Downfall of a drug lord
The man often known as Asia’s El Chapo is said to have been a major supplier of methamphetamine to New Zealand. But he’s unlikely ever to stand trial here, reports Eugene Bingham.
He stands accused of having a significant negative impact on New Zealand, overseeing a drug empire the likes of which have never been seen.
He ran a syndicate allegedly responsible for one of the country’s biggest drug seizures.
Fabulously wealthy, with a preference for private jets, thinking nothing of gambling millions of dollars at a time in casinos, and surrounding himself with a private bodyguard of Thai kickboxers, he is, finally, behind bars.
But he will never face court in New Zealand.
Tse Chi Lop, often called ‘‘Asia’s El Chapo’’, was arrested at the weekend after boarding a flight in the Netherlands.
It was the end of a long game of cat and mouse with authorities around the world, and one that has been welcomed by police in New Zealand.
The sting was engineered by Australian Federal Police (AFP), whom the New Zealand Police’s Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, national manager of organised crime, congratulated.
‘‘Tse Chi Lop and his network [have] had a significant negative impact on communities in both Australia and New Zealand as a result of their role in the methamphetamine trade, seen particularly with the fall in methamphetamine prices in Southeast Asia in recent years,’’ Williams told
‘‘We hope this arrest causes disruption in the activities of this criminal network, and the supply of methamphetamine in New Zealand.’’
A United Nations report obtained by shows Tse’s syndicate has been linked to some of the biggest drug seizures in New Zealand, including the 2016 discovery of 500 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine on a Far North beach.
The arrest, said Williams, showed that no-one was untouchable.
Not even a man whose empire was said to make as much as US$17 billion a year, and alleged to have connections to governments across Asia.
Tse, 57, was born in southern China, in Guangdong province. According to news agency Reuters, his path to criminal notoriety began when he became a member of the ‘‘Big Circle’’, an organised crime group formed by former members of the Red Guard at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
The drug trade took him to Hong Kong and Canada (where he became a Canadian citizen). He was arrested by American authorities for heroin trafficking in 1998. That did not stop him.
In fact, on his release from prison in 2006, his illicit business took off. Police told Reuters that Tse’s masterstroke was to form a peace pact among five Asian criminal factions: the Big Circle Gang (also known as the Big Circle Boys); the 14k, Wo Shing Wo and Sun Yee On triads from Hong Kong and Macau; and the Taiwanese Bamboo Union.
With the parties now in an alliance, they were in a position to feed a global demand for methamphetamine, and gobble up massive profits.
Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Republic of Korea were particularly attractive markets because of the high price consumers were prepared to pay.
A 2019 report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said the four nations made up about one-third of the high-end
estimated total value of the methamphetamine market ‘‘as a result of disproportionately high wholesale and retail prices for methamphetamine’’.
Put simply, with consumers willing to pay so much, New Zealand was too attractive an opportunity for a businessman like Tse to ignore.
In 2019, authorities told Stuff a surge of methamphetamine across the borders was the work of Tse’s syndicate, known as ‘‘The Company’’ or ‘‘Sam Gor’’.
A record 469kg seizure, found by Customs in a shipping container in Auckland in 2019, fitted the syndicate’s modus operandi, said a senior UNODC official, Jeremy Douglas. ‘‘Sam Gor have scaled the synthetic drug market in a way that we’ve never seen before anywhere in the world.’’
Distribution was left to a network of partners, from the Japanese Yakuza to outlaw motorcycle gangs in Australia and New Zealand, officials say.
A 2019 UNODC report said the biker gangs from Australia and New Zealand were even establishing chapters in Southeast Asia to facilitate drug trafficking, and other crimes.
Profits were so good that, when intercepts did occur, Tse’s syndicate would simply dispatch another consignment.
‘‘They can afford to lose shipments because meth is so profitable,’’ Douglas said. ‘‘Even though it’s a small market, if you can get it to New Zealand you can make many, many more times than what you can elsewhere.’’
And the demand was insatiable. A study in 2019, based on wastewater testing, estimated 832kg of pure methamphetamine a year was being consumed in New Zealand.
The expanding flow of the drug into Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Korea was having the effect of shifting global trafficking patterns, the UNODC said. It estimated the market of Southeast Asia, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Bangladesh had become interconnected and was worth up to US$61b.
And Tse chased as big a slice of those profits as he could get.
While he is frequently compared to South American drug lords – such as Mexico’s Joaquin ‘‘El Chapo’’ Guzman, now serving a life sentence in the United States – Tse led a less conspicuous lifestyle.
Not that he was exactly monklike. Reuters reported that he once lost US$66m in one night at a casino.
His syndicate kept a low profile until 2016 when a Taiwanese man, Cai Jen Ze, was arrested in Myanmar. His phone revealed what officials told Reuters was an ‘‘Aladdin’s Cave of intel’’. Thousands of calls, texts, social media messages, and photos provided evidence of huge shipments to Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Some photos on Cai’s phone were of the 2016 seizure in the Far North, Stuff has learned.
Until that point, police around the world had no idea the shipments were connected. ‘‘There was a lot of confusion,’’ said Douglas. ‘‘Different police forces were investigating different groups.
‘‘It was through Cai’s phone that they realised it was all interconnected, that Sam Gor had been a dominant player all along.’’
With that, the hunt was on. In Australia, Tse was listed as a ‘‘Priority Organisation Target’’, a designation used to describe those suspected of causing significant harm.
The AFP sought their prey, but it wasn’t easy, partly because Tse had allegedly built connections with policing agencies across Asia. In 2019, for instance, he allegedly obtained the contents of a highly confidential AFP document circulated among partner agencies. Tse now knew he was on the wanted list.
He was understood to be lying low in Taiwan. Chinese and Australian police forces issued arrest warrants, but he proved elusive.
And then, on Friday local time, Tse was arrested by Dutch police at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. The AFP said it would seek Tse’s extradition to Australia, although no details of any charges have been made public. Reuters said police accused him of involvement in at least 13 major drug importations to Australia.
In a statement, the AFP said the syndicate had ‘‘targeted Australia over a number of years, importing and distributing large amounts of illicit narcotics, laundering the profits overseas and living off the wealth obtained from crime’’.
It was connected to a 2013 operation called Operation Volante, which resulted in the arrests of 27 people for importing and trafficking large amounts of heroin and methamphetamine into the country.
Despite the damage he has allegedly done to New Zealand via his network, there is no prospect of Tse facing justice here.
While New Zealand Police would provide any assistance required to the AFP, it was a matter for Australian authorities, Williams said.