03x02 - Chasing the Dragon: Prince of Death

[bunniefuu]

RANGER (speaking Thai): They came down here, through there.

RANGER (speaking Thai): Hey, be careful, careful.

RANGER (speaking Thai): There are around ten sacks.

There have to be more here.

RANGER (speaking Thai): We heard noises, they were just here.

(Ranger speaking Thai)

Get in, g*ns up, g*ns ready.

RANGER : There are sacks around here.

RANGER : Yeah, they must have gone this way.

RANGER : Come out!

RANGER : Just clear it!

Just clear it! Fire the warning shot to be safe.

(g*nsh*t)

RANGER : Quick, quick! Over there!

Over on that side.

(Rangers speaking Thai)

(yelling in Thai)

RANGER (off screen): Go in, go in!

Go in and get them.

Get them out!

(yelling continues)

RANGER : Get down! Lie down!

NARRATOR : Shake this square world and blast off for kicksville.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: America's public enemy number one

is drug abuse.

NARRATOR : Heroin destroys everything.

NARRATOR : Prescribing pain pills created huge numbers of addicts.

CROWD (chanting): People die...

NARRATOR : Opium is cash.

It's like you're growing bills on the bush.

NARRATOR : Crime and drug abuse go hand in hand,

it's like peanut butter and jelly.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: There's now an understanding that the w*r on drugs

was an abject failure.

NARRATOR : You have to stop and ask yourself, "How did we get here?"

(theme music plays)

AGENT MIKE LEVINE: The physical feeling

of walking in to a house, into a cellar, into a rooftop,

you're walking in to their domain,

you have to get your quarry, your prey, to like you

'cause if they don't like you, they won't trust you.

These people are inches from your face and they're looking at you,

trying to rule out that you're the one thing that they feared.

An informant or an undercover agent.

So, when you walk into that room,

you know, that a flaw in your act, you're dead.

The first years of my life was in the Bronx.

My brother was David.

I was four years older than him and I had to take care of him.

Back in the 's heroin was usually in poorer neighborhoods

and it was getting worse.

I had already started working as an agent

and my mom calls and just asks me to come over to her house.

And she had a bag and I recognized what it was instantly.

There was my brother's hypodermic needle,

a couple of bags of heroin and a spoon.

And when my brother came home we were all crying.

My mom, my brother and I and...

I said, "You're a dead man."

I said, "I'm looking at a dead man."

And I thought, I said it hopefully to scare him,

to try and scare him into just getting away from this drug.

That's how I felt looking at my poor baby brother.

How does that feel?

There's no worse feeling, there's no, no worse.

He was years old and he would live till age .

But it gave me a banner, a flag.

Because to me going after some drug dealer was just a waste of time.

Let's get the source.

The organization that's controlling this stuff.

(laughter echoing)

AGENT RICH LAMAGNA: In the early 's, the United States heroin market

was mostly coming out of Turkey, Marseilles, Sicily.

But thanks to US, French and international support,

it basically came to a halt and there was a bit of a vacuum.

And then the so-called Golden Triangle, Thailand, Laos, Burma

started increasing their cultivation of opium.

So very, very high quality heroin

was just pouring out of the Golden Triangle.

We really began to realize that we had a huge problem with Asian heroin.

And it was being sold by groups

that were unfamiliar to US law enforcement.

AGENT LEVINE: The really big breakthrough came on July th, ,

when this guy was arrested with three kilos of heroin.

This is a big case in that time.

I see by his passport

that was his seventh trip coming in from Bangkok, Thailand.

And he's carrying heroin. And it's pure white.

How heroin is usually brown.

So this is China White.

China White was the process where it came out pure white.

And most of it came from Southeast Asia.

I said, "Who's you're source? Where did you get this?"

And he said, "Gary and a guy called Mr. Geh in Bangkok."

I said, "Well, can you introduce me to them?"

And eventually he agrees to set me up with his source.

And I asked my boss,

"Can I go after the source?"

Nobody had ever done this before.

My boss said, "Go, get 'em. Go do it."

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

When I landed in Bangkok, first I'm met there by Joe Jenkins

who was the customs agent in charge in Bangkok.

I get to the hotel

and I have a phone number to call Gary and Mr. Geh.

And they wanna come right over.

So I'm on the ground and running.

The undercover role I used was a guy with mob connections

who wants to make big bucks dealing dope.

So, they show up.

And the photo I gave you, Joe Jenkins took from the kitchen.

Gary is the guy to my left, my back is to the camera.

The guy to my right is Mr. Geh, G-E-H.

So here I am watching their reactions very closely,

watching their eyes, picking up the signs,

you don't wanna go there,

that's where you wanna go, seeing them smile,

seeing this little micro gestures that you're on the right track.

And after they got to know me,

they said Mr. Geh's uncle wants to meet me.

Mr. Geh's uncle ran the factory in Chiang Mai.

So Mr. Geh was the key

to probably one of the biggest source of heroin on Earth.

And he wants to meet me.

This is big.

Destroying this factory and getting these people

is at the very least gonna put a big dent into their whole operation.

So I immediately reported to Joe Jenkins.

And immediately all my logistic support starts to vanish.

Days go by and I get no support.

Money dries up. I can't even pay my hotel bill.

And I call Joe, I said,

"Look, the worst thing can happen to me is that these guys doing trust me.

Whatever is going on, you're gonna get me k*lled."

That's when I get a call to come into the embassy.

Make sure I'm not followed.

And there I meet a man who's introduced to me as a CIA officer.

And he says...

"You can't go to Chiang Mai."

And I said, "Why?"

He said, "Because we can't protect you there."

My first reaction was to start to argue with him.

He got frustrated with me and said,

"You don't know all the priorities.

Our country has other priorities."

Now I had never heard that before.

Like a moth to the flame,

I was target-focused on getting these guys.

But they took that away from me.

It was over. I knew it was over.

PATRICK WINN: Nothing surprises me about the fact that he got shut down.

Nothing, you know.

The CIA had every incentive to make sure that law enforcement agents

could not do their job.

Certain drug traffickers were avowedly anti-Communist.

Now, the CIA will do business with just about any anti-Communist on Earth.

So, starting in the s,

they were using drug traffickers for espionage.

And what they were interested in is

these drug traffickers access to the Burma/China border.

Really difficult terrain.

So they would have these traffickers,

when they're going on their normal runs to collect opium

up in the mountains on the border, gather espionage.

The CIA armed these drug traffickers.

The CIA gave these drug traffickers radios.

The CIA basically gave them seed capital.

If somebody had come along and dug into what the CIA was doing,

it would have scandalized the United States deeply.

So, it's clear that Mike Levine was never gonna make it

to Chiang Mai to see the factory.

And it's really smart that he didn't disobey

what that CIA agent told him

because it could have gone bad for him.

The drug trade is power and the CIA is all about managing power.

So if this person has power

and they're useful to the United States, they're okay.

They can traffic drugs.

(birds chirping)

(thunder rumbling)

His operation moved so much heroin.

It changed the landscape of the United States.

He is like Skeletor. He's villain supreme.

INTERVIEWER: Are you Khun Sa?

KHUENSAI JAIYEN: Khun Sa was born in Shan State in the Golden Triangle.

The Shan state was rich in resources.

But they are all under the control

of the Burmese government and army.

So for the Shans there was only opium.

Khun Sa's grandfather had horses and opium fields.

So he was involved in the opium business

even before he was born.

WINN: Khun Sa from very early age was working for his grandfather

and he was extremely hard-working.

He was also an extremely ambitious person.

And there was a particular narco group that the CIA was backing,

who took on Khun Sa as sort of an apprentice.

And gave him horses, g*ns, some money,

the things that he would need to become a mini drug lord.

From there it was off to the races.

He began to make China White.

China White is extremely high quality heroin.

It's north of percent pure.

It's the finest heroin probably that the world has ever seen.

And Khun Sa had in his head

a fairly well developed concept of America.

And it was the most lucrative market for his China White.

Everybody knew that Khun Sa had good stuff so they wanted to see his logo on there.

This was a brand like Coca-Cola.

And it was meant to assure quality

to traffickers along the supply chain.

The CIA had already created

some of the pipeline relationships and infrastructure

that allowed the Golden Triangle to thrive the way it did.

Khun Sa came along and plugged himself into that.

He had territory right on the Thai/Burma border

so he would send caravans up into Burma to collect the opium,

bring them down to the Thai/Burma border to refine them into heroin.

sh**t it straight down to the coast

and put it in a cargo ship mixed in with legal goods

and then have it sent to America.

By the mid s Khun Sa is a rising star.

AGENT LAMAGNA: Khun Sa was the largest drug trafficker we had ever encountered.

And his heroin was pouring into the country.

I'm Richard LaMagna. I'm a retired DEA Agent.

In New York we were getting

huge loads of pure heroin, to pounds at a time.

But people just weren't investigating it.

We just didn't have that many people in the country

who knew how to investigate Asian drug trafficking.

And Khun Sa was out of reach,

up in the mountains of Thailand.

And he grew ever more powerful.

WINN: Not every drug lord has a dream.

Khun Sa had a dream.

And he realized that heroin was the ladder he could climb to being a great man.

He also realized that if he could amass followers, weapons, supply routes,

then he could be king of a little patch of the world.

And so he starts saying, "I'm Shan,

we the Shan people, we don't have a nation of our own."

JAIYEN: Khun Sa says he was fighting

for the freedom of Shan State.

(clamoring)

WINN: So Khun Sa is able to convince a lot of people to fight for him.

You'll get steady meals.

You'll get to hold a g*n,

you get to fight for the liberation of your people.

Sounds a lot better than you can be a grunt in a drug cartel.

He was able to quickly amass , fighters

and he creates his own Shan narco army.

Circa , you start to see a shift.

Khun Sa is controlling more of the opium trade than his rivals.

He's the main man now.

Where you really start to see things turn is

the DEA opens an office a few hours drive up mountain roads

from Khun Sa's territory in the city of Chiang Mai.

That in a sense, is a declaration of w*r.

Khun Sa was very squarely in their crosshairs.

He was the person that they most wanted to take down.

AGENT MIKE POWERS: Like most DEA agents,

you go in ready for a fight

and bad things happen in this world.

That was a bad one.

In this world you're either good guy or bad guy.

My name is Mike Powers, actually it's Michael Powers

but nobody calls me Michael.

I'm a good guy and I don't like the bad guys.

I wanted to be as good a narcotics agent as I could be.

But you had to be aggressive.

If you were a passive person it was not the place for you.

I transferred to Thailand in .

AGENT LAMAGNA: Mike Powers headed the DEA Chiang Mai office.

That was the hot spot.

That's where the big loads of heroin were coming from,

that's where the refineries were.

And for a DEA agent,

it was very exciting getting so close to the source.

Mike ran very good operations.

He was very effective and very capable.

AGENT POWERS: I wanted to find out where the labs were,

who was supplying the labs, the names of the people.

Where are they?

We made some big seizures in Thailand.

Two kilos, ten kilos,

even once case we did kilos of heroin

which is an awful lot of dope.

AGENT LAMAGNA: Khun Sa felt threatened by us

because he knew DEA was not at all willing to back off.

We had a mission to accomplish.

And he knew who our agents in Chiang Mai were.

So to be an agent in Chiang Mai

that was threatening a very, big opium empire,

was very, very dangerous.

(indistinct chatter)

INTERVIEWER: Do you have anything you wanna say about the events

of October ?

AGENT POWERS: That's a fair question, and, uh...

I knew it was gonna come here at some point, so...

I don't wanna talk about it.

MAJOR GENERAL VIRAJ JUTIMITTA: It was a very, very warm, very hot day.

At least , degrees.

My name is Viraj Jutimitta.

I worked in the Thai Police organization for years.

Mike Powers' wife was coming to town from her residence

in the U.S. Consulate area.

WINN: She's going to a shoe shop to get her shoes re-heeled.

She also happened to have her three-year-old daughter with her.

GENERAL JUTIMITTA: I got a phone call around noon or so.

Mike Powers' wife was kidnapped

and they're holding her near the market.

Immediately I told my team that we should not get the g*nman to be too excited.

Talk to him to try to cool the guy down

so that he can release her.

But when the Provincial Police Commander came in,

took over the case, my guy has to move out.

But I don't think the Provincial Police were trained

in this area before, you see.

WINN: Mike Powers is summoned to the scene and goes through the crowd.

He pulls open his shirt to show the g*nman, "I'm not armed."

He goes up as close as he can get to the g*nman and says,

"At least give up the kid."

The g*nman complies.

He gives up Mike's three-year-old daughter.

GENERAL JUTIMITTA: They spent about six hours negotiating.

The g*nman didn't want to k*ll her

but finally I think she was moving or something

and the g*n went off.

She passed away.

AGENT POWERS: Anything I wanna say? Yeah, wish it had been me.

WINN: After the m*rder of Joyce Powers,

there is a change of tone in Thailand.

Khun Sa is not to be tolerated.

Khun Sa is a serious enemy

and so the DEA is absolutely determined

to actually go into Khun Sa's territory and take him out.

DEPUTY IVAN INIGUEZ: While I was working the Interstate,

I observed a vehicle pass me.

I saw a traffic violation.

I made a stop on that vehicle.

What I'll do is I'm gonna have you step out of the car.

I'm come talk to you back here on the passenger side of my right.

So I know you're nervous 'cause you don't have a drivers' license.

I get it, right?

What we're looking for

is how you're standing, how you're talking.

And who's the girl in the car with you?

-DRIVER: She's my girlfriend. -DEPUTY INIGUEZ: Your girlfriend?

What kinda story you're giving me.

Right now I've got conflicting stories about where they're going.

All that stuff plays a factor in our decision to search the vehicle.

Yeah, he was super nervous when I stopped him.

When I asked her, I said, "Why do you have to go all the way to Phoenix

to pay your Chase credit card?"

And she goes, "Uh, I don't know." (laughs)

We wanna make sure that we don't miss anything

because sometimes they get creative.

OFFICER (off screen): Hey, how's the door look over there?

I'm looking at this one.

There's some abrasion right here.

Feel in there, buddy boy.

Yeah.

There you go.

DEPUTY INIGUEZ: It was amazing. It was kinda like, "Wow,

like, all this is inside this vehicle."

-OFFICER: Excellent work, dude. -DEPUTY INIGUEZ (off screen): Yeah.

This was the biggest stop I had ever had in my whole career.

(birds chirping)

WINN: One chilly morning in Khun Sa's territory...

(crows)

...the locals see all of these armored vehicles,

trucks and motorcycles roaring into their territory.

And hopping out of all these vehicles

are troops from Thailand's Border Patrol Police.

They are going dusty street by street, seizing Khun Sa's base.

NEWSCASTER: The Thais used air power and top Border Patrol Police

in an operation backed by American money

and advisors on the ground.

Like this man, a US narcotics agent.

WINN: The border patrol police get all the way to Khun Sa's villa.

And Khun Sa is not there.

(thunder rumbling)

(yells)

(chanting indistinctly)

KHUN SA (translation): No one has known where I was for the last four years.

Not the CIA or the DEA or even the KGB.

(chanting)

The DEA may wish I was dead but I'm not.

(chanting continues)

WINN: Khun Sa took a lot of his loyal fighters

across the border to Burma.

He starts merging with other Shan rebel groups

and now he's got , fighters.

And now he's got a territory as large as Florida.

KHUN SA : Machine g*n. Boom, boom, boom, boom!

(siren wailing)

AGENT LAMAGNA: In the United States the situation was horrific.

In New York alone, there were around , heroin addicts.

He was so powerful.

He was the biggest drug warlord in the world.

And I was told, "We had to do something about this."

I had the knowledge and the wherewithal of how to go about it,

but I had to build the team to do it.

AGENT NICK CARUSO: All we knew was we had a mission.

We were brand new.

We were pretty much starting out from scratch.

And Khun Sa was in charge of an army.

Was it realistic to think that we would get him?

I don't know.

(hooting)

(cheering)

AGENT PETER CARPANINI: It's power, it's money.

If we could figure out a way to stop Khun Sa's money,

that would be the way to stop Khun Sa.

My name is Peter Carpanini

and I spent years

with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Khun Sa was the person that we all wanted to get

but there was no one looking at the big picture.

AGENT CARUSO: In the summer of ,

I learned that I was going to be assigned

to a new enforcement group in New York City.

And this was the Asian Heroin Group, Number .

And there were only eight of us in the group.

AGENT CARPANINI: Group was a unique animal.

We weren't about knocking down doors.

AGENT LAMAGNA: We were able to start building our intelligence base

in knowing who's important, who isn't.

AGENT CARPANINI: And we realize if we were able

to arrest Khun Sa's lieutenants,

as many as possible,

we would be able to dismantle his empire.

Group had gotten some information

regarding a possible shipment of heroin

that was destined to Port Newark.

We were told by our informant that the shipment

was to be units or pounds of Southeast Asian heroin.

We had information to look at specific numbered crates.

So we opened up the container.

There were numerous cartons and cases of Chinese ornamental vases.

We X-rayed the crate and the vases,

we actually broke a vase

and there was no heroin where it was supposed to be.

We couldn't find the heroin anywhere.

Then we looked in the crate itself.

And within the wooden corner posts of the crates...

they had drilled a whole and put a PVC pipe.

Within the PVC pipe they packed the Southeast Asian heroin.

We found out the person responsible for arranging the shipment...

was an individual named Mr. Lin.

He was a lieutenant in charge of finance for Khun Sa.

The highest member of Khun Sa's organization

that we had ever come across.

That's when the case got extremely interesting.

He was extradited to the United States from Thailand.

You know, you think about arresting someone like him

but the fact that he was actually on a flight

heading to New York was pretty amazing.

When Mr. Lin got off the plane, he was a bit numb.

He wasn't in Southeast Asia anymore.

He wouldn't be in a position to pay his way out of prison.

We explained what he would be looking at from a prison term.

And eventually he made the decision that he wanted to cooperate.

The information that Mr. Lin gave us covered

Khun Sa's highest-level lieutenants

who were responsible for everything

from the exportation of heroin, to the finances,

to the logistics of running an army of , people.

(chanting)

AGENT CARUSO: We were getting closer and closer.

Then we started to realize that, yeah, well, this just might be possible.

AGENT CARPANINI: It was an absolute monster of a case.

We were focusing on arresting the upper echelon

within Khun Sa's heroin organization in Thailand.

These were people that controlled the logistics,

the finance, the exportation of heroin.

If we could stop those three sections,

we would put an end to Khun Sa's reign.

The problem was they had to be arrested at the same time,

within the same day.

If not, word would get out, of course,

and they would be in the wind and we'd never see them again.

And that's a huge thing.

It's not like you're looking at a two-block area.

You're looking at a country.

GENERAL JUTIMITTA: We had ten targets

in the area of Mae Hong Son, Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai.

We used the element of surprise and we used the early hour in the morning.

I was up in Chiang Rai, in the border area.

And I was talking to the team through the radio communication.

AGENT CARPANINI: I was home, I had a satellite phone

and we were communicating with the agents in country

and just kinda waiting.

GENERAL JUTIMITTA: And every unit hit the target

at six o'clock in the morning.

AGENT CARPANINI: And we got one, we got two, we got three,

we got four, and then six.

And it was an exciting day.

(indistinct chatter)

NEWSCASTER: DEA agents working in Northern Thailand

with the Thai military,

have arrested ten leaders of the Shan United Army drug cartel.

AMBASSADOR ROBERT GELBARD: These individuals, all associated

with the drug trafficking organization

controlled by Khun Sa

have been taken into custody by Thai authorities.

GENERAL JUTIMITTA: I feel relief.

Nobody was hurt.

No accident, no death, no injury.

All the targets were arrested.

What else can you ask more than that?

WINN: Operation Tiger Trap hurt Khun Sa's infrastructure and his finance

to a degree that he was far weaker.

So, you're starting to see soldiers and followers peel away.

They're defecting and his operation is shrinking.

AGENT CARPANINI: We accomplished something that rarely had been done.

You rarely hear of drug cases

where you actually remove a product from the table.

The Southeast Asian heroin in New York City was almost gone.

WINN: But you've gotta remember, Khun Sa was extremely slippery.

Khun Sa knew the art of the deal.

Think about what happened to Pablo Escobar,

who got shot in a back street in Colombia.

Think about what happened to El Chapo.

He's in a supermax cell in Colorado.

Khun Sa got out of the game pretty cleanly.

KHUN SA: Whoo.

AGENT LAMAGNA: It's so ironic that some guy in New York

selling a couple of ounces on the street of heroin

would go to jail for at least ten years or more.

And yet you have this warlord

who sold heroin to thousands of people,

living out his existence

in a very cushy manner in Rangoon.