The Underworld Podcast - The Burmese Heroin Jungle Kingpin & the Transgender Opium Queen

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Khun Sa was a mercenary, a rebel, a warlord and a freedom fighting drugmaker who all-but created the modern heroin industry in the wake of the Vietnam War’s smack epidemic. At one point, the Shan hero, his fiefdom buried deep in the Burmese brush, supplied three quarters of all the gear in America. No wonder Washington called him the ‘Prince of Death.’ But Khun Sa’s path was actually paved by a princess, who eschewed a life of Kokang royalty to become a gun-toting shaven-headed, trans opium kingpin. Few dared to mess with Miss Hairy Legs, who dated Hollywood stars and went everywhere with a cigarette-carrying lackey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. 29th of July, 1967, on a rough track 50 miles outside the town of Banquan, Lowe. A giant caravan of mules and men are traips in across the banks of the Mekong River, 150 miles into a mammoth journey from the easternmost reaches of Burma. At its head, the warlord Kun Sa, hero of the sham people, bane of just about everybody else. 16 tonnes of raw opium, his 300 animals have on their backs, is part of one of the world's biggest ever drug deals,

slated for half a million dollar sale to the CIA-backed Laoshen General and drug lord, Rouanei Raticone. If Kunzar and his 800 men can make it to Awane's back, Van Kwan stronghold, they can add another thousand men to their numbers. Chinese Khoomintang, the KMt, who will once Kun's colleagues, will be muscled out, and Shan dominance of the world's most lucrative market will be secured. It won't go to plan. A KMT unit has tailed the caravan since it set out attacks.

Shan fight back and flee across the river, taking shelter in a nearby village. But there's a bigger foe. General Orane tells the Shan and the KMT to get lost or face Lao Retribution. It's a shakedown. Kansar tells his guys to stay put. He's holding out for the half a mill he now tells O'ane he'll take in order to leave. His original payout. No dice.

The next morning, six Laoshen Air Force bombers swoop over the village and drop 500-pound bombs on Kuntzar's forces, scattering them into the jungle, killing their mules and leaving the opium behind. O'Anne is only too happy to scoop the product up. He's got plenty of places to refine it, at a ready-baked consumer market just across the island. the Vietnamese border, where hundreds of thousands of disaffected, angry and bored US troops

are getting higher during a war that appears to have no purpose and no end. Hwane will get wildly rich off the back of a bombing campaign that's quarterbacked by the CIA. Kansar is weak, defeated, his men dispersed and his treasure stolen. It'll take him an entire decade to fight his way back into a market that he was inspired to join, in part by a lesser-known warlord or lady. whose own incredible tale will drift into jungle apocrypha like smoke from an opium pipe. But he will. And when he does, Consul become one of the richest drug barons the world has ever seen. Supercharging in industry supplying up to three quarters of all the heroin in America.

Welcome to the Underworld podcast. So hey guys, and welcome to the show that teaches you all about how to switch up from mules to motorbikes. I'm your host Sean Williams. And with me, as always, is Danny Gold. Hey, how's it going? This is the show where we take you through the worlds of international organized crime. And we have a pretty good episode today. I think people are going to find it really interesting, especially since everyone seems to love the wilds of Burma meth story. This is sort of the precursor to that.

As always, we're going to have extra stuff up on the Patreon. Patreon.com slash the On the World Podcasts. For the price of one coffee a month, you can help Sean keep all his fingers and also get tons of bonus material, including scripts and sources and all that good stuff. Anything else? I mean, we've just had some really, really good interviews up there recently, right? We had Josh Hunt talking about his Lestin Family and the opioid crisis. We had Max Daly talking about like how people are doing county lions and the Coke industry

in the UK. There's some really interesting stuff on there. So, yeah, sign up, guys. Yeah, and also send us questions too for the Q&A episode at the Underworld Podcast atjum.com. And lastly, I think we just got more merch up on Underworld rollpod.com slash merch. So if you want to get that, go for it. And let's let's get going. Yeah, Kansar. Anyone who's listened to these shows before read my GQ story from Myanmar, personal plug, editors hire us both, blah, blah, but you're going to know about Kansar.

This is the Shan Warlord, who pretty much shaped the Golden Triangle's drug trade into the biggest and most lucrative in the world during the Cold War. Golden Triangle, for those of you don't know, it's where Burma, Lao and Thailand meet. And it's kind of been infamous as a drug-producing area for for generations although i think it's pretty calm down now like i went there as a backpacker maybe 10 or 15 years ago and it was pretty it's beautiful uh still pretty underdeveloped but but not uh full of warlords and guerrillas like it used to be yeah and there's actually like people might have seen this but there's actually a scene in the ridley scott movie american gangster where denzil washington's frank lucas just horsebacks it into the asian outback

to get supplies straight from the source he picks up the so-called china white smack that gets so many Americans hooked on the drug in the 60s and 70s, and he ships it around with the help of GI's pissed off with the Vietnam War and looking to make a buck. As far as I can tell, it's even coming through Berlin, where Tempeloff Airport was like a bastion of the West and Eastern Europe. Anyway, the guy that Denzel Washington's Lucas meets and drinks tea with, that's loosely based on Kansar,

although I can't find any concrete evidence the two ever met, IRL. Yeah, so I'm actually reading a book by the guy who wrote the book that became American, the story that became American gangster Gary Jake. Mark Jacobson. And he, I mean, he doesn't specifically mention meeting Koonsa, but he does mention to Jacobson that he went up there and like,

you know, spent 10 days trekking back up there. And I guess almost died on the way back. He said they were getting shot at. He lost half of his first supply and all this sort of stuff. It's really interesting. Yeah. I mean,

like the Frank Lucas stuff is incredible as well. I mean, how they were like hiding smack in the, actually literally in the bodies of fallen GIs. And then he had his name. No, see, that's not. That's not true.

Is that, is that, is that, that's not true. Ah, okay. They weren't. He was hiding it in. They built their own coffins with a false bottom. Oh, right, okay. So he would hide it in the bottom of the coffins. He didn't hide it in their bodies.

Oh, interesting. Still, pretty crazy. But yeah, like, as we're going to get into further down this show, the setting, the atmosphere of that scene in the movie, it pretty much checks out. And I've actually interviewed a journalist who met Kansar a few decades ago. I've done firsthand reporting on this podcast. guys. Keep your well-earned $3 a month coming to pay for my Skype account. Yeah, I think from what I read,

he was pretty fairly open to journalists you could get there, right? Like, there was just a wild amounts of rebel groups and warlords and guerrillas all in those areas. And these journalists would just go and figure it out. Yeah, and as we're going to get into, he pretty much loved the limelight. He wasn't, he wasn't afraid of making himself the story. So Kinsar is massive. He's one of the biggest drug lords in the whole of history, worth around $5 billion, according to some sort of seen. But yeah, if you take that back to the mid-90s, that's like $9 billion today, which is four or five times an El Chapo, who's somehow become the official benchmark for all kingpins everywhere, even though Sechi Lop, if you go back to our Burmese meth lab for stuff on that

guy, I think he's worth like $17 billion. It's crazy. I think, you know, these numbers, they're not arbitrary, but they're kind of hard to pinpoint. They get thrown around a lot. I mean, people can't even get the fortunes of or estimate the fortunes correctly of like actors or people who earn their money legally. So it's kind of weird that we think we have these numbers pinpointed for drug lords and people who, you know, spend a lot of their career trying to hide their money through various sorts of shell companies and everything else. Yeah. And I mean a lot of this, a lot of these figures come from sort of drug crime fighting agencies as well. So maybe there's a bit of hyperbole there. But I'm not actually just doing this show on Kansar because

there's another Burmese drug lord, I think, might be even more interesting than him, if that's possible, who barely gets a mention in the history books, but who partly kicked off the entire Golden Triangle Opium industry decades before. And just like Kuntzar, she or he was an innovator. And just like Kansar, she or he was a lively figure, happy for the limelight, never short of a good story or two. So first we're going to take this show back to June 24, 1927. And that's when a princess named Yang Kian Su is born. She's the eldest daughter of 11 kids to the royal family of Kokang, which is an area of Shan state on the border of Yunnan province, China. It's around the same size as modern Lebanon. Now, this place is historically part of China. It's people speak Chinese, they're

ethnically Han, unlike the rest of Shan, but the British took it from China in 1897 and threw it into British India. Yes, India. And then it becomes a part of colonial Burma. So, well done again, London. Can you sort of explain where this is now and then who, like, who are the Shan? They're just a, they're a hill tribe. Is there anything else specific about them? Yeah, I mean, they have their own, they have their own language and culture and Shan State is a huge place. I think it's like, I'm not sure, but I think it's the biggest state in Myanmar, just on the border with China, in the Far East. It's, it's like historically been a bit of a black spot, like, for control by the various countries or the colonial forces that have been in control of Burma or Myanmar, whatever you want to call the country.

So it's really, really, it has its own kind of like really unique feel to the place. And if you go there, it's like stepping back in time. It's crazy. So Yang, she's educated in a convent and she quickly switches to her anglicised name, Olive. and she's expected to play the role of a princess, right? Fancy dresses, going through the godawful Chinese custom of footbinding, which for anyone who doesn't know is when women are made to wrap up their feet so tight that their toes grow and break around their souls,

and they're just hobbled with these little triangle flipper feet that are supposed to look like lotuses. It's really grim. Quite rightly, though, Olive's having none of this. And she tells her family to go buy their business. I couldn't even say that joke. It was so bad. she tells them to mind their own business.

Olive also refuses to wear classically feminine outfits, and she cuts her hair short. She even gets crushes on her brother's love interests and partners instead of boys. Eventually, she gets the name Miss Hairy Legs, and as you'd imagine, lots of people bully her, including her own brother, Francis. So what she does is Olive just runs with it. She loves guns, and she gets into trouble in school

for packing a revolver in classes. She's described in both male and female terms this point and she calls herself a lesbian but there's way more to it and i'm using some great material by gabriel poloque here who wrote an obituary about olive and she was the last western journalist to interview her before she died for the magazine coconuts yangon so shout out to coconuts she's also got a book called opium queen coming out soon apparently so shout out to gabriel we'd love to get you on for a bonus show yeah it sounds awesome has a great title yeah yeah it should be really good that one Ollo's family are top of the tree in cocaine, but then history comes knocking.

When Japan invades British Burma in 1941, they flee east across the Yunnan border to Kunming, which is the unofficial capital of the nationalist KMT, who are struggling against the Japanese and Mao's communists, so you can see why they didn't do so well in the long run. Can you just break down all of Chinese history really quickly in like two or three seconds and explain who the KMT are? Oh yeah, sure, that's easy. KMt, Kowmintang, they're the nationalists.

who are at the time that we're talking about here, they're fighting a kind of war for control of China with Mao's communists. They end up fleeing to two different places, one of which is Taiwan, which the Republic of China we still have today. And another one of them is this border with Shan in Myanmar, which I didn't really know about that much until quite recently. So, yeah, I think we're probably going to do some stuff about the KMT in the future

because they were pretty deep into drugs as well. but yeah so why didn't you nan olive's parents force her into a marriage with her cousin but she's not really a fan of that either she allegedly attacks him with a chamber pot when he tries to have sex with her it's unknown whether the pot was full or not jesus yeah says sister judy yang to palut quote she didn't want to be married to him she didn't want to have sex with him and she didn't want to be a mother olive does have a baby with this guy eventually naming her son juan jipu after the u.s jips riding around town. And she also has another daughter called Jewelie Leaper. I'm like 80-20 on that being a terrible Sean dad joke or a real thing. Yeah, no, it's a, it's a dad joke. I need to get some kids so I can

actually get away with these a bit more. By 1949, Mao has pushed the KMT out of China altogether, and he's christened his people's republic. Part of the KMT, like we just said, they flee south to Taiwan and reformed the Republic of China that still exist today. But another part of the KMT gets pushed out to Shan State in Burma, and actually Taiwan still claims the region now. Yeah, I found that surprising. I had no idea. Yeah, that's crazy, right? But Olive has her own plans, and I'll let the guys at war is boring take over from here, because they wrote a real boss piece about her. Quote, Olive was miserable in the role of a wife and mother. Just a few weeks after becoming

pregnant, Yang left her husband behind. They were divorced after two years, swaggering in a gray military uniform of her own design, with twin Belgian pistols. at her hip and a personal army of 300 Kokang militia under her command. Through connections with her brother, she had received an invitation from the Koomen Tang she couldn't refuse. So people think that a big driver of this is actually Olive's fight against gender conformity, she'd have a loveless marriage and preferring to be named Uncle Olive. I mean, what better way to make people accept you than down the barrels of a few hundred AK-47s?

Honestly, if you have the ability to form your own private militia, the cocaine gang, why wouldn't you, like, if you want to prove a point about your politics or not, you know? Yeah, I mean, how many more Patreon members do we need to start our own cocaine gang? That would be pretty cool. We need about like a 15-fold increase, but we'll get there. All right, we'll do it, yeah. But after Mao's takeover China, his army is fighting back the Americans and the UN in Korea.

So what does the U.S.'s newly minted CIA do? Well, it throws money at the KMT, hoping not only to contain leftism, but also to open up a whole new front to keep Chinese troops away from the Korean peninsula, keeping Mao, quote, honest, according to then, Southeast Asia CIA chief Anthony Persefni, aka Tony Poe. You're a little, you know, sounding characterously pro-Mao here. Oh, God. All right, that's going to take us down a dark path online.

This includes, of course, KMT member Chang Kai Chek, who orders his men to commandeer poppy fields in the region, and they do, and they get really rich from them. But the CIA also funds a KMT commander in Shan named Lee Me, and he's gearing up to storm Yunnan from an airstrip in the Burmese town of Monsat, which actually I spent like four days in that village when I was reporting the Meth Lab story, waiting for some gangsters to pave a route through the jungle. Never happened. Thank God for alcohol. Burmese beer. It's pretty good, actually.

So Lee Me and his so-called Lost Army, they're getting megabucks from Uncle Sam, and he turns to olive to ship the opium that will help the war effort against Mao. says Nationalist General Duan Givin at the time, quote, An army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium. But Olive is a bit of a maverick, and on her first route smuggling for Lee Me, a bunch of local Burmese cops along the way try and extort her. In response, she kidnaps them and Cheyngan marches them all the way to her compound.

It's, quote, careless, she later says. But this route is nonetheless a break. through for the Golden Triangle. Olive is the first person to motorize the opium industry, and she ships up to 600 tons of products each year by car and motorbike. It was really easy, I feel like, to become an innovator in drug trafficking back then. Yeah. It's like, why don't we not use don't use don't use don't evenikes, and that's like a brilliant innovation. It's like taking planes over the border from Mexico and the 70s, right? You don't have to be a genius, I feel like to figure some of this stuff out.

It's just like modern art, man. Just got to be the first. Don't have to be good. By now it's the late 50s, right? And Kuntar's career is just taking off. He's born on February 17, 1934, to a Chinese father and Shan mother, with the Chinese name Chang Chi Fu, aka Chu Fu. Chang's father dies when the boy is just three,

and his mother marries a local tax collector. So Chang is brought up by his grandfather in the hard-scrabble Burmese village of Loy Moor, buried deep in the Shan Hills. But while his brother's getting education, Chang spends some time at a Buddhist monastery. and get some basic military training from the KMT before forming his own KMT-affiliated Rebel Battalion

in his hometown as a 16-year-old kid, kicking off a life of arms. Wait, hold on now. He just, like, gathers his homies, and he's like, okay, we're a battalion now. How does that work? Yeah, he is. Yeah, he does pretty much.

And I think the KMT were just, like, funding loads of small-time militias at the time, just trying to open up as many different fronts against the communists. But remember the stories. There was a recent one about them too. Of the two little kids, they weren't Sean.

They were somewhere in Burma. They might have been Karen. And they were like two twins that were like 12 years old that had their own militia. Oh, really? We're supposed to be some sort of like living gods. Yeah. All right.

That sounds pretty cool. I'll go out there. Yeah, I got to look that up. That was a good story. Yeah, we should do that one. By the time Chang's 20 in 1954, olive is well on her way to becoming one of the region's most feared opium kingpins. The Burmese army, the Tatmador, soon gets tired of Leamy.

This rogue KMt general causing mayhem on its Chinese border, and it drives him out of the country. They throw Olive in prison five years too, but Olive's army is here to stay, and Olive's army is on its way, lull. When she gets out in 1959, her brother's Edward steps down as the nominal leader of Kokang, and other princes swerve the role too, so it's there for the time. taken. And as you can imagine, she snaps it up. She leverages her commanding position in the opium trade to furnish Kokang's coffers alongside casino and gold revenue. She also hires his former

school friend Lackey to cook the books, and he follows her around everywhere holding up a jar of cigarettes whenever she wants one. I like the jar of cigarettes thing, but also like who are they cooking the books for? Like, I don't imagine there's really strict tax collectors operating over there. You know, who do they have to... I think she had legit business. too, right? She was kind of involved in these casinos. I think she had some other businesses, so she was probably just trying to funnel shitloads of opium money through these legit things. So I guess that's where her little brown-nosed-in lackey guy comes in. But this is actually the point where Olive's story goes really Hollywood. At first, she chases a relationship with

an actress and former Miss Burma called Louisa Craig Benson, who's half Jewish and half Karen. and the Korean are these Chinese Tibetan ethnic group in in southeastern Myanmar they've been in perpetual war with the government I actually once had a fling with the daughter of a Kareni general so go me

Wait what? Yeah it's fun She was really nice But anyway Benson could easily have had a movie made about her too By the way And she winds up living in California I think in like Bakersfield

That we could do a whole other episode About her too But that love interest doesn't pull through for Olive but she does have a pretty high-profile affair with a Burmese actress called Wawa Win Shea, and she wooes Wawa with wins some gifts like tea, textiles and apparently bacon. Anyway, it seems to work because Wawa's name is on the deed to a massive Yangon villa, Olive once owned, despite Waiwai getting married in the 70s and denying her and Olive Whiffing, which is pretty sad. Also, I'm going to stop saying Wawa now.

And things aren't exactly going great for Kokang either during this time. In 1962, the Tatmador, led by a guy. guy called Ne Win, sees his control of Burma in a bloodless coup. But it instigates a wave of communal and racial violence against ethnic Chinese, among others, and denies them the chance to be educated in their native language. Bonjour, compadre. It's the... Priceline negotiator! How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those

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Ask your doctor about Epgless.com or call 1-800 lilyr-r-X or 1-800-545-9709. It's probably worth mentioning just how insane the Junta or Hunter, I don't know, leader Nehwin is. He throws Burma behind a disastrous socialist so-called bamboo curtain, cuts it off from the outside world, demolishes what there is left of industry. I'm going to quote here from my GQ piece that came out last year because why not. Quote, Wyn, who believed his lucky number was nine, issued banknotes and denominations of 45 and 90.

When in 1970, as Sue Sayre told him he would be killed from the right, Wynne ordered cast a switch from the left side of the road to the right. He ruled Burma just as bizarrely, decreeing a so-called Burmese way to socialism that crippled the economy, making Burma one of the planet's poorest countries. Opium producers switched to heroin, which is far stronger in the 1970s,

led by warlords who bivouacked in the jungles of Shan and other semi-lawless states, while the hunter hermitize itself with Rangoon. Rangoon's the colonial name for Yangon, by the way, the most important city of Myanmar. What's the switching to heroin bit? Like, were they already refining it? I thought they were already refining it.

They were doing it. They were doing it, but I think this is the wholesale kind of refining. So before OPM had been the key player, but around that time, it really all, switched over to heroin. In 1963, Ney's hunter throws Olive behind bars again,

and locks her up in Yangon's insane prison, one of Southeast Asia's most notoriously grisly places. Olive's there for five years, during which time Luo Jing Han, the brown knows who followed her about with the smokes, he takes over Olive's opium roots and gets mega, mega rich.

He winds up making a deal with the hunter to fight communists and sneaky rat, but he's going to get his comeuppance before long. So Oly's reign as the king or queen of opium is coming to an end. Kuntars, on the other hand, that's just beginning. Throughout the 50s, he grows his little band of merry men into a militia of a few hundred and goes freelance. Then he just switches sides, lining up alongside rebels, governments, whoever he thinks will give him the best chance to command the opium trade and build an empire.

In 1963, he forms his own militia called the Carqueyei Army, which I like that name. I mean, it's in the town of Lashio, which I also really, really like. And he just makes a career fighting anybody the Burmese wanted to, the Shan, the KMT, just so they let him carve out of fiefdom in the dense Shan Hills. It's at this time he changes his name from Chang, by the way, to Kunzar, which means Prince of Prosperity in Burmese. Washington instead calls him the Prince of Death, neat. Wait, he fought his own people and he took orders from the government.

I guess I kind of knew his story from later years, because I don't, It was always like he, I don't know. Yeah, the way he made himself was just by being like a massive turncoat. He was eager to do anything for power. And he was genuinely a big fan of Machiavelli's writings, including this following passage from his best known work, The Prince, quote, severity should be dealt out all at once. That by their suddenness, they may give less offence.

Benefits should be handed out drop by drop that they be relished more. And hold that thought about Machiavelli, because it's going to come up a lot in the second half of this show. In 1964, Kansar's got hundreds of troops. He's a freelance warlord with a little set up in the Shan village of Vinguan. And this is where his own vision comes in. While his rivals are still getting puppies from farmers, and with the exception of olive ferry-knit out on the backs of pack animals,

Kansar decides to domesticify production. He builds giant factories, bringing in chemists from across the border in Taiwan to, and he produces his own heroin, more potent, better margins. It's the best product in town. And that is good timing because the Vietnam War is raging a few hundred miles east

and an insane number of GIs are getting hooked on drugs as the war becomes more brutal, more hopeless, just terrible. Over 2.7 million Americans go to war against the Vietcom. Half-tri-gear and about 20% of them become addicted to some form of drug. I mean, that's insane. And these guys just aren't buying it in situ. They're flooding back to American cities and they're fueling a heroin boom in the 60s and 70s that's really bad

and makes a lot of gangsters very, very rich. And by the way, they're also getting high off their own supply. Between 1966 and 69, the US Armed Forces used 225 million stimulant tablets, that's meth, to improve performance or steady nerves. One commanding officer is quoted as saying, if it would get them to give up the hard stuff, I would buy all the marijuana and hashish in the Delta as a present.

And there's a brilliant 1970 documentary by John Pilger for British TV called The Quiet Mutiny, by the way. Decades before Pilger went all no chemical weapons bonkers. And it's just this amazing account of grunts losing it, refusing to fight, getting higher, telling generals to go screw themselves. It's on the reading list. I highly recommend people watch it. Yeah, I don't. I don't think we can recommend anyone to watch anything John Pillager or read anything he's ever done. Yeah, I'm going to say stop reading anything that he's done.

after 1970. But when these GIs, they come home, nobody helps them. I saw one newsreel from New York says that of 36,000 addicted Vietnam vets that year, I'm not sure exactly

which year that was. Only 998 are getting methadone treatment. It's like, it's really sad stuff. It's pretty shameful. In 1971, Nixon inaugurates the war on drugs, declaring addiction

the country's biggest issue. But it doesn't really do a lot, as we all now know. And this is from History.com report by Adam Yanos, quote, from heroin to amphetamins to marijuana, drugs were so commonplace among the troops that in 1970, liaison to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Egil Crow, told President Richard Nixon, you don't have a drug problem in Vietnam, you have a

condition, problems are things that we can get right on and solve. And then you get all these chinchilla coat wearing crooks like Frank Lucas earning hundreds of millions, if not billions of this stuff. It's nuts. Anyway, back to the jungle. In 1966, Kuntar cozes back up with the Tadmador, and it deputizes him to fight against the Communist Party of Burma, which is trying to harvest its own poppy and get

some of the trade. But being the Machiavelli and think he's always been, Konsar uses the alliance to beef up his forces. And when he hits 800 men, he tells the Tampador to stick it and he strikes it out alone again. I mean, why is anyone cozy up to him at all? The trip with the mules I described at the top of the show is basically his godfather, Michael in the Italian restaurant moment.

And he's poised to take over more senior KMT drug lords. When the Laotians bomb him, he loses his gear and his whole world comes crashing down. I kind of want to know more about that Laotian general. Yeah, he was on the pay, well, he wasn't on the payroll, but he's working with the CIA. I didn't see a lot more about him, but apparently he died in 1978, so he wasn't around a huge amount longer. But he's kind of like a standing to show how the CIA was really pushing the drugs out there back in that day. They were really trying to use it as a way to shift all the different moving plates out there. But two years later, the Burmese hunter captures Kansar,

and he spends the next four years behind bars in Mandalay. Here's your midpoint, Kuntar, sitting in a cramped dirty prison cell plotting his comeback. Yeah, I mean, that's a cliche movie scene, but only because it's often true. Pretty true. Yeah. In that, In 1970, by the way, for lovers of Shard and Freud, Luo, who's that cigarette flunky who took over all his trade, he gets double-crossed by the Tatmador and spends ten years behind bars. I mean, this is basically how modern Myanmar functions too. It's just a series of pacts and battles and truces and shady deals between mini-states and fiefdoms. It's absolute madness.

In 1973, Kunsa's Shan Acolytes have had enough. They kidnapped two Soviet doctors in Tongji, another really beautiful city. in the Shan Highlands, and they negotiate a swap for their main man. He then sets up shop across the border in Thailand in a place called Ban Hintech, near Chang Rai, and he sits pretty paying off the local Thai Army generals to watch his back. Soon, he forms a group called the Shan State Army, with high-minded rhetoric of an interdependent nation

that's more sham than Shan, if you know what I mean. All right, nicely done there. Ah, wow, I'm going to take that one, home. More importantly, Kansaw ramps up opium production. By the mid-1970s, the US government claims that 80% of opiates from Burma come from Kinsar's narco troops, around half the entire planet's supply crazy. It places a $2 million reward on his head, which goes unclaimed, which just goes to show just how much money he's dishing out.

And here's Peter Bourne, Jimmy Carter's Drug Policy Chief in 1977-78. He's talking about efforts to reduce poppy cultivation in Burma. Quote, Kuntar was very committed to the independence movement, And I think some of that had to do with the stage of life that he had reached. He didn't want to go down in history as just somebody who was involved in drugs. And I think he saw an opportunity for himself, in effect, to be a national hero leading an independence movement. But according to journalist Bernd Lintner, who I just found out actually, Berndt Linnah had a hit taken out by Kuntar back in the day.

Kuntar was illiterate and merely the front for Chinese mafiosos who ran the show from Yunnan. Quote, he was basically a country. Bumpkin. He was a peasant and never the brains behind the organization. I mean, I'm not sure the true, I know, like, maybe he wants to get his own back burnt. I'm not really sure the truth lies fully in either of these descriptions. Like, Consar's revolutionary spirit was clearly afront of his, for his business, like not the other way round. And he was no idiot. I mean, anybody who builds an empire almost from scratch, they might be an asshole, but stupid they most definitely are not. Alfred McCoy, who wrote the politics of Herod,

who I'd love to get on this show. He describes Kuntzat as, quote, the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium and said he was, quote, the first of the Golden Triangle Warlords to be worthy of his media crown as Kingpin. That's quite an endorsement right there.

Yeah. What does King Ping mean? I remember you telling me about this before. Yeah, well, no, now there is an official designation of a foreign narcotics campaign that's like part of the law. It's like it's an act. They did it to, I mean, a lot of the narcos in Mexico

and then Caesar, the abuser, who we talked about in the Dominican episode. And yeah, it's like a legal designation as a kingpin. And I think it allows for various prosecutions to be made and things like that. Okay, interesting. So yeah, Kuntzar, pretty big guy by now. And in 1975, communist win massive vicarious.

as we know in Vietnam and Lao and Pol Potting his Khmer Rouge psychopaths implementing Year Zero in Cambodia. I mean, this is very bad news for humanity, but good news for Kinsar, because the nationalist KMT's control of smuggling routes in the region is heavily disrupted. In the 1976 to 77 crop year, the Shan States Army 3,500 strong militia, they haul 70 tons of Rooping across the Thai border, which is the so-called front door to the rest of the world for heroin. And he does it in 12 caravans, with an average 116 mules and 335 guards that each time. And that's huge, and it's getting even more huge. Wait, so is he living in Thailand then growing in Burma or going back and forth?

Yeah, he's living in Thailand and growing in Burma, although, yeah, that switches over the years. This is a passage from a report of the diplomat, quote, Kunzar's outlets through Thailand suddenly assumed unparalleled importance. At its peak in the early 1980s, the SUA had 20,000 men under arms and claimed to control around 8 million people. But Kunzah's pose as a liberation fighter was a sham. His objective was to win control of the drug trade emanating from the Golden Triangle. And in 1980 to 81, there's a record 500-ton harvest, half of which actually goes to local addicts. That's an insane amount to go to local addicts too.

You've got to imagine that, like it's, first of all, it's an insane amount of people being a day. addicted to heroin, opium, but also, like, that's definitely got to cut into profit margins. Like, I imagine that everything they sell that continues to go overseas, they're probably making a lot more money off that than they are off local addicts buying it for, you know, pennies on the dollar. Yeah, and as I'm about to get into, like, the markups were insane, but I guess there was just such a huge local market and almost no chance of getting anything caught or taken off you or anything.

So, yeah, tons of people addicted to heroin in that region back then. I read a great Mother Jones article actually from 1982, and it puts together all the pieces of this mad industry that this is creating. For example, there are 50,000 heroin addicts in West Germany at that point, 300,000 in Malaysia, 50,000 in Hong Kong, which is insane given the place barely has 5 million people back then, and 400,000 in the US. And tons of this stuff heads straight through Thailand. That's where Kansai has his handshake deals with the big wigs. But Lodes also goes through the Himalayan trails at northern Nepal, ferried by a Tibetan tribe called the Menangis. And actually, I'm heading off to Nepal in like a month or so, and I'm going to head to that region,

speak to the Menangis all about this, which I'm really looking forward to. It's going to be a great bonus show. Guys, Patreon, yep, you know. Anyway, these guys get stuff through airports like Dum Dum in Kolkata, New Delhi, and there are even fleets of US Air Force guys landing at Berlin's Temple Off Airport with sacks of Iranian, quote, tan, they pick up in Turkey.

I mean, this is a truly global game. And the markups? Insane. 1.6 kilos of so-called joy sold from a poppy farmer to a refiner in the Golden Triangle. That makes the farmer 250 bucks. You get a third of a pound of heroin from these poppies, and that's worth 600 bucks before anything else happens. In Hong Kong, that's worth 15 grand,

35 grand to a wholesaler in NYC, and it can make up to 640 grand on the streets. And I know it's more complicated than this, because there's loads more steps in the way, but it's fun to point out this is a 256,000% markup. I mean, not even my own hex is doing that well. Yeah, that's like having it moon with every kilo, you know? Yeah.

So isn't hex is crashing right now, is this? Hex is crashing. I was about to say that. I was really pissed off this morning. No wonder you're stressed out. I know, right? In March 984, a truck bomb explodes at the KMT HQ in Chang Mai, Thailand, and it devastates what's left of the KMT's heroin industry,

and it basically hands complete control of the Golden Triangle straight to Kun Sa. Between 1981 and 1989, Burmese opium production goes from 500 tons to 2,430 tons. And it switches to the high-grade China white smack you mentioned in our last episode on Chinatown, New York, and it's hooking even more unfortunate Americans. Kunzor actually crowns a new group, the Mong Thai Army, in 1985. Very Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing, lots of these rebel groups are. And he sets up in Hohong near My Hong's son in Sihland. God, I've got those names right.

I can't believe it. He gets cocky as hell around this time too. Definitely a blueprint for Escobar. He invites celebrities, like you said at the top of the show, like even US congressmen to his compound. He tells them he can help them reduce heroin production in the region if they'll just get behind his freedom fight, which is God-level trolling.

I spoke to Canadian journalist Tricia Elliott this week, actually, about interviewing Kansai in 1990, which is sounding like a crazy trip, right? She's working at the Bangkok Post, just about ship out of town when she gets the call. She can't believe it, and she heads to My Hong Son before being taken on days of boats, motorcycles, and cars,

his compound, which she described as pretty much the most functional town in the country. City streets, shops, new buildings, pretty amazing. After a couple of days, Trisha meets the big man, and he's giving her a bunch of propaganda saying he's not involved in the drug trade. But she said he looked, quote, straight out of central casting warlord.

Kaki shirt, AVA, her sunglasses, and he's drinking tea and chain smoking fancy Chinese cigarettes the whole time. Pretty amazing. Actually, Trish is worried at that point she's going to get used as collateral and be kidnapped because that's allegedly what's going on at the time. But after the interview, she's sent back across the border to tell the tale. And if anyone wants to send me or Danny on trips like this,

yeah, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. I think it's pretty hard to have these sort of adventures nowadays, It was a lot easier back then when everyone didn't have access to making their own warlord TikTok dances or whatever it is. I mean, maybe we could get some money doing that, I don't know. And thanks to Ron Felber,

who's booked The Hunt for Kansar, is a great link between him and the New York heroin trade you got into last week. He gives something of a structure to Kunsa's operation within the US. There's him and his military and finance guys at the top as this triumvirate. And then refineries in Lao,

northern Thailand. This often heads overland through her Southeast Asia, then boat to Hong Kong, where local triad ship it over the States with Lynn Chin Kong, aka Mr. Lin, who's Kuntar's head of sales. Lin then passes the gear onto two Chinatown factions, Johnny Eng and Paul Ma, who broker it to Asian street gangs, the Sicilian mob, and the guys living in Spanish Harlem. Yeah, we got into that a bit. I mean, Johnny Eng was infamous for what he was doing with the Flying Eagles.

I'm not Flying Dragons, I'm sorry. Paul Ma, I don't remember hearing too much about him getting involved in that, but, you know, I'd have to look further. Yeah, yeah, it's in that book. I mean, it's a pretty nuts book. It goes all around the place, but I could do it in editor, but it's really interesting. But it just shows, like, it's pretty tightly organized this operation, like way more than when the kingpins like Lucas were commanding the trade a few years before. Anyway, on August 8th, 88, that's 888, student-led democracy protest against Ne Win come to a bloody head,

and the Tatmador tightens its vice-like grip on Burma, renaming it Myanmar. The Communist Party of Burma, which is in control of Shan State, splits into four different factions, and olives called upon to make sure the Tatmador and what was then the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA, don't annihilate each other. Actually, if you read books about Myanmar, there's usually like a two or three-page glossary of the so-called ethnic army groups.

There's so many of them now. And Olive, yeah, I mean, why would you think that Miss Harry Legs isn't going to be successful? I mean, who's going to defy her? And that means that everyone can take a break from killing each other and focus on their true favorite pastime, which of course, is shipping huge quantities of heroin across the world. Wait, so had she been in prison this whole time? Was she back warlording? Was she just kind of operating at like a smaller level? Yeah, she was pretty much just sitting in a backseat, like as a bit of a

co-cang celebrity at this point. I think she pretty much bowed out of the drug trade after she went to prison that first time. So she's just like revered as a really, just someone who gets stuff done, I mean, which she did. And her actions, they spell good news for Kansar because he's the biggest player in the region. And like we said a ton of times on this show, violence is bad for. business. By the mid-1990s, Kuntzah seems absolutely bulletproof. He's got the world's richest production of illegal drugs. He's got Thailand's leaders in his pocket. Washington is

getting royally pissed off by this point. So it launches something called Operation Tiger Trap, named apparently for Kuntzar's love of tiger penises as aphrodisiacs. I mean, I think you grind them up or saying you don't use them as sex toys. I think everyone knew that, but thanks for painting a picture. I'm just trying to be vivid, man. People like it. This is Donald Ferraroni. the DAA Bangkok chief from 93 to 95 in an interview of Frontline. Quote, Kuntzar was doubling his capacity, his ability to produce heroin every 10 years. The amounts that were coming out were staggering. The heroin purity on the streets in inner cities in the United States had more than quadrupled.

Some places were going from 6 and 10 and a half purity that had received in a dosage unit on the street. Now we were looking at 60 to 80 to 90% pure heroin on the street. And the problem certainly over the last 20 years did not lessen. It went in the exact opposite direction. It was a disaster. And you could, by looking at couldn't size capacity, understand that he was not having a cash flow problem. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day,

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Yeah, I don't think the heroin on the street was looking at like 60 or 80 or 90%. Right? They cut it, I think back down to, I think the max I've seen was like 30%. I think Frank Lucas talked about how usually on the street was 3%. He put it up to like 8 or 10%. But generally, you know, the heroin itself that was coming in was really pure. But it would be cut numerous times before they put it on the street. And then it was still three or four times stronger than the stuff that was normally

out there. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty bonkers. I mean, this guy's DEA, so I guess he's got a vested interest in kind of bigging it up, but this guy goes on, quote, his heroine was always the best in the business, that's Kansaz, of course. I think you have to understand the structure of this guy's organization to get a sense of the power. He had, by the time I arrived back from my second time in South East Stager in 93 to 94, he had 20 to 25,000 men under arms. I mean, that is a sizable army. Tiger Trap can't really. really penetrate Kansar's operations directly. So it tries to strangle the Mung Thai Army's supply chains.

Yeah, see supply chain problems, man. It's not a new thing. We're staying topical. Always. Here's Ferraroni again, quote, we needed to open up a lot of avenues and we needed to get a lot more help. And that included that we need to shut down the resupply that was going on on the border between Thailand and Burma.

So the DEA gets witnesses to testify against Kansar, and it raids every arm of its distribution network, especially stuff in Thailand, which like I said before is the front door of the heroin trade. Danads Ferrooni, quote, we asked the tires to restrict the flow of precursor chemicals, weapons, cement, steel, gasoline, and trucks. The tires took it a step further.

They actually cut off food supply that was coming out of Thailand. So Tiger Trap cuts off Kansar's money. It closes the door on massive shipments, guns, even food. Kuntzah's unable to pay. his men and they just kind of abandoned him. I'm hoping to get one of the agents who worked on the operation to come on the show in a couple of weeks actually. So stay tuned there, guys. And you think this is the end of Kansar that he dies in a hail of bullets and bloodshed

or alone in some American prison after being picked up by DAA SWAT teams? Well, that does not happen. In 1994, local rebels break down Kunzah's defenses and the Burmese government works on heroin shipments with its allies. That's the Burmese government getting involved in dope. guys. Corners and out of product, Kuntzar turns to his sense for the occasion. In January 1996, he and his 1700 men staged a dramatic surrender to the Tatmador in front of TV cameras for the country's national channel. He promises that, quote, we will work together to eradicate

the opium and narcotics drugs, which endanger the entire humanity of our country. So, more trolling by our man Kansar there. Yangon reacts by a grunt in the old man immunity from prosecution. And he lives out his days in a Yangon villa with his eight children, two wives and four teenage Shan mistresses, just yards away, by the way, from the place that's keeping Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. And this coming sides of the time in which the Wa, an ethnic group on the Chinese border, are pumping out millions of so-called Yaba or crazy meth pills. And Afghanistan is overtaking poppy production and Golden Triangle heroin is no longer the biggest production market on the planet. And we will for sure.

do an episode on the wah because those guys are mental. Yeah, the war rule. The war are crazy. Anyway, on October 25th, 2007, Kuntzar dies peacefully at home, age 73. And that is how the story ends if you basically play your cars right and don't Instagram your crimes, folks. But I don't want to end this episode with Kuntzar. I want to come back to Olive.

She dies in July 2017 at the ripe old age of 90 in the city of Moussa, Myanmar, which is just outside Kokang. She seems to have been an incredibly popular figure there, despite the fact she was clearly trans or genderqueer in a time before those things are widely recognized, which is kind of heartbreaking. But there's a touching twist to the story, courtesy of Gabrielle Palloch's reporting. I'll let her take it from here. Quote, Olive's lifelong struggle with an inability to conform to Burmese society's female gender norms earned her the moniker hairy legs, and led journalists to erroneously describe her as bisexual. Later in life, however, she asked to be called Uncle Olive.

Her brother Francis, who pre-deceased her by a few months, said he still felt regret when he thought of how frequently he scolded his sister for not being normal. We would ask her why she didn't wear women's clothes or why she had to have a short haircut. Who'd shout at her for chasing women, he said. Back then, we didn't know about lesbians and transsexuals. I told her when I went to visit her two years ago

that I was sorry, Francis said in an interview in his home in London in 2015. I told her, I will call you uncle from now on. Wow, it's a good thing we didn't have to get Dave Chappelle for this episode like the plan is. Definitely. Yeah, although, you know, he's still free to come on. We welcome him, right? Anyway, thank you guys again for tuning in.

I just want to make sure we thank our bigger sponsors on Patreon. P. Thomas, Mike Ulrich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Chris Cusamano, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, Doug Prunderville, and Jared Levy. Thanks, guys, so much without you guys. you know, we'd be far less motivated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks. That's a massive, massive help to us, guys.

And yeah, that's the end of this week's show. We've got a really, really cool one coming up. You're doing a show on Israel, right? Yeah, yeah. We'll talk about it next week. All right. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination

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