(Tom Allard’s article from the REUTERS on October-14, 2019.)
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| Tse was a young Red Guard originally. |
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.
In the 1990s, Tse shuttled between North America, Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asia, said a senior AFP investigator based in Asia. He rose to become a mid-ranking member of a smuggling ring that sourced heroin from the Golden Triangle, the lawless opium-producing region where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand, China and Laos meet.
In 1998,
according to court records, Tse was arraigned on drug-trafficking charges in
the Eastern District Court of New York. He was found guilty of conspiracy to
import heroin into America, the records show. A potential life sentence hung
over his head.
Through a petition filed by his lawyer in 2000, Tse
begged for leniency. His ailing parents needed constant care, he explained. His
12-year-old son had a lung disorder. His wife was overwhelmed. If freed, vowed
Tse, he would open a restaurant. He expressed “great sorrow” for his crime,
court records show.
The entreaties
appear to have worked: Tse was sentenced to nine years in prison, spent mostly
at the federal correctional institution in Elkton, Ohio. But his remorse may
have waned. After he was freed in 2006, police say he returned to Canada, where
he was supposed to be under supervised release for the next four years.
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| Tse later become a Trian gang member in Hong Kong. |
It’s unclear when Tse returned to his old haunts in Asia. But 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.
Tse would host lavish birthday parties each year at resorts and five-star hotels, flying in his family and entourage in private jets. On one occasion, he stayed at a resort in Thailand for a month, hosting visitors poolside in shorts and a T-shirt, according to a member of the task force investigating the syndicate.
Tse was a frequent visitor to Asia’s casinos and
fond of betting on horses, especially on English races. “We believe he lost 60
million euros (about $66 million) in one night on the tables in Macau,” said
the senior Asia-based AFP investigator.
As the
investigation into Tse deepened, police suspected that the Canadian was the
major trafficker supplying Australia with meth and heroin, with a lucrative
sideline in MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy.
But the true
scale and breadth of the Sam Gor syndicate only became apparent in late 2016,
police say, when a young Taiwanese man entered Yangon airport in Myanmar with a
bag of white powder strapped to each of his thighs.
