Disturbing smiling 'meth king' stripped of '£46billion drugs empire'

With his smiling, happy demeanour, even the police couldn't believe that Tse Chi Lop was the boss of a that flooded New York's streets with a deadly influx of heroin.

After his first arrest for importing heroin in August 12, 1998, investigators were stunned by the would-be billionaire's manner.

When FBI agent Mark Calnan met him, Tse wasn't panicked or defensive, he was all cool charm and strategic – even faced with the prospect of jail Tse just smiled, according to Clanan. Ceci Scott, the assistant US attorney on his case, said: "I remember thinking, God, he's just got the most unusual demeanour, a kind of a down-to-earth personality."

"He was impressive," Calnan "He was different."

But behind the smiles, Tse, now 61, was a fully immersed in the drug trade. After striking a plea deal, on September 26, 2000, Tse was given a nine-year prison term, and served six.

A former inmate of Elkton, who wished to remain anonymous and so spoke to CNN under the pseudonym of Ben, described Tse as "a pretty nice guy" with a cheerful disposition.

Whilst behind bars, he rubbed shoulders with American drug dealers and picked up new tricks of the trade. It is there that he's said to have crossed paths with future collaborator, Lee Chung Chak.

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Despite Tse's claims that he wanted to run a humble restaurant after leaving jail, by the time of their release in 2006, the pair were ready to embark on a drug enterprise together, Australian officials said.

This time, he had designs on methamphetamine, and Tse - affectionately nicknamed Sam Gor, translating to "brother number three" in Cantonese - is rumoured to have commanded a conglomerate referred to simply as The Company.

Unified by Tse in an allegiance similar to the Sicilian mafia, Sam Gor was allegedly responsible for an industrial-scale synthetic drug production within Myanmar's loosely controlled jungles—the same zones linked to Tse's heroin dealings in the 1990s.

Their alleged tactic was straightforward: mass-produce meth to achieve economy of scale, undercut prices, then inundate the market with this affordable, addictive supply. Australian authorities say the Sam Gor Syndicate - as it was also known - was one of Asia's largest narcotic operations with an astonishing £22billion to £46billion generated in revenue.

They claim it was responsible for 70 percent of the drugs that entered alone, and that meth, along with heroin and ketamine, was smuggled into the country in tea boxes.

The human cost has been "devastating," according to Jeremy Douglas, the regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

"He used cooperation, he crossed borders. He thought outside the box, and we had to do the same thing or else we never would have caught him," Calnan said. "We had to be as good as he was."

Lee was arrested by Thai police in October 2020, just months before Dutch authorities apprehended Tse in Amsterdam. By this point had climbed to the top of a meth empire raking in £13billion annually and living a life of luxury with his spoils.

But in January 2021, Tse's time ran out when he was nabbed at Amsterdam's Schipol International Airport at the request of Aussie cops, ending a decades-long manhunt.

According to Australian authorities, Lee played a "key role" in the multibillion-dollar methamphetamine syndicate, with one investigator telling Reuters that Lee's "star had risen to be an equal or even a bigger player" than Tse.

Calnan admitted he was taken aback when the name of the man who once sat calmly across from him in Hong Kong surfaced in the news more than two decades after their meeting. After Tse's conviction in 2000, Calnan hadn't spared him a second thought.

He never imagined Tse would, allegedly, rise to become "one of the biggest international drug dealers of all time," Calnan remarked. "Looking back on it, it's not surprising at all. He (Tse) had the skills, and of course time in prison is networking like crazy."