ON THE TRAIL OF A MULE - A Drug Run Through The Golden Triangle.

"Unbelievable". Lao Ta has been busted again.
Former Khun Sa aide arrested, 20kg of ya ice seized

Former Khun Sa aide arrested, 20kg of ya ice seized

CHIANG MAI - Lao Ta Saenlee, a former aide to the late drug kingpin Khun Sa, and his son were arrested and 20kg of crystal methamphetamine, or ya ice, and some war weapons seized from them at the family-run petrol station in Mae Ai district on Tuesday. A team of narcotics suppression police apprehended Mr Lao Ta and his son Wicharn Saenlee, former kamnan (sub-district chief) of tambon Tha Ton in Mae Ai district, at Saenlee petrol station in tambon Tha Ton. Seized from them were 20kg of crystal methamphetamine and some weapons, Thai media reported.

Pol Maj Gen Sommai Kongwisaisuk, acting commissioner of the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, later searched Mr Lao Ta’s house. Authorities would seize his assets and extended the investigation.

Police would take him and his son to the Metropolitan Police Bureau’s Division 6 in Bangkok on Tuesday evening for further questioning.

Pol Maj Gen Sommai said police were confident that the evidence seized during the police operation would implicate Mr Lao Ta in the drug trafficking and his assets worth about one billion baht would be seized.
Thai media reports that police had acted as drug buyers to purchase illicit drugs worth 11 million baht from the two suspects. The drugs were delivered at the petrol station on Tuesday morning before police moved in to arrest Mr Lao Ta and his son.

During the operation, Mr Lao Ta's wife and his 14 aides were also caught.

Mr Lao Ta, now 79, a former Kuomintang fighter accused of being involved in the illegal trade, denied any involvement in the narcotics trade.

Jailed for four years as he fought charges of trafficking, attempted murder and illegal possession of weapons, the infamous Lao Ta was released in 2008.

Like many former Kuomintang soldiers, Lao Ta fought the communist insurgents before being allowed to live in Thailand. He has consistently denied being involved in heroin trafficking although he admitted that he used to trade in opium in the 1970s.

Mr Lao Ta wielded influence in his village and surrounding hill tribe villages.
After being released from jail, he ran a new business venture -- his own franchise of Laota Coffee shops in the North.

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From today's Nation

The Mekong middlemen running drugs across Asia

Compared to their ultra-violent Central and Latin American cousins, the drug dealers of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle use their low-profile to remain beyond the long arm of the law.
But they control the world's second largest drug producing region, manufacturing and moving meth and heroin out off hidden labs in a remote, mountainous wedge of land that cuts across Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and China.
A series of recent arrests in Thailand and Laos have shone a rare spotlight on some of the key middlemen pushing product from the Golden Triangle across Asia. Here are a few of them.

Khonpasong Soukkaseum, a.k.a. Xiengther.
The flurry of police action started with the arrest of 50-year-old Laotian Khonpasong in early January.
The was picked up on the way back from a wedding in Laos near the capital Vientiane as a dragnet closed in on drug runners and their associates.
Laos authorities swiftly seized hotels, cash and cars belonging to a man accused of getting rich on the proceeds of meth, sex venues and illegal casinos.
Since his arrest, three networks shuttling drugs from Myanmar through Laos, Thailand and onto Malaysia have been hit by raids and arrests.
Press reports in the tightly-controlled Communist country said officials rejected a $800,000 bribe to release Xiengther and his associates.

Xaysana Keophimpa -- 'Mr X'
Heavily built and tattooed, Xaysana -- dubbed "Mr X" by law enforcement officials -- was detained on 19 January while transiting through Bangkok's main airport on his way back home to Laos.
Thai police arrested him in front of TV cameras and stunned travellers.
Investigators in Bangkok accuse Xaysana of running a multi-million dollar drug transport network, ferrying meth, ice and ecstasy pills from the Golden Triangle through Thailand to Malaysia and beyond.
His social media posts pointed to a life of luxury and connections -- photographed alongside Thai "hi-so" (high society) celebrities, at a wedding attended by the daughter of Laos' former prime minister and next to a bevy of supercars.
Some of those Thai celebs are now being probed for allegedly laundering Xaysana's cash.

Sisouk Daoheuang
Fond of riding thoroughbred horses at his stables on the outskirts of the Laos capital Vientiane, Sisouk has an unlikely profile for a man accused of large-scale drug running.
He is a local Laos celebrity, well-known on the party scene who conducted several television interviews on his love of horses -- including one he bought from America for $25,000.
He was arrested in early April after cops linked him to Xaysana, partly through his active social media life.
Sisouk's Facebook profile revealed a penchant for fast cars, which he sold through his garage in the Laos capital, as well as a proclivity for partying -- including with Mr X.
His garage and stables have been seized.

Usman Salameang
A Thai national born in the kingdom's "deep south", Usman is one of the region's most wanted drug men.
He is accused of being a key player in the drug chain from Laos to Malaysia.
He has achieved notoriety among drug cops for his ingenuity in avoiding jail, supposedly even faking his own death.
Canny and connected, he has been linked with several major yaba pill seizures.
A 2005 raid on a Bangkok house belonging to him saw an SUV impounded. Four years later police who had been using his vehicle found 10 million baht ($290,000) stashed in rear panels in the vehicle.
Recent police operations may have shaken him from his apparent hideout in Laos, with authorities hinting he could now be in Cambodia, Malaysia or at large in Thailand.

Tun Hung Seong - 'The Malaysian Iceman'
A year ago Thai cops seized nearly 300-kilogrammes of crystal meth in the far south.
Eventually it led them to Thai-based Malaysian Tun Hung Seong, who allegedly headed a network running ice and turning huge drug profits into legitimate businesses.
He was arrested on April 19 this year at Hat Yai airport in the Thai south where he is accused of acting as a gatekeeper to the Malaysian drug market.
The drug money was laundered through a series of business, according to Thai cops, including karaoke bars, restaurants, hotels and bars which circulated up to 1 billion baht ($29 million) in narco-profits at any one time.
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Poor old Laos you might think?
A quote from the Laotian Times

A multitude of assets and evidence linked to the drug trade have been confiscated including residences, luxury cars, jet-skis, a hotel, a market, a restaurant, various manufacturing plants, warehouses, garages, a gas station, assorted drugs, military guns and many other unnamed possessions.​

Re Khonpasong vs Xaysana

Khonpasong is said to be an even bigger player in the drug trafficking world than Xaysana​

Read the full report here: Multiple Lao Drug Barons Arrested, Millions of Dollars in Assets Seized

 

The passing of Olive Yang aged 90, a legendary female drug war lord & wheeler dealer in Myanmar.

The Female Warlord Who Had C.I.A. Connections and Opium Routes



MUSE, Myanmar — She was born to royalty in British colonial Burma, but rejected that life to become a cross-dressing warlord whose C.I.A.-supplied army established opium trade routes across the Golden Triangle. By the time of her death, last week at 90, she had led hundreds of men, endured prison and torture, generated gossip for her relationship with a film actress and, finally, helped forge a truce between ethnic rebels and the government.

Olive Yang grew up as one of 11 children in an ethnic Chinese family of hereditary rulers of what was then the semiautonomous Shan state of Kokang. According to relatives, she wore boys’ clothes, refused to bind her feet and frequently fell in love with her brothers’ romantic interests.

Concerned about their unconventional daughter, her parents arranged for her to marry a younger cousin. Shortly after she became pregnant, archives show, she left her husband to pursue a life among opium-trafficking bandits. Her son, Duan Jipu — named for the American jeeps Ms. Yang had seen in the Chinese city of Kunming during World War II — was raised by other family members.

Ms. Yang’s pursuit of a career as a militia leader and opium smuggler grew in part out of her desperation to escape traditional gender roles, her relatives said. “It was a temptation she couldn’t resist,” wrote her niece Jackie Yang in “House of Yang,” a family history published in 1997.

By age 25, she commanded hundreds of soldiers guarding caravans of raw opium on mules and trucks across the hills to the Thai border. Those trade routes served what would eventually become the world’s most productive opium-growing region, supplying raw ingredients for the heroin that was trafficked across the United States and Europe.

Ms. Yang partnered with remnants of the Chinese Nationalist troops who had been defeated by Mao’s Communists but continued to fight from havens in Burma. Intelligence dispatches at the National Archives in Yangon described her as a menace to the peace.



The Nationalist troops had won support from the C.I.A. because of their shared interest in stemming the spread of communism during the early stages of the Cold War. The covert plan, called Operation Paper, included an agreement by which American weapons were airlifted to Southeast Asia using planes owned by the C.I.A., Alfred W. McCoy wrote in his 1972 book, “The Politics of Heroin,’’ as the Nationalists and Ms. Yang’s troops financed their operations through opium sales.

The C.I.A.-supplied arms found their way into Ms. Yang’s hands in 1952, as documented by the Burmese government in a complaint submitted at the United Nations General Assembly the following year. Ms. Yang’s army was observed traveling across the border to an airfield in Thailand, where an unmarked C-47 aircraft arriving from Taiwan, the seat of the Chinese Nationalist government, was reported to have unloaded weapons.

Shortly thereafter, Ms. Yang was intercepted by the Burmese authorities while traveling by car from the Thai border with her deputy, Lo Hsing Han. She spent five years in prison in Mandalay, on charges that she helped Chinese Nationalist soldiers illegally cross the border into Burma. It was the first of many imprisonments for Ms. Yang and Mr. Lo.

Mr. Lo would go on to earn the designation “kingpin of the heroin traffic in Southeast Asia,” by United States drug enforcement officials, after striking a deal with the Burmese military government that allowed him to resume trading in opium in return for assisting government forces against rebel forces.

After her older brother Edward abdicated in 1959, along with dozens of other hereditary rulers in Shan state, Ms. Yang took control of his former army, becoming the de facto ruler of the territory. She also, according to her relatives, entered into a relationship with a Burmese movie actress, Wah Wah Win Shwe, lavishing her with gifts and adding her name to the deed of her house in Yangon.



Ms. Yang’s family considered them a couple, though in an interview in 2015, Ms. Win Shwe, who still lived in a house on Ms. Yang’s former property, denied an affair. In any case, the arrangement came to an abrupt end in 1963, when Ms. Yang was arrested by police officials under Gen. Ne Win, who had seized power in Burma the year before. She spent six years in Yangon’s Insein Prison, where she reportedly endured torture.



Her career took another turn in 1989, when she was in her 60s. Retired as a warlord but respected among the ethnic rebel groups, Ms. Yang was recruited by the Burmese government’s chief of intelligence, Khin Nyunt, along with her former colleague Mr. Lo, to help negotiate peace agreements for the government. The agreement struck with Ms. Yang’s distant relative Peng Jiasheng and his Kokang rebel force, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, largely held until new fighting broke out in 2009.

Confined to a wheelchair, Ms. Yang spent her twilight years in relative obscurity, living in the care of her stepson and his militiamen in a compound in Muse. Visited there not long after she had a stroke in 2015, Ms. Yang said she was happy to be living surrounded by deferential soldiers. When shown a photograph of Ms. Win Shwe at her home, Ms. Yang responded with a knowing smile and a devilish laugh. With a Chinese cigarette in her hand, she said, “That whole property was mine.”



Ms. Yang, who died on July 13, is survived by two younger sisters and her son. None of her immediate relatives remain in Kokang. Ms. Yang’s eventual tomb, built for her with the help of one of her former soldiers, stands near Muse, just outside Kokang.

“It’s very sad for all of Kokang,” said the former soldier, Liu Guoxi, reached by phone as he was preparing for the funeral. “We have all come to say farewell to our leader.”
​

Source: New York Times & Coconuts Bangkok.

Olive Yang: the Drug Lord Known as Miss Hairy Legs

Olive Yang—also known as Yang Kyin Hsiu, nicknamed Miss Hairy Legs—was the half-sister of Sao Edward Yang Kyein Tsai, the saopha (chief) of Kokang, a state in post-independent Burma from 1949 to 1959. She was born in 1927 and received an education at Lashio's Guardian Angel's Convent School. Described as a "bisexual warlady by the historian Thant Myint-U, she developed a tough reputation while still at convent school, where she was rumored to carry a revolver in her handbag. At the age of 19, she organized ethnic Kokang forces, nicknamed the Olive's Boys, an army of over a thousand soldiers and consolidated control of opium trade routes from the highlands to lowlands. She dominated Kokang's opium trade from the end of World War II to the early 1960s. In the 1950s, after the Nationalist defeat and their subsequent expulsion from mainland China, she partnered with the Kuomintang to establish opium trade routes along the Golden Triangle. [Source: Wikipedia,Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, Macmillan, 2008, pp. 298–299. +]

From 1948 to 1950, she was married to Twan Sao Wen, the son of Tamaing's chieftain, and had a son, Duan Jipu, in 1950. Her son is a teacher in Chiang Mai, Thailand. From the 1950s to the mid-1960s, she was the commander of the Kokang Kakweye (People's Defense Forces). She was a prominent figure in opium trafficking and gold trading. She was arrested in 1962, along with her brother Jimmy, a member of parliament in Yangon, by Burmese authorities, to remove them from power and place Kokang territory under Burmese administration. She was imprisoned at Insein Prison and released in 1968. +

Yang was known to be a bisexual who carried on affairs with film actresses and singers, including Wa Wa Win Shwe. In the late 1980s, she was recruited by Khin Nyunt to help broker ceasefires in Burma with ethnic rebel groups. After her release, she reportedly spent her final years as a nun. Today she lives on University Avenue Road in Yangon.
​

Source: Facts & Details.

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US sanctions Laos-based 'criminal organisation'

The US Treasury Department early Wednesday announced sanctions against four men and a group of companies allegedly linked to drug and human trafficking throughout the region.
A press release by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control said the sanctions revolved around a group based in Hong Kong and Chiang Saen district of Chiang Rai, the Kings Romans Company, a casino operator.
The company operates a well known casino in Laos and has operations in Hong Kong,
Laos, Myanmar and China, as well as Thailand, according to the sanctions list.

(See infographic below)


The Kings Romans Casino is a hotel and gambling site in Laos, clearly visible from the Thailand side of the Mekong River at the Golden Triangle. Owned by Hong Kong-based Kings Romans Group, the casino claims to cater mostly to Chinese tourists.

Previous press reports have claimed that the casino operates in a "lawless playground". The four people and the companies may have knowledge of in international criminal activities including drug and human trafficking, the US press release alleged.
The four sanctioned people, who are barred from doing business in the US, or with US companies or citizens are
Abbas "Basu" Eberahim, 29, an Australian whose residences are listed as Kooringal in Australia, Chiang Saen in Chiang Rai and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in southern Laos.
Thai national Nat Rungtawankhiri aka Rungtawankeeree, aged 41, a resident of Mae Fah Luang district,Chiang Rai.
Guiqin Su aka Zhao Su or Madame Su,69, a Hong Kong resident with Chinese nationality. She is the wife of Zhao Wei aka Chio Wei aka Thanchai Saechou, 66, a dual Chinese-Macau national.
The US claims the four are members of "the Zhao Wei translational criminal organisation" (TCO).

"Based in Laos within the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ), the Zhao Wei TCO exploits this region by engaging in drug trafficking,human trafficking, money laundering, bribery, and wildlife trafficking," the US announcement alleged.
"All assets of those designated that are under US jurisdiction are frozen, and US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them," it said.
The US alleged that the group's front is the Kings Romans Casino in Laos, which it uses as a headquarters and money laundering aid.
"Operating largely through the Kings Roman Casino, the Zhao Wei TCO facilitates the storage and distribution of heroin, methamphetamine, and other narcotics for illicit networks, including the United Wa State Army, operating in neighbouring Burma," said the sanctions announcement.
"Since 2014,Thai, Lao, and Chinese authorities have seized large narcotics shipments that have been traced to the Kings Romans Casino."​

Source: The Bangkok Post 31 January 2018.