Historic UK heroin shipment seized 0:53
Hong Kong (CNN) -
When FBI agent Mark Calnan finally met the kingpin whose drug cartel he had been investigating for the past six years, he was shocked.
With his black hair parted in the middle and his modest sense of fashion, Tse Chi Lop did not look like the head of a multinational operation that had flooded the streets of New York with heroin before his arrest on August 12, 1998.
And, while sitting in a stark interrogation room in Hong Kong, he wasn't behaving like one either.
The suspects used to react to the arrest in one of two ways, the now-retired agent told CNN from his home in New Jersey.
The most combative clung to machismo that helped them navigate the ruthless world of drug trafficking.
Cooperatives were concerned that not talking would mean more time in prison.
Tse did neither.
He was calm, kind and strategically quiet, even when Calnan told him that the United States was requesting his extradition.
Tzu just smiled.
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"It was awesome," Calnan said.
"It was different".
At the end of that year, Tse was in New York, where he pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to import heroin into the United States and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
But if the authorities who put Tzu behind bars expected him to come out of jail a changed man, it seems they were wrong.
Two decades later, Tse had allegedly become the head of a methamphetamine cartel that made about $ 17 billion a year.
He was long out of jail and reportedly led a lavish lifestyle based on the drug empire that he allegedly managed with relative anonymity until his existence was revealed in a newspaper report in 2019.
Then, in January this year, Tse was detained at Amsterdam's Schipol International Airport at the request of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), which had led a decade-long investigation into his organization.
The man who previously sat quietly across from Calnan is now accused of being the mastermind behind the Sam Gor cartel, possibly the largest drug trafficking operation in Asian history.
Australian authorities are seeking Tse's extradition on methamphetamine trafficking charges.
Tse, through her attorney, declined to speak to CNN for this report.
During an extradition hearing in June, he told a Dutch judge that he was innocent of the charges.
As prosecutors prepare their case against Tse, CNN has investigated his early years, to better understand the man who, according to Australian authorities, is one of the greatest methamphetamine masterminds of the 21st century.
This is the story of the first Tzu cartel: how it thrived in American prisons;
how the police ruined it all over the world;
and how, from his ashes, this seemingly unassuming man from southern China was allegedly able to lay the foundation for a billion-dollar drug empire from a prison in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
The FBI investigation that led to Tse's arrest in Hong Kong began in a corner of the Bronx, some 20 years after the United States government launched its war on drugs under President Richard Nixon.
To end what Republicans in 1980 called a "murderous drug abuse epidemic" raging across the country, the government had invested heavily in the police fight against drugs and passed laws that toughen penalties for drug-related offenders. drugs
But the tougher mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and investments in surveillance were not having the desired effect.
By 1992, heroin in America was getting cheaper and purer, according to a White House report at the time, with most of it coming from Southeast Asia.
That heroin was one of the purest found in the United States, according to the report, and it was easy to overdose with small amounts.
The consequences were dire, especially in New York City, which was home to the majority of America's heroin addicts.
Thousands of people came to emergency rooms each year after using the drug.
Hundreds died.
2020, the year with the most overdose deaths in the US 0:36
That year, Calnan received a tip from a colleague about the sale of drugs in the Bronx, at the corner of 183 and Walton, that would change his career.
At the time, he was working for the FBI in New York, as a member of the 25th Crime Squad. The C-25, as it was known, was tasked with tackling the growing problem of organized crime involving Asians and Americans from around the world. Asian origin, especially those who trafficked in heroin from Southeast Asia that flooded the United States.
When Calnan and his team began patrolling the corner of that street, a few miles from Yankee Stadium, and identifying suspects and tapping the phones, one name kept popping up: Sonny.
The problem was, there were at least two suspects named Sonny.
There was Sonny from New Jersey and Sonny from Leavenworth, the American penitentiary from Kansas.
One was Sonny on the outside and, to her surprise, the other was Sonny on the inside.
They found out that the Sonny outside was a Malaysian heroin dealer living in New Jersey.
The Sonny on the inside was the boss, and he'd figured out how to run a heroin business from a federal prison.
Yim Ling did not hear the assailants quietly entering her home in Kingston, New York, on a warm fall day in 1983. She was in her room, changing to go to work at her family's tea house, when someone grabbed her behind.
She defended herself, but one of her kidnappers allegedly covered her mouth with a chemical, likely chloroform, according to the account of a local police officer assigned to the case.
The government believes that Yim was accidentally killed in the initial struggle, although her captors never mentioned it when they extorted her husband into asking for nearly $ 200,000 in ransom.
They never found Yim's body.
Authorities charged several people with the kidnapping, including Yong Bing Gong, then a 23-year-old former employee of the Yim family's tea house.
Gong was sentenced to life in prison, where he became the Sonny “inside”: the purveyor of the heroin dealers on the corner of New York that Calnan guarded.
Gong made drug deals in the same place intended to punish people for trafficking them.
Gong spoke to CNN through phone calls, letters and emails, though he declined to discuss the details of his heroin trafficking conviction, which was handed down while he was in prison.
Gong hoped that sharing parts of his story would draw attention to what he considers to be his unfairly long sentences.
He was sentenced to another 27 years in prison for heroin trafficking, in addition to his first life sentence.
After nearly 40 years behind bars, Gong believes that he has paid off his debt to society and that he should not "let himself rot and die, forgotten and abandoned by everyone I know."
"I know I am not an angel, but I am still a human being," Gong said.
Born in 1960 in Malaysia, Gong was involved in crime from a young age.
His father owned a logging company in Indonesia and was often away, and his mother had six children, too many to devote herself to controlling her wayward son.
That left Gong, as he puts it, to "run the streets."
Nine members of the MS-13 gang were charged with murder, kidnapping and drug distribution, among other charges.
He joined a gang at age 12 and ended up becoming a lieutenant.
At age 20, he was in a Malaysian jail, serving a two-year sentence after several encounters with the law.
After his release in 1982, he went to the United States.
Within a year, he was in prison for Yim's kidnapping.
At first, Gong found the incarceration to be "mostly boredom and monotony."
He needed something to liven up his everyday existence.
So, after an introduction from another inmate, he turned to the heroin trade.
Flamboyant, talkative, and somewhat cheeky, Gong was outgoing from birth, and there was no better place to meet new clients than jail.
Gong made deals with other inmates and then coordinated with his overseas contacts to sell the heroin through the prison phone system.
They all spoke in code because inmate calls are always recorded, although they are not always monitored.
Calnan's investigation revealed that Gong was the Sonny on the inside, supplying heroin to a Puerto Rican gang at the corner of 183rd and Walton Avenue in the Bronx.
He was also the Sonny of Leavenworth, which referred to the Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, one of the oldest federal prisons in America.
It is one of several facilities that have held Gong since his 1983 conviction.
Calnan's team cited prison tapes and cracked Gong's code, which was not terribly complex: sometimes it just meant referring to heroin as "menus" and dealers as "Chinese restaurants."
The C-25 now had an important case on its hands and, like any important case, it needed a name.
They chose Sunblock, in honor of Sonny and the cell block they found him in.
The heroin Gong trafficked almost certainly came from the Golden Triangle, the lawless border region where Thailand, Laos and Myanmar converge.
The area's climate is ideal for growing poppies, the plant used to make opium and heroin.
The surrounding hills and jungle make it difficult for law enforcement to enter the area, allowing the militias and warlords that dominated part of Myanmar to become some of the largest heroin traffickers in the world.
Production skyrocketed in the 1960s, when these groups realized they could use laboratories to process poppy into more potent narcotics, such as morphine and heroin.
And it continued to boom in the following decades.
In the late 1980s, drugs were flooding the United States.
Heroin from Southeast Asia accounted for 56% of the supply in the United States, and nearly 90% of that of New York City in 1990, according to the DEA.
Five years earlier, it only represented 14% of the supply in the United States.
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The introduction of these drugs into the US fell largely on Americans and Canadians of Chinese descent, or people with ties to Sino-Thai or Chinese criminal groups, according to the US Department of Justice.
People like Paul Kwok.
Although court records say that Gong and Kwok met in jail, Gong told CNN that they first crossed paths while living in New York in the early 1980s.
In 1983, Kwok, a Canadian national, was sentenced to a federal prison in the United States for heroin trafficking.
By chance, he ended up in the same prison as Gong, and the two became close.
Over time, they began to do business together.
As Kwok began to meet the requirements for parole, he was transferred to a Canadian prison before being released in 1990. Over time, he began to use his contacts to import heroin into Canada.
Back then, illicit drugs were easier to get through customs in Canada than in the United States, according to Calnan.
Kwok was then moving heroin across the US-Canada border, which in the early 1990s was less difficult to cross undetected than it is now.
In the United States, Gong used the client network he had developed in federal prison to find buyers.
The agreement worked well.
In early 1994, Gong and Kwok were receiving so much heroin that they began looking for more ways to get larger amounts into the United States.
So Kwok turned to the Sicilian Mafia in Montreal for help.
The Sicilians agreed, in exchange for a fee, to hide Kwok's heroin along with their own drugs and to smuggle all the contraband to a Long Island barbershop.
Kwok's associates would collect the heroin there and deliver it to Gong's buyers.
When the FBI discovered the Sicilian connection, Operation Sunblock became a major international case.
Calnan and his team were now pursuing a global cartel involving multiple organized crime groups.
The stakes were higher.
The FBI installed at least four microphones, monitoring phone calls for potentially incriminating evidence about the heroin trade.
Calnan hired an undercover agent who had been dealing with Gong's organization for a long time to gather more evidence.
By September 1995, Sunblock had obtained enough information to charge or detain more than a dozen people.
Kwok was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States authorities and Gong was charged from prison.
Kwok seemed to be the man in charge, at least at first.
He was stoic and serious, and seemed to command respect and deference in the criminal underworld.
So Calnan and an American lawyer assigned to the case went to Canada to interview Kwok in jail and see if he would cooperate.
Talking was dangerous.
Shortly after Kwok was arrested, two men approached his wife to ask if she was collaborating with the authorities.
She then received "numerous threatening phone calls" warning her husband not to say anything to the police, as stated in a letter addressed to the judge handling the case.
Later, a group of inmates who briefly saw Kwok in the company of law enforcement officers struck his head against the wall of the prison bathroom, knocking him unconscious.
Kwok's attorney said his client was attacked because he appeared to be cooperating.
Even so, Kwok decided to take the risk and told the judge that he had decided to offer information so that he could get out of jail as soon as possible and take care of his wife and young son.
It turned out that Kwok and one of his lieutenants were able to give the FBI the identity of their supplier in Asia: a 33-year-old Chinese-Canadian man, unassuming, with bad taste for fashion and with hair parted in the middle.
Her name was Tse Chi Lop.
Tse was born on October 25, 1963 in South China's Guangdong Province, before the Cultural Revolution began, the bloody movement in which Mao Zedong tried to reassert his leadership over the Chinese Communist Party by radicalizing the country's youth. against anyone who is considered unfair.
Following the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and the chaotic dissolution of the Red Guards, as the youth paramilitary groups were known, some formed an amorphous gang called the Big Circle Boys.
This criminal group was joined by Tse.
In the 1990s, the Big Circle Boys were the major players in the heroin trade in the Golden Triangle and North America, and they had no problem making deals with just about anyone if money could be made.
The cartel's decision to do business with the Sicilian mafia impressed Calnan.
Most Asian bands in the US, he found, did not associate in that way.
Tse approached his business as a company, he found value in the new partnerships but he was smart enough to try to go unnoticed.
"He used cooperation, he crossed borders. He had a divergent thinking, and we had to do the same or else we would never have caught him," Calnan said.
"We had to be as good as him."
After Kwok and Gong's arrests in 1995, it took Calnan and Sunblock's team almost three more years to catch Tse, because he was allegedly in China, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
The FBI seemed to have no options until 1998, when Calnan's Canadian colleague learned that Tse was traveling to Hong Kong.
If the police detained him in the semi-autonomous Chinese city, which did have an extradition treaty with the United States, Tse could be sent to New York for trial.
Calnan convinced the FBI to have him and the Canadian agent fly to Hong Kong to assist in the arrest, and on August 12, the Hong Kong Police Department caught Tse at a local coffee shop.
After a few months, he was in the United States.
Ceci Scott, the assistant US attorney in the case, recalled that after Tse arrived in the United States, her attorney seemed eager to reach an agreement with the prosecution.
Calnan believed that Tse was doing everything possible to get to Canada quickly, where his wife lived with their two children born in the early 1990s: a daughter and a son who had a lung problem and respiratory problems from birth.
Although Tzu wanted to cooperate enough to reduce his sentence, he was unwilling to reveal everything.
"I think he knew that we knew he wasn't telling us everything," Scott said.
But the way Tzu behaved stuck with Scott.
I remember thinking, "God, he has an unusual demeanor, a very focused personality," he said.
Finally, Tse reached an agreement with the prosecution whereby he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import heroin into the United States.
Avoiding a trial allowed Tse to reduce his time in prison and limit the amount of information that would exist in the public record.
Today, the exact extent of his role in his first heroin cartel remains a mystery.
We don't know how much heroin he supplied to Gong and Kwok, or whether Kwok was his only customer.
Calls to Kwok's family and his former lawyer went unanswered.
Tzu's nine-year prison sentence was handed down on September 26, 2000, although he only served six.
The prison would mark the beginning of a second chapter in Tse's life, giving him the opportunity to learn from drug traffickers in the United States.
It was also where Tse supposedly met her next partner.
After driving through the lush vegetation of rural Appalachia, Tse would have arrived at the Federal Correctional Institution, in Elkton, Ohio, handcuffed, with foot shackles and chained at the waist.
Elkton is a low security federal prison.
It is situated at the top of a hill and has a wire fence to prevent inmates from escaping into the surrounding pine trees.
But inside, security precautions aren't overwhelming, ex-inmates and staff say.
Most inmates are non-violent offenders or people nearing the end of their sentences and preparing to re-enter society.
"It was a different environment than other prisons I've been in," said Charles King, a former inmate who came to Elkton in 2006, the year Tse left federal prison.
"It was kinder, more welcoming."
King and others said the prison felt like a safe college campus.
The inmates lived in one of several concrete-floored dormitory-style buildings with shared bathrooms and common space.
Three or four men slept in small, crammed cubicles, divided by block walls 1.2 to 1.5 meters high, making it easy enough to see the other side.
In 2002, two years after his conviction and sentence, Tse claimed to be almost penniless and requested an exemption from legal fees to file appeals or sentence reductions.
In his court statements, he claimed that all he owned was $ 500 and $ 1,000 worth of clothing donated by friends and family, although he may have chosen not to disclose his possessions outside the United States.
Prison may have been an adjustment for Tse, but if he was in trouble, most of those around him didn't see it.
Ben, a pseudonym for a former Elkton inmate who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, said Tse was "a pretty nice guy" who always had a big smile.
Other drug dealers in that prison wanted to make it look like they were "important," Ben said.
Tzu, on the other hand, was quite humble, Ben said, and didn't really care about reputation or prestige on the street.
Elkton housed about 1,500 prisoners during Tse's stay.
Ben said there were a couple dozen inmates who were ethnically Chinese, and most spoke Cantonese.
Tse was one of them.
Another was Lee Chung Chak.
Lee had entered the United States through the Canadian border on July 4, 1994 to coordinate what was supposed to be a large heroin business, but the FBI was behind his partners.
It is unclear if Tse and Lee met before being at Elkton.
But the prison's Cantonese-speaking community was small enough for Lee and Tse to get to know each other.
By the time the two were released in 2006, they were comfortable in the drug business together, Australian authorities would later claim.
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Although Tse told the US government that he planned to open a restaurant once he got out of jail and expressed "great regret" for his criminal past, he and Lee allegedly had their sights set on methamphetamine.
Methamphetamine was becoming increasingly popular in the US during his time in prison, and it represented a potentially far more lucrative business opportunity than heroin.
Because it is made from chemicals, not crops, you don't have to worry about a poor harvest affecting your supply, like heroin.
Australian authorities maintain that, in 2010, Tse and Lee had formed a methamphetamine cartel that the police call Sam Gor, a nickname for Tse that means "brother number three" in Cantonese.
Its members reportedly call it simply The Company.
Sam Gor is believed to be made up of ancient rival triads who banded together to make money, as Tse and Kwok did with the Sicilian Mafia.
Together, these gangs allegedly manufactured synthetic drugs on an industrial scale in vast swathes of Myanmar's poorly guarded jungles, the same place where Tse allegedly sourced his cartel's heroin in the 1990s.
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Sam Gor's supposed strategy was simple: make enough methamphetamine to create economies of scale and lower cost per unit.
Then flood the market with this cheap and addictive product to get new customers, and watch the money pile up.
El cártel se convirtió en una de las mayores operaciones de tráfico de drogas de la historia de Asia, según las autoridades de Australia. Tenía, y puede que siga teniendo, la mayor cuota de mercado de una economía ilícita que, en 2019, estaba valorada en la impactante cifra de entre US$ 30.000 y US$ 61.000 millones.
El costo humano ha sido "devastador", dijo Jeremy Douglas, representante regional para el Sudeste Asiático y el Pacífico de la Oficina de las Naciones Unidas contra la Droga y el Delito (UNODC, por sus siglas en inglés).
El número de consumidores declarados en países como Indonesia, Tailandia y Vietnam ha aumentado considerablemente desde 2015, según las cifras de la UNODC. Más de 206.000 personas en todo el sudeste asiático buscaron tratamiento por consumo de metanfetamina en 2020, pero el número real de adictos es probablemente mucho mayor debido al estigma que rodea a la adicción. Muchas personas que desean ayuda optan por evitar el tratamiento, o simplemente no tienen acceso a los mismos recursos que tendrían en los países occidentales.
Además, miles de adictos y traficantes menores han muerto a manos de la policía en países que libran sangrientas guerras contra la droga, como Filipinas, en las que no se toman prisioneros.
La policía de Tailandia detuvo a Lee en octubre de 2020, solo unos meses antes de que las autoridades de Holanda detuvieran a Tse en Ámsterdam. Las autoridades de Australia afirman que Lee había desempeñado un "papel clave" en el multimillonario cártel de la metanfetamina. Un investigador dijo a Reuters que la "estrella de Lee había ascendido hasta ser un jugador igual o incluso mayor" que Tse.
El abogado de Lee no respondió a la solicitud de comentarios de CNN.
Encarcelarlos fue un gran logro, pero la metanfetamina sigue fluyendo sin ellos.
La UNODC afirmó que las autoridades de toda Asia incautaron de 170.000 kilogramos el año pasado, un nuevo récord, a pesar de que la mayoría de los países de la región sellaron sus fronteras para evitar la propagación del covid-19. Los precios de la metanfetamina no se vieron afectados, lo que significa que estas redadas no tuvieron un impacto significativo en el suministro de drogas, según la UNODC.
Los expertos afirman que, para acabar realmente con el tráfico de metanfetamina, las fuerzas del orden del Triángulo de Oro asiático deben tomarse en serio la resolución de los problemas sistémicos que han permitido que los traficantes de la región prosperen durante décadas, tanto si fabrican heroína como metanfetamina. Eso significa encontrar una solución política a la guerra civil en Myanmar, que lleva décadas, para que las milicias dejen de recurrir a las economías ilícitas para financiarse. Es una tarea difícil, especialmente para un país gobernado por una junta militar que a principios de este año derrocó a un gobierno elegido democráticamente.
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Cuando Scott, la fiscal estadounidense que ayudó a encarcelar a Tse, se enteró de su detención en enero, se retorció.
"No teníamos información de que hubiera hecho algo con metanfetamina", recordó Scott, que ya no trabaja en el Departamento de Justicia. "Obviamente, conoció a gente".
A Scott le encantaba su trabajo como fiscal adjunta del Distrito Este de Nueva York, pero dijo que los casos de drogas a veces la dejaban en conflicto, especialmente en una ciudad liberal como Nueva York.
A finales de la década de 1990, las dolorosas consecuencias imprevistas de la guerra contra las drogas se hacían patentes. Los duros castigos destinados a disuadir a los posibles consumidores y traficantes de drogas habían inundado las cárceles estadounidenses de delincuentes no violentos, la mayoría de los cuales pertenecían a comunidades minoritarias.
"Muchos de los fiscales de esa oficina se cuestionaban la eficacia de esas leyes", dijo Scott.
El encarcelamiento está pensado para castigar a los delincuentes y proteger a la sociedad de ellos, pero también para rehabilitarlos.
En cambio, la guerra contra las drogas creó un círculo vicioso. Los traficantes de drogas fueron a la cárcel durante años gracias a las duras leyes de condena. Se dedicaron recursos limitados a conseguir que los delincuentes cambiaran su forma de actuar. Así que la cárcel acabó ofreciendo a los convictos la oportunidad de relacionarse y aprender unos de otros.
Varios estudios han demostrado que el encarcelamiento, en determinadas circunstancias, puede tener un efecto criminógeno: en lugar de disuadir el comportamiento delictivo, lo refuerza. Un análisis realizado en 2002 sobre los delincuentes condenados en el condado de Jackson, Missouri reveló que los delincuentes encarcelados por drogas tenían entre cinco y seis veces más probabilidades de cometer otro delito que los que estaban en libertad condicional. Otro estudio realizado en 2012 descubrió que, en algunos casos, el delito es redituable. Los que fueron puestos entre rejas ganaron, en promedio, unos US$ 11.000 más en ingresos ilícitos que los que no habían pasado por la cárcel.
Los académicos de Dinamarca que analizaron toda la población carcelaria del país descubrieron en 2020 que, en el caso de los delincuentes condenados a prisión por delitos de drogas, había "fuertes indicios de que los efectos de los compañeros se reforzaban en la reincidencia", es decir, que los traficantes de drogas que conocían a otros traficantes en prisión aprendían los unos de los otros y acababan volviendo a la cárcel.
Calnan dijo que se sorprendió cuando el nombre del hombre que se sentó tranquilamente frente a él en Hong Kong apareció en las noticias más de dos décadas después de su encuentro. No había vuelto a pensar en Tse después de su condena en 2000.
Nunca pensó que Tse se convertiría, supuestamente, en "uno de los mayores narcotraficantes internacionales de todos los tiempos", dijo Calnan.
"En retrospectiva, no es sorprendente en absoluto", dijo Calnan. "Él (Tse) tenía las habilidades, y por supuesto el tiempo en prisión es una red de contactos sin igual".
Calnan se dio cuenta más tarde de que el traficante de heroína de moderado éxito que puso entre rejas era lo suficientemente inteligente como para dirigir un imperio criminal, y lo suficientemente astuto como para saber cómo utilizar la prisión en su beneficio.
"(Sunblock) comienza con unos tipos en la cárcel que establecieron redes", dijo Calnan. En lo que respecta a Tse Chi Lop, Calnan dijo: "No dudo... que eso es exactamente lo que hizo también".
Cárteles de la drogaHeroínaNarcotraficantes