Milk of Paradise

by Lucy Inglis

  In 1963, embattled by the Marseilles heroin trade and looking for a global answer, Interpol sent out a memo from its Paris headquarters: ‘Since 1958 the General Secretariat’s attention has been drawn – more especially by the authorities in Hong Kong – to the arrival of a certain number of Chinese in Europe. Supplied with passports, and claiming to be representatives for genuine or non-existent clothing manufacturers in the Far East, they make numerous journeys in all European countries . . . their real purpose is to establish contact and relationships with certain suspicious characters in an attempt to set up a system of drug traffic and distribution, aimed ultimately at the USA.’36

  Traditional Triad business on the mainland stretched to people trafficking, and kidnap and protection rackets, but Hong Kong offered the potential to create a global heroin network. The Green Gangs, who specialized in the three original Triad mainstays, gave way to a new generation who saw the revenue potential in narcotics and learned that only savage violence would protect their interests, resulting in splinter groups such as the Thin Blade Gang.

  The level of Hong Kong heroin traffic was reflected in customs seizures, which escalated from eighty-four kilos between 1947 and 1951 to 2,337 kilos in 1977 alone. Seizure rates are typically taken to be around 10 per cent of the real amount of any given illicit commodity passing through a customs centre, rendering Hong Kong the largest heroin hub in the world outside of Rotterdam. By the mid-1970s, the US Drug Enforcement Agency had listed heroin as fifteenth in comparative sales listings for the top 500 American corporations, only just below Shell Oil, and above Goodyear Tyres, Xerox, and the Campbell Soup Company.37

  As the heroin business supplanted Hong Kong’s traditional opium trading, the established commercial systems were co-opted into the modern world. Compradors became ‘controllers’, who travelled on the planes from Chep Lap Kok airport with the drug mules who carted kilos of heroin No.4 in suitcases or internally; in the early 1970s, the sex and drugs trades united as Chinese women leaving Hong Kong for Amsterdam had their vaginas packed with heroin to the point where it was difficult for them to sit through the flight. This made it considerably easier for them to be identified as persons of interest by the Dutch authorities. Once the mules reached their ultimate destination in Vancouver or the coast of the United States, they were abandoned with their passport and some money, deemed payment enough for services rendered. Should they be caught, the controller would visit the family and deliver compensation in cash.

  The criminal grip on urban commerce and politics that began in the nineteenth century, implemented by Du Yuesheng in Shanghai in the 1930s and cemented by his move to Hong Kong in 1951, meant that not only British Hong Kong but also Chinese Hong Kong was always teetering on the brink of legitimacy. Added to this was the fact that most of the ethnic Chinese who had arrived in Hong Kong spoke or adopted the dialect of the chiu chau people, which is notoriously difficult and exclusive, making commercial transactions opaque at best, and an impartial and increasingly independent Hong Kong took in not only the economic migrants but an organized-crime hierarchy that established itself with rapacious efficacy. Throughout the twentieth century, disillusioned soldiers, sailors and fugitives from the law gathered and entered the heroin trade in Hong Kong. They later followed natural routes of emigration through the massive port cities of Europe, such as Naples, Marseilles, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and then New York, San Francisco and Vancouver in the US and Canada. Italy, France, Holland, America and Canada all possess largely uncontrolled and porous borders that allow for the movement of people and narcotics. The alleged activities of the Ma brothers, chiu chau speakers from Canton, illustrate the almost mainstream aspect of Hong Kong organized crime. The brothers arrived in Hong Kong in the 1960s and, in 1969, established the Oriental Daily News, a popular tabloid newspaper with a current daily readership of over 3 million people. Ma Yik Shing, also known as ‘White Powder Ma’, was charged by the Hong Kong government in the summer of 1977 with conspiracy to traffic in morphine and opium. The brothers fled to Taiwan and Ma Sik Yu died in 1992, still a fugitive. The Hong Kong government’s main witness, Ng Sik Ho, popularly known as ‘Limpy’ owing to a leg injury, died in 1991, his testimony and evidence perishing with him. The true whereabouts of Ma Yik Shing are unknown, although, since the death of Limpy Ho, his British lawyers have made repeated requests for him to be permitted to return to Hong Kong at the end of his life. These requests have been met with continued refusal and the promise of immediate arrest should Ma Yik Shing return to the island. Taiwan will not tolerate any discussion about extradition, but maintains that it is strenuous in its efforts to combat organized crime, and will collaborate with Chinese police to that end. The Oriental Daily News remains the most popular newspaper in Hong Kong.

  Drugs, along with vice and racketeering, were the mainstays of the colony’s organized criminal network. Corruption in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was a major problem, with many officers supplementing their relatively low wages through bribery and blackmail, known as ‘tea money’. Arrest warrants for those suspected of smuggling were often issued after the subject had left the harbour area. In 1973, the Chief Superintendent of the RHKPF, Peter Fitzroy Godber, was found to have amassed millions of dollars in various bank accounts. He was tipped off, and fled to Britain, but was later extradited and stood trial, serving four years in prison. The Godber incident led to the creation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in 1974, which has been called ‘one of the best parting gifts from the colonial government’.38 The ICAC made huge inroads in cleaning up police corruption, and just in the nick of time.

  A sharp rise in the numbers of resident heroin addicts to around 45,000 in the early 1980s resulted in a renewed attempt by the government and law enforcement agencies to get a hold on the trade. It was concentrated inside the 9.25-acre site of the old Chinese fort, which had become a slum known as the Walled City, where drugs, prostitution and gambling went on in plain sight with little attempt to control the Triad gangs who operated there. With around 20,000 residents packed into the crumbling, labyrinthine, centuries-old site, the police had been faced with an impossible task in controlling the Walled City since at least the 1950s. A police report from 1955 gives an insight into the character of the neighbourhood at that time, where there were 648 buildings, some as high as 14 storeys, and 120 huts, between them housing 120 narcotics divans, 20 brothels, 5 gambling houses, 9 dentists, 94 shops (many of them specializing in dog meat) and 4 schools. The same year, police seized over 17,000 packets of heroin and morphine powder alone within the Walled City, but they were fighting a losing battle.39 With only a few entrances and exits, and a warren of passageways within, ‘swarming with mendicants suffering from all sorts of diseases’, suspects could be lost to sight within a moment. The Triads were also quick to react to any attempt to bring in new legislation. Owing to the long history of opium use in Hong Kong, it was not illegal to be an addict, only to possess narcotics. Inside the Walled City, the gangs set up impromptu ‘clinics’ where users could come for their hit, and then go back to the streets empty-handed. As IV heroin use took over from the heroin pipe the older Chinese had favoured, these clinics were a fast and efficient way to do business.

  The Godber scandal and creation of the ICAC heralded the beginning of the end for the Walled City and its endemic heroin trade (it was finally demolished in 1994, and replaced with a municipal park). Wider changes to the law meant that ships found carrying narcotics in Hong Kong waters, which was still the primary method of smuggling it in, meant that the vessels’ owners were now liable. Between 1976 and 1978, in a push to disrupt police corruption, the Triads and the heroin trade, the ICAC managed to shut down the notorious Yau Ma Tei fruit market in West Kowloon, which had been a centre for narcotics import and the Hong Kong heroin trade. The resulting arrests of eighty-seven local officers left the police station there virtually unmanned.

  The continued success of the ICAC has seen a vast improvement in Hong Kong’s
law enforcement structure, but the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a huge rise in both seizures and the trade itself. As the CIA shored up the Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand and Laos, the boom in production and advances in refinement meant that Hong Kong became an international centre for the production of high-quality heroin. New technology such as mobile phones and pagers also gave the criminal gangs the edge over law enforcement agencies, which were slower to adopt them. Despite two bumper years for heroin seizures in 1983 and 1984, including a record haul of 298 kilos found in a fishing net off Ping Chau, the 1980s cemented Hong Kong’s position as one of the world’s key locations for the refinement and movement of heroin.40

  Up in the hills of the Triangle, extended families laboured to produce the opium latex that then made its way to Hong Kong, from where it fanned out across the world. Each small family group, averaging five workers, could produce up to fifteen kilos of latex from a good harvest, although more usually nine or ten, which would still produce over a kilo of morphine.

  The production of heroin is not a magical process, but an industrial one. It can be done in a bathtub, as demonstrated by a defiant group of Polish university students in 1976 (leading to the invention of Kampot, a cheap and unreliable version of home-cooked heroin still popular in Poland), but the easiest and most common method is to stack clean oil drums onto bricks or blocks thirty or forty centimetres above the ground and to build a wood fire beneath them.41 Into each drum, 115 litres of water are poured and then ten to fifteen kilos of opium latex are added. The resulting mixture is sieved for impurities before slaked lime or calcium hydroxide is added, which binds to the morphine solution and makes it rise to the top. When it is almost cool, it is scooped out and put into different cooking pots for reheating or ‘cooking’. Ammonium chloride is added as the morphine heats, creating a telltale strong smell of urine, making it risky to have a heroin kitchen in the stacked apartments of New York City and Hong Kong, but irrelevant in the vast expanses of Turkey, Afghanistan and the Mexican highlands.

  The pH levels of the solution are monitored until it precipitates, or crashes, to the bottom of the drum, from where it is poured through muslin filters then spread out on baking trays to dry. This morphine base is then ready to be processed into smoking or IV heroin. The process can be scaled up or down, and some of the most basic heroin kitchens only possess a wok, a measuring cup, a plastic funnel, coffee filter papers, litmus paper and a steel pan. Industrial kitchens feature bottled-gas ovens, food mixers and fan extractors, still all ordinary items featured in homes around the world.

  To cook heroin from morphine base takes between four and six hours. The simplest form is ‘black tar’ heroin, popular in Mexico and some parts of West Africa. This is the quickest and cheapest way to produce a heroin that can be sticky like tar, but also hard, or rock-like.

  To produce the brown or white forms of heroin, the dried morphine base is crushed in a food mixer, then put into a pan to which acetic anhydride is added. Acetic anhydride has been a common compound used in chemical processes for years, and since it has been used to modify starch for food purposes, bulk imports of it into the USA are either ignored or passed without question. It is easily available in large quantities and when added to morphine base, after two hours of continuous heating at eighty-five degrees Celsius, will produce impure heroin. The skill of the heroin cook comes into play at this point, when No.3 or No.4 are created. Sodium carbonate is added for stability, until the mixture stops fizzing, and the heroin is now only up to two-thirds of the weight of the morphine, which was only one-tenth of the weight of the opium latex. To create smoking heroin is simple: the base is mixed with hydrochloric acid, another industrial compound found easily across the globe. Each kilo is stirred slowly with the acid until heroin hydrochloride is formed, after which various adulterants can be added, such as caffeine, quinine or strychnine. This is heroin No.3, the brown-coloured pieces of which are ground up and packaged for sale. It is most easily consumed by snorting or smoking, but can be mixed with lemon juice or vinegar and filtered through cotton wool for intravenous use.

  To create the coveted heroin No.4, chloroform is added to the mixture and left to stand, which binds to the impurities in the solution and creates a heavy red grease at the bottom of the pan. The pourable solution is drained off, and purified repeatedly with activated charcoal, until it is colourless. Again, sodium carbonate is added until the powder becomes very white, after which it is dried, mopped with filter paper and then ground into powder and pressed into 700 gram or 350 gram bricks of 85–95 per cent purity, which is easily soluble for IV use.42

  Cooking highly refined heroin using basic kitchen equipment in trying surroundings is what the best of the Cantonese heroin cooks specialize in, and they are transported around the world for their work. Just like Mecca during the hajj, spring in Chiang Mai is a market for bulk heroin and a recruitment fair for the best chefs.

  Throughout the 1970s, various members of the Thai government set fire to, or otherwise destroyed, seized shipments of heroin in the public eye, to convince the West that they were on the side of narcotics enforcement. Yet each successive military enforcer was holding back a portion of the seized drugs for personal gain. Their main traffic is with the Netherlands, and neither Thailand nor the Netherlands have conspiracy laws, so possession is the only possible charge – there is no ‘intent to supply’ indictment.

  The world’s second-largest Triad, the 14K gang, operated with impunity throughout northern Europe during the 1970s, culminating in the obvious and flamboyant murder of Kay Wong, a Chinese restaurant owner from Essex who was kicked to death in London’s Soho during a game of mah-jong over a botched heroin delivery in Amsterdam. The body of the errant dealer was found decomposing in the sand dunes of The Hague’s Scheveningen two weeks later, with eight bullets in his chest and hundreds of guilders stuffed into his suit pockets, done to prove that the killing had been one of honour, not just another tiresome mugging. Despite fleeing to the north of England and Wales, the killers of Kay Wong were found guilty of manslaughter in London’s Old Bailey in November of 1976 and served terms of five to fourteen years.

  The 1970s marked a period of intense global turf war for the Triads, who were establishing themselves in Western cities and using the narcotics trade to gain a foothold. The trial of Shing May Wong – no relation to Kay Wong – is a prime example of the relationship between East and West at the time. Shing May Wong was educated mainly in Britain and latterly at the exclusive private school Roedean, then went on to own a beauty salon. After her bullion-dealer father was kicked to death in a Triad honour killing in Singapore, she ascribed her entry to organized crime as an act of revenge, in order to find his murderers. In reality, she was importing and distributing vast quantities of heroin through Heathrow airport with her Chinese Muslim lover, Li Jafaar Ma (also known as Li Mah). In a short time they were earning £9,000 a day, supplying between 250 and 900 addicts at any one time. The accounts were kept carefully, in red double-entry books, in an unoccupied flat in North London, along with kilos of heroin. When the police arrested Li Mah, he took them to the flat, which contained an estimated £700,000 in heroin and two automatic weapons.43 Shing May Wong testified that she was a married mother of three, and that she had trafficked drugs only in order to penetrate the Overlord gang which ran London’s narcotics business, and which she believed had murdered her father. She had, according to her testimony, only engaged with Li Jafaar Ma to this end. Judge Michael Argyle was not convinced. When sentencing her to fourteen years in prison (later commuted to twelve on appeal), Argyle told her: ‘When your tiny shadow fell upon Gerrard Street, metaphorically the whole street was darkened and you and your confederates walked through the shadow of the valley of death.’ Addressing them both, he said, ‘When you drove to the West End of London it was to become spreaders of crime, disease and corruption, even death.’44 Shing May Wong was divorced in absentia by the husband she had married in 1966, in Penang’s High Court in March
1980, on the grounds of desertion.

  The 1980s saw the Triads dominate global heroin trafficking, although the numbers of addicts in Hong Kong itself fell. The Chinese youth were turning instead to cannabis and barbiturates to relax from high-pressure urban lifestyles. The Triads were increasingly cleaning up their business, separating the money and drugs on almost all levels, so that cash and heroin rarely changed hands in a straightforward trade. Money-laundering became highly complex, and highly rewarding, allowing the proceeds to be filtered into restaurants, wholesaling, and other legitimate businesses. Such transactions are hard to pin down, but the DEA in the United States began to make concerted efforts to identify how the profits from the narcotics trade were moving around the world, and who was moving them. A series of investigations culminated in 1999 with the introduction of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. Kingpin works to halt the movement of money in and out of the drugs trade by seizing the assets of any person or entity thought to be involved in it. Now seventeen years old, Kingpin is under review: many of those it has designated to be kingpins are dotted around the globe and disappear from sight with the majority of their funds intact, and legitimate, low-paid American employees face losing their jobs in companies and corporations moving the money. The Act has been more successful in South America, owing to banking practices there.

  Meanwhile, Hong Kong has returned to Chinese control. The global narcotics trade remains, unsurprisingly, a cornerstone of many of its banking transactions, cloaked as it is by long-established privileges and traditions. This laundering does not only support the lifestyles of the world’s kingpins, it also has the ability to fund terrorism. Offshore banks have been linked to facilitating the use of heroin profits to fund terrorism in Afghanistan, and more specifically, the 2008 Islamist terrorist attacks in Mumbai that left 164 people dead and 308 wounded. Dawood Ibrahim, the world’s biggest heroin kingpin and, as a drug lord, second only to the late King of Cocaine Pablo Escobar, enabled the terrorists to operate through his network in Mumbai, where he was born the son of a policeman in 1955. The UK Treasury department’s Consolidated List of Financial Sanctions Targets listed him in 2003 and, as of November 2017, his entry contains twenty-one aliases (his wife has two), fourteen known passports, multiple addresses across the world and hundreds of millions in suspect assets in the UK alone.45 His total wealth is estimated by Forbes magazine at $6.7 billion and international authorities have a bounty on his capture in the region of $25 million. His main business is heroin trafficking, but he is also heavily involved in weapons and counterfeiting, and is believed by the Indian government to be involved in the flooding of the Indian economy with fake currency, causing economic crisis in 2016. He is believed to move between Pakistan and Dubai, but his true whereabouts are unknown. His holdings in the Indian construction industry, as well as Bollywood, are legitimate and growing rapidly, despite the fact that Ibrahim fled India in 1984, implicated in a murder. Ibrahim’s D-company organized crime outfit operates in at least sixteen countries, and his money moves constantly through the global banking network of tax havens. In 2017, it was reported that he was in a state of depression, as his only son, aged thirty-one, had chosen to pursue a life of religion, rather than take up the reins of the family business.