007 and their 10-year-old daughter, Samantha, attended a prestigious and expensive private school a few neighborhoods over. Their dogs, a German Shepherd and a Chow Chow, often roamed freely in their large yard.
Right before 11 p.m., Huang pulled up and walked to their front gate. In that short window of time, something happened – though the exact details may never be known. A 14 year old who was babysitting two blocks away said she heard what she initially thought were fireworks. A neighbor who lived down the street said she only figured out the sounds were gunshots when sirens followed shortly after. Huang’s daughter, Samantha, called 9-1-1.
The police said they were unsure whether someone had trailed Huang home or had been silently, patiently waiting for him. In the weeks that followed, law enforcement slowly released details that revealed the killing had almost certainly been targeted. Not only was Huang “known” to many of Canada’s police agencies, he was a “top-national-priority organized-crime target.” Sources told the local papers that Huang was a senior figure in the Big Circle Boys (BCB), a powerful and often violent Chinese organized crime group. Huang was believed to be a major player in the BCB’s sale of heroin and synthetic drugs.
But that wasn’t yet on the radar for most of the people living in Huang’s neighborhood. When the sun came up the next morning, his body was still out front of his house – covered with a white tarp and blocking his previously pristine sidewalk.
The killer was never identified and no suspects were ever shared publicly. But what’s remarkable about the murder is what happened after – for the BCB, for millions of future drug addicts and for the next 15 years of the international drug trade. Huang’s death opened up the North American drug market for a man recently released from prison: Tse Chi Lop. A man suspected of going on to create the largest drug syndicate the world has ever known.
The Surveillance
In 2012, more than seven million people visited the city of Phuket, Thailand – more than would pour each year into Las Vegas, Prague and Mecca. White sand beaches back up to thick jungles. A short drive away Bangla Road, a crowded pedestrian street with bars and clubs, comes to life each night with bright signs and a steady back and forth of tourist money in exchange for quickly made drinks. On the other side of the city, Old Town Phuket is lined with short, brightly-colored buildings, mostly built in the 1900’s for immigrants, most of them Chinese, seeking to cash in on the area’s thriving tin mining industry.
Phuket in 2012 was at the beginning of a tourist boom that continues to this day, and eventually led to articles like, “It’s Official: This Is The World’s Most Overcrowded Tourist Destination.” Large groups regularly descended on the area, drawn by the option of a choose-your-own-adventure style vacation.
But this was different.
Two groups were in town for separate reasons. One had reserved most of a resort to hold a confidential, confrontational meeting. The other was there to surveil them.
The group watching included members of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Thailand’s Narcotics Suppression Bureau, many who had spent the last few years trying to get a grasp of an international drug trade that had dramatically shifted.
Around the world, the use of methamphetamines, specifically ice or crystal meth, was soaring. The UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime reported that meth-related arrests in East and Southeast Asia increased by nearly three times from 2007 to 2011. The Australian Institute on Criminology found that more than one and half million people over the age of 13 had used meth in their life – 7% of the population. Another study found a 318% increase from 2010 to 2012 in the number of times ambulances were called to crystal meth emergencies in Melbourne.
For drug traffickers and distributors, meth offered an almost undeniable proposition. It could be made cheaply in makeshift labs and turned around for extraordinary profit. A kilo of meth that cost $1,800 to produce in Myanmar might sell for $298,000 in Australia or $588,000 in Japan. Heroin, on the other hand, relied on poppy plants that require time to grow in fields that can’t be moved or disguised in a raid.
Much of the world’s meth was coming from the Golden Triangle - an area historically known for opium where Myanmar, Thailand and Laos converge. By the late 1980’s, more than half of the heroin in the US – and almost 90% of New York City’s – could be traced back to The Golden Triangle. But in the early 2010’s, the UN reported that heroin production in the Golden Triangle was decreasing, and across the region, specifically in Myanmar’s Shan State, super-labs had begun to pop up where industrial quantities of meth could be cooked and packaged with little risk of detection.
For as striking as the rise of meth was, authorities seemed to be just as shocked by the way drugs were getting from remote locations in South-East Asia to people of cities around the world. Efficient and cohesive networks had emerged to ferry drugs to places like Sydney, Tokyo and Minneapolis that were notably lacking in violence.
Five Asian crime syndicates, also known as “triads,” seemed to have formed an unprecedented alliance; putting aside their differences to grow the international market for drugs such as meth, heroin and MDMA. The triads’ consolidated their connections with the Yakuza in Japan, biker gangs in Australia, the ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra of the mafia and other organized crime groups from Asia, Africa and Europe. They seemed to have realized – or someone had convinced them – that competitors fight over market shared, but partners can exponentially grow the market itself.
Members of the newly-united triads, which included the groups 14K Triad, Wo Shing Wo, Sun Yee On, Big Circle Boys and Bamboo Union, called their syndicate, “The Company.” Law enforcement agencies, however, referred to the group as "Sam Gor," Cantonese for "Brother Number Three," a name they'd heard used for the organization's presumed leader.
The AFP's investigation into unmasking Brother Number Three tipped them off to the meeting in Phuket. Drug shipments going into Australia had repeatedly vanished, leading The Company to call for a face-to-face with distributors. The AFP, tracking all of this, approached Thailand’s Narcotics Suppression Bureau with a chance to finally put a face to the shadowy figure at the helm of this vast criminal enterprise.
AFP lead investigator Roland Singer recalled twenty to thirty people gathered around the pool at the resort. Some swam in the pool, but many stood around dressed in all black.
The Australian distributors came into the pool area and sat across the table from a man wearing loafers and a polo shirt, making him look more like a businessman on a Friday than the leader of a burgeoning international drug empire. Despite appearances, Singer said, “There was no doubt that he held the room at that table. He was in charge and he was, you know, a man of authority.”
This was Tse Chi Lop. Much of what authorities would learn about him over the better part of the next decade was already on display at this meeting by the pool. Singer said the people sitting with Tse were another senior leader of The Company, Lee Chung Chak, and Tse’s wife, Tse Yim Fun, who would allegedly run financial operations out of Hong Kong. The men in all black were his bodyguards; large, imposing men who were trained kickboxers, which, according to Singer, allowed them to protect Tse even when passing through customs without guns.
Even the decision to reserve most of the resort would be standard for Tse. For years to come, he would regularly host parties at resorts and hotels across Asia, flying in a sizable entourage of bodyguards, advisors and family.
The man the AFP and the Thai officials were watching from afar would prove to be the embodiment of organized crime’s evolution from 20th century kingpins to 21st century syndicates. Where Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman granted interviews to Hollywood stars and is said to have personally tortured his rivals, Tse never used a phone and could have passed through most hotels without a second glance. Where Pablo Escobar owned a private zoo, hired professional cameramen to shoot his home videos and eventually entered into politics, Tse seemed to believe that anonymity yielded more power than notoriety.
For Singer, identifying Brother Number Three as Tse Chi Lop was a watershed moment that illuminated the shadowy architecture of an entire syndicate. But halfway around the world, the FBI was already quite familiar with the name Tse Chi Lop.
The History
In 1992, FBI Special Agent Mark Calnan followed a tip from a colleague to 183rd and Walton in the Bronx, New York. Calnan was a member of Criminal Squad 25, or C-25, which was formed specifically to handle organized crime involving Asians and Asian-Americans.
The tip Calnan received led him to a Puerto Rican gang selling heroin from Asian suppliers. At the time, New York City was being flooded with heroin that was cheap and dangerously pure, much of it from South-East Asia. The investigation that followed would go on for years, result in numerous arrests and indictments and repeatedly turn up the same name in connection to the whole operation: Tse Chi Lop.
Tse was born on October 25, 1963 in Guangzhou, China. The China of Tse’s early years was one in the depths of the Cultural Revolution, or, as it would later be called, the "decade of chaos" (十年动乱) or the "ten-year calamity" (十年浩劫). The Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, worked to preserve communism by violently purging anything resembling capitalism or traditional Chinese culture.
In the earliest years of the Revolution, large numbers of young people, many of them students, took up Mao’s call to action by forming Red Guard paramilitary groups. The violence and chaos that ensued transformed idealistic youth into both perpetrators and victims. Within a few years, Mao called for the Army to step in and restore order. Numerous Red Guards were imprisoned in labor camps near Guangzhou, where they forged tight bonds to endure brutal conditions that ranged from food shortages to torture. In the years that followed Mao’s downfall, many former Red Guard members fled to Hong Kong. There, they channeled their military experience and hardened solidarity into forming a crime triad called the Big Circle Boys (BCB), a reference to the red circle that was commonly around the city of Guangzhou on maps.
By the late 1970’s, Chairman Deng Xiaoping led China towards capitalism, opening to the West and embracing a new, unofficial mantra: “to get rich is glorious.” Somewhere in this time of transition, Tse made his way to Hong Kong and joined the BCB.
A decade later, the BCB expanded operations to Canada, where members could claim refugee status despite their criminal records. It allegedly became involved in car theft, prostitution, massive importation of drugs and, at one point, it was responsible for almost all of the counterfeit credit cards in Canada.
In 1988, Tse joined the group in Toronto, where rival criminal factions regularly engaged in bloody conflicts. Outside of the BCB, Tse maintained a domestic façade; working legitimate jobs at Fujifilm and Kodak, marrying Tse Yim Fun and having two children by 1990. Inside the BCB, Tse was quietly demonstrating skills that would come to define his criminal career by being part of the group that directly negotiated with the Rizzuto crime family, a powerful Montreal-based Mafia organization.
"At the time, Italian mobsters normally wouldn’t have anything to do with the Asian gangsters,” Larry Tronstad, a former RCMP staff sergeant who supervised the RCMP’s anti-Mafia unit in Toronto told the National Post.
In 1996, a drug probe into those same Mafia connections led the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police directly to Tse. Sensing danger, he fled to the temporary safety of mainland China.
“He could have been on Mars as far as I was concerned, because we had no extradition treaty with China and no cooperation with the Chinese,” said Agent Canlan.
The FBI and the RCMP had all but given up on catching Tse, until an informant told Canadian officer Mario Lamothe that Tse was going to be in Hong Kong. Canlan and Lamothe scrambled to book flights, sensing that Tse had made an error. Despite returning to Chinese control in 1997, Hong Kong had signed the United States-Hong Kong Agreement for the Surrender of Fugitive Offenders, maintaining extradition cooperation between the two places.
On August 8, 1998, Tse walked into a restaurant in the neighborhood of Tsim Sha Tsui. Hong Kong police were there waiting to arrest him, with Canlan and Lamothe looking on. Two years later, he would plead guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to import heroin into the U.S. and be sentenced to nine years in prison.
Tse was sent to the Federal Correctional Institute in Elkton, Ohio, an isolated prison surrounded by forests of pine trees. Occasional breaks in the treeline reveal small roads connecting to a highway that leads to Cleveland in one direction and Pittsburgh in the other.
There were about 1,500 people imprisoned in Elkton – Tse was one of a handful of whom spoke Cantonese. It’s here that Tse had a meeting that’s significance would only become apparent years later.
Lee Chung Chak was a British-Chinese citizen with his own history of drug trafficking. Investigators told Reuters he had been arrested by Australian police in the 1980s for allegedly managing heroin couriers, and he had deep ties in the Golden Triangle. Both men recognized that the heroin market was changing. Afghanistan had displaced the Golden Triangle as the world's primary opium producer, and synthetic drugs offered higher profits with fewer supply vulnerabilities.
When Tse was up for early release, he told the courts he had “great sorrow” for his crime and that, upon release, he would open a restaurant. But when he walked free in 2006, that never happened. Tse would reportedly return to Canada, where multiple sources allege he was involved in the shooting of Raymond Huang in Vancouver. While no evidence confirms that, the US lost track of his whereabouts. At some point, he returned to Asia, where he began to build The Company, with Lee by his side.
The Empire
At its peak, The Company thread a supply line that tied together disparate parts of the world. Deep in Myanmar’s Shan State, warehouses transformed row after row of chemicals stored in 50-gallon drums into record amounts of crystalline powder. Many of them also produced heroin, MDMA and yaba. The Company became known for packaging its meth in vacuum-sealed tea packets. Workers reeking of the chemicals would bring the finished products down from the hills.
Boats left ports, packed tightly with tonnes of illicit substances. Tea-packets full of meth appeared in police seizures in places like India, Australia, the Philippines, but the ones that arrived at their destination were repackaged and sold, alongside drugs from many of the world’s other producers. Meth use spiked across the globe, from Bangladesh to Slovakia, South Korea to South Africa, Iran to the U.S.. In 2018, The Company was estimated to have been responsible for as much as 70% of the meth in Australia.
The Company’s operations were decidedly corporate in nature. Their decisions were strategic. Their supply chains a triumph of logistics. Their coordination allowed them to drive down costs and flood markets, introducing highly addictive drugs to new users. The UNODC reported that the typical wholesale cost of a kilo of meth in Malaysia dropped by over 75% between 2011 and 2019. In 2019, Thai officials said buying a tablet of yaba, or caffeine-laced methamphetamine, could cost about the same as buying a bottle of beer.
The relatively low cost of production meant the syndicate needed just one of every 15 shipments to break. This led The Company to make an Amazon-like guarantee to distributors: : if authorities seized a shipment, The Company would replace it, for no additional cost. For distributors, this minimized some of the costliest risks of narco trafficking, and created a deep loyalty to Tse and his syndicate.
The masterfully designed system and savvy business decisions led to profits that would have been previously unimaginable. At its peak, the El Chapo-led Sinaloa Cartel was making an estimated $3 billion per year. For Sam Gor, the UNODC approximated that figure to be $17.7 billion annually.
Tse still dressed like an understated middle-manager, but his life had morphed into one of extreme luxury. He flew his entourage around Asia, hosting lavish parties and staying at the finest resorts. He was a regular at casinos which allegedly served the dual purpose of helping to launder millions of dollars and providing an outlet for his intense gambling habit. He reportedly lost $10 million at the Sands casino in Singapore, which he left without paying. In Macau, investigators say he lost $66 million in one night.
The Company’s scale of operations and revenue resemble that of the most unencumbered tech companies. Like many of those corporations, The Company came to deliver efficiency, convenience and lowered prices that often obscures the real, human cost of doing business. The dispassionate calculation of ever-growing revenues doesn’t need to account for the human suffering and the first responders, drug counselors and governments scrambling to curtail the damage.
In November 2016, a young man named Cai Jeng Ze arrived at the Yangon International Airport in Myanmar for a Taiwan-bound flight. Making his way to the gate, Cai carried a leather bag and two cell phones when police stopped him, noting his nervous demeanor and blistered hands that suggested he could have been handling something as toxic as methamphetamines. A search revealed two packets taped to Cai’s thighs, each containing 80 grams of ketamine. However, the most valuable discovery wasn’t what was strapped to his body, but what was on his phones: information that revealed never-before-seen parts of The Company and proved to be vital clues for investigators.
Myanmar police said the phones had a video of a man being gruesomely tortured with a blowtorch and a cattle prod. The man reportedly claimed to have hastily thrown 300 kg of meth from a boat out of fear of being detected by law enforcement. Police also said they found thousands of messages and call logs about meth deals, as well as photos, including one of Tse Chi Lop himself.
The syndicate’s scale of operations was beginning to create the very type of exposure Tse had always worked to avoid.
About a year later in the Australian port city of Geraldton, men unloaded bulging bags from a fishing vessel into a waiting van when Australian police moved in. The AFP seized 1.2 tons of methamphetamine, valued at approximately $1 billion. It was the country’s largest-ever meth bust.
In late 2019, Reuters published an exposé on Tse Chi Lop that took reporter Tom Allard two years of diligent investigation. The article told of the formation of Operation Kungur, a joint effort between 20 international drug enforcement agencies, led by the AFP, to target 19 key figures. “Target 1” was Tse. The leader who spent years operating in the shadows now had his name and face in the international media, and his tight-knit network began to distance itself from him.
One of the last places Tse had connections to protect him was Taiwan. He spent most of 2020 in a wealthy area of Taipei, protected by bodyguards and unable to leave because of COVID-19-repated border closures. At the beginning of 2021, Taiwanese authorities denied his application to extend his stay, forcing him to leave.
On January 22, 2021, the Dutch National Police waited for an EVA Air flight from Taipei to touch down at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Onboard was Tse Chi Lop, making a stop before continuing on to Canada, where he likely hadn’t been in years. Tse – ten years after the poolside meeting in Phuket, and half a world away from the superlabs in Shan State that had helped squeeze tens of billions of dollars out of a plan that likely began in the Ohio jail – stepped off the plane and was arrested.
The Capture
At the end of 2022, Tse stood in Melbourne’s Magistrates Court, looking as unremarkable as ever: silver-hair, glasses, gray tracksuit pants and a black collared shirt. He’d only been in Australia for a few hours, having just been extradited from the Netherlands following a nearly two-year legal battle with Dutch authorities.
Tse was charged with conspiracy to traffic 20 kg of methamphetamine, worth over $4 million, into Australia between March 2012 and March 2013, which could land him in prison for life. Tse told the court he was innocent. Dutch news agency ANP said he spoke to the court judges through an interpreter. “Mass media are calling me a drug kingpin but that is not true.”
Law enforcement spent the better part of three decades chasing Tse. Today, they are some of the only people who know his exact location: reportedly in and out of solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Melbourne, awaiting trial. The network that kept him insulated for so many years is left, like the rest of the world, to wonder about the specifics, all of which have been kept confidential.
But beyond his cell, the street prices of drugs have stayed mostly stable since his arrest. Seizures across South-East Asia decreased slightly in 2022, but remained well above where there’d been before The Company’s rise.
The Company that Tse is accused of creating wasn’t just designed to make a fortune. It was designed to go on seamlessly without him.