On the Hunt for Burma's Billion Dollar Meth Labs
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Welcome to the Underworld Podcast, where we talk about global, transnational, organized crime and fun things like that. I am one of your hosts, Danny Gold, and I am here with Sean Williams. So I think it's his birthday today, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Crazy birthday in lockdown. It's a fun time.

Sean is in Berlin, like the craziest party city on earth, taking time on his Friday night to do a podcast for everyone. If that doesn't send you to patreon.com slash the underworld podcast, I don't know what will. I would be doing jigsaw puzzles. I would be watching TV. I would be doodling. I could be doing anything right now, but I'm right here with you guys. I mean, you're not going to go out for another seven hours until like two o'clock in the morning anyway. No, I'll be in bed by nine.

Anyway, today we have, I mean, a fantastic story. This is something that Sean has gone and done. He wrote an article for it, I think for GQ magazine. It's actually, Sean and I have never met, but after I read this article, I was like, that's the guy I want to do the podcast with. And I hit him up in Berlin and I was like, let's do this because Sean...

Sean went hunting for a billion dollar meth lab in the jungles of Myanmar. And I'm just going to, I'm going to let you start right now because if, I mean, that's a, that's a selling point right there. Yeah. It sounds like a good idea, right?

Yeah. So there's this giant casino, right? And it's actually kind of a city all its own. And it's carved out of the jungle at the point where Thailand and Laos meet right on the Mekong River. But it's not really in Thailand or Laos at all. And it's decked out in all these giant fake marble columns and golden crowns. There's statues of Zeus and Confucius and armies of low-paid Burmese.

manned and baccarat tables and food stalls and outside the streets packed with bright lit pink brothels and restaurants where you can eat snakes and pangolins and tigers and out back there's a great big cage complex right where two dozen tigers pace back and forth angry next to kids just like playing football that sounds like the best bachelor pad like bachelor party destination i've ever heard of in my entire life i don't know why they didn't make the hangover in burma it would have like been way better

Is this Meng Law? Because I've had friends that have gone there. I've heard about the place. It's like downright mythical, just lawless. No, so this is somewhere else. But the fact that you mentioned that is interesting. So we're going to get into that in a bit as well. So this place is similar and it's construction all around, right? And there's neon signs everywhere. And at night, thousands of Chinese tourists tramp up and down the streets looking for girls and drugs and weird things to eat. And everyone speaks Mandarin. And the currency is Yuan.

And the clocks are set to Beijing time, even though Beijing's like 2,000 miles away. And some of the brothels have girls who look about 12. And cops don't patrol there in the U.S. Treasury, so there's a hotbed of truck trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, bribery, and wildlife trafficking. And it's placed it under official sanctions. So this place sounds pretty insane, right? I would say so. Yeah. This is the King's Romans Casino. And it's one of the key stop-offs on the Southeast Asian meth trade.

I feel like people don't think places like this exist in the world anymore, but they definitely do. And I feel like a lot of them are near or in Burma's borderlands. Yeah, it's like it's another universe, this place, right? I mean, I spent a bunch of time running around the region late last year and again early this one. And it didn't do much for my sanity, to be honest. It's probably good...

To mention, by the way, when most people think of drug markets, they think of the Mexican cartels, cocaine. But Southeast Asian syndicates make two to three times what they do, and they're fueling the world's biggest drug epidemic by far. It's wrecking lives even as far away as the States, right? One of them, this kingpin called...

Tse-Chi Lop, this Canadian-Chinese guy, he's accused of running a drug empire worth almost $18 billion alone. El Chapo, by the way, is reckoned to be worth about $2 to $4 billion. Jeez, that's a lot of money. This is the story of yours that I read that I was just like blown away. You know, I read a lot about this stuff. I report about it. This thing completely just shocked me. It's crazy. Like,

These jungle kingpins, they're not to be messed with. But I guess over like six, seven weeks or so, I tried to get as close as I could to one of their infamous labs that pump out billions of dollars of pills and crystal into the world.

We headed deep into rebel-held territory, hung out with gangsters. My photographer nearly got killed by a tiger. Like, seriously, he had this giant lump clawed out of his arm. It was insane. And all in search of this lab, which the locals call The Machine. It's sophisticated, massive, carved out of thick forest and hills, secured by militants and bribed army officers and operated by chemists shipped in from Taiwan. Why Taiwan? Why Taiwan?

I think they've just got like the talent. They're just getting headhunted because they've got the best chemist in the region. That's what we're told. I mean, this is the kind of journalism that I think used to be in a lot of places 20, 30, 40 years ago. And it just, it doesn't really exist anymore except in one man, Sean Williams. I'm nothing if not a throwback.

So nearly all of this stuff goes on on the Burmese side of the border, right? Which is one of the three countries that makes up this historic so-called Golden Triangle region with Thailand and Laos that I'm going to get into in a little bit.

This is a country torn into tiny kingdoms run by about 30 different rebel groups who are either at war or a ceasefire with the ruling military, which is one of the biggest in the world. And it runs this country like a hermit kingdom. We got into Burma tons in your Rohingya trafficking episode, right? And I'm not even going to mention the Rohingya in this episode, which gives you an idea how screwed up the country is. Even the name is contentious, right? Some people prefer Myanmar, but that's what the dictatorship calls it. So I'm going to go with Burma.

But it has – I mean it was the Hermit Kingdom. It has opened up I think in the last six, seven, eight years. But it's still – I mean the borderlands there are just completely wild. There's still all these rebel groups fighting to carve out their own territory, drugs, lawlessness. And the country still is – I mean it's opened up a bit to Western business interests, but it's still closed off in a weird way. And it's still – like you said, it's still kind of a dictatorship. Yeah, I mean it's like – it opened up like just over a decade ago.

But it was kind of... I think some guy told me it was kind of like just all of the military guys just took off their uniforms and put suits on instead. Yeah. So it's like, you know, same day as yesterday. But, I mean, this place is absolutely crazy. It's the maddest country I've ever reported from by a mile, I would say. Like...

So this show is about the world's biggest drug empire in one of the world's most fucked up regions and how it's gone from the opium capital of the world where donkeys haul tons of poppies across mountain ranges to a network of rebel-held mega labs driving a drug crisis that's got tens of millions of people hooked worldwide. It's like Breaking Bad times a million.

A million. And I'll tell you why I wound up at the end of my trip sleeping rough on the banks of the Mekong with a mate with a broken rib, hoping tigers or the cold wouldn't kill us. This is not, by the way, an episode about successful journalism.

Look, if we had episodes about successful journalism, we would not be making a podcast right now. That's a fair point. There will be no stories of successful journalism here. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. Make us a successful podcast at least. So to get to the background for this mad stuff, we've got to go way back to when British soldiers piled through Burma in the 19th century, right? And they turned it into part of their massive empire. Yeah.

It was this really important trade import between South and Southeast Asia, and its capital city that was called Rangoon at the time, it's now called Yangon, was this bustling, busy harbour that shipped pretty much everything imaginable. George Orwell was actually posted there as a colonial policeman in the 20s,

and the chaos he saw pretty much influenced 1984 and Animal Farm. He also described the, quote, cool, sweetish smell of opium that wafted through the streets. Poppies were one of the region's biggest crops, and most of it was grown in the cool northern highlands where Burma met Thailand and French-controlled Laos.

Yeah. There's a really good, uh, I think Andrew Marshall wrote a book called the trouser people. I think that was saying that's really good and deals a lot with the colonial history in Burma, but I just, I love the old French colonial architecture there. I think it was French. Maybe it was, uh, yeah, it's just like, I mean, now I'm sure it's all being, it's all being ripped up and replaced with like steel and glass monstrosities, but it's just, it's beautiful, man. Yeah. The whole region is just full of like gorgeous little towns and villages everywhere. It's amazing. Um,

But yeah, like back then, opium was the order of the day. Meth back then was a baby, right? Oh, baby meth. Baby meth. Baby meth. It's going to grow up, though. It's not going to be so nice. A German scientist first synthesized it in 1887, but it didn't get used widely until the Second World War, where German soldiers used it to stay awake and wired on the battlefield.

Hitler actually used it too as part of this like mad speedball concoction. He was getting injected every day. So that explains some. Japanese soldiers used it too and they occupied Burma during the war. When the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviets took Berlin, tons of methamphetamine just lay around for mobs across Asia to make millions on. Doctors rebranded them as diet pills and this great addiction just kind of carried on.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. This is the bio for meth? This is pretty wild. Were these pills just lying around waiting for anyone to kind of take them? Yeah. I mean, like, the fascist governments had, like, made millions of these things because, like, their troops are just sweeping across the region way quicker than the Allies. And this is one of the big reasons why. I mean, they just weren't sleeping. They were off their face all the time. So when the war ended, they were expecting to win. But just giant crates of this stuff just lying everywhere. Yeah.

So yeah, so then the mob got hold of them. Goldmine. Yeah, yeah. In like 1948, Burma gets independence from London, but it's an absolute basket case. I mean, the wars ripped up all these tribal grievances and warlords are battling control of land the size of their own back garden. At the same time, the US, which is desperate hold of communism, tools up a bunch of them, not only in Burma, but in Laos and northern Thailand.

The rebels get their money from heroin, which starts flooding into the US market from the Golden Triangle. Tons of this production is focused on Shan State, which is this huge, dense region where eastern Burma meets China and Laos. So you get to the 60s and the story of modern Burma as its drug kingdom becomes the tale of two despots.

One of them is a socialist called Ne Win. He takes control of Burma in a bloodless coup in 1962, and he throws the country behind a so-called bamboo curtain and just isolates it completely from the world. Now, this guy is nuts, right? His lucky number was nine, so he minted banknotes in denominations of 45 and 90. When a fortune teller told him he'd be killed from the right, Win ordered cars to drive on the right instead of the left-hand side of the road.

Burma still runs an hour out of step with its neighbors even today. Windholed up in Rangoon, surrounded by military and steered this so-called Burmese way to socialism. It didn't do much but cripple the economy and get the rebels who wanted this throne, building the world's biggest heroin producing market. And heroin was first synthesized by German too in the 1890s, by the way. Guys in Germany must have been getting messed up back then. Yeah, that's totally different from now. But I didn't... Heroin and meth came from Germany. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you can thank Germans for a lot of modern chemicals. I think ecstasy is German as well. Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, like in Burma at the same time as Ne Win, there's this Chinese Shang guy called Kun Sa. And he's building an empire, right? As a young man, he joined the Chinese Kuomintang army that lost to Mao's communists in 1949. Kun Sa was a separatist and Ne Win locked him up in 1969. And he was a separatist.

When Khun Sa came out of prison five years later, he becomes this massive drug lord, building an empire across the Golden Triangle border in Thailand. By the mid-1980s, his so-called Shan United Army has 20,000 troops, material including surface-to-air missiles. By that time, the Golden Triangle was pumping out like 45% of the world's heroin, and Khun Sa was doing half of it. U.S. officials reckon the Shan United Army supplied seven-tenths of all the heroin in America.

I feel like there's half a dozen or so other insane drug lords I've heard about existing in Burma throughout the years. And they're all like real compound in the jungle type dudes. Like it's fertile ground for Narco season eight. You know what I'm saying? I actually had someone in Hollywood contact me about this story. And they mentioned exactly that, that someone wanted to make like Narco's TV show, but say in Southeast Asia, which they should, which they should. Yeah. What happened to that guy? Oh,

It's Hollywood, man. I mean... He sounds like an idiot. Like, how do you have the idea and then not follow through? Pay Sean his money. Pay me. To make the show. Patreon.com forward slash round the world podcast. You're bad at that. Anyway, sorry. So, Kinsalov's attention too, right? And he's always inviting foreign journalists into his little fiefdom, calling himself the king of the golden triangle.

How did we miss out on this era, man, where drug lords were like, yo, come hang out. I'll tell you a story. Come hang out at my compound. Why don't you write an article about me? How did we...

We missed it all. It could have been. So hard, man. Anyway, sorry. Go on. American historian, right, this guy called Alfred McCoy, he calls Kinsar, quote, the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium. Neywind's Lucky Street runs out on August 8th, 1988. That's 8-8-88. When a pro-democracy movement whose lucky number is, guess what, 8th,

topples him in the capital, Rangoon. But the Tatmadaw, which is the name of the Burmese military, by the way, it cancels the coup and a military dictatorship carries on. Khun Sa's empire begins to fall around this time too, right? In 1980, a regime change in Thailand robs him of his biggest protector and he flees across the Burmese border.

By the 90s, the military government in Rangoon, working with the USDA, fought his men back into the hilly borderlands. In 1996, Khun Sa makes this pact to stop making heroin, and he lives out the rest of his life in Rangoon, retired, which is renamed its pre-British name Yangon years later, by the way. And he lives in Yangon with four Shan wives. So he kind of gets off. Sean, I just want to say I'm learning so much. What a fantastic podcast. Please give us money at our Patreon. Indeed. Indeed.

So in the 90s, heroin production is collapsing and Afghanistan is getting bigger as a producer. But the tap of the door is really weak after decades of disastrous economic decay. I can't even say that word. Decay? Delay?

Decay. Decay, that's the one. And they make a bunch of pacts with rebels to let them rule tribal areas in return for ruling Burma, whatever broken-up state Burma actually is by this point. One of the maddest of these groups is the United Wa State Army. In this part of Shan on the Chinese border called Wa State, they're a remnant of the Burmese Communist Army that broke into three parts in 1989. And, like, this is going to get into, like, People's Front of Judea kind of airspace.

at territory here there's like so many acronyms rebel groups running burma it's like it's actually impossible to keep up with them every book on burma is like a glossary of hundreds of these things anyway the war these guys are tough they fought off every invader including the british back in the day and they they got armed by the communist chinese way back when

Yeah, I want to do a whole episode on the walk because they're just – I mean they're nuts. And also I think – I mean we said they're a remnant of the Burmese Communist Army, but they're like – they're an ethnic group too, and they were known as being like –

headhunters and all that i think my favorite war story is from um bertel lintner's book on on on on burma i think the british this is like in the 30s or 40 something sometime around then maybe a little later and the british were on some like you know british civilizing mission and they hit up the wall to be integrated into the country into the government and i asked them what do you want for the future of what do you want the future of the water being they were like

we don't think about that stuff because we are wild people. We only think about ourselves. And the Brits go, don't you want education, clothing, good food, good hospitals, et cetera. And the Wago, this is a quote, we are very wild people and we do not appreciate all these things. Just legends. They were just like notoriously famous fighters before even all this. They're nuts, man. Like we were traveling through war territory a bit during this trip and like

There's these kids, they look like... They must be, like, four and a half feet tall, wearing old fatigues from, like, the 50s and stuff. Like, holding rifles, like, twice their height. It's pretty nuts. They're everywhere. It's like... I think they have an Air Force, too, don't they? They have, like, a rebel Air Force. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're like a fully de facto, like, state on the corner of Burma. So why is this hermit kingdom still backed by China? Yeah, it's about the size of Belgium or Maryland. Like...

600,000 people. And the kids and the men are conscripted into a 30,000-strong army that's dressed in all these crazy Cold War fatigues and tall with rifles from the 60s. Like, it's a crazy place. In the 90s, these guys...

build this kind of narco North Korea by pressing this new pill called yama or horse pill. These things were first used to give pack horses a boost up mountains, but of course the locals assumed getting high on them. And the wars pressing millions of these things and they're flooding Asia. Is this also like they call it Yaba in Thailand? Because when I was in Thailand, that was really popular. Yeah. I mean, it's the tires that gave it that name actually. So like

Basically, these things, they're meth pills, right? And workers can get through long days, parties stay up for days and days on end. But it rots people's teeth and it makes them look like zombies. So the Thai authorities call them yabba, yeah, or crazy pills in Thai. And the name kind of sticks, right? So over the years, other groups make the pills and some venture out into crystal meth or ice, the stuff Walter White cooks up. And by the way, crystal meth is pound for pound worth more than heroin, so no wonder it's taken over in the region.

I did not know that. But yeah, Yabba was like, I mean, backpackers were smoking it. Like it was, this is 2007 and it was everywhere. I'm not going to say that I've smoked it, but if I had smoked it, I'm sure the experience would have been pretty insane and I would have been up for about a day talking about football. But I haven't, so let's move on. I guess like we're getting pretty up to speed now, right? And you might wonder how the King's Roman Casino fits into this whole mess.

Its owner is this guy called Zhao Wei, who's a Chinese guy from a massive poor region on the border of Russia. I always find it all mad how Russia and China share a giant border like this. They're two crazier countries to share a border like that. It's weird. Anyway, Zhao makes his fortune in timber. Then he goes into casinos. So he invests in one in Macau and then in his tiny little town on the Chinese-Burmese border called Mongla in 2000. There's your Mongla.

So he builds this mini China, right? He imports Chinese stuff. He puts these exotic animals on the casino's food menu. Sound familiar? Yeah.

Yeah, dude, Meng La is just, the stories I've heard of that place, it was exactly like you described the casino in the beginning, just like endangered animals, child prostitutes, all sorts of gambling, drugs, all that. Yeah, lawless. Yeah, lawless. Yeah, it's like crazy place. I never went there actually, but I've heard some pretty grim stories, yeah. Anyway, the dream is to make money while you sleep, right? That's why we've got the Patreon, but...

Zhao realizes that he can make a ton of cash helping the Hua and others ferry their drugs out into the world and bring the meth constituent drugs over the border from China, right? So in 2005, Beijing's on this anti-drug campaign and they ban travel to Mongla from China, which is basically his entire money gap.

I think I heard a quick Meng La story. I think Andrew Stambridge, the photographer that I broke with there, who's a crazy person, had been there before. But he might have told me this story, but I'm not sure who did. It was about rich Chinese people who would pay people in Meng La to gamble for them. I don't know if they had...

cameras on or, or headphones or something like that, or on cell phones. And they would just like tell them every hand or what was going on and they would gamble through them. Yeah. I saw this, you know, cause they'd been banned. Yeah. I saw this in the King's Romans as well. It's nuts. Like the money they were putting away as well, like thousands and thousands of thousands of bucks, like on single hands. It's like, I don't know. It's, it's, it's pretty crazy. Um,

Anyway, so after this anti-drug campaign in Beijing, like Zhao's biggest money spinner has just gone out the window, but he's sturdier than that. And in 2007, he buys a 99-year lease on a 38-square-mile patch of land he calls a special economic zone. This guy is no Kansai, right? He barely ever gives interviews. And when I was there, I'd never imagined for a million years I'd see him, let alone get close enough to talk to the guy.

In 2011, he told a journalist, quote, we have done a lot to stop drug trafficking here. We have our own special economic zone police and an office of the Lao police here. We take a very strong position against drug trafficking. This is our responsibility.

I mean, that's obviously bullshit, right? But there's pretty much nothing anyone can do. Lao politicians are in Zhao's pocket. I think there's like a picture of him smooching. I think there's a picture of him smooching like the Lao president or prime minister or something in the brochure for the hotel. And the U.S. sanctions aren't really going to hit a guy who does his business in yuan, not dollars.

And here's the thing. You can barely even get to these places. Mong La still exists, of course, but it's one of tons of so-called black zones in Burma that foreigners in theory can't even get into. But in a place where bribes are pretty much the order of the day, there are ways, of course. I

I think we got into one place through some telecommunications contractor who was going out with a local woman through her. We got some commander who could be bought like that kind of stuff. Like I'll go into some of our trip in a bit, but every single interaction in Burma is like this to go like 10 yards. You've got to bribe someone. It's it gets it gets pretty tough.

So the way this system works, right, in this drug world, is pretty much that you have precursors like ammonia and pseudoephedrine. That's the stuff you get in cold medicine to unblock your nose. We're putting a special how to cook meth video up on the Patreon, but you got to cough up some more donations to get it. Yeah, you've seen those cooking videos on YouTube. We're going to do one of those. It's going to be great. Are there cooking videos up with that on YouTube? Cooking meth? Yeah. Probably, yeah. There's the market right there. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. And now...

Because the Golden Triangle, and especially Burma, is wedged between India and China, you've got these two great routes to smuggle all of that stuff. A retired DEA agent told me that back in the 90s and early 2000s, there's this kind of no man's land between India and Burma right up in the beautiful mountainous north, which is just lined with blister packs of pills, about a football field in length, and people were just rocking up and loading a shit ton of this stuff on lorries.

I've actually heard stories of that border now, like the India border. And apparently there's a ton of generic pills made in India that are just flowing over into those border towns. And it's full of addicts to like anti-anxiety and pain pill, all sorts of prescription medicine. It's just like crazy on that border and all those villages and everyone's addicted. Always the borders. Always the borders. Borderlands. Borderlands.

So these days, the primary route is from the Chinese province of Yunnan that backs onto the Golden Triangle. I mean, one is China, right? So there's just tons and tons of this stuff going into making all kinds of chemicals and other things.

Second, after China cracked down on its own meth industry several years back, many people say they've kind of turned a blind eye to constituents leaving the country, kind of like outsourcing their meth production by proxy. So now it's all in Shan State and Hua, which is where I spent the vast majority of my time out there. Actually, a lot of the key players actually are Chinese. An American officer I spoke to told me they get ID cards from dead Burmese so they can get across the border easily.

Just lawless. It's crazy. So like once you've got your stuff across the channel, our border, they don't need to head to Thailand much because the tidy are actually pretty bad-ass and they've been known to just slaughter entire bands of smugglers on the spot. I've seen some pictures of that. It's pretty grim. Um, once you're over the border, you take your stuff to this massive so-called machine and the machine just means massive factory, like massive pill factory. Yes. Just become the standing that everyone says when there's like a giant one that's making ice basically. Um,

These things are owned by a big cartel. I mean, there are smaller places like mom and pop operations, like pill presses all over the place that are pushing out Yabba for peanuts so people can eat. Like this place really is a narco state in that respect.

This is an excerpt from a recent crisis group report. Quote, the trade in ice, along with amphetamine tablets and heroin, has become so large and profitable that it dwarfs the formal economy of Shan state, lies at the heart of its political economy, fuels criminality and corruption, and hinders efforts to end the state's long-running ethnic conflicts. So this stuff really is the economy in Shan, and to a lesser extent northern parts of Laos as well.

So now you've got your stuff on site, right? And you're a big player and you've got your Taiwanese water whites cooking up the good shit. And you've got your protection either from the Burmese military or whichever group is in control that particular day. Then when it's all loaded and ready, you can get it across the border either by land or sea along the Mekong or into Cox's Bazaar or Bangladesh or Thailand from Yangon. I mean, there's tons of ways of getting out.

Yeah, I think we talked a bit in the Rohingya episode about Cox's Bazaar, how Rohingya now are used as drug mules a lot. They're being plucked from the refugee camps and some are just starting their own trafficking rings to get it out there. Yeah, I mean, the most vulnerable people, right? They're going to be the mules for this kind of industry. To give you some idea how chaotic the place is, here's Patrick Wynn in his brilliant book, Hello Shadowlands, which goes into drug trades all over Southeast Asia. Excellent, excellent book. Yeah, it's awesome, man.

Quote, here in Myanmar's far north, survival hinges on knowing the do's and don'ts, whom to flatter, what laws you can safely ignore, which officials to bribe, when to shut up, when to smoke meth without getting caught. We actually posed as Aussie dealers on our trip, and we met this married couple, pair of smugglers, who just walked straight across a supposedly closed bridge from Burma to Laos, where we had lunch, and we hoped they wouldn't know our accents were way out. They didn't.

They told us the guys they worked with were Wa, and they wanted 50% up front to smuggle our supposed gear through, which gave us a pretty good excuse just to walk away. Their route was on a long boat down the Mekong, which stopped off at the King's Romans, where they said the authorities would just turn a blind eye. Wait, this couple of smugglers, were they Burmese or Thai? They were Burmese, yeah. But then they just hopped across the bridge into Laos.

I actually, I took a boat. I don't think there, I took a boat where Thailand, Laos and Burma meet that area. I mean, years back, maybe 2007. I actually crossed into Burma at that time just to get like the little passport stamp because you need to leave Thailand and come back to get 30 more days. And it was, you know, we took the boat to, I took two days to Luang Por Bang and it's just, it's a beautiful area. I mean, it's wild and it's poor, but it's beautiful there. Yeah, I'm going to stick some of the videos I took on my phone of this like trip down to Mekong we ended up doing that night. There's like,

I think it's maybe the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It's like unbelievable. But yeah, anyway, that was like how some of these small time smugglers get their stuff through the region, right? So now we're back to the King's Romans and the casinos.

And here's the thing. They've become like the place to launder money in Southeast Asia. To give you some idea how big a deal they are, in 2014, there were 57 casinos in the region, and now there are 230. There are like 150 in Cambodia alone, including this one called Naga World that's worth 3.5 billion. That's like an eighth of Cambodia's GDP.

Jesus, it's Vegas right there, man. It's crazy. Once the gear's on the road, then you can just send it pretty much anywhere. Singapore's got a massive meth problem right now. Duterte, of course, is fighting his bogus drug war over it, but it is widespread. Japan loves meth, and you've even got Aussie bikers and Kiwi mongrel mob guys living in Pattaya and other beach towns getting wasted and quarterbacking deliveries there too.

And you've got an episode on that soon, right? Yeah, I'm out in New Zealand in like a couple of weeks. So yeah, it's going to be really cool. The biggest kingpin in this world, allegedly, is a guy called Tse-Chi Lop. He's a Canadian national born in China. He's thought to be the head of a syndicate worth almost 18 billion bucks. I'm going to use a bunch of reporting from Reuters' Tom Allard, by the way. He wrote a fantastic feature on this guy last October. I remember that story. It was incredible. It's so cool. It's a really good piece of work.

So police called a group Sam Gore, which is Cantonese for brother number three, which is one of Say's nicknames. The Sam Gore is basically massive and it hides most of its products in tea bags, which is actually a really common way of smuggling meth in the region. It's really technologically advanced, the group, and it's got people from every country going. And here's one reason why people don't hear so much about meth is in Southeast Asia. They're pretty peaceful by the counts.

Now, I'm not saying people don't get killed all the time, because they definitely do. But compared to the North and South American gangs, these guys are angels. It's partly because of the culture, and partly because the money's so huge, it's just not worth the hassle getting into wars all the time.

That's really fascinating. I mean, it's a much smarter way to do things, but I had no idea. Yeah, it's brilliant. I mean, maybe there aren't as many competitors rising up either. I don't know. I mean, you know about the Burmese theory of saving face, right? Face is such a massive thing in that country. And if you renege on a deal or if someone thinks you've lied to them, that matter of honor or face, they call it, is absolutely massive. It means so much in the culture. So I guess that plays into a lot of it as well.

Anyway, back to say, right, so he began as part of this triad-like gang getting heroin into China in the 90s. But in 98, he was charged with drug trafficking in New York, and he was in an Ohio prison until 2006.

When he gets out, he flees to Canada, then Hong Kong. Then he sets up a company there in 2011, and it just grows and grows. He's protected by this ring of Thai kickboxers. He travels in private jets and spends millions on lavish birthday parties. Thai kickboxers. I mean, that is a classic move. Personally, I would rather have, you know, a bunch of guys with guns. But, I mean, you do you. I mean, the guy clearly knows what he's doing, you know? I mean, it's your gang. Why not just have both, right?

Yeah, that's true. Tight kickboxers with guns. With guns, yeah. An Australian cop said that he lost $66 million in a single night on the tables in Macau, this guy. I mean, when I went to Vegas, I lost a couple of hundred bucks and my dignity, to be fair.

You should definitely read this Roy's report, which we'll have in the reading list for Patreon members, because it involves this giant sting and a bunch of amazing characters. But basically, like, this is the kind of person who's in charge of this industry. It's another world. And a really important part of this is that it's not even really in the authority's interest to shut it down, because it's propping up entire regions that happily go to war at any moment.

If anything, the Burmese government has even got more isolated and weird. Like they just don't care about governing anymore. In 2008, they built this new capital called Naypyidaw right in the middle of the country near absolutely nothing. It's like full of giant empty buildings and this famous like 20 lane highway no one drives down. There's this fantastic Patrick Sims article for Outside About It. He's one of my favorite writers, by the way. And he describes it like this.

Napador was a brown, barren and superheated Lego city, a cross between Pyongyang and a gated community outside Phoenix. Rebar poked out everywhere and women carried firewood on their heads past just finished office parks. Spread across miles of empty landscape, it was full of pre-ruins, a folly as ambitious in its way as the pagodas it began.

A DEA guy I met actually while I was out there described the dictatorship in pretty simple terms. He said, quote, there are a lot of people who want to succeed the right way. The problem is the leadership are idiots. I mean, hearing all this back now, I'm not sure why we took on this challenge to find a meth lab. But like it kind of consumed us. We became totally obsessed. Each day we'd be in some new town or black zone chasing the cartel or the war or some pill pressed chance who would hand us on to a rebel leader.

Every journalist right now is like, who covered the expenses and how can I pitch them? I mean, the sad truth is get on Condé Nast, but yeah.

There's this one time, right, where we went to a town in Shan. We took a bunch of fake documents and we were posing as Christian missionaries. It took us six hours on these old cobbled mountain roads across paddies and palm line hills. It was absolutely stunning. Then we spent three days in this weird hotel on the edge of town waiting for everything to be sorted so we could go into this jungle with these nutcases and see the so-called machine.

I think something few journalists talk about is how much time on these kind of assignments you just wait around for ages, waiting for someone to show or some logistics or security to be put in the way.

I mean, 90% of the job is waiting at checkpoints. But what was this whole, I mean, you're Australian dealers, you're Christian missionaries, you're going full, I don't know, Mr. Bean? Like who wears costumes and decisions all the time? I was going to say Gonzo, but yeah, you can call him Mr. Bean if you want. We were told that was the best way of getting past all these like government checkpoints. And it worked. Like it really did work. And we were like jokingly saying, peace be with you and stuff at these checkpoints. It's kind of funny.

I hope it was worth the hellfire. It will be. It will be. So we spent three days in this weird hotel, right? We were just waiting for these guys to set us up so we could go on the jungle road to get into the sort of like middle of nowhere to see the machine.

And we're just like huddled up in this hotel, making our trip out for beer or food, but basically trying to stay on the wraps because we're not supposed to be there. And one time we had to evade the cops who were chasing us. We got two vans and one of them went one way and the other one went the other. It's like it was a bit slapstick.

Then on the third day at dawn, like 5 a.m., it turns out that one of the guys in the group has stolen a car and a bunch of guns and driven through the jungle towards Laos. And there's nothing we can do but head back. And everyone's just like crazy mad. I mean, we're covered in mosquito bites and like tired and pissed off.

It was kind of heartbreaking at the time. And by the end of the trip, the guy we'd spent ages setting the thing up with, who's a US national, by the way, he asked if we want pictures of this guy's body when they killed him. We're like, thanks, but no, please don't kill him. That's fine. We just screwed up. I mean, the photo editor was definitely pissed. But also who, when you say one of the guys, like one of the guys in your group, just some random guy you guys were with or like someone working with your fixer, what do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, we were in with these guys that were like,

They were kind of on the fringes of a really massive cartel. And yeah, I think there were four of them that came with us. And then one of these guys, we just called him the tattoo guy because he had tattoos all over himself. He just like scooted off in the morning with one of the guy's cars. And he like just packed a load of guns and some money apparently and just like ran off.

And yeah, I get like intimate messages every now and then. Oh, I did at the time asking like if I wanted them to chase after the tattoo guy. I'm like, ah, it's cool. I'm all good. Cheers. Don't kill him, please. Um,

So there's this like another time where we headed to this village that was like literally on the edge of the jungle where not long before there'd been a giant bust and millions of dollars of meth and equipment had been held by the authorities. We go to this silent village at night and there's barely anyone on the streets. And it has this kind of like wild west, but just before a dual fight kind of vibe about it. And weirdly on the wall of this little town hall, there's this graffiti that says in English, fuck you.

Do you think that was specifically put there for you? I mean, I appreciate it if it was. It's a nice welcome. Like, we'd heard the machine there was gigantic and, like, it's obviously they're all, like, in pocket with the police, so it's all back up and running. And some local priest said the trucks were just hammering along the jungle road day and night.

So we hang out in this town past sunset, and that's probably not a good idea anyway, and it's getting pretty sketchy, just like two white guys in a 4x4 drinking cans of Myanmar beer with our fixer who's like, by the way, this massive meth addict and a former drug runner. Former or like current criminals always make the best fixers. Yeah, for sure. I mean, this guy...

Remember, he used to run drugs for some Russian mafia member or something in the region. But yeah, he's a pretty crazy guy. Sometimes they make the absolute worst ones too. So I guess my comment isn't really helpful at all. You had to pretty much stop him drinking in the morning or taking meth. And then you'd have a good day. If you could get to him before he started drinking, then you were good.

I feel like I would want my fixer to be on meth. Can you imagine how much work they would get? Like how helpful they would be? Oh, he did a lot of work, yeah. You would have to be like, call that, hey, can you call that guy again? Because he'd just be calling that guy like 15 times in a row every 20 minutes because he's so wired, you know? Yeah, I mean, this guy was solid. He's a solid guy, but...

I mean, like, he walked up to this bunch of teenage boys, actually, and he was like, right, they'll know. Like, the young boys will know, if anything. And the first guy starts talking about the machine, and then one of the others just, like, hits him and tells him to shut up. And then people start showing up, and our fixer gets really scared, so we just have to get out of there. And I think, like, looking back, that's probably the closest we got to finding this thing. Like, I reckon it was just a few yards away. We just didn't know it. There's a bunch of, like,

There's a bunch more mad stuff that happened in that GQ piece that I did and some that didn't make it in, like the night we did Opium in some weird Chinese gangster karaoke bar. I'm not sure I could listen to Elton John the same way, to be honest, after that. But this thing was like an adventure, right? And we learned tons about this massive industry that's wrecking so many lives across the world. Did we find a billion-dollar meth lab? Well...

I mean, we were so angry after the first trip when the one guy went rogue and screwed us. We head out there again this year and we ended up chasing more cartels across the country. And no, we didn't. But it was a ride for sure. And we wound up getting some guys to pilots over 100 miles along the Mekong, which was, as I said, like the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And then it went dark. We had to sleep rough, which wasn't so good. But it's all a story for sure, right?

Yeah, and the article is amazing. Please go just search for Sean's name in GQ and you'll – search for Billion Dollar Meth Lab and read it. And yeah, thanks everyone again for tuning in, man. Please, like if you're not subscribing, please subscribe. It really helps us out. And yeah, we're looking – we've reached a zenith right now. We're looking for advertisers.

Yeah. Throw some money up on that Patreon. Help us out. Otherwise, we'll send Sean back into the jungle again. We might just do that anyway. You know what? If we don't make money, we'll send him back there. If we do make money, we'll send him back there. It's a win-win for me too. Yeah.