The Underworld Podcast - The Headhunting Burmese Tribe Running the World's Biggest Cartel: The Wa w/ Patrick Winn

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

The Wa tribe, an indigenous tribe residing in the mountainous Burma China borderlands, has long had a reputation as a people not to be trifled with. And yes, they were actually headhunters, well into the 20th century. Known as powerful warriors who weren't keen on outsiders telling them what to do, they were able to carve out their own autonomous state in Myanmar despite the ruling junta's militant authoritarianism, Long before they launched the powerful United Wa State Army in 1989, various warlords had grown opium and sold it to a shadowy group of Chinese dealers known as The Exiles. And then in the late 1980’s, there’s a man that takes the helm. He’s quiet, unassuming, basically an accountant and logistics guy. He’s half Chinese and Half Wa. Not a tough guy cowboy headhunter war lord. But even today, they still speak his name quietly, if at all. Wei Xuegang. And he sets up his heroin trafficking operation to be one of the biggest the world has ever seen.  Much, much more in this episode, with Patrick Winn, Bangkok based journalist and author of the new book Narcotopia, including various CIA and DEA entanglements, battles with the infamous Khun Sa, and the move to the potent asian methamphetamine pills known as Yaba. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What they call China White, see, it doesn't actually come from China. It comes from those wild border regions of Burma. That's where peasant farmers grow opium poppies, churning out the raw ingredient to all that heroin causing Americans to drop dead. And the most potent poppies, they're grown by an indigenous group of mountain folk with a feared reputation, the Wa people. They've got their own military, the United Wa State Army, that's part army, part government, part narcotic syndicate, no one can even enter their territory without permission, not even Burma's own vicious military.

Even they don't want to mess with the Waugh. The Waas rep as a people not to be trifled with, it goes back generations. And yes, they are actually headhunters, or they were well into the 20th century. And there was no shortage, too, of warlords in the region, funded off opium growing and trafficking. Mostly, though, the Wa,

they just wanted to be left alone by outsiders. And then, in the late 1980s, there's a man that takes the helm. He's quiet, unassuming, basically an accountant and genius logistics guy. He's got a crazy background with all sorts of traffickers all over Southeast Asia, and he's half Chinese and half-wa. Not a tough guy cowboy headhunter warload, the kind of guy who looks like he shops at Costco. But even today, they still speak his name quiet.

if at all. Wei Jigong. And he sets up a heroin trafficking operation to be one of the biggest the world has ever seen. But in 1991, the DEA has a breakthrough. They've got a small office in Burma's capital, a crumpling city in the country's military around heartland. A figure from the United Wai State Army

comes down from the mountains and reaches out to the DEA, a man named Saul Liu. Saul Liu is a stern man. he doesn't smile much. He looks people straight in the eye and he acts like he's on a mission from God. We'd like to make a deal, he says, the DEA. We're ready to come out of the shadows.

We'll actually quit the drug trade forever and make sure no one else ever grows poppies in our territory. We'll help you save countless American lives. But if this is going to work, they're going to have to change strategy completely and embrace us instead of trying to lock us up. It's a dangerous move. It's a betrayal of that man whose name often goes unmentioned.

This is the Underworld podcast. Welcome back to yet another episode of the Underworld podcast, the audio storytelling experience. We're two journalists who live on opposite sides of the earth and have reported all over it, bring you stories of international organized crime. I am one of your host, Danny Golds. I am usually joined by Sean Williams, who is not here today, but we have a doozy of an episode on some wild stuff. that I've long been interested in. So get ready for that.

As always, housekeeping, you know, bonus episodes on patreon.com slash down the world podcast. You can also sign up on Spotify and on iTunes to support us in our quest to live a life comparable to a Burmese warlord. Don't forget, you know, check TikTok, Instagram, YouTube channels, all that. We do 60-second videos there. Hit us up if you want to advertise. And today I am joined by a man whose career. I am actually very envious of true old school journalist of, you know, warlords and pirates and

jungle guerrillas and all sorts of stuff like that. Patrick Wynn, say hello to us. So happy to be here, Danny. Yeah, I am psyched to have you. Patrick, for those who don't know, is an American journalist. He's been based in Bangkok for the last 16 years. He wrote a book that I think we've talked about a number of times called Hello Shadowlands, which is just really great, you know, a bunch of different stories exploring the lives of criminals in Southeast Asia, definitely pick that up and pick up his new one that we're going to talk about today. He's going to tell that story. It's called Narcotopia in search of the Asian drug cartel

that survived the CIA. And it's like proper adventure journalist stuff. Like he's in, in the hinterlands, in the middle of nowhere, doing stuff that I think journalists don't really do anymore. It's like a throwback to the old days of crazy stuff. He spent years investigating the United WAA State Army, which some call the most powerful drug trafficking organization on Earth. It's located inside the borders of Myanmar, but functions as sort of like an independent nation state with their own boss, its own government, its own national anthem. I think we've talked about it maybe once or twice.

And today, the DEA calls it a, quote, powerful criminal syndicate, which is not entirely wrong. It sits at the center of a $60 billion Asian meth trade, bigger than any in the Americas. In its territory, they've got the labs turning out the pink meth pills called Yaba, which we've talked about before. And according to Patrick's book, they're sold in higher volumes than Big Macs, which, yeah, that is, that's a lot of meth. So, spoiler alert, the Wa did not join hands with America to quit the drug trade. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. I know you're going to hate that I bring this up.

But my first introduction to the Wa was when I was preparing to go to Burma for the first time in 2013. I was reading Bertranden Rintner's book. It's a massive Burma book. It has the coolest title ever, which is Burma in Revolt, Opium and Insurgency since 1948. And he has this part from, I'm not going to be entirely accurate here. I think maybe the mid-20th century, and I think it's the English or someone trying to basically settle the Wa.

And they bring them to the negotiating table, and they're like, don't you want medicine and, like, doctors and teachers and schools and basically things that that comprise civilization. And they're just like, no, we don't want that. We're wild people. We don't need any of that nonsense. And, you know, I fell in love right there. So tell us about the, about the Wa.

Yeah, let's get all the, the Wah are savage mystique out of the way in the beginning. We have to do it. Look, the Wa are an indigenous group. There's about a million of them. They've lived in the mountains where Burma and China meet. since before recorded history. Different empires have tried to conquer them. The British, as you mentioned, Chinese dynasties, the CIA, which we'll get to later.

So why have these groups always failed? Well, the wa are actually much more clever than they're given credit for. Probably what you ran into when you started looking into the wa is their practice, which they no longer do, of head hunting. Right? Okay. So let's get into that. Yes, until about the 1960s, Wah villages all had Waugh warriors who were fierce and proud of it. And what they would do is they would put their enemies heads on sticks, mostly to scare off intruders. As I point out in my book, Scottish Highlanders did this. Well, they severed heads. Japanese samurai did this. French

revolutionaries, very famous for severing heads. They all did this because there was a reason behind it. It was a very effective tactic at scaring people away from their territory. So that head hunter warrior mystique had a purpose of keeping them independent and free, which was the ultimate goal. when you mention British-backed It was actually British-backed Burmese emissaries coming to the Wa and saying Hey, don't you want to fold into Burma

You know, hospital schools, all that Doesn't that sound good? This is probably a crap analogy But, you know, imagine a team of, you know, People from the Russian or the Chinese state going into the Ozarks and being like, Hey, you know, don't you want us around? Don't you want us to develop roads and schools for you? Beed it. No. No, get out of here.

So that's the spirit in which that comes from. And yet that quote, I've seen it so many places used to make the wa seem like, wow, they just love being primitive. No, that's not it. They just don't love outsiders coming in and telling them what to do. Something you see in mountain peoples all over the world. So yeah, that warrior mystique, you know, I say early in my book, that warrior mystique was so strong that during the Cold War, the CIA actually tried to use it to its advantage. It tried to recruit Wa warriors to make trouble for communist China. I found this memo from 1953 that said CIA memo, then secret, now declassified, said, you know, what the wa really want is for white men to rule them. And it's like, no, that's completely absurd.

But the CIA wanted to use that warrior mystique to its advantage. Look, the wa don't want, didn't want anyone to rule them then. They don't want anyone to rule them now. And I'm sure we'll get into this, but as it turns out, if you don't want anyone to rule you, you need a armed state of your own. estate cost money, and one way to make a lot of money is through the narcotics trade. So that's much of the thrust of my book. Yeah, I think, look, it definitely piqued my interest reading that, but I can, I totally understand how, you know, that becomes an overall sort of legend about these people, and it can, you know, lead to, I think, a lot of negative implications of who they are and what they represent.

But I think you mentioned it too, like mountain people, right? We've talked about this on the podcast before. I think it was Judith, I forget who wrote it. She wrote a book about various mountain, a journalist about various mountain people and why, you know, they seem like they might be prone to more warlike conditions. And it's, you know, the nature of living in those sort of regions. And then also when you mix that with opium and with that sort of trade,

you know, we've seen that in like in Sinaloa, in Afghanistan and then Pakistan and those areas where you mix that in. and things people might have been doing for generations, you know, it can get a little messy. And when your book opens up, I think eventually, like, one of the first parts of it, you talk about these sort of warlords that developed that grew opium in that region, in this sort of border region of China and Myanmar,

where the Wa are from, that was just kind of just wild and relatively, I don't know if lawless is the right term, but basically the kind of place where, warlords sprang up and were able to, you know, create these sort of opium, not cartels, but basically, you know, they ran these militias. Can you get into that a little bit? Yeah, sure. And just for context, why opium? So in the Wa hills, just picture an area maybe like the size of, I don't know, New Jersey or something. So it's not a vast area, but it's pretty big.

their area is just the soil is really bad it's very bitter um it's very alkaline crops don't grow very well i mean it's also all slopes valleys slopes valleys slopes valleys slopes valleys slopes valley so there's no wide open plains where you could grow wheat or something like that um so crops are difficult to grow but soil that is very alkaline and bitter is great for growing opium poppies um and opium poppy is also like chilly weather. So their geography really steered

them towards the opium poppy. I mean, what else can they grow that has so much value to the outside world? Really nothing. I mean, they're not going to grow a bunch of tomatoes because they'll all be rotten by the time it got to any city. They're really far away from any city.

So that's why the emphasis on opium. So yeah, these warlords sprang up, in part because the Wa got connected to the broader international drug trade. So, I don't want to get off on too big of a tangent, but they were approached by what was then the biggest international drug cartel in Southeast Asia. They were all these Chinese anti-communists who were pushed out of China and they kind of washed into Burma. And they kind of washed into Burma. And they had dreams of going back and retaking China.

We're talking like 1949-ish. The CIA approached this group of anti-communist Chinese, gave them weapons, medicine, supplies, and built them up into a fighting force. And the idea was they were going to roll back into China and retake it. I think we all know China is still communist. That didn't work out. They came back into Burma and decided. all right, well, and I'm really generalizing this, but just, you know, a very potted history, they decided, well, let's just become an opium trafficking syndicate. So with the CIA still

supporting them, they bullied a lot of the indigenous people in the mountains of Burma into growing more and more and more opium. This is talking about areas beyond where the Wa live, just all around the hills and mountains of Burma. Burma. When they got to the Wa, it ain't so easy to bully the Wa. And so they had to trade with them fairly. One thing that they did is they traded automatic weapons to certain powerful Waugh clans. And those clans received those weapons, became more powerful in turn, forged these business relationships with this cartel. I'm just going to call them the exiles for short because they were exiled Chinese anti-communist.

So with lots of weapons in hand, they were able to dominate more areas, dominate a greater area within their respective parts of Wa State. And they became warlords churning out vast quantities of opium for this giant opium-moving cartel that I refer to as the exiles and was receiving support from the CIA. So that's how they plugged into the international drug. trade in the beginning. Yeah, and just, I want to just backtrack just for a second. Before that got going, sort of was society. And I found this really fascinating. You get into this in the book, too, was kind of like, you know, these clans and these separate villages. It wasn't like a sort of

unified group, right? They just sort of like kept their separate ways, separate villages, towns, whatever you want to call it, and clans who would occasionally clash and fight with each other. Is that, is that accurate? That's totally accurate. Yeah, the anthropologists will tell you, the very nature of Wa life is egalitarian. It's almost anarchistic in a way. I mean, look, they, in these individual villages and hamlets, they didn't have stores and they didn't have a mayor and they didn't have prisons. It was these independent like pockets of civilization and then a couple valleys over, you would have another Wa village. They usually have these giant

wooden walls around them and often booby traps. So if people approach, they might fall into a pit filled with spikes and sometimes they would put poison that they would milk from these local amphibian creatures and put that on the tips of the spikes so that you then get poisoned when you fall on the spikes. That's if you're crazy enough to try

to approach a walled fortress where inside live Waugh warriors you know this is they each it's all like separated into little constellations of civilization so the Wa

wa weren't this tribe with a great chief that they all revered and he's the great council of holy men it no no no it was not like that at all it was much more anarchistic I think is the

best way to put it yeah and then eventually they have this this sort of coming together right the United Wa State Army which I want to get to because I mean, you're one of the few people I know who's gotten access to it, which is a whole other story and Saul Lou and all that. But, you know, okay, so we have this happening with the exiles and the warlords.

What happens, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s? What are we seeing there? What is Saul Liu involved in? Can you, you know, tell us a little bit about him and your relationship with him and then sort of use that as like a, I guess, narrative structure into this whole time period? If that isn't too tall a task. right there. Yeah, I'll try to give a general synopsis. So during the Cold War, 60s and 70s, mostly 60s, there were these different Wa warlords that had come to prominence because of their attachment to the CIA-backed drug cartel.

And the CIA was doing other things in there, too. They were building listening stations in Wao territory. These are radio outposts that like soak up transmissions from communist Chinese military radios. The CIA with its junior partner, Taiwanese military intelligence, would pay basically the certain warlords to go into communist China and blow up bridges, steal documents, tap radio lines, all sorts of things. So the CIA was heavily involved in the region through its partner Taiwanese military intelligence. This was all an effort to keep communist China from expanding into the Wa territory. And these warlords, one of whom was a man named Saul Liu, who I think we'll get to later, they were resisting the expansion of communist China into Wa lands. and they ultimately failed.

A communist puppet government was installed over the Wa people. It ruled for 20 years. It was pretty awful. It came in with all of these utopian promises of a greater life for the impoverished Wa people, didn't pan out. Even into the 80s, when China's government was moving away from Maoism and towards a more, more free market, more capitalist vision, the communists that were installed to rule over those mountains of Myanmar on the Wa side, we're like, eh, no, we're actually really orthodox.

Mao wouldn't have approved of this. So even Beijing was looking at them like, all right, these guys are these guys are ready to go. Bonjour, compadre. It's the price line negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Price Line app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals.

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Stop cutting me up. The jurors sat in a dark room, hands resting on a Ouija board. They weren't guessing. They were asking the victim, Who killed them? Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. Meesterfer. And every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling true crime story connected to that exact day

in history. From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult, and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, Morning Cup of Murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot, but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a Morning Cup of Murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Long story short, some of the Wa who were being ruled over by this communist party, rose up, dethroned them. To their credit, did not line them up against

a wall and slaughter them all. They just said, hey, where do you want to go? Back to Burma. You want to go to China. What's the deal? They said, uh, send us over to China. All right, pack up your stuff, get out of here. You can carry, if you can carry it in your hands, we'll let you take it out of here. But you don't run us anymore. And they established what is now called Wa State in 1989, this nation state that has its own laws, its own vision for the wa people that is not, they didn't want to be ruled over. I mean, it goes back to what their ancestors thought and felt. We don't want to be ruled over.

We want to run our own affairs. Now we're going to do it through a nation state. Not one that goes to the UN and says, please, please recognize us and put our flag up on your wall. Nope, nope. They do things their own way. They don't need anyone's outsized. side approval, but it's going to be a functioning nation state. 1989 until today, it's been there.

So basically, you know, there are a lot like someone else that was born in 1989, which is Taylor Swift, you know, the same sort of power. I was going to say that, Danny. Yeah, I was going to get to that. Just basically doing what they want, not taking crap from anyone else, including the United Nations. That's exactly right. Absolutely.

Yeah. Actually, I didn't even really think you needed to mention that. It's so obvious. So you actually, I mean, like I said, they're not. not easy people to get to, and you get access there through this guy, Saul Liu, who's fascinating, and also has this incredible backstory. I don't even know how to describe him, so I'm going to let you do that because it's, you know, your book. Yeah, I'll just explain to you how I met him because it was sort of by accident. Probably going back at least 10 years, I had dreamed

of getting access somehow to the inner circle of the United Wa State Army. I mean, let me just explain why in case the listeners don't fully understand. I mean, it is really one of the most unique places on Earth. Totally independent. Its own electricity grid. It's on highways. Its own, you know, flags, national anthem, you name it. No one goes in without their permission, though.

So, yeah, it's completely inside Myanmar, but it is its own thing. It's also really big. it's about the size of Belgium. It has 30,000 troops. As I point out in my book, that's more than Sweden. And it's essentially a narco state, and I don't mean that in a sneering way. Kind of like Saudi Arabia is a petro state. Wa state is a narco state.

Narcotics are this financial engine of the Waugh government. So, look, the leaders are very adverse to scrutiny. if I'm going in and trying to interview them, it's a bit like trying to interview El Chapo or someone like that. I mean, they think all Americans are spies with good reason. Just sort of an impossible endeavor. So about five years ago, I was still trying to do this ridiculous thing,

trying to talk to one of the leaders. And I was kind of nosing around this town called Lachio, which is in the hills near Wazzo. state, but it's in Myanmar. And I had befriended this Wah guy who spoke English, got to know him pretty well, met his wife and kids, ate dinner at his house, the whole thing. And he knew what I was doing. And he had conceded to me one evening, like, you know, I actually used to be in the United Wa State Army. I wasn't a soldier, but I used to, I used to be a teacher. Like I mentioned, it's a fully functioning government.

It has doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants, guys who build roads, everything. So I was like, oh, wow, that's really fascinating. So, you know, could you get me any access to the guys really running this place, who are many of them indicted by the DEA? It's like, don't know about that. But one evening he's like, Patrick, I think I'd like you to meet my father-in-law. Like, okay, who's he? Well, he's a pretty important guy.

All right. Where does he live? Right at the street. All right, well, let's go see him. So we walk over to this compound with security cameras everywhere, and we're led into this living room full of old furniture, and a servant brings us cookies, and we wait, and we wait, and eventually in shuffles a former church.

top three leader of Wa state. The most powerful narcotics trafficking organization in Asia. I mean, that's the kind of thing that you just can't, like, God. Did you even have an idea for the book before that? I, not exactly. I knew I wanted to interview one of the Wa leaders. I didn't know what I would do with it. And so, you know, he's a former leader.

He wasn't actively running the organization, but he was very high. up in the Wa State government. So he walks in. He's in his 70s. He's wearing a sarong and a baseball cap. And he talks, he says a very raspy voice. He's like, you're American. I say, yep, also a journalist.

I'm thinking this is the part where I get thrown out. But to my surprise, he plops down and we chat a bit. And he's like, all right, you know, why are you here? What do you want to know? And so we just talked and talked and talked until midnight. I kept coming back and coming back. And eventually he's like, look, I should tell you something. I'm really not like most WAA leaders.

As you can tell, I'm pretty fond of Americans, very unusual for a WAA leader. And that's because I was a longtime informant for the DEA. Tells me this. And that, Danny, is when I knew I was probably going to be writing a book about this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so, God, there's like five directions I want to go in because there's so much here and there's so much in the book. Like one thing that I didn't know again, you know, as someone who had a cursory knowledge of the wall was that it wasn't just this territory that they used to have. They also had like a tiny little state, like an additional tiny statelet on the border that they use for trafficking purposes.

But I feel like to get into that, we have to get into, you know, one of, I think, I mean, you can you can speak to that. one of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, who I had never heard of before your book, which is Wei Shagong, who also Saul Liu kind of went against. So I guess we'll start with Wei Shagong. Like, who is he? Where does he come from?

What is his story? Because that guy is something else. Yeah, Saul Liu and Wei these two clash repeatedly in my book, almost as a protagonist and an antagonist. I don't make any grand ruling about who's right and wrong and all that stuff. But I do describe how they bumped into each other. I should explain why Saul Liu and Wei Shikang, who is a major DEA target and the trafficker-in-chief of Wa State, the financial brain behind its narcotics industry, I should explain why they would clash. Saul Lou, he had this vision.

He had been, his family had been converted to being Baptist way back in the day by American missionaries. I mean, he had a big picture of a blonde Jesus on his wall. It's one of the first thing I noticed when I walked in his house and crosses everywhere. And he was almost like this figure out of the Old Testament with this like gravelly voice and very serious. and he spoke in terms of good and evil, and evil to him was the drug trade. And he had this belief that he could save, the word he actually used was civilized,

but that's a little dicey for obvious reasons. But he could save his own wa people with the help of the United States, namely the DEA and lead them out of this trade. So that, of course, brings him into direct conflict with the financial, chief operator of

Wa State Wei Shikang so who is Wei right Wei Wei has been the chief financial officer

since the very early days he's a quiet man does not smile much doesn't wear any flashy rings

doesn't chase women he is just a pure like corporation in human form he's just out

to make lots and lots of money for Wa State and himself. But the people that I talk to that have known way throughout his life, the sense I get from them is he doesn't even really like to spend money. I mean, if you look at pictures of him, and there are very few out there, he's dressed like the manager of a radio shack.

This is not a flashy Pablo-type guy. He's half-wah. He was born in Wa-State. he was actually we talked about those CIA outpost in Wa State back in the 60s that soaked up radio chatter from communist

China he actually had a job as a very young man I think even a teenager in one of those listening stations because he's a very smart guy he could read and write Chinese and so typical Wa could not so he was he got his start early early

early days in one of those places then because he was such a smart guy got recruited by other drug lords, and when he joined the Waugh in 1989, their narcotics industry just took off. Why do they keep him around? Because he's so good at making money, and he doesn't mind sharing it, and it finances the state. But way just, he doesn't, I don't, from what I could gather from afar. He just he doesn't have

much of a moral center. I think he just, he's really good at drug trafficking and making money and he just, that's his purpose on earth. So that's going to bring him into a direct conflict with someone who's trying to rid the WAA of

the drug trade. And that person was Saul-Loo. So was Wei, is he or was he the most powerful person in Wa State then? Like after 1989? A lot of Wao nationalists don't like this, but there's a phrase that people say about the wa. And it's sort of like the wa are the muscle and the Chinese are the brains. And what they mean by that way is half Chinese, half wa. And him being half Chinese has helped them plug into the international drug trafficking market.

Because let's face it, if you only speak in indigenous language like Wa, you're not going to be able to make contacts in Bangkok and city. Sydney and Seattle and all these places that have a Chinese-speaking diaspora. I mean, that's how you actually, from Asia at least, move drugs around the world. So he's considered sort of like the brains of the operation, but there are these very powerful Wa leaders who are the muscle, and they run the armed forces. You need the armed forces to protect the drug labs, but you need someone with international business smarts to have the drug labs in the first place. So there's kind of a symbiotic relationship there.

And then, I mean, they're sort of their tension, right, Salu and, and Wei, it's almost another central conflict in your book is that between the DEA and the CIA. And it's kind of representative of that as well. I mean, obviously, that's a big part of the book. You don't have to describe the entire thing. But, I mean, let's kind of get into why, why those two agencies were clashing so hard in Burma and through these men. Yeah. At first, I'll just explain what Saul Liu was to the DEA. He provided information about the inner circle of the United WAA State Army, which, let me just establish where we're at now.

We're in the early 90s, grunge era, heroin chic, Nirvana's on the radio. People are dropping dead from very potent heroin. A lot of that was coming was produced in Waw State. China White, that stuff was being produced in Wa State. So the DEA had a reason to want to know what was going on inside this, what they saw as a drug cartel. What I would describe as a nation meets a drug cartel. So Saulu is one of the top leaders. I mean, he had access to their files, where the drug labs were located and everything.

So why was he just offering this up to the DEA? because, as I mentioned before, he wanted the DEA to help save the WA people. Like, look, I'm going to give you everything you want to know about our drug trafficking operation. But this is for a larger purpose. Eventually, I would like the United States to come in and bring us schools, hospitals, modernization, and then we will ease out of the drug trade. That's the deal. So that's what he was to the DEA.

and they had a codename for him, which was superstar. The DEA calls them CIs, confidential informants, people it talks to on the inside of criminal organizations. And usually the DEA thinks these guys are kind of like rats, scumbags, and just kind of grind them up and take what they need. But they really liked Saul Liu. He was not a drug user at all, and he thought drugs were bad, which they agreed with.

So, you know, he was... I mean, they really adored him. So, CIA, right? Why would the CIA have a problem with this? Well, once the DEA starts pursuing Saul-Lu's vision, and they actually start, I mean, talking, DEA headquarters outside of D.C. knows who Saul-Lu is, and they know that he is presenting this opportunity to shut down a drug trafficking organization, and they don't have to fire a single bullet. They don't have to go guns blazing like they do in Colombia and Mexico. They get to shut this down at a time when people are dropping dead from heroin produced in Wa State.

They are really taking this seriously. The CIA doesn't like the DEA playing on that level, basically. The CIA sees the DEA as a bunch of cops, really. and the DEA is getting kind of too big for its bridges here. You're forging a pact with a drug cartel that controls a large area. And also the DEA was bringing in Myanmar's regime, Myanmar, Burma, same thing, and including them in the plan. So because to get in and out of WA state,

the DEA was relying on helicopters from Myanmar's regime. which is a truly horrible and continues to be very racist, brutal regime. But the DEA was working with them because the DEA in any host country, Mexico, Colombia, wherever, works with the host government. So you got a plan to unite with the WA civilization and Myanmar's regime is involved. The CIA is looking at this like you guys are way out of your league. The CIA hated Myanmar's regime. The state department hated Myanmar's regime. and so that brought the DEA and the CIA in conflict,

all kind of swirling around this vision of Saul-Lews. Wow, okay. Yeah, that is a lot, right? It's a lot. No, I feel like I'm throwing 15 different things at you and you're summarizing it, like, expertly. So thank you for that. And yeah, well, I guess that leads into, like,

the other thing I wanted to talk about, which was, you know, these two different territories that the Wa had, right? Because it wasn't way, way shang-on, wasn't he the head of, like, the little small, or state lit at one point. Yeah, so the motherland of the Wa people is on the China, Burma border, China, Myanmar border, whatever you want to say. Wei had helped establish an area called Waugh South.

And this is a pretty large area, I think 5,000 square miles along the border of Myanmar and Thailand. So anyone listening to this, if you've ever gone like backpacking? in Chang Mai, Thailand, or gone to bye, which is like the hippie, chill area in northern Thailand. Okay. I was there a long time ago. Yeah. Okay.

Were you to continue traveling north, you would hit Wa South. Now, on Google Maps, it looks like Myanmar, but trust me, it ain't Myanmar. It's Wao South. It is a part of Wa State. if you were to like push through some the brush to get there you would encounter Wa soldiers in their olive green uniforms

in their barracks and hopefully they would eject you hopefully they wouldn't do so in a forceful way that would cause you to I don't know lose a limb or something but they run that place okay and that is a place where the Wa have really under the guidance of Wei Shikang placed drug labs

why place them there? Why not keep them up in the motherland? The motherland is 200 miles away. And Thailand is kind of like, kind of a bad analogy, but Mexico, it's like a country through which you transit through. So if you imagine like Pablo's making Coke, but to get it to the U.S.,

he has to go through Mexico, right? If a drug trafficking organization in Burma is making drugs, they got to get it to international markets by going through Thailand. Thailand has big ports that could ship things all over the world. So you put the meth labs on the border of Thailand,

put the heroin labs on the border of Thailand, it comes through Thailand and gets to the outside world. Wa South was where all those drug labs were located. This is all under the, I think, genius vision of Wei Shikang. I'm not saying he's a great guy, but he is a smart guy. And for my money, probably the most success, successful drug lord in Southeast Asia ever.

Yeah, I'll say that. Yeah, I mean, he seems to have one of those brains. You know, people talk about how Chapo could have been, you know, the CEO of FedEx, you know, something along the way, the lines of how these guys figure out logistics and how to work with different people and how to put things together and moving the money around and all that. He just seems like he is that person for Southeast Asia in terms of drug cartels and whatnot. But let me interject, Danny. If people want to picture his, his, like, his demeanor, his personality, the closest analog in, in Hollywood, I would say is Gus Fring from Breaking Bad.

Gus, I assume you watched the show, Gus Fring was moving meth all around the southwest of the United States. You know, again, the guy dresses like he's an accountant or something. very low-key, very understated. Way is like that, too. I mean, he doesn't care if you are impressed by him. He doesn't care if you think he's the greatest. This is an amazing gift for a drug lord because all these other guys have fallen hard

because they wanted to be great. You know, when you're importing a bunch of hippos to run around your backyard to show how cool you are, you're just attracting more attention. Wei was not ever doing that. Like, I remember when Sean Penn went to interview El Chapo, and the first thing I thought was like, Wei Shikang would not talk to Sean Penn.

You're just attracting more attention to yourself. He's also a germaphobe, like he washes his hands incessantly. He's just, I think it's probably not great to be inside his mind. he's probably very paranoid, meticulous OCD type of person, but it lends itself really well to being a professional mover of narcotics. Yeah, and you mentioned that he was, in your mind, the most powerful drug trafficker in Southeast Asia, possibly ever. There's another part of the book.

Again, guys, please buy this book. It is fantastic, and Patrick's doing the kind of journalism that's rare these days. So we want to support that. But he goes to war against, or the white. go to war against Kunza, who we've talked about too, who was also a massive, massive drug trafficker. That's right. So when I talk about Wa South, what I mean is that the Waugh conquered Kunsa's territory. That Wa South I'm referring to was Kunza's little kingdom for decades. Kunza being the probably the most famous drug lord in Southeast Asia ever. I mean, he's moving a ton of heroin

into the U.S. When I talk about people ODing in the early 90s, that's Koonza's stuff too. But the Wa outsmarted him, outmaneuvered him, in part under the vision of Wei Shikang, conquered his territory and took it over. And look, after that, you didn't hear about Wei Shikang being this big evil drug lord.

The U.S. had built Kuntza into, I think, one of the state department called them like the worst enemy the world is ever known or something like that. There have been some attempts to build up way into that type of figure. The DEA generally likes to build someone up into a big menacing figure so that when they finally catch that person, you're like, oh, wow. Because if I say, you know, I don't know, Jim, over here was just caught by the DEA. You're like, who the hell is Jimmy? But if I've spent 10 years telling you how Jimmy

is the most evil drug lord in the world, you're like, oh my God, they caught Jimmy. So there have been attempts to do that with Wei, but he just gives them so little information and so little flash and scandal for them to glom onto that it's kind of difficult to make him into a big deal, even though he is.

Yeah, and I guess, I mean, I'm assuming part of that is the fact that what they're doing now, which you can get into too, which is, you know, they're trafficking in meth, in Southeast Asian meth, which Yaba, again, I think you talk about that in Hello Shadowlands as well. We've talked about it on the podcast number of times. But I think there's this line you mentioned where it's kind of like, you know, this is not a drug that's affecting Americans, right? For the most part, it's destroying, you know, people across Southeast Asia, other parts of Asia, but it's not something that's flowing into the U.S. So I assume that might not be why they're another reason why they're not attaching all these superlatives to him at the moment.

I also give Wei Shikang credit for this. The Wa really in a big way shifted away from heroin. And they shifted, I mean, they went down and destroyed all of their own poppy fields. This was in part a way to tell the world in the United Nations, hey, we want to be considered legit. at the same time, they did shift into making a lot of methamphetamine. The meth is targeted at the Southeast Asian market and the Asian market in general. That line about making more meth than Big Macs.

Let me kind of unspool that a little bit. According to the UN in Myanmar, a lot of it's produced in Wao, but wa areas but other places too. They're churning out two to six billion meth pills, Yaba pills per year. These little pink pills that are spiked with meth

and smell like vanilla cream frosting. You know, two to six billion. Okay, so I went and I tried to see how many Big Macs are churned out in a year. The most recent data I could find was something like half a billion. So let's say the UN is

really wrong and only a billion Yaba tablets are produced per year. It's about how many the cops catch, by the way, so we know it's more than that. That means that this meth pill is outselling Big Macs by a pretty significant margin. So it is super, super, super popular. It's not coming to the U.S., as you mentioned. It's not coming to the U.S. So when you reorient your business model towards Asia and you leave the U.S. market alone. Let the Mexican cartels handle meth. It's going to be hard for the DEA to justify coming into your territory and doing a big paramilitary style raid. I mean, how do you justify the budget for that? We're going to go into Wa State and we're going to kill Wei Chakong, and we're going to drag him out. Okay, that sounds pretty expensive. Why are you going to

do that. To save Southeast Asians from meth, okay. I mean, that's a tough argument to make to Congress, right? You know, when you hear these Republican presidential contenders talking about bombing cartel and drug labs in Mexico, insane idea, by the way, but the reason that resonates with some people is because it's personal. My son, my daughter, my cousin is mixed up in fentanyl, and I just want to hurt the people that produced it. All right. Understandable. But if it's not hurting people in your city, why do you want to justify going in and doing a warlike operation against that group? It doesn't make sense. Yeah. I mean, it's just a smart thing to do if you're a drug trafficker, which is one, don't traffic into the U.S. or even Europe, you know, avoid Interpol,

avoid the DEA. Smart thing to do. Don't attract that attention. And, you know, don't use your profits to fund terrorism. You do those two things. You're going to stay off the radar off a lot of really powerful organizations that could bring you down. Let me interject one more thing, Danny, because when I talk about the wa and drug trafficking, real quick, I just want to explain what they're doing today. So they used to produce heroin and they used to produce meth pills and crystal meth. I just want to say that these days, their model is different. They don't usually produce it in-house.

What they do is they rent territory and defend. territory that usually ethnic Chinese criminal syndicates come in and build the meth labs themselves and run it and export it themselves. So the wa are mostly landlords for outside criminal groups. Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's mostly what they do. So the wa will tell you, like, we're not making drugs. Mostly true. Mostly true. They're charging rent to the guys that are making the drugs. And the guys that are making the drugs and trafficking them internationally are making all the money. So when we hear that there's a $60 billion meth economy in Asia, yeah, it doesn't mean that the WAA GDP is $60 billion. It really doesn't. You had Josh Berlinger on your show talking about this guy, say, Chilop,

Chinese mega trafficker raking in billions and all that. So I don't know if Say Chilop had meth labs on Waa territory there are other places in Myanmar he could have built them but it's that type of arrangement those guys are making more money than than the wa are so i just want to be clear about how they currently make money yeah no that's fascinating i had i had no idea like right now where do the chinese where do the tie where do the uh burmese i mean i guess burm has got their handfuls right now with with a ton of other stuff going on but where do these governments fall right now on on this wa territory and on what's going on there Thailand, pretty antagonistic.

Burma, I'll just deal with Burma real quick or Myanmar. The Myanmar regime rapidly falling apart, corroding. This is, it's going to sound crazy, but it's true. The Wa government is the most stable government in the country of Myanmar. Look, I know no one wants to hear that, especially the DEA, because they just see the, what are you talking about? That cartel? You need to open your eyes.

Yeah, they make money from drug trafficking, but they're running a pretty stable government. So whatever happens in Myanmar's revolution, let's say the people do overthrow the military regime in Myanmar and establish a democracy, a brand new country as is their dream. I promise this will happen. They will go to the Wao and they will say, same deal, right? You guys run your territory. you're not going to go to the UN and ask to cleave it off or anything. Wa will say, yep, we're good. Like, cool, we're good too.

They're not going to fight each other. No one wants to mess with the Wa. China, we do have to bring in China here. Again, I know this sounds crazy. It sounds like a MAGA conspiracy theory, right? But China is very, very involved in Wa state. I mean, you can go look it up online. There's photos with,

diplomats appointed by Xi Jinping standing next to the leaders of Wa State who are indicted by the DEA. I'm just waiting for Fox News to figure this out and make a big splash about it and just I hope they don't, but it could happen. Hey, you want to sell books, man, just get on there. Start DM in Jesse Waters, you know, let them know. We're not currently in touch. So the deal is China props up Wa State. Like, geez, why would Beijing prop up a narco state, right? Well, it's pretty smart. The Wa are really indebted to China.

I mean, in Wa State, they use Chinese currency. They use Chinese cell phone towers to access the China censored Internet. They get all their products and goods from China right across the border because they're really detached from Myanmar, which as I mentioned a minute ago is falling apart. And the Chinese leaders prop up while leaders because it's good to have influence on the narco state in your backyard. So the U.S., I mean, what we do, sorry, what the DEA does, goes down on the U.S.-Mexico border and tries to smash break up cartels, right?

That's the name of the game. And when you do that, you create power vacuums, and these smaller cartels rush in to fill them, kill hundreds of thousands of people in the process. It's very bloody. It's very chaotic. There's just sort of a constant scramble for power that the U.S. has a role in.

You knock somebody off, somebody comes in to take the spot. China seems to understand that it's actually good to have stability. So if you have a big, bad narco state on your border, it's better to have one big whale that you can control than a bunch of little piranhas gnashing at each other all the time. So that works in their favor. And, you know, one thing I did learn from Saoou, former Wa leader, former DEA informant,

a guy who I spent a lot of time with, is that there's basically an understanding that the Wa government will do everything in its power to prevent any drugs from slipping into mainland China, because if they do that, they're going to piss off Beijing, and Beijing is going to remove their support upon which they rely. So that means that drugs produced in Wa territory, perhaps by Chinese criminal syndicates, it has to flow somewhere else, but not into China, because that's bad news. So it's actually a pretty clever policy by by Beijing.

Yeah. I mean, that's that was one of the questions that I was wondering, like whether any of their product ends up there because I can see that not ending well for them. I'm trying to think of there's anything else I want to touch on. I mean, there's so much in the book, Narcotopia by Patrick Wing God. Is it, did it just come out or it's about to come out? No, just came out. You can buy it now at the, you know, the big corporate. whose name starts with A and rhymes with Slamazon, or you can go to your local bookshop and get it there.

I will just, I'll say this other thing, Danny. There's more to the story that I could even fit into this book. I mean, if you go back and look at the Cold War days, there was this family of American missionaries. The same family that Christianized Saul-Lews-Wa family were just, They were missionaries. They were also spies for the CIA. They were jungle commandos. This is the Young family. Yeah. Yeah. The standout guy from the young family is named Bill Young, probably the most legendary CIA officer ever in Southeast Asia. There's a writer named David Lawitz, who I consider sort of a creative partner. We read each other's work and share information and everything. He's writing a book called American Warlord. great title. And he's still writing it, but he's shopping it around.

Any publisher listening to this, you know, reach out to David LaWitts, reach out to me, I'll put you in touch with them. It's almost like his work is almost like a prequel to Narcotopia in a way. There's just so, so, so much here. I know Hollywood is obsessed with the cartels in Latin America. Look, I watch Narcos too. Awesome show. I'm into that stuff too, but there's a story to tell on this side of the world.

Oh, yeah. You know, and it's not really being told very well. And my final thing I'll say about that is, if you're a young journalist pretty intrepid and you are a Chinese speaker, there are opportunities here that I can't tap because I don't speak Chinese. And if you are ethnic Chinese and you can blend in better, which I can't do, there are opportunities. there as well. So I'm waiting for someone with that skill set to come in and really blow the roof off of things because in the drug trafficking milieu in Asia, Chinese is sort of the lingua franca. You have to have a common language that is spoken in multiple parts of the world if you want to

move things around the world. So it's going to be English or Spanish or Chinese. Over here, it's Chinese. So someone who has that ability should come in and come outperform me i will i will praise your work and i will get a attention you know holler at me yeah and uh you know i didn't even get into i think and i'll leave this for the book for people who buy the book your journey into into into wa territory and everything that goes with that it's kind of like one of my uh one of my favorite genres of of just foreign corresponding stuff is that sort of like uh you know those journeys that um are are you know not the story but part of the story itself so i think there's a there's a great section in your book about that where can oh wow yeah it's great i mean

where can people find you what how can they reach you anything else like that that you want to add in uh if you want to find me and look at my work patrick wynnonline dot com is my personal website but more than anything you know just just go by uh narcotopia in search of the asian cartel that survived the cia it's my my book plugging voice um yeah i just want people to to to read it and to better understand this part of the world and to, I know most people haven't heard of the wah, those who have probably only heard negative things. The story is much more complicated than that. This is not a, look, denigrating an entire race, not cool.

Read, you know, try to learn more about them and why they do the things they do. I really try to stay away from the good versus evil, you know, noble anti-narcotics agents chasing evildoers in the dark shadows stuff and no and by the same token i met some DEA agents in the reporting of this book who were really outstanding people who who very smart very clever and had a real sense of morality so i'm not i'm not here to bash one side of the other it's a it's a really fascinating nuanced story that i hope people enjoy. Thanks so much for coming on, man. That was great. And yeah, we'll have you one again. Maybe we'll do one on Wei Zhang, whose name I'm definitely mispronouncing. But, uh, Wei Chikang, bring me on. I'll talk

about him all you want. All right. Thanks so much, Patrick. Thanks, Danny.