The Underworld Empires (Part 1)

Hole of Justice

By Peter G. Jimenea

Underworld Empires (Part 1)

The Heroin Trade

When I started writing about illegal drugs in 1994, nobody inquires as they knew nothing about it. Now they do, after illegal drugs have become a global crisis. This story refers to the activities of a secret society known as the Chinese Triads. 

With the exception of the hardworking and honest vast majority of Chinese who have my great respect, there is no intent to slight them. They deserved praises as Chinese race and culture are at the forefront since the inception of written history.

This delves only on the unfortunate segment of the Chinese race- the Chinese Triads. They have a systematic and vicious control of large, illicit empires in the criminal world from the East to the West. The backbone of this organization is - illegal drugs!

The Triads are virtually unknown to the underworld business until the mid 50s. Auguste Joseph Ricord, a Corsican mastermind of the French connection, was by then the king of heroin trade from Turkey to Marseilles and into New York until the mid-70s.

Heroin addiction, however, declined at the entry of the Latin-American Cocaine Cowboys in the underworld business. A research by US investigative journalist Gerard Posner revealed that the Cocaine Cowboys earned enormous profit from this trade.

But not until the advent of the 80s when the Hong Kong Triads took control of the heroin trade in the US with their “China white” product coming from the Golden Triangle, the mountainous mist-shrouded areas in Southeast Asia fit for the cultivation of hush-poppy plants.

The Golden Triangle is consisted of four Northern provinces of Siam (now Thailand), the Eastern fringe of Laos, and a broad stretch of Northeast Burma (now Myanmar). The Chinese are also credited for the fast development of Hong Kong into a third-largest financial center after New York and London.

Hong Kong has become a melting pot of world’s businesses and had the world’s most profitable bank – the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The most dominant Triad gang in Hong Kong before it was returned to Mainland China in 1997 was the 14K with over 30,000 members in the colony alone.

As a Hong Kong Police Superintendent disclosed, the Chinese Triads invented organized crime. And as he is said to have remarked, “They are the best at it. These secret societies have made it into big business but they are absolutely ruthless.”

“The Chinese criminal syndicates make billions of dollars a year from all regular businesses of organized crime – gambling, prostitution, extortion, loan sharking, protection rackets, guns-for-hire, political and civic corruption. But there is one thing that makes them unique – heroin!

They controlled most of the world’s heroin supply coming from the Golden Triangle, a mountainous patch of land covering parts of Laos, Thailand and Burma that produces more than 70 percent of the world’s opium and heroin. This is an advantage other criminal organizations don’t have.”

But where did these Chinese Triads originate? How did they become warlord of crime in the underworld? How did they make the Mafia look as bunch of school kids in uniform when it comes to atrocities in criminal activities?

Next issue, the Origin of The Triads.