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”