The Burmese Heroin Jungle Kingpin & the Transgender Opium Queen
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29th of July 1967, on a rough track 50 miles outside the town of Ban Quan, Laos, a giant caravan of mules and men are traipsing across the banks of the Mekong River. 150 miles into a mammoth journey from the easternmost reaches of Burma. At its head, the warlord Khun Sa, hero of the Shan people, bane of just about everybody else.

16 tons of raw opium his 300 animals have on their backs is part of one of the world's biggest ever drug deals slated for half a million dollar sale to the CIA-backed Laotian general and drug lord Juan A. Raticone.

If Khun Sa and his 800 men can make it to Awane's Ban Kwan stronghold, they can add another thousand men to their numbers. Chinese Kuomintang, the KMT, who were once Khun's colleagues, will be muscled out, and Shan dominance of the world's most lucrative market will be secured. It won't go to plan.

A KMT unit that's tailed the caravan since it set out attacks. The Shan fight back and flee across the river, taking shelter in a nearby village. But there's a bigger foe. General Awane tells the Shan and the KMT to get lost or face Lao retribution. It's a shakedown. Khun Sa tells his guys to stay put. He's holding out for the half a mil he now tells Awane he'll take in order to leave. His original payout.

No dice. The next morning, six Laotian Air Force bombers swoop over the village and drop 500-pound bombs on Khun Sa's forces, scattering them into the jungle, killing their mules and leaving the opium behind.

Hoa Anh is only too happy to scoop the product up. He's got plenty of places to refine it. At a ready-baked consumer market just across the Vietnamese border, where hundreds of thousands of disaffected, angry and bored US troops are getting hired during a war that appears to have no purpose and no end. Hoa Anh will get wildly rich off the back of a bombing campaign that's quarterbacked by the CIA. Khun Sa is weak, defeated, his men dispersed and his treasure stolen.

It'll take him an entire decade to fight his way back into a market that he was inspired to join, in part by a lesser-known warlord or lady, whose own incredible tale will drift into jungle apocrypha like smoke from an opium pipe. But he will. And when he does, Consul will become one of the richest drug barons the world has ever seen, supercharging an industry supplying up to three-quarters of all the heroin in America. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

So hey guys, and welcome to the show that teaches you all about how to switch up from mules to motorbikes. I'm your host, Sean Williams, and with me as always is Danny Gold. Hey, how's it going? This is the show where we take you through the worlds of international organized crime, and we have a pretty good episode today. I think people are going to find it really interesting, especially since everyone seems to love the...

of Burma meth story. This is sort of the precursor to that. As always, we're going to have extra stuff up on the Patreon, patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast. For the price of one coffee a month, you can help Sean keep all his fingers and also get tons of bonus material, including scripts and sources and all that good stuff. Yeah.

Anything else? I mean, we've just had some really, really good interviews up there recently, right? We had Josh Hunt talking about his lasting family and the opioid crisis. We had Max Daly talking about

like how people are doing County Lions and the Coke industry in the UK. There's some really interesting stuff on there. So, yeah, sign up, guys. Yeah, and also send us questions, too, for the Q&A episode at the Underworld Podcast at gmail.com. And lastly, I think we just got more merch up on underworldpod.com slash merch. So if you want to get that, go for it and let's get going. Yeah, Kunsa, anyone who's listening,

Listen to these shows before, read my GQ story from Myanmar, personal plug, editors hire us both, blah, blah. But you're going to know about Kansai. This is the Shan warlord who pretty much shaped the Golden Triangle's drug trade into the biggest and most lucrative in the world during the Cold War. Golden Triangle, for those of you who don't know, it's where Burma, Laos and Thailand meet. And it's kind of been infamous as a drug producing area for decades.

for generations. Although I think it's pretty calm down now. Like I went there as a backpacker maybe 10 or 15 years ago and it was pretty, it's beautiful, uh, still pretty underdeveloped, but, but not, uh, full of warlords and gorillas like it used to be. Yeah. Yeah.

And there's actually like people who might have seen this, but there's actually a scene in the Ridley Scott movie, American Gangster, where Denzel Washington's Frank Lucas just horsebacks it into the Asian outback to get supplies straight from the source. He picks up the so-called China white smack that gets so many Americans hooked on the drug in the 60s and 70s. And he ships it around with the help of G.I.S. pissed off at the Vietnam War and looking to make a buck.

Far as I can tell, it's even coming through Berlin, where Tempelhof Airport was like a bastion of the West in Eastern Europe. Anyway, the guy that Denzel Washington's Lucas meets and drinks tea with, that's loosely based on Kunsa, although I can't find any concrete evidence the two ever met IRL.

Yeah, so I'm actually reading a book by the guy who wrote the book that became American, or the story that became American Gangster, Gary Jacobson. Mark Jacobson. And he, I mean, he doesn't specifically mention meeting Kun Sa, but he does mention to Jacobson that he went up there and like, you know, spent 10 days trekking back up there and I guess almost died on the way back. He said they were getting shot at. He lost half of his first supply and all this sort of stuff. It's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, like the Frank Lucas stuff is incredible as well. I mean, how they were like,

hiding smack in the actually literally in the bodies of fallen gis and then he had no see that's not that's that's not that's not true is that is that is that's not true ah okay they weren't he was hiding it in they built their own coffins with a false bottom okay so he would hide it in the bottom of the coffins he didn't hide it in their bodies oh interesting still pretty crazy but yeah like as we're going to get into further down this show the

The setting, the atmosphere of that scene in the movie, it pretty much checks out. And I've actually interviewed a journalist who met Kansar a few decades ago. I've done firsthand reporting on this podcast, guys. Keep your well-earned $3 a month coming to pay for my Skype account. Yeah, I think from what I read, he was pretty fairly open to journalists who could get there, right? Like there was just a wild amount of rebel groups and warlords and guerrillas all in those areas. Yeah.

And these journalists would just go and figure it out. Yeah, and as we're going to get into, he pretty much loved the limelight. He wasn't afraid of making himself the story. So Kunsa is massive. He's one of the biggest drug lords in the whole of history, worth around five billion bucks, according to some sources I've seen, but...

Yeah, if you take that back to the mid-90s, that's like $9 billion today, which is four or five times an El Chapo who's somehow become the official benchmark for all kingpins everywhere. Even though Sechi Lopp, if you go back to our Burmese meth lab for stuff on that guy, I think he's worth like $17 billion. It's crazy. I think, you know, these numbers...

They're not arbitrary, but they're kind of hard to pinpoint. They get thrown around a lot. I mean, people can't even get the fortunes of or estimate the fortunes correctly of like actors or people who earn their money legally. So it's kind of weird that we think we have these numbers pinpointed for drug lords and people who, you know, spend a lot of their career trying to hide their money through various sorts of shell companies and everything else. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of this, a lot of these figures come from sort of drug crime fighting agencies as well. So,

Maybe there's a bit of hyperbole there, but I'm not actually just doing this show on Kansar because there's another Burmese drug lord I think might be even more interesting than him, if that's possible, who barely gets a mention in the history books.

but who partly kicked off the entire Golden Triangle opium industry decades before. And just like Kunsa, she or he was an innovator. And just like Kunsa, she or he was a lively figure, happy for the limelight, never short of a good story or two. So first we're going to take this show back to June 24, 1927.

And that's when a princess named Yang Qiansu is born. She's the eldest daughter of 11 kids to the royal family of Koukang, which is an area of Shan State on the border of Yunnan province, China. It's around the same size as modern Lebanon.

Now, this place is historically part of China. Its people speak Chinese. They're ethnically Han, unlike the rest of Shan. But the British took it from China in 1897 and threw it into British India. Yes, India. And then it becomes a part of colonial Burma. So well done again, London. Can you sort of explain where this is now? And then who like who are the Shan? They're just they're a hill tribe. Is there anything else specific about them?

Yeah, I mean, they have their own language and culture. And Shan State is a huge place. I think it's like, I'm not sure, but I think it's the biggest state in Myanmar, just on the border with China in the Far East.

it's it's like historically been a bit of a black spot like for for control by the various countries that have or the colonial forces that have uh been in control of of burma or myanmar whatever you want to call the country so it's it's really really uh it has its own kind of like really unique uh feel to the place and if you go there it's like stepping back in time it's crazy

So Yang, she's educated in a convent and she quickly switches to her anglicized name, Olive. And she's expected to play the role of a princess, right? Fancy dresses, going through the god-awful Chinese custom of foot binding, which for anyone who doesn't know is when women are made to wrap up their feet so tight that their toes grow and break around their soles. And they're just hobbled with these little triangle flipper feet that are supposed to look like lotuses. It's really grim.

Quite rightly, though, Olive's having none of this, and she tells her family to go mind their own business. I couldn't even say that joke. It was so bad. She tells them to mind their own business. Olive also refuses to wear classically feminine outfits, and she cuts her hair short. She even gets crushes on her brother's love interests and partners instead of boys. Eventually, she gets the name Miss Hairy Legs. And as you'd imagine, lots of people bully her, including her own brother, Francis.

So what she does is Olive just runs with it. She loves guns and she gets into trouble in school for packing a revolver in classes. She's described in both male and female terms in this point, and she calls herself a lesbian, but there's way more to it.

And I'm using some great material by Gabrielle Palook here, who wrote an obituary about Olive. And she was the last Western journalist to interview her before she died for the magazine Coconuts Yangon. So shout out to Coconuts. She's also got a book called Opium Queen coming out soon, apparently. So shout out to Gabrielle. We'd love to get you on for a bonus show. Yeah, it sounds awesome. It has a great title. Yeah, yeah. It should be really good, that one. Olive's family are top of the tree in cocaine. But then history comes knocking.

When Japan invades British Burma in 1941, they flee east across the Yunnan border to Kunming, which is the unofficial capital of the nationalist KMT, who are struggling against the Japanese and Mao's communists. So you can see why they didn't do so well in the long run. Can you just break down all of Chinese history really quickly in like two or three seconds and explain who the KMT are? Oh, yeah, sure. That's easy. KMT, Kuomintang, they're the nationalists who

who are at the moment at the time that we're talking about here they're fighting a kind of war for control of china with mao's communists uh they end up fleeing to two different places one of which is taiwan which uh the republic of china we still have today and another one of them is this border with shan uh in myanmar which i didn't really know about that much until quite recently

So, yeah, I think we're probably going to do some stuff about the KMT in the future because they were pretty deep into drugs as well. But, yeah, so while in Yunnan, Olive's parents force her into a marriage with her cousin. But she's not really a fan of that either. She allegedly attacks him with a chamber pot when he tries to have sex with her. It's unknown whether the pot was full or not. Jesus. Yeah. Says Sister Judy Yang to Palook, quote, She didn't want to be married to him. She didn't want to have sex with him. And she didn't want to be a mother.

Olive does have a baby with this guy eventually, naming her son Juan Jeepoo after the US Jeeps riding around town. And she also has another daughter called Dua Lipa. I'm like 80-20 on that being a terrible Sean dad joke or a real thing. Yeah, no, it's a dad joke. I need to get some kids so I can actually get away with these a bit more. By 1949, Mao has pushed the KMT out of China altogether, and he's christened his People's Republic.

Part of the KMT, like we just said, they flee south to Taiwan and reform the Republic of China that still exists today. But another part of the KMT gets pushed out to Shan State in Burma. And actually Taiwan still claims the region now.

Yeah, I find that surprising. I had no idea. Yeah, that's crazy, right? But Olive has her own plans. And I'll let the guys at War is Boring take over from here because they wrote a real boss piece about her. Quote,

swaggering in a grey military uniform of her own design, with twin Belgian pistols at her hip and a personal army of 300 Koukang militia under her command. Through connections with her brother, she had received an invitation from the Kuomintang she couldn't refuse.

So people think that a big driver of this is actually Olive's fight against gender conformity, shed of a loveless marriage and preferring to be named Uncle Olive. I mean, what better way to make people accept you than down the barrels of a few hundred AK-47s?

Honestly, if you have the ability to form your own private militia, you know, the Kocang gang, why wouldn't you, like, if you want to prove a point about your politics or not, you know? Yeah. I mean, how many more Patreon members do we need to start our own Kocang gang? That'd be pretty cool. We need about like a 15 fold increase, but we'll get there. All right. We'll do it. Yeah. But after Mao's takeover of China, his army is fighting back the Americans in the UN in Korea.

So what does the US's newly minted CIA do? Well, it throws money at the KMT, hoping not only to contain leftism, but also to open up a whole new front to keep Chinese troops away from the Korean peninsula. Keeping Mao, quote, honest, according to then Southeast Asia CIA chief Anthony Persephone, a.k.a. Tony Poe. You're a little, you know, sounding characteristically pro-Mao here. Oh, God. All right. That's going to take us down a dark path online. Yeah.

This includes, of course, KMT member Chiang Kai-shek, who orders his men to commandeer poppy fields in the region. And they do. And they get really rich from them. But the CIA also funds a KMT commander in Shan named Li Mi. And he's gearing up to storm Yunnan from an airstrip in the Burmese town of Mong Sat, which actually I spent like four days in that village when I was reporting the meth lab story, waiting for some gangsters to pave a route through the jungle.

Never happened. Thank God for alcohol. Burmese beer is pretty good, actually. So Li Min and his so-called lost army, they're getting megabucks from Uncle Sam. And he turns to Olive to ship the opium that will help the war effort against Mao. Says Nationalist General Duan Jiuwen at the time, quote, an army must have guns and to buy guns, you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium.

But Olive is a bit of a maverick, and on her first route smuggling for Lee-Me, a bunch of local Burmese cops along the way try and extort her. In response, she kidnaps them, and Chaingan marches them all the way to her compound. It's, quote, "'careless,' she later says."

But this route is nonetheless a breakthrough for the Golden Triangle. Olive is the first person to motorize the opium industry, and she ships up to 600 tons of products each year by car and motorbike. It was really easy, I feel like, to become an innovator in drug trafficking back then. Yeah. It's like, why don't we not use donkeys and use motorbikes? And that's like a brilliant innovation. It's like taking planes over the border from Mexico in the 70s, right? Yeah.

You don't have to be a genius, I feel like, to figure some of this stuff out. It's just like modern art, man. Just got to be the first. Don't have to be good. By now it's the late 50s, right? And Kun Sa's career is just taking off. He's born on February 17, 1934 to a Chinese father and Shan mother with the Chinese name Chang Chi Fu, a.k.a. Chu Fu.

Chang's father dies when the boy is just three, and his mother marries a local tax collector. So Chang is brought up by his grandfather in the hardscrabble Burmese village of Loy Moor, buried deep in the Shan Hills. But while his brothers get an education, Chang spends some time at a Buddhist monastery and gets some basic military training from the KMT before forming his own KMT-affiliated rebel battalion in his hometown as a 16-year-old kid kicking off a life of arms.

Wait, hold on now. He just like gathers his homies and he's like, okay, we're a battalion now. How does that work? Yeah, he is. Yeah, he does pretty much. And I think the KMT would just like funding loads of small time militias at the time, just trying to open up as many different fronts against the communists. But remember, remember the, the stories, there was a recent one about them too.

of the two little kids. I don't, they weren't Sean. They were somewhere in Burma. Uh, they might've been Karen and they, uh, they were like two twins that were like 12 years old that had their own militia. Oh, we're supposed to be some sort of like, uh, living gods. Yeah. All right. That sounds pretty cool. I'll go out there. Yeah. I gotta, I gotta look that up. That was a good story. Yeah. We should do that one. Um,

By the time Chang's 20, in 1954, Olive is well on her way to becoming one of the region's most feared opium kingpins. The Burmese army, the Tatmadaw, soon gets tired of Limi, this rogue KMT general causing mayhem on its Chinese border, and it drives him out of the country. They throw Olive in prison for five years too, but Olive's army is here to stay, and Olive's army is on its way. Lol.

When she gets out in 1959, her brother Edward steps down as the nominal leader of Kokang and other princes swerve the role too, so it's there for the taking. And as you can imagine, she snaps it up. She leverages her commanding position in the opium trade to furnish Kokang's coffers alongside casino and gold revenue. She also hires his former school friend Lackey to cook the books and he follows her around everywhere holding up a jar of cigarettes whenever she wants one.

I like the jar of cigarettes thing, but also who are they cooking the books for? I don't imagine there's really strict tax collectors operating over there. Who do they have to... I think she had legit businesses too, right? She was kind of involved in these casinos. I think she had some other businesses. So she's probably just trying to funnel shitloads of opium money through these legit things. So I guess that's where her little...

her little brown-nosing lackey guy comes in. But this is actually the point where Olive's story goes really Hollywood. At first, she chases a relationship with an actress and former Miss Burma called Louisa Craig Benson, who's half Jewish and half Karen. And the Karen are these Chinese, Tibetan ethnic group in southeastern Myanmar. They've been in perpetual war with the government. I actually once had a fling with the daughter of a Karen general, so go me.

Wait, what? Yeah, it was fun. She was really nice. But anyway, Benson could easily have had a movie made about her too, by the way. And she winds up living in California, I think in like Bakersfield. We could do a whole other episode about her too. But that love interest doesn't pull through for Olive. But she does have a pretty high profile affair with a Burmese actress called Wawa Winshay. And she woos Wawa with winsome gifts like tea, textiles, and apparently bacon.

Anyway, it seems to work because Wawa's name is on the deeds to a massive Yangon villa Olive once owned, despite Wawa getting married in the 70s and denying her and Olive were a thing, which is pretty sad. Also, I'm going to stop saying Wawa now.

And things aren't exactly going great for Koukang either during this time. In 1962, the Tatmadaw, led by a guy called Ne Win, seizes control of Burma in a bloodless coup. But it instigates a wave of communal and racial violence against ethnic Chinese, among others, and denies them the chance to be educated in their native language.

It's probably worth mentioning just how insane the junta, or junta, I don't know, leader Ne Win is. He throws Burma behind a disastrous socialist so-called bamboo curtain, cuts it off from the outside world, demolishes what there is left of industry. I'm going to quote here from my GQ piece that came out last year, because why not? Quote, Win, who believed his lucky number was nine, issued banknotes and denominations of 45 and 90.

when in 1970 a soothsayer told him he'd be killed from the right when all the cars had switched from the left side of the road to the right. He ruled Burma just as bizarrely, decreeing a so-called Burmese way to socialism that crippled the economy, making Burma one of the planet's poorest countries. Opium producers switched to heroin, which is far stronger, in the 1970s, led by warlords who bivouacked in the jungles of Shan and other semi-lawless states while the junta hermetized itself with Rangoon.

Rangoon is the colonial name for Yangon, by the way, the most important city of Myanmar. What's the switching to heroin bit? Like, were they already refining it? I thought they were already refining it. They were doing it. In the 60s. Yeah, they were doing it. But I think this is the wholesale kind of refining. So before it, opium had been the key player. But around that time, it really all switched over to heroin.

In 1963, Ney's hunter throws Olive behind bars again and locks her up in Yangon's insane prison, one of Southeast Asia's most notoriously grisly places. Olive's there for five years, during which time Luo Jinghan, the brown nose who followed her about with the smokes, he takes over Olive's opium roots and gets mega, mega rich. He winds up making a deal with the hunter to fight communists and sneaky rat, but he's going to get his comeuppance before long.

So Olu's reign as the king or queen of opium is coming to an end. Kunsa's, on the other hand, that's just beginning. Throughout the 50s, he grows his little band of merry men into a militia of a few hundred and goes freelance. Then he just switches sides, lining up alongside rebels, governments, whoever he thinks will give him the best chance to command the opium trade and build an empire.

In 1963, he forms his own militia called the Kar-Kwe-Yeh Army, which I like that name. I mean, it's in the town of Lashio, which I also really, really like. And he just makes a career fighting anybody the Burmese want him to. The Shan, the KMT, just so they let him carve out a fiefdom in the dense Shan hills.

It's at this time he changes his name from Chang, by the way, to Khun Sa, which means Prince of Prosperity in Burmese. Washington instead calls him the Prince of Death. Neat. Wait, he fought his own people and he took orders from the government? I guess I kind of knew his story from later years because I don't... It was always like he... I don't know. Yeah, the way he made himself was just by being like a massive turncoat. He was...

eager to do anything for power and he was genuinely a big fan of Machiavelli's writings including this following passage from his best known work The Prince quote severity should be dealt out all at once that by their suddenness they may give less offense benefits should be handed out drop by drop that they be relished more and hold that thought about Machiavelli because it's going to come up a lot in the second half of this show

In 1964, Khun Sa has got hundreds of troops. He's a freelance warlord with a little set up in the Shan village of Vinh Nguyen. And this is where his own vision comes in.

While his rivals are still getting puppies from farmers, and with the exception of Olive ferrying it out on the backs of pack animals, Kun Sa decides to domestify production. He builds giant factories, bringing in chemists from across the border, in Taiwan too, and he produces his own heroin. More potent, better margins, it's the best product in town.

And that is good timing, because the Vietnam War is raging a few hundred miles east, and an insane number of GIs are getting hooked on drugs as the war becomes more brutal, more hopeless, just terrible. Over 2.7 million Americans go to war against the Vietcom,

half try gear and about 20% of them become addicted to some form of drug. I mean, that's insane. And these guys just aren't buying it in situ. They're flooding back to American cities and they're fueling a heroin boom in the 60s and 70s that's really bad and makes a lot of gangsters very, very rich.

And by the way, they're also getting high off their own supply. Between 1966 and 69, the US armed forces used 225 million stimulant tablets, that's meth, to improve performance or steady nerves. One commanding officer is quoted as saying, if it would get them to give up the hard stuff, I would buy all the marijuana and hashish in a delta as a present.

And there's a brilliant 1970 documentary by John Pilger for British TV called The Quiet Mutiny, by the way. Decades before Pilger went all no chemical weapons bonkers. And it's just this amazing account of grunts losing it, refusing to fight, getting higher, telling generals to go screw themselves. It's on the reading list. I highly recommend people watch it.

Yeah, I don't. I don't think we can recommend anyone to watch anything John Pillager or read anything he's ever done. Yeah, I'm going to say stop reading anything that he's done after 1970. But when these GIs, they come home, nobody helps them. I saw one newsreel from New York says that of 36,000 addicted Vietnam vets that year, I'm not sure exactly which year that was, only 998 are getting methadone treatment. It's like, it's really sad stuff. It's pretty shameful.

In 1971, Nixon inaugurates the war on drugs, declaring addiction the country's biggest issue. But it doesn't really do a lot, as we all now know. And this is from a History.com report by Adam Janos, quote, From heroin to amphetamines to marijuana, drugs were so commonplace among the troops that, in 1970, liaison to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Egil Crow, told President Richard Nixon, You don't have a drug problem in Vietnam. You have a condition.

problems are things that we can get right on and solve. And then you get all these chinchilla coat wearing crooks like Frank Lucas earning hundreds of millions, if not billions of this stuff. It's nuts. Anyway, back to the jungle. In 1966, Kunsar cozies back up with the Tatmadaw and it deputizes him to fight against the Communist Party of Burma, which is trying to harvest its own poppy and get some of the trade.

But being the Machiavellian think he's always been, Kansai uses the alliance to beef up his forces. And when he hits 800 men, he tells the Tatmadaw to stick it and he strikes it out alone again. I mean, why is anyone cozying up to him at all? The trip with the mules I described at the top of the show is basically his godfather Michael in the Italian restaurant moment. And he's poised to take over more senior KMT drug lords. When the Laotians bomb him, he loses his gear and his whole world comes crashing down.

I kind of want to know more about that Laotian general. Yeah, he was on the payroll. He wasn't on the payroll, but he was working with the CIA. I didn't see a lot more about him, but apparently he died in 1978, so he wasn't around a huge amount longer. But he's kind of like a stand-in to show how the CIA was really pushing the drugs out there back in that day. They were really trying to use it as a way to shift all the different moving plates out there.

But two years later, the Burmese hunter captures Khun Sa and he spends the next four years behind bars in Mandalay. Here's your midpoint, Khun Sa sitting in a cramped, dirty prison cell plotting his comeback. Yeah, I mean, that's a cliche movie scene, but only because it's

Often true. Pretty true. Yeah. In 1970, by the way, for lovers of schadenfreude, Luo, who's that cigarette flunky who took over Olive's trade, he gets double-crossed by the Tatmadaw and spends 10 years behind bars. I mean, this is basically how modern Myanmar functions too. It's just a series of pacts and battles and truces and shady deals between many states and fiefdoms. It's absolute madness.

In 1973, Khun Sa's Shan acolytes have had enough. They kidnap two Soviet doctors in Tonji, another really beautiful city in the Shan Highlands, and they negotiate a swap for their main man. He then sets up shop across the border in Thailand, in a place called Ban Hintek, near Chiang Rai, and he sits pretty paying off the local Thai army generals to watch his back.

Soon, he forms a group called the Shan State Army, with high-minded rhetoric of an interdependent nation that's more sham than Shan, if you know what I mean. All right, nicely done there. Ah, wow. I'm going to take that one home.

More importantly, Kunsal ramps up opium production. By the mid-1970s, the US government claims that 80% of opiates from Burma come from Kunsal's narco troops, around half the entire planet's supply. Crazy. It places a $2 million reward on his head, which goes unclaimed, which just goes to show just how much money he's dishing out.

And here's Peter Bourne, Jimmy Carter's drug policy chief in 1977-78. He's talking about efforts to reduce poppy cultivation in Burma. Quote, Kunsal was very committed to the independence movement. And I think some of that had to do with the stage of life that he had reached. He didn't want to go down in history as just somebody who was involved in drugs. And I think he saw an opportunity for himself, in effect, to be a national hero leading an independence movement.

But according to journalist Bernd Lindner, who I just found out actually Bernd Lindner had a hit taken out by Kun Sa back in the day. Kun Sa was illiterate and merely the front for Chinese mafiosos who ran the show from Yunnan. Quote, he was basically a country bumpkin. He was a peasant and never the brains behind the organization. I mean, I'm not sure the truth. I know, like maybe he wants to get his own back, Bernd.

I'm not really sure the truth lies fully in either of these descriptions. Like, Kansar's revolutionary spirit was clearly a front for his business, like not the other way around. And he was no idiot. I mean, anybody who builds an empire almost from scratch, they might be an asshole, but stupid they most definitely are not.

Alfred McCoy, who wrote The Politics of Heroin, who I'd love to get on this show, he describes Kun Sa as, quote, the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium and said he was, quote, the first of the Golden Triangle warlords to be worthy of his media crown as Kingpin. That's quite an endorsement right there. Yeah. What does Kingpin mean? I remember you telling me about this before.

Well, no, now there's an official designation of a foreign narcotics campaign that's like part of the law. It's like it's an act. They did it to, I mean, a lot of the narcos in Mexico and then Caesar, the abuser who we talked about in the Dominican episode. And yeah, it's like a legal designation as a kingpin. And I think it allows for various prosecutions to be made and things like that. Okay, interesting.

So yeah, Khun Sa, pretty big guy by now. And in 1975, communists win massive victories, as we know, in Vietnam and Laos. And Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge psychopaths are implemented in year zero in Cambodia. I mean, this is very bad news for humanity, but good news for Khun Sa. Because the nationalist KMT's control of smuggling routes in the region is heavily disrupted.

In the 1976 to 77 crop year, the Shan State's Army 3,500 strong militia, they haul 70 tons of raw opium across the Thai border, which is the so-called front door to the rest of the world for heroin. And he does it in 12 caravans with an average 116 mules and 335 guards each time. And that's huge. And it's getting even more huge.

Wait, so is he living in Thailand then and growing in Burma or going back and forth? Yeah, he's living in Thailand and growing in Burma. Although, yeah, that switches over the years. This is a passage from a report of the diplomat. Quote, Kunsa's outlets through Thailand suddenly assumed unparalleled importance. At its peak in the early 1980s, the SUA had 20,000 men under arms and claimed to control around 8 million people.

But Kunsar's pose as a liberation fighter was a sham. His objective was to win control of the drug trade emanating from the Golden Triangle. And in 1980 to 81, there's a record 500-ton harvest, half of which actually goes to local addicts. That's an insane amount to go to local addicts too. Because you got to imagine that like it's, I mean, first of all, it's an insane amount of people being addicted to heroin and opium, but also like that's definitely got to cut into profit margins. Like I imagine that

Everything they sell that continues to go overseas, they're probably making a lot more money off that than they are off local addicts buying it for pennies on the dollar. Yeah, and as I'm about to get into, the markups were insane, but I guess there was just such a huge local market and almost no chance of getting anything caught or taken off you or anything. So yeah, tons of people addicted to heroin in that region back then.

I read a great Mother Jones article actually from 1982, and it puts together all the pieces of this mad industry that this is creating. For example, there were 50,000 heroin addicts in West Germany at that point, 300,000 in Malaysia, 50,000 in Hong Kong, which is insane given the place barely has 5 million people back then, and 400,000 in the US. And tons of this stuff heads straight through Thailand. That's where Kansai has his handshake deals with the bigwigs.

But loads also goes through the Himalayan trails of northern Nepal, ferried by a Tibetan tribe called the Menangis. And actually, I'm heading off to Nepal in like a month or so, and I'm going to head to that region, speak to the Menangis all about this, which I'm really looking forward to. It's going to be a great bonus show. Guys, Patreon, yeah, you know,

Anyway, these guys get stuff through airports like Dum Dum in Kolkata, New Delhi, and there are even fleets of US Air Force guys landing at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport with sacks of Iranian, quote, tan they pick up in Turkey. I mean, this is a truly global game. And the markups? Insane. 1.6 kilos of so-called joy sold from a poppy farmer to a refiner in the Golden Triangle? That makes the farmer 250 bucks.

You get a third of a pound of heroin from these poppies, and that's worth 600 bucks before anything else happens. In Hong Kong, that's worth 15 grand, 35 grand to a wholesaler in NYC, and it can make up to 640 grand on the streets. And I know it's more complicated than this because there's loads more steps in the way, but it's fun to point out this is a 256,000% markup. I mean, not even my own hex is doing that well.

Yeah, that's like having it moon with every kilo, you know? Yeah. So isn't Hexis crashing right now? Hexis crashing. I was about to say that. I was really pissed off this morning. No wonder you're stressed out. I know, right? In March 1984, a truck bomb explodes at the KMT HQ in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and it devastates what's left of the KMT's heroin industry. And it basically hands complete control of the Golden Triangle straight to Khun Saar.

Between 1981 and 1989, Burmese opium production goes from 500 tonnes to 2,430 tonnes.

And it switches to the high-grade China white smack you mentioned in our last episode on Chinatown, New York, and it's hooking even more unfortunate Americans. Kun Sa actually crowns a new group, the Mong Thai Army, in 1985. Very Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing, lots of these rebel groups are. And he sets up in Ho Mong, near Mai Hong Sun in Thailand. God, I got those names right, I can't believe it.

He gets cocky as hell around this time too. Definitely a blueprint for Escobar. He invites celebrities, like you said at the top of the show, like even US congressmen to his compound. He tells them he can help them reduce heroin production in the region if they'll just get behind his freedom fight, which is God-level trolling. I spoke to Canadian journalist Tricia Elliott this week actually about interviewing Kansai in 1990, which...

It sounded like a crazy trip, right? She's working at the Bangkok Post, just about to ship out of town when she gets the call. She can't believe it, and she heads to Mai Hong Son before being taken on days of boats, motorcycles, and cars to his compound, which she describes as pretty much the most functional town in the country. City streets, shops, new buildings, pretty amazing. After a couple of days, Tricia meets the big man, and he's giving her a bunch of propaganda saying he's not involved in the drug trade.

But she said he looked, quote, straight out of Central Casting Warlord. Khaki shirt, AVA sunglasses, and he's drinking tea and chain-smoking fancy Chinese cigarettes the whole time. Pretty amazing. Actually, Trisha's worried at that point she's going to get used as collateral and be kidnapped because that's allegedly what's going on at the time. But after the interview, she's sent back across the border to tell the tale. And if anyone wants to send me or Danny on trips like this, yeah, patreon.com slash theunderworldpodcast.

I think it's pretty hard to have these sort of adventures nowadays. It was a lot easier back then when everyone didn't have access to making their own warlord TikTok dances or whatever it is. I mean, maybe we could get some money doing that. I don't know. And thanks to Ron Felber, who's booked The Hunt for Kunsa, is a great link between him and the New York heroin trade you got into last week. He gives something of a structure to Kunsa's operation within the U.S.,

There's him and his military and finance guys at the top as this like triumvirate. And then refineries in Laos, northern Thailand. This often heads overland through Southeast Asia, then boat to Hong Kong, where local tribes ship it over the states with Lin Chin Kong, aka Mr. Lin, who's Khun Sa's head of sales. Lin then passes the gear on to two Chinatown factions, Johnny Eng and Paul Ma, who broker it to Asian street gangs, the Sicilian mob, and the guys living in Spanish Harlem.

Yeah, we got into that a bit. I mean, Johnny Yang was infamous for what he was doing with the Flying Eagles. Flying Dragons, I'm sorry. Paul Ma, I don't remember hearing too much about him getting involved in that, but I'd have to look further. Yeah, it's in that book. I mean, it's a pretty nuts book. It goes all around the place, but I could do it in an editor, but it's really interesting. But it just shows like,

It's pretty tightly organized, this operation, like way more than when the kingpins like Lucas were commanding the trade a few years before. Anyway, on August 8th, 88, that's 8888, Stu

Student-led democracy protests against Lei Wen come to a bloody head, and the Tatmadaw tightens its vice-like grip on Burma, renaming it Myanmar. The Communist Party of Burma, which is in control of Shan State, splits into four different factions, and Olives called upon to make sure the Tatmadaw and what was then the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA,

Don't annihilate each other. Actually, if you read books about Myanmar, there's usually like a two or three page glossary of the so-called ethnic army groups. There's so many of them now. And Olive, yeah, I mean, why would you think that Miss Hairy Legs isn't going to be successful? I mean, who's going to defy her? And that means that everyone can take a break from killing each other and focus on their true favorite pastime, which, of course, is shipping huge quantities of heroin across the world.

Wait, so had she been in prison this whole time? Was she back war lording? Was she just kind of operating at like a smaller level? Yeah, she was pretty much just sitting in a backseat, like as a bit of a cocaine, like celebrity at this point. I think she pretty much bowed out of the drug trade after she went to prison that first time. So she's just like revered as a really just someone who gets stuff done. I mean, which she did.

And her actions, they spell good news for Khun Sa because he's the biggest player in the region. And like we said a ton of times on this show, violence is bad for business. By the mid 1990s, Khun Sa seems absolutely bulletproof. He's got the world's richest production of illegal drugs. He's got Thailand's leaders in his pocket. Washington is getting royally pissed off by this point.

So it launches something called Operation Tiger Trap, named apparently for Kunsa's love of tiger penises as aphrodisiacs. I mean, I think you grind them up or something, you don't use them as sex toys.

I think everyone knew that, but thanks for painting a picture. I'm just trying to be vivid, man. People like it. This is Donald Ferrarone, the DEA Bangkok chief from 93 to 95, in an interview with Frontline. Quote, Kun Sa was doubling his capacity, his ability to produce heroin, every 10 years. The amounts that were coming out were staggering. The heroin purity on the streets in inner cities in the United States had more than quadrupled.

Some places were going from 6 and 10.5 purity that an addict received in a dosage unit on the street. Now we're looking at 60 to 80 to 90% pure heroin on the street. And the problem certainly over the last 20 years did not lessen. It went in the exact opposite direction. It was a disaster. And you could, by looking at Kunsa's capacity, understand that he was not having a cash flow problem.

Yeah, I don't think the heroin on the street was looking at like 60 or 80 or 90%, right? They cut it, I think, like back down to, I think the max I've seen was like 30%. I think Frank Lucas talked about how usually on the street it was 3%. He put it up to like 8 or 10%. But generally, you know, the heroin itself that was coming in was really pure, but it would be cut numerous times before they put it on the street. And then it was still three or four times stronger than

than the stuff that was normally out there. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty bonkers. I mean, this guy's DEA, so I guess he's got a vested interest in kind of bigging it up, but...

This guy goes on, quote, his heroine was always the best in the business. That's Kinsars, of course. I think you have to understand the structure of this guy's organization to get a sense of the power. He had, by the time I arrived back from my second time in Southeast Asia in 93 to 94, he had 20 to 25,000 men under arms. I mean, that is a sizable army. Tiger Trap can't really penetrate Kinsars operations directly.

So it tries to strangle the Hmong Thai army's supply chains. Yeah, see, supply chain problems, man. It's not a new thing. We're staying topical. Always. Here's Ferraroni again. Quote, we needed to open up a lot of avenues and we needed to get a lot more help. And that included that we need to shut down the resupply that was going on on the border between Thailand and Burma.

So the DEA gets witnesses to testify against Khun Sa, and it raids every arm of its distribution network, especially stuff in Thailand, which, like I said before, is the front door of the heroin trade. Then adds Ferroni, quote, We asked the Thais to restrict the flow of precursor chemicals, weapons, cement, steel, gasoline, and trucks. The Thais took it a step further. They actually cut off food supply that was coming out of Thailand.

So Tiger Trap cuts off Kun Saar's money, it closes the door on massive shipments, guns, even food. Kun Saar is unable to pay his men and they just kind of abandon him. I'm hoping to get one of the agents who worked on the operation to come on the show in a couple of weeks actually. So stay tuned there guys. And you'd think this is the end of Kun Saar, that he dies in a hail of bullets and bloodshed or alone in some American prison after being picked up by DEA SWAT teams. Well,

Well, that does not happen. In 1994, local rebels break down Kunzars' defences and the Burmese government works on heroin shipments with its allies. That's the Burmese government getting involved in dope, guys. Cornered and out of product,

kunsa turns to his sense for the occasion in january 1996 he and his 1700 men stage a dramatic surrender to the tatmadaw in front of tv cameras for the country's national channel he promises that quote we will work together to eradicate the opium and narcotics drugs which endanger the entire humanity of our country so more trolling by our man kunsa there

Yang Gon reacts by granting the old man immunity from prosecution, and he lives out his days in a Yang Gon villa with his eight children, two wives, and four teenage Shan mistresses, just yards away, by the way, from the place that's keeping Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.

And this coincides with a time in which the WHA, an ethnic group on the Chinese border, are pumping out millions of so-called Yaba or crazy meth pills. And Afghanistan is overtaking poppy production and Golden Triangle heroin is no longer the biggest production market on the planet. And we will for sure do an episode on the WHA because those guys are mental.

Yeah, the war rule. Ah, the war, crazy. Anyway, on October 25th, 2007, Kun Sa dies peacefully at home, age 73. And that is how the story ends if you basically play your cards right and don't Instagram your crimes, folks.

But I don't want to end this episode with Kun Sa. I want to come back to Olive. She dies in July 2017 at the ripe old age of 90 in the city of Musée, Myanmar, which is just outside Koh Kang. She seems to have been an incredibly popular figure there, despite the fact she was clearly trans or genderqueer in a time before those things are widely recognized, which is kind of heartbreaking.

But there's a touching twist to the story, courtesy of Gabrielle Pollock's reporting. I'll let her take it from here. Quote, Olive's lifelong struggle with an inability to conform to Burmese society's female gender norms earned her the moniker Hairy Legs and led journalists to erroneously describe her as bisexual. Later in life, however, she asked to be called Uncle Olive. Her brother Francis, who pre-deceased her by a few months, said he still felt regret when he thought of how frequently he scolded his sister for not being normal.

We would ask her why she didn't wear women's clothes or why she had to have a short haircut. We'd shout at her for chasing women, he said. Back then, we didn't know about lesbians and transsexuals. I told her when I went to visit her two years ago that I was sorry, Francis said in an interview in his home in London in 2015. I told her, I will call you uncle from now on.

Wow. It's a good thing we didn't have to get Dave Chappelle for this episode. Definitely. Yeah. Although, you know, he's still free to free to come on. We welcome him. Right. Anyway, thank you guys again for, for tuning in. I just want to make sure we thank our, our bigger sponsors on Patreon. Yeah.

p thomas michael rich william wintercross trey nance matthew cutler chris cusimano ross clark jeremy rich doug prindaville and jared levy thanks guys so much without you guys uh you know we'd be far less motivated yeah yeah yeah thanks that's a massive massive help to us guys and um yeah that's the end of this week's show we've got a really really cool one coming up you're doing a show on israel right yeah yeah we'll talk about it uh next week all right