Opium (45 page)

The end was near, though. In 1972, Ng's empire started to fall apart. Seven hundred kilograms of raw opium and 80 kilograms of morphine base were found in a tunnel connected to a block of flats rented by Ng and on a duck farm owned by a close associate. His casinos were busted. He moved to Taiwan to escape implication in the murder of a double-crosser but, on legal advice, he returned to Hong Kong and was duly arrested for murder, but the charge did not stick. However, after this set-back, he was grassed by another Triad: his arrogance and flashy life-style infuriated other gangsters who preferred to keep their heads down. It is also said the Mas assisted the police in building up their dossier on Ng, passing information through officers whom they owned: like Ng, they had a large number of bent officers at their beck and call. Ng was at last arrested by an untainted, hand-picked police narcotics squad and sentenced to thirty-five years in May, 1975: his wife got sixteen years. In 1992, he was given bail on compassionate grounds, because he was suffering from liver cancer, and died early in 1993.

Not only criminals were in on the game: so were some Hong Kong police officers who were Triad gangsters themselves. In particular five sergeants, actually members of the police Triad Bureau, were involved in receiving massive kickbacks from gambling, vice and narcotics. The central figure of this group was Sergeant Lui Lok who was nicknamed ‘$600 Million Man'. This was no mere moniker: it was a conservative guess at his wealth for, between them, the five had received hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars.

When, in November 1974, the ICAC began to close in on them, they decamped from Hong Kong to Vancouver which already had a substantial Chinese immigrant population and was a conduit for heroin entering Canada. Once settled, they established the Five Dragons Corporation, their most prominent purchase being a Vancouver office block in the heart of the financial centre, for which they paid C$60 million –
in cash.
Such extravagance inevitably aroused suspicion and the corporation folded with the key figures flying to Taiwan. There were by then over forty ex-Hong Kong police officer millionaires in exile on the island: one of their number, a much-admired career policeman called Tang Sang, had escaped there by forfeiting a HK$330,000 bail.

Those who did not make for Canada or run for Taiwan headed for the USA. The most famous was Chan Tse-chiu (
aka
Fast Eddie). He arrived in New York in the winter of 1975, where he joined the On Leong Triad society and invested his money in legitimate businesses, such as a jewellery shop, several restaurants and (ironically) an undertakers. In time, he came to run Chinatown, expanding his tentacles into political circles (including giving donations to election campaigns: one his protégés stabbed himself to death during an anti-corruption investigation), buying off police officers, founding a bank, purchasing a string of cinemas and becoming president of the Continental King Lung Commodities Group, which was a suspected major Triad money-laundering business. By 1983, Chan was allegedly a central figure in the importation of heroin.

In October 1984, Chan was subpoenaed to appear before a commission on organised crime: he did not show up. Testimony put down by the authorities outlined his considerable legal and illegal activities. By November, he was missing although his legitimate businesses were still functioning normally. Guesses as to his whereabouts were legion. The DEA believed he had set up a heroin network in France, the New York Police Department thought he was in the Dominican Republic, the Hong Kong authorities suggested he divided his time between Taiwan and Canada whilst the Dutch claimed he was running a crime syndicate in Malaysia. He remains untraced.

The ICAC purge of police corruption destroyed the syndicates' protection, without which they could not operate effectively. No. 4 heroin entering the USA dropped off for a short while but the syndicates were not beaten: they merely moved their chemists elsewhere. Hong Kong ceased to be a major manufacturing centre for heroin: instead, it became the financial centre for the South-east Asian drugs trade. The considerable affluence of Hong Kong, its huge mercantile base and its array of international and offshore banks made it an ideal money laundering centre – which it remains.

The Chiu Chau syndicates moved to Thailand and Malaysia. Here, they were closer to the opium source of the Golden Triangle, were aided by corruption, could obtain their supplies by land (avoiding well guarded border crossings and airport customs controls) and had the jungle in which to hide their refineries. They also moved to Europe where they based themselves in the large Chinese community in Amsterdam which developed into the main importation and distribution hub, assisted by lenient application of Dutch narcotics laws. By the start of the 1980s, heroin addiction was a major problem in Western Europe.

In part, the Chiu Chau success was unwittingly engineered by the international narcotics agencies. The Hong Kong production of heroin had been largely side-lined, the US Bureau of Narcotics concentrating its attention on the French Connection and ignoring the likes of the Mas and Ng. Despite this, there were some international law enforcement successes against the Chinese. One of these was the taking of the Corset Gang.

Operating out of Hong Kong, the gang was caught in 1967 by international police co-operation. Hired by the Hong Kong Chiu Chau Triads, the gang was masterminded by several retired Australian policemen. The couriers were also predominantly Australian. The heroin was smuggled, as the gang name implies, in specially tailored corsets or vests. Using a set of duplicate passports to disguise their origins, the couriers flew from Sydney to Hong Kong, where they collected the heroin, then flew on via London or other European cities to New York. In six months, they smuggled $22.5 million worth of heroin which was delivered into the Mafia distribution system.

Even then, it took another successful syndicate bust in 1970 and the horrendous addiction of GIs in Vietnam before the US Bureau of Narcotics turned its attention to the South-east Asian heroin trade and admitted the connection between the American Mafia and the Triad gangs.

Another criminal group was also becoming involved in the distribution of South-east Asian heroin: they were the Yakuza, Japan's equivalent of the Triads. Dating back 300 years, the Yakuza are famous for their tattoos and infamous for slicing off part of a finger as an aspect of their initiation rites or as a punishment to anyone transgressing their code. In the 1920s and 1930s, Yakuza gangs played a part in Japan's opium policy in Manchuria and China. They were also instrumental in importing Japanese morphine – known as ‘cotton morphine' on account of its appearance – into the USA early in the 1930s, later supplying drug rings on the west coast with heroin. Pearl Harbour brought to an end that enterprise. During the Second World War, the Yakuza set up supplying illicit amphetamines to Japanese civilians and military personnel. They now monopolise this market, with at least 50 per cent of their income reckoned to be drug-related. After the war, with the American presence in Japan, the CIA employed the Yakuza to spy on left-wing politicians. To this day, the gangsters are a political power to be reckoned with in Japan.

Around 1970, the Yakuza began to expand from being primarily a Japanese domestic criminal fraternity into an international one. They exploited the potential of the Pacific Rim, smuggling and dealing in drugs and arms, and investing heavily in the sex trade. They also linked up with the Triads and are now globally connected wherever there is an ethnic Japanese community. By 1972, they were establishing themselves in the USA. They first set up shop in Hawaii, moved to Los Angeles, then on to San Francisco and New York.

They were not slow in connecting with the Mafia but again it was some years before law enforcement agencies realised what was going on. Yet in May 1979, three Yakuza couriers were to be caught in Honolulu, carrying heroin disguised in duty-free cigarette cartons. It was discovered through passport checks that the couriers had made sixteen trips to Bangkok and twelve journeys to Hawaii, Guam and San Francisco. When Japanese police raided their homes in Tokyo, a curious code of behaviour for smugglers was discovered which, in part, read:

You should obey whatever you are told to do by your group leader. You have no choice, you cannot refuse or complain of the leader's instructions. The above instructions are given at the request of the financier in order to protect ourselves and to accomplish our work … You must pay for your souvenirs yourself. Your leader will pay for your hotel and three meals. He will also pay for your drinks, up to $75.

Faced with the political, geographical and logistical problems of reducing poppy growing and the opium trade within the Golden Triangle, the DEA had decided to attack international trafficking. A large South-east Asian regional force of DEA intelligence gathering agents targeted drug shipments and, by 1975, South-east Asian heroin smuggling to the USA was cut by two-thirds. With the French Connection also severed, addiction rates in the USA fell from an estimated 500,000 addicts in 1971 to 200,000 in 1974. To counteract the heroin shortage on the street, Mexican poppy growers, who had accounted for about 35 per cent of the available heroin in the USA, increased their market share to about 90 per cent by 1975. Poppy fields proliferated in the Sierra Madre Mountains of central Mexico and, to a lesser extent, in Colombia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, but the heroin was of poor quality.

Mexico was easier for the Americans to deal with than the mountains of Indo-China. The DEA was quick to join forces with the Mexican government. Poppy fields were attacked, uprooted by hand or sprayed with weed-killers. The campaign was aided by a severe drought in 1977 which cut Mexican heroin production by half although it picked up again from 1981 to climax in 1986. The lesson was hard learnt: it was one thing to wipe out a harvest but another to keep it suppressed. Farmers merely accepted their loss and waited for the next sowing season.

Overall, the 1970s was a decade with some notable successes in the on-going war against opium. However, when a drought occurred in the Golden Triangle in 1978, opium and heroin production in Afghanistan and Pakistan expanded to fill the sudden deficiency, the heroin from this source being a high quality powder, off-white to mid-brown in colour. At the same time, opium production increased in Iran following the 1979 revolution, leaving more of the Golden Crescent output available for the international market. Then history repeated itself and another lesson was completely ignored.

Until 1973, Afghanistan was a monarchy but this was overthrown by an Islamic republican movement which established a constitution in 1977, vesting all power in the president. A
coup d'état
in 1978 transferred power to a pro-Communist revolutionary council which developed into a Soviet-sponsored Communist government. Internal Muslim anti-communist rebels soon presented the Russians with their own Vietnam-style war which was not to end until 1989.

This was by the way in the eyes of the American government, which saw a Communist Afghanistan bordering pro-Western, but politically temperamental, Pakistan: it was Indo-China all over again. In 1979, the CIA started covert operations in Afghanistan to assist Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation. Acting alongside the Pakistani secret service, Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), the CIA allied with the Mujaheddin Afghan guerrillas who were already involved in opium growing, particularly supporting Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who employed the CIA to arm his men and provide military back-up to his forces. Opium production soared, doubling between 1982 and 1983. Hekmatyar, later to be Afghanistan's prime minister, was soon the region's most influential drug lord.

Not only the rebels dealt in opium. So too did the Pakistani military and intelligence services. Opium arrived at border posts where it was bought by Pakistani refiners of whom there were about 150 operating in 1986 in the Khyber district of the North-West Frontier Province, protected by the provincial governor. Pakistani military vehicles frequently transported opium made immune to police search by ISI passes.

It has to be said the CIA were not as instrumental or as actively involved in the Golden Crescent as they had been in the Golden Triangle, but their intervention certainly encouraged a considerable increase in opium production. Even when it was known the rebels were dealing in drugs, the CIA would not withdraw support for fear of compromising their political stand. In the Cold War against Communism, the CIA considered drugs the lesser evil and actively gave succour to rebels for whom opium was a currency and who were known opium producers, helping to transform the region into a major world heroin source.

Pakistan suffered from the increase in heroin production. A number of heroin syndicates appeared including well-organised operations run by military officers and civilian officials in the corrupt regime of President Muhammad Zia Ul-Haq. Zia, who was also chief of staff, was almost certainly implicated in the trade, although no concrete proof was ever presented: he was killed in an air crash in 1988. What is certain is he knew of his senior officers' complicity in the heroin trade and of their protection of heroin dealers and the heroin-financed Pakistani criminal organisations which held a degree of political influence. By the time of Zia's death, and the end of his military rule, Pakistan had the largest pro rata addict population in the world.

The civilian government tried to make inroads into the drug trade but with little success for it was so well established in the country's economy. Heroin income in 1989 was in the region of £2.5 billion, substantially more than all the rest of Pakistan's legal exports. The poppy farmers of the North-West Frontier were reluctant to give up a lucrative business whilst over the border, with the Soviet army pulling out of Afghanistan in 1989, foreign aid to the guerrillas halted with opium production increasing to sustain the guerrilla forces who were now engaged in a civil war and with fighting each other for opium supremacy.