The Rise and Fall of Golden Triangle Dope: From a Jailed Kingpin to a Casino Shootout
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It's 1973 in the hinterlands of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle. Lo Sing Han, the so-called godfather of heroin, is marshalling a convoy of mules through Burma's Shan State from his home in the mountainous kingdom of Koh Kang towards the Thai border.

Their cargo is five tons of morphine, the dark brown resin produced by drying the latex of opium poppies and which, after some chemical wizardry, will become heroin. That is, in the wake of America's failing war in Vietnam, fueling a global addiction epidemic the likes of which the world has never seen. Five tons of morphine, Lowe claims, is enough to keep feeding the hives of every dope fiend in America for six months. It's a huge amount.

Which makes sense given that Lo, once the deputy of feared opium queen Olive Yang, is thought to command half of all the heroin traffic on Earth.

Only, Loazier marked this particular five tons for a wildly ambitious deal. One he hopes will end decades-long chaos and bloodshed between Burma's communists and democrats, rebel armies and Maoists, each one shifting allegiances more often than baseball players and keeping their country locked in a vicious cycle of poverty and warfare.

Lowe himself has done so recently, turning away from the Burmese state and his paranoid socialist leader, Ne Win. In Rangoon, the Burmese capital, Lowe is public enemy number one. According to Lowe, his greatest opportunity isn't in Rangoon at all, but in Washington, D.C. It's two years, of course, since President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, and just a month since the U.S. launched its Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, with a mission to rid the world of narcotics.

If America is so desperate to end the heroin trade, Lowe thinks, why don't they buy it, my morphing? At $12 million, the price Lowe offers is, well, low. A drop in the ocean for Uncle Sam had a chance to stem the flow of a drug that's crippling its cities. How could they refuse? But a narco kingpin, however lofty his goals, can't just stroll into a U.S. embassy and broker a drug deal.

Instead, Lowe dispatches a British filmmaker named Adrian Cowell, who's been tailing him for a year, to Bangkok, where he'd deliver the proposal in person to staff at the Thai capital's American station. It's a solid plan. However gung-ho the Americans are, they're unlikely to arrest a British journalist. But there's another reason for Cowell's Bangkok visit. Lowe's not just making the offer out of the blue. Like all good gamblers, and he definitely is one of them,

He spent months stacking the cards in his favor, conducting shadowy talks with Thai military officials and their U.S. allies. He knows the Americans want the deal, but he also knows that if they keep the deal secret, they could bilk him out of the cash, cut and run, or worse, use it as a ruse to shop him into his enemies, not least to the Burmese regime, who'd love little more than to parade about a drug lord and shan separatists in shackles.

Cowell then is Lowe's insurance. If the Thai or the Americans try to screw him, there's no chance they can keep the heroin deal out of the public eye. Cowell crosses the Thai border to begin his journey south. Just a few hours later, Lowe steps over the border himself, accompanied by a hundred of his men. There they meet a dozen Thai cops who've arrived by helicopter and offer to fly Lowe to the nearby city of Chiang Mai to conclude talks with the morphine.

It was naive, Cowell would later say, in a documentary he made of the affair. Lo Sing Han is quite obviously a gambler, not only when he made his bid to become the biggest man in the opium trade, but when he switched sides. That was an enormous gamble. And this, Cowell adds, was another.

But Lowe isn't quite the card counter he thought he was. And what's about to go down on that chopper will change not only the fortunes of him and his co-kang narco army, but the entire face of the global war on drugs. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Hello and welcome to the Weekly Organised Crime Podcast where two seasoned and embittered reporters explain the world so you can sound clever down the pub because the media knows more than you and that is just a cold hard fact.

I am Sean Williams in New Zealand. I'm fit and healthy and loved. I'm fit and healthy and loved. Sorry, what was I doing there? And I'm joined today by Danny Gold in New York City, who goes out clubbing while I lay on the sofa watching University Challenge, recovering from my son's first birthday party. Yeah, I don't think that's 100% accurate, but, you know, go with it. Maybe 90%, 95%, I don't know. Anyway, housekeeping first, guys. Make sure you like and subscribe on all the socials. That really gives us a boost.

And like we mentioned last week, we have this thing going with the good folks at Aura, firm right in the show's wheelhouse, protecting users from fraud, identity theft, and a bunch of other crimes Danny's done in his past. If you go to aura.com forward slash underworld, that's A-U-R-A dot com slash underworld, you'll be not only doing us a massive favor, but you'll also get a two-week trial. So, yeah, do that or I'll come and hurt you.

I think for legal reasons, I need to point out that Sean is actually not capable of hurting you or anyone else. He's an English gentleman and is merely speaking metaphorically. He'll hurt you maybe karmically. I don't know. But yeah, definitely, definitely go to Aura, A-U-R-A dot com. You know, Robert Downey Jr. is a spokesperson. Iron Man wouldn't lie to you. And Slash Underworld, sign up for that free trial.

Yeah, I like that you've argued that case on the basis of memes and not intent. Moving swiftly on, yes, it is time for part two of...

of this kokang cowboys double bill which i just found out is called a duology which i didn't know before but in case you missed part one definitely stop this go back a few weeks and play that one because it's going to make a lot of today's stuff make a lot more sense but basically last time out we ran through the mad life and crimes of olive yang kokang's opium queen it wasn't really a queen at all gay trans it was the 40s it's all relative and

and her transformation from errant princess to gun-toting opium warlord, aided all the way by a slight-framed lackey named Lo Sing Han.

And then we left the tale in the mid-50s. China in turmoil, war erupting in Vietnam. Nuts. Burma too is in chaos. Something it will get used to throughout the 20th century and beyond. Independence from Britain in 1948, civil wars right after. And by the mid-1950s, the country's been fought for by various ethnic groups with a podgy socialist army general named Nay Win maneuvering himself into the big position of power.

Weird little dude, superstitious, power mad, very bad news for his country. But Burma's loss is Olive's gain, of course. And by the time we left her story in the last show, she'd been commanding more and more of the dope trade down from Koh Kang, this little spit of land in northeastern Burma on the Chinese border, down into the Golden Triangle, Thailand and out across the world.

And that, don't forget, has come with considerable help from the United States of America. Remember, the U.S. is keen to prop up Chinese nationalist camp town in Burma, whose only source of cash to fight Mao Zedong is the opium trade. So they've been boosting it.

not least by CIA front company C-Supply, based down in Bangkok, Thailand, and that's shipping drugs in one direction and sending back guns in the other. And the chief of C-Supply is a mysterious Taiwanese intelligence agent named Mr. Ho. He's one of the global drug trade's most important men. And soon after we left the story, he's brought down in a scandal. The police chief who protects him is ousted, and the

And the CIA dismantles C Supply altogether. Langley pops back up in the region with a host of other front companies, and it renames its airline Air America, which is a whole other story. And when we get into a few months back, so check that out. So how would you summarize? Quick, well, to be quickly like what is going on right now in the in the Olive Young story?

So she's on top, basically. She has motorized all of these caravans and opium caravans that are going through the hinterlands. And she's become the top dog in the dope trade. And she's bringing it down from Koh Kang and into Bangkok with the help of this CIA front company. But...

The CIA front company has been dismantled. There's a bunch of politics behind that. And the guy who runs it, Mr. Ho, he's been brought down too. So kind of the whole edifice is being brought down around Oliver's business. For a while, none of it really cuts into her profits, right? In fact,

As Mao's cultural revolution continues into the late 50s, it actually kind of helps her. Chinese anti-communists are being forced over the Yunnan border into Burma in greater and greater numbers. They get in exile, basically. And they've got no way of making a living other than to join Olive's boys, the Koukang Defense Force.

The numbers swell, as does the amount of dope olives getting out of the Golden Triangle to feed addiction epidemics in Europe and the US. So things are looking up for her. And now it's 1958, and a crucial year for Koh Kang and its ruling Yang Dynasty.

Remember back in 1949 in the last show? So listen to that because it's not going to make much sense. Just after Burmese independence, the Yangs agreed to a 10-year deadline before their hereditary titles were taken away. I actually, I did not remember that. So, but I don't remember much, but I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, definitely go listen to last week's episode. I don't know why. I mean, I thought it was, or not two weeks ago was episode. I thought it was fantastic, but like people don't seem to listen to these insane, you know, global,

vast criminal cartel stories as much as they want to listen to like the same american mafiosos over and over and over so i don't know tell us like if that's what you guys want let us know i i happen to find this stuff more interesting but i also love you know skinny joey merlino too but we're just uh we're trying to figure out we have no principles in this we just want as many people listen as possible is what we're trying to say any principles at all yeah i mean this is like stuff that makes the world go around right these these are the big cartels i mean this is the

birth of the dotre but yeah go back to that show listen to that and the Kocang ruling Yang dynasty well they're on the way out and the date for their abdication is fast approaching and despite the best efforts of Olive's dashing elder brother Edward who's camped out the UN in New York sort of having cocktails and trying to chat people up about independence Kocang hasn't become an independent nation I

I am to be the eighth and last Yang chieftain, he says in a speech. Our courts, our police, our taxes, they will all come under Burmese command. Our children will no longer read Chinese in schools. Our opium fields will be criminalized. Boo hoo. As it has always been. While Edward's making speeches, Olive's doing something else. She is taking action.

Enraged by the abdication, she goes all out against Burma's socialists. She buys up all the tobacco and liquor licenses in the region and she reopens gambling dens so as to fatten Koukang's coffers to rise up against Ne Win and his leftist grifters in Rangoon.

He, in turn, allows Mao's People's Liberation Army to conduct raids inside Burma and orders his men to burn down the home of Olive's most beloved enforcer, Fat Huang, with his wife, sister, and daughter still inside. Not cool. Yeah, cool nickname, though, Fat Huang. But also, I'm actually surprised. I mean, maybe it's just me being a little...

I don't know, not giving them credit, but that there were actually tobacco and liquor licenses in these sort of rough areas that are... I mean, I'm assuming... What are we talking about? Like the late 50s, early 60s here that are definitely not super developed in like Burma's borderlands, which are still not developed, but that there was already a process, like a government bureaucracy for selling tobacco and liquor. Though I guess the taxes are probably a big part of that. Yeah, I was thinking that as well. And I'm guessing it's sort of like...

more that she was running everyone else out of town. That is because I'm a massive racist, of course. I was assuming that she was just running local competition out of town, which sounds a lot more gangstery and a lot more her, but...

Yeah, I don't know. Than buying up licenses, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's not really that legit, any of this, in case you hadn't noticed. In 1962, Neywin snatches control of Burma altogether in a coup, and he launches it on a mad political path. I'm going to be a complete dickhead now and quote from my 2019 GQ Meth Lab feature here. Do it. Do it. You earned it. I know, I know. I get a paragraph out of it.

nay win who can one control of his country in a 1962 bloodless coup for a socialist bamboo curtain around burma isolating it from the world win who believed his lucky number was nine issued bank notes in denominations of 45 and 90 when in 1970 a soothsayer told him he killed from the right win ordered cars to switch from the left side of the road to the right

He ruled Burma just as bizarrely, decreeing a, quote, Burmese way to socialism that crippled the economy, making Burma one of the planet's poorest countries. Is he the one who moved the capital to the middle of nowhere based on like a dream or like an astrologer or something? Was that also him? Yep, that's him. He set up Naypador, right, which is the weird sort of ghost city in the middle. I actually drove around it when I was there because we got stuck and had to drive 10 hours down the country. And it is like...

so so weird it's like the 10 12 lane highways no cars proper north korea stuff um wouldn't recommend a trip there but uh very interesting nonetheless

Anyway, nay, nay win, he seizes businesses all over Rangoon, as all good socialist leaders do, bankrupting many of his rivals overnight. But Koh Kang, over 500 miles north, may as well be a different planet, right? And actually, the coup does Olive's Dote trade a ton of good. Again, it wipes out competition and increases the need for black marketeers through chronic shortages of anything from food to gas.

She's also managed to keep her opium trading license, though of course by this point she's making high-grade heroin in far greater quantities than she's ever been allowed in the first place anyway, so it's kind of not really worth the paper it's written on. And so in 1963, just months after Naywin's coup, cops arrest Olive and they send her down to Rangoon's notorious insane prison.

This is nothing like her short happy stint behind bars in Mandalay when she basically ran the joint and got it on with a bunch of jailbirds with the help of her so-called special belt. That's the last episode again. A prison guard at Insane forces Olyssa Strip to prove whether she's a man or a woman. Then he assaults her in front of other inmates while telling them, quote, this is what a real man does. Pretty grim.

Olive will spend six years at Insane, all but handing over control of her drug empire to her understudy Lo Sing Han, the Don Draper guy who came up with their Gears 999 branding. If

If you want to know more about how that stuff made its way out of the Golden Triangle with the help of rebel leaders and corrupt American GIs, check out our show from way back on Ike Atkinson, Sergeant Smack. And we should definitely do a big show on the French Connection too, the Corsican mob that dominated dope back then. Although maybe we should just do another, I don't know, 10 episodes on John Gotti, but...

Yeah, let us know. Anyway, Lotho, he takes over Olive's operation. And in theory, he's given the green light to ship opium along designated roads in Shan State, the region that Kocang is a part of, which Burma hopes will make his empire self-sufficient, relying less on the security of rebel groups who are fighting the Rangoon regime. I just should take a note here. Like, this is so complex. I mean, Burmese politics is mental.

What's happening here is that Ne Win has imprisoned Olive, but he has let her understudy Lo Sing Han still run opium caravans through the Golden Trial as long as he stays on the government roads and keeps away from the rebels. So it's always, always trying to play one group off against another like 15. And it really hasn't changed even today. So.

This being Burma, there are literally dozens of these ethnic guerrilla forces dotted all over the country. Hasn't changed today. Khun Sa, who would become the biggest narco on earth, he's another one who benefits from this Faustian pact with Newin's paranoid kakistocracy, and he founds his Shan state army in 1964. So these pacts, these deals, they're a complete disaster.

Nightmare, they're a disaster for Rangoon. The state might own the highways, but the rebels own everything around them. And rather than mugging off the rebels to work with Rangoon, Lowe and Kunsa's opium caravans make deals with everyone, multiplying their routes through the jungles, making stacks more cash, and paying tribute not only to the regime in Rangoon, but those fighting them. And actually, they're far more plugged into the struggles of these ethnic groups. I mean, they are one.

So if anything, by boosting the drug empires, Ne Win is kind of signing a future death warrant for his regime. But anyway, it's 1971 now, a key moment for this story. Firstly, 1971 is the year Koh Kang is lost as a nation forever.

Burma swallows it up and Edward Yang or his brother, the quote, Kou Kang Gregory Peck, who spent his life ginning up support for a doomed independent Kou Kang, he dies, ending the Yang dynasty in the region.

1971 is also the year US President Richard Nixon inaugurates his war on drugs. His policy chief, Harry Anslinger, blames Chinese triads for the global dope crisis and identifies 21 opium refineries across the Golden Triangle that are fueling the addictions of US troops in Vietnam. And they point the finger ultimately at Koh Kang and Lo Sing Han, who they call the King of Opium.

In 1972 Rangoon attempts to disband Loh's Kocang Empire altogether but he's too powerful and ditches the Burmese altogether to pair up with Khun Sa's Shan State Army. Whoopsie. Now there's a mega cartel working out of Shan State. Loh alone has 3,000 men at his command and altogether surprisingly this puts a massive target on his back not only in Rangoon but in Washington DC.

It's crazy for how powerful the Burmese regime has been for decades, like how totalitarian it is to how much support it's gotten from like China and later Russia, maybe even back then, like the Soviet Union. But it's never really been able to stamp out like these ethnic militias in the borderlands that that are I mean, there's tons of them, you know, and they just don't get they're just they've been existing forever. And I usually think of the Burmese state as like quite powerful. Obviously, not right now. Now they're getting more.

They're getting, you know, they're shit rocked. But it's for decades, it was super powerful and they still couldn't stand them out. It just kind of shows you how wild the borderlands there are.

Yeah, and it's kind of like a six and a half, a dozen, right? Because back then in the 50s and early 60s, I think they were trying to stamp out these rebels. But now with the drug industry being so entrenched, I mean, so many of the, like the Tatmadaw, the name for the military there, like so many of them are on the payroll of these cartels or helping them or getting money from them. So it's kind of like...

They're just happy to keep the sort of chaos going in these hinterlands now and sort of consolidate their power. I mean, they literally live in this city, Napador, that's just like a fortress in the middle of nowhere. I mean, they barely have any sort of interaction with the outside world, some of these generals. So they're just leeching money off the drug trades. It's kind of...

I don't know. I mean, I don't think they care about stamping any of these groups out. But anyway, back to low. I reckon, I reckon, massive if true, if you're the head of a global massive narco empire and the president of the United States of America singles you individually out as one of the biggest problems in the world in the middle of a failing war just a few hundred miles away in Vietnam,

It probably means you should avoid reaching out to Americans to say, I don't know, sell them five tons of morphine or else you'll carry on getting all their citizens hooked on smack. It's a nice little threat at the end. But what do I know? I spent my life chasing the Korean journalism despite every single shred of evidence telling me it leave me broke, dejected with nothing to show for my life. So, yeah. But what do winners like Lo and us do, Danny? We just pick up the microphone. We keep on creating good content. So, yeah.

By the time it's 1973 and we get to the mad tale in the cold open of this show, when Lowe steps onto that Thai police helicopter, he genuinely believes he's about to make the deal of his life, even though there's basically a death sentence hanging over his head. And when the Thai cops double cross and arrest him and extradite him down to Rangoon, what does Ne Win's Burmese government do? Yeah, they sentence him to death.

There's gambling and there's the 10 match accumulators my dad does on the weekends. This is hopeless. Yeah, I mean, are accumulators the same thing as a parlay? And also, like, who betrayed him? The Thais or the Americans or both? Or did we find that out?

Yeah, we don't really know. It's hard to say. I actually don't. I think a parlay is the same as an accumulator, right? You just bet on like the outcomes of about 10 different matches and see if it comes off right. That's pretty much what it is. I mean, you almost never win them, but you get really excited and then like, I don't know, Aston Villa scores five in the last minute. Yeah, they're horrible. The best.

Anyway, in a bid to save his ass, Lowe sings like a canary to his Burmese captors. According to Gabriel Palook's Opium Queen, quote, singing like a canary, describing an 800 mule caravan with 9,000 kilos of raw opium he traded to buy refining chemicals, uniforms, weapons to fight communists and the Yangs. Lowe ratted on everybody.

He bribed customs and police officers, military intelligence, even ministers. He described the payoffs and how they happened. He described all the opium he sold from the fields Olive's family once controlled to Jimmy Yang, her brother. He said Jimmy's cousin was the one refining it into heroin. Number four, pure China white. Ouch. Burma's kingpin has turned king rat. But is there another version of this story?

Well, yes, that is a bad narrative conceit. I just did to tee up the fact that, of course, Adrian Cowell, the British filmmaker who goes down to Bangkok, he might be certain that Lowe's offer was legit and that

and that he was only double-crossed by the Thai and Burmese authorities, and maybe even the Americans. But others suspect that Lowe knew the vice was tightening on his narco caravans anyway, and it was better to turn himself in and make a public offer to the Americans for insurance than to risk getting bombed or shot to death by US or Burmese troops on one of his opium caravans.

And these things are not small. Lowe tells one reporter that, quote, it stretched out for three miles. And if it went smoothly, it took about 26 days.

And that is about my 10K pace these days, which is slow, Danny. Very, very slow. Although many thanks to my center-off last weekend who told me he loved how I put my head down and sprinted after 25-year-olds like a puppy, which does sound like a put-down now I think of it, of a sad old man. But yeah, I'll take it. Yeah, I love the episodes where it's basically like every six minutes or so, you're just kind of revealing that you're basically having a breakdown. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I was telling you before we recorded this how I sent a wild WhatsApp message to you and Dale about how we were going to... I think I was sending you a message about how we're going to make documentaries and films of the podcast. And then I realized that I'd basically been trying to put a baby to sleep for two hours and was going fully insane. So...

deleted the whole thing but yeah i am having a breakdown and if you join up to the patreon you can actually listen to me have more parts of my breakdown in greater detail so there's a reason to give us a couple bucks a month anyway a burmese court sentenced low to death

but it soon commuted to life in prison. And just eight years later, in 1980, Lowe is released under a general amnesty. That is some Scandinavian sentencing shit right there. Now, of course, while he's inside, just as he'd done with Olive Young, Lowe basically concedes the Golden Triangle's opium trade to Kun Sa, who then becomes the world's biggest drug trafficker with his own army and kingdom. Utter insanity. Check out our previous show on him for way, way more. Besides that,

But a lot else happens during Loh's imprisonment. America is out of Vietnam and Burma is slowly transitioning from a dictatorship to, well, not democracy, just a kind of more bureaucratic form of dictatorship.

And cheers to my mate Olly Slow who wrote the book Return of the Hunter. The military generals basically just took off their fatigues and threw on some suits. It's all in there. Ne Win continues on as the leader of socialist Burma until 1988 when thousands of people are killed in anti-regime riots. In 1989 the regime announces a period of martial law and arrests thousands of protesters, activists and human rights campaigners. It renames Burma Myanmar and

and Rangoon becomes Yangon, and the regime puts democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. And it's this year, 1989, as global communism is creaking and Burma, I'm going to continue calling it that, is descending into even more chaos than usual, that the lives of Lo Sing Han and Olive Yang take another decisive turn.

Olive is in her 60s by this point, slight but never without a cigarette in her hand and demanding to be called Uncle Olive. Lo is a little younger at 54 but no less the master negotiator and gangster. Burma's intelligence chief recruits Olive to negotiate peace agreements between the regime and rebel groups that still love her, while Lo takes a similar role with a twist.

Chiefly that while Olive is happy to retire and leave the opium world behind her, Lowe gets stuck right back into it, building a phoenix empire from the ashes. A huge loan from the Burmese state, which is still hung up on him somehow, ending internal conflicts by making billions off drugs. Well, that doesn't hurt.

Before long, Lowe's established new poppy roots and no fewer than 17 refineries across the region. In 1992, Lowe found Asia World, a conglomerate with fingers in almost every economic pie including ports, malls, supermarkets, tourism, energy and manufacturing.

That's crazy though. I think it's still like one of the biggest conglomerates in Burma, if not the biggest right now. Like they were getting a ton of money during that brief opening, the first half of the 2010s, if I remember correctly. They were like all over Washington. I just, yeah, kind of shocking. What a great rags to opium, to riches, to even more riches, legitimate story, sort of legitimate. Sort of legit, half legit. Yeah, I mean, some of the people who got rich off the back of Burma opening up was...

It's pretty crazy. I mean, proper billionaires being made off the backs of a country that's basically North Korea for decades. By the mid-1990s, Asia World is indeed Burma's biggest company, and it's run by Lowe's Singapore-based son with considerable backing from Burma's stratocracy, which is easy for me to say, but it's the official word for a military dictatorship, which you didn't know, did you? And nor did I. But now you do know, which is the whole point of this podcast, you lucky little buggers.

I'm actually learning a lot, you know? Yeah, cacistocracy, stratocracy, I'm not going to say that. God, these words are awful, aren't they? Of course, a gigantic firm working in Burma's ports means Asia World is able to slip seamlessly between legal and illegal markets. And in 2008, Lo and a host of family members are sanctioned by the US for involvement in the drug trade. Again.

writes the Observer newspaper Asia World is a quote up market front for one of the world's biggest heroin rackets. For what it's worth Lois never wavered on his insistence that Asia World and his other businesses are above board. Even his opium shipping in the 60s and 70s he has claimed was to aid poor farmers in Koh Kang and beyond. My whole life he says has been spent just helping the poor.

Just one more opium caravan, sir, please. Just one more. One more trading. Lowe dies in 2013, aged 80. Stellar career, kept himself fit, got into real estate, laundered his cash in Singapore, played every side against each other. Absolute textbook. He's survived by his wife and eight kids and is thought to be Burma's wealthiest person. Crime.

Yeah, for some people, you know, but that import-export and construction and real estate baby, that's where it's at. Everything else is a waste of time. Oh my God, yes. Yeah, he really did it right. Amazingly, Olive Yang, despite her hard-smoking, hard-drinking lifestyle, outlives Lo by four years, dying at her home in the Shan city of Musée in July 13, 2017.

Aged 90. Good innings. Her legacy in the region is massive, not least for establishing Kokang's opium roots, but by mechanising it too. She is believed to be the first narco to have used motorcycles rather than mules to hump opium through the Golden Triangle. I mean...

That sounds obvious? Anyway, but Olive is outlived by somebody who may be her greatest legacy of all, a guy whose illicit career she had helped promote as part of her peacemaker work with the government in the late 80s and 90s. This guy is another native of cocaine, another ruthless drug trafficker, and his empire is still giving the governments of China and Burma headaches today.

His name is Peng Jiaxing, the King of Kokang. I mean the King of Opium, the Queen of Opium, King of Kokang. Come on guys, get better names. Born in 1931, Peng trains with KMT troops in the 1950s and he battles the Burmese army on behalf of the Chinese nationalists. He flees to China soon after and switches sides, teaming up with Burma's Communist Party and pretty much working as a warlord while Olive and Lo are getting their breaks in the poppy biz.

Peng does his fair share of dope trading too, remember there was almost no other way to make money in Shan back then. He's not that huge though. But in 1989, again with that year, Peng breaks from the communists and founds his own rebel group, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or awkwardly named MNDDA.

Now we're what, like 40 minutes deep into this show and you're probably tired of names, so I'll make this quick. Peng, with Olive's help, sides with the Burmese hunter, Junta, I don't know, promising to fight off other rebel groups, but only if they'll let him carve out his own fiefdom in Koh Kang, retaining troops and running it like an independent state. So Edward Yang kind of did get his wish after all.

Only this is no national utopia. Rather, Peng's Koukang Kingdom is more like the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, the place I've been to, infamous for drugs and wildlife trafficking and sex and illegal gambling. Peng builds this mountain Sodom on the town of Lokang, right on the border with China.

As he gets more entrenched and makes more money from his casinos and resorts, he bans opium in Koh Kang to curry favour with the Chinese Communist Party, who've grown fed up with the drug crime coming across their western border. But killing Koh Kang's golden goose doesn't go down very well with Peng's neighbours in Shan, nor members of the Burmese army, the Tatmadaw, who've been skimming opium profits for decades.

In 2009, there is so much heat coming down that Peng skips Burma altogether and lives in exile in China.

In 2015, Burma pounces on his absence to attack Lokang, trying to reclaim the territory, but it fails and Kokang remains a drug and crime hotspot. Here's the Voice of America that year, 2015, quote, In Kokang, the issue over who profits from the opium trade remains a matter of dispute. Both

Both rebel groups and the government accused the other side of trafficking. Many ethnic villagers say they want out of the business, partly because of the ruinous impact of opium in their communities and partly because the drug gangs that control the trade made it much less profitable to grow. I feel like if you combine the six or so episodes that we've done, maybe more on like the Burmese borderlands and drug trade over the last, I don't know, three generations in Burma, Thailand's

you know, uh, Lao, that whole area, you have the basis for like a five season arc for, for Narco Southeast Asia. And, uh, that is the soundbite that I'm going to play in the pitch meetings for my pilot show. Anyway. Um, yeah, in 2015, Peng is partially ousted by four Chinese mafia families who've allegedly got backing from Burmese and Chinese authorities. Um,

They used Lokang and Kokang to grow lucrative but venal criminal empires. Here's the BBC quote. Initially developed to take advantage of Chinese demand for gambling, which is legal in China and many other neighboring countries, Lokang's casinos evolved into a lucrative front for money laundering, trafficking, and in particular for dozens of scam centers. And it goes on.

More than 100,000 foreign nationals, many of them Chinese, were estimated to have been lured to these scam centers, where they were effectively imprisoned and forced to work long hours running sophisticated online fraud operations, targeting victims all over the world.

The most notorious of these is a place called Crouching Tiger Villa, run by the Chinese Ming family. On February 16, 2022, aged 91, Peng dies and over 3,000 mourners show up at his funeral in the border town of Mong La, itself a criminal hotbed.

Yeah, that's the one that I've heard of the most or did back in the day when I was in that region, maybe 10 or 12 years ago. That was like the crazy casino lawless town that I had some friends that had gone there a couple of times. Yeah, that was always like the one that stood out. I think people end up doing a ton of stories on that, but it was a wild place from what I remember for what I remember. Yeah, and I won't be getting this wrong, so feel free to correct. But I think it's

I think that was one of Khun Sa's big places back in the day. I'm pretty sure it's still going today as well. Yeah, so this funeral is attended by pretty much anyone who's anyone in the region, right? Including ethnic rebel group leaders, triad bosses, and even pro-democracy groups from down in the capital city, Yangon.

Peng is a Peng guy, if you know what I mean, and are from London and are approximately 38 years old. Kou Kang's criminal gravy train weakens thereafter. The four Chinese families fight among themselves for control of Lou Kang. Illegal gambling and slave compounds, they just become more and more embarrassing for the CCP, and some fear the Chinese could even raid the city.

On October 2020-23, guards at the Crouching Tiger Villa, perhaps in anticipation of these raids, are transferring slaves to another building when around 50 to 100 of them escape. The guards open fire, killing several. Some even say undercover Chinese cops are among the dead.

This is the final straw for the Chinese authorities. They issue arrest warrants for four members of the Ming family and write angry letters to Shan political leaders. Writing angry letters will get you everywhere, as all of the people who email us know well. The following month, CCP cops enter Lokang, arresting two scions of the four families that run the city. Around the same time, the Burmese release photos of an autopsy being carried out on a 69-year-old man in the back of a van.

It's Ming Shui Chang, leader of the Mings and the Crouching Tiger Villa.

They say he took his own life, which is a bit rich. I mean, whatever the truth of Ming's death, one thing is clear. After over a century at the heart of the Golden Triangle's opium trade and the global heroin market, the home of Olive Yang and Lo Sing Han and Peng Jia Sheng, it only took a few years of unruly Chinese mafiosos to bring Ko Kang down for good.

And that, dear leaders, is how the tale of the cocaine cowboys ends. For now. Thanks for tuning in. We've got tons more great stuff coming up. Bonuses. Please do sign up to the Patreon if you can. It's a massive, massive help. And I'm off to Melbourne, Australia next week where I'm going to do some cool stuff for the show, in theory. Don't Instagram me crimes, but definitely do sign up for the free trial at Aura using our link, aura.com slash underworld. Peace. Yeah, definitely. We can't really say much more, but definitely do that because it really helps us out.

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