Sam Gor syndicate; virus update; 70 kg of fentanyl seized

8-17    India 62.5/616= 10% increase/day each of last 3 days  new cases/active cases  https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/

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Iran  2.3/23.7= 9.7% increase/day each of last 3 days https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran

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USA 50/2407 = 2.1% increase/day each of last 3 days  https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us

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Brazil 33/767= 4.3% increase/day ave. of each last 4 days  https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/brazil

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Mexico  6.4/103.4= 6.2% increase/day  ave. each of last 3 days    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/mexico

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10-14-2019    Four of the 19 Sam Gor syndicate leaders on the AFP list are Canadian citizens, including Tse, whom police often refer to as “T1” - the top target.  Others hail from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam and mainland China.

  The syndicate is enormously wealthy, disciplined and sophisticated - in many ways more sophisticated than any Latin American cartel, say anti-narcotics officials.  Sam Gor supplies a bigger, more dispersed drug market and collaborates with a more diverse range of local crime groups than the Latin cartels do, including Japan’s Yakuza, Australia's biker gangs and ethnic Chinese gangs across Southeast Asia.

  The crime network is also less prone to uncontrolled outbreaks of internecine violence than the Latin cartels, police say. The money is so big that long-standing, blood-soaked rivalries among Asian crime groups have been set aside in a united pursuit of gargantuan profits.

“The crime groups in Southeast Asia and the Far East operate with seamless efficiency,” says one veteran Western anti-drugs official. “They function like a global corporation.”

  Amid the bloody purges, forced labor camps and mass starvation, a group of imprisoned members of Mao’s Red Guard in the southern city of Guangzhou formed a triad-like criminal enterprise called the Big Circle Gang.  Tse later became a member of the group, say police, and like many of his Big Circle Gang brethren moved to Hong Kong, then further afield as they sought sanctuaries for their criminal activities.  He arrived in Canada in 1988.

corporate records show that Tse and his wife registered a business, the China Peace Investment Group Company Ltd, in Hong Kong in 2011.

  Police suspect Tse quickly returned to the drug game.  He “picked up where he left off,” said the senior AFP investigator.  Tse tapped connections in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and the Golden Triangle, and adopted a business model that proved irresistible to his customers, say law enforcers.  If one of his drug deliveries was intercepted by police, it was replaced at no extra cost, or deposits were returned to the buyers.

  His policy of guaranteeing his drug deliveries was good for business, but it also put him on the radar of police.  In 2011 AFP officers cracked a group in Melbourne importing heroin and meth.  The amounts were not huge - dozens of kilos. So, rather than arrest the Australian drug dealers, police put them under surveillance, tapping their phones and observing them closely for more than a year.  To the frustration of the Australian drug cell, their illicit product kept getting intercepted.  They wanted the seized drugs replaced by the syndicate.

  The syndicate bosses in Hong Kong were irate - their other drug rings in Australia were collecting their narcotics and selling them without incident.   In 2013 as the patience of the syndicate leaders wore thin, they summoned the leader of the Melbourne cell to Hong Kong for talks.  There Hong Kong police watched the Australian meet two men.

  One of the men was

Tse Chi Lop.  He had the center-parted hair and casual fashion sense of a typical middle-aged Chinese family man, said one AFP agent.  However, further surveillance showed Tse was a big spender with a keen regard for his personal security.  At home and abroad, he was protected by a guard of Thai kickboxers, said three AFP investigators.  Up to eight worked for him at a time, and they were regularly rotated as part of his security protocol.

  Two days after Cai’s arrest, Myanmar police raided a Yangon address, where they seized 622 kilograms of ketamine.  That evening, they captured 1.1 tonnes of crystal meth at a Yangon jetty.  The interception of the drugs was a coup.  Even so, Myanmar police were frustrated.  Nine people were arrested, but other than Cai they were lower-level members of the syndicate, including couriers and a driver. And Cai still wasn't talking.

  Then came a major breakthrough.  Swiping through the gallery of photos and videos on

Cai’s phones, an AFP investigator based in Yangon noticed a familiar face from an intelligence briefing he had attended on Asian drug traffickers about a year earlier.  “This one stuck out because it was Canadian,” he recalled.  “I said:  ‘Fuck, I know who you are!'”  It was Tse Chi Lop.

  The Myanmar police invited the AFP to send a team of intelligence analysts to Yangon in early 2017.  They went to work on Cai’s phones.

  Australia had been a profitable drug market for Asian crime gangs since the end of the Vietnam War.  For at least a decade, the AFP had fed all its historic files on drug cases, large and small, into a database.  A senior Chinese counter-narcotics agent described the database, which includes a trove of names, chemical signatures of seized drugs, phone metadata and surveillance intel, as the most impressive cache of intelligence on Asian drug trafficking groups in the region.

  The AFP analysts cross-referenced the contents of Cai’s phones with the database.  They discovered photos related to three big consignments of crystal meth that were intercepted in China, Japan and New Zealand in 2016, according to investigators and Myanmar police documents.  Later a team of Chinese anti-narcotics officials connected photos, telephone numbers and addresses in Cai’s phones to other meth busts in China.

  For regional counter-narcotics police the revelations upended their assumption that the drugs were being trafficked by different crime groups.  It became clear the shipments were the work of just one organization.

  The epicenter of meth production had shifted from China’s southern provinces to Shan State in Myanmar’s northeastern borderlands. Operating in China had provided the Sam Gor syndicate with easy access to precursor ingredients, such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, that were smuggled out of pharmaceutical, chemical and paint factories in the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone.  Shan gave Sam Gor the freedom to operate largely unimpeded by law enforcement….

  About six kilometers away, near Loikan village, was a sprawling drug facility carved out of thick forest.  Police and locals say the complex churned out vast quantities of crystal meth, heroin, ketamine and yaba tablets - a cheaper form of meth that is mixed with caffeine.  When it was raided in early 2018, security forces seized more than 200,000 liters of precursor chemicals, as well as 10,000 kg of caffeine and 73,550 kg of sodium hydroxide - all substances used in drug production.  The Loikan facility was “very likely” to have been the source of much of the Sam Gor syndicate’s meth, said the Yangon-based AFP officer….

  The UNODC estimates the Asia-Pacific retail market for meth is worth between $30.3 and $61.4 billion annually. …The wholesale price of a kilo of crystal meth produced in northeastern Myanmar is as little as $1,800, according to a UNODC report citing the China National Narcotics Control Commission.  Average retail prices for crystal meth, according to the UN agency, are equivalent to $70,500 per kilo in Thailand, $298,000 per kilo in Australia and $588,000 in Japan....

  The members include the three biggest Hong Kong and Macau triads, who spent much of the 1990s in open warfare:  14K, Wo Shing Wo and Sun Yee On.  The other two are the Big Circle Gang, Tse’s original triad, and the Bamboo Union, based in Taiwan.  In the words of one investigator, the syndicate’s supply chain is so complex and expertly run that it “must rival Apple’s.”

  Seizures of crystal meth and yaba rose about 50% last year to 126 tonnes in East and Southeast Asia.  At the same time, prices for the drugs fell in most countries.  This pattern of falling prices and rising seizures, the UNODC said in a report released in March 2019, “suggested the supply of the drug had expanded.”…When Thailand stopped much of the meth coming directly across the border from Myanmar by truck, the syndicate re-routed deliveries through Laos and Vietnam. This included deploying hordes of Laotians with backpacks, each containing about 30 kilos of meth, to carry it into Thailand on narrow jungle paths.  The last time a top-level Asian narcotics kingpin was successfully prosecuted and imprisoned for more than a short period was in the mid-1970s.  https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meth-syndicate/

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6-18-20  70 kg of fentanyl seized (enpugh to kill at least 30 million people) along with 124,000 fentanyl pills in Ontario, Canada.  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/fentanyl-bust-ontario-1.5617318

Police took three suspects into custody—30-year-old Halid Sefic and 34-year-old Edin Sefic from Burlington along with 54-year-old Richard Atanasoff of Toronto. https://thepostmillennial.com/largest-fentanyl-seizure-in-ontario-history-made

The three accused were released from custody and are scheduled to appear in court in September.  https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/06/18/opp-announces-record-breaking-fentanyl-seizure-in-counterfeit-pill-making-bust.html

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