Chapter 7
The Town That Dope Built
At midnight it was still a humid 90 degrees, a sweltering tropical summer night in Southeast Asia. I was crammed into a brown Toyota jeep with four other men, without air-conditioning, a fully loaded M- 16 machine gun strapped onto the side of the left front door, and two chrome-plated .38 revolvers resting on the center divider. In addition to Hu and Chan, my two escorts from the heroin trade, I was joined by two provincial police officers. Hu was sweating through his jeans and T-shirt. His breath reeking of local whiskey, he kept slapping me on the back and assuring me I was lucky to be on this excursion. Chan, our driver, the youngest of the group, was barely tall enough to see over the dashboard. His hair was plastered back in an Elvis Presley-style pompadour, and he sported a peach-fuzz mustache and was missing an index finger. I watched him at the wheel, knuckles white, eyes wide, as he hurtled the jeep down the twisting potholed roads. Suddenly we swerved down a narrow back alley, now enveloped in almost pitch darkness, the jeep screeching to a stop in front of a large, battered, metal gate. Chan impatiently honked the horn three times, and the gate slowly rolled open.
We pulled onto a gravel driveway, revealing a group of young, armed thugs sitting around a small barbecue in the adjoining courtyard. Behind them was a pack of mongrel dogs, skeleton-like, kicking up a small cloud of dust as they ripped apart a chicken carcass. At the back of the makeshift driveway was a rickety two-story wooden building with its windows boarded shut with planks. Hu told us to get out of the jeep and wait while he made further arrangements. As we waited, swatting at dive-bombing mosquitoes, a rat the size of a jackrabbit scurried past me and nestled near the metal gate. I started to get back into the jeep, but Hu nudged me and indicated that I should stay. He said something to one of the thugs in Thai and received a grinning acknowledgment.
A young tough, a Colt .45 automatic pistol stuffed into his jeans, strutted over, sized me up, and then signaled to follow him. He took us under a strip of corrugated tin supported by a couple of bamboo sticks, which served as a covered walkway to the wooden shack. Before entering, each of my escorts stopped and bowed, hands clasped as if in prayer, in front of a small black metal shrine of a meditating Buddha, illuminated in the darkness by a large mound of smoldering incense and burning candles encircling the bottom.
Entering the shack, I was immediately struck by a strong odor, an unusual mixture of fresh sawdust and cheap perfume. My eyes blinked rapidly to adjust to the very bright lights. As they focused I noticed I was in a single large room, about sixty feet long and nearly twenty feet wide. Sawdust covered the floor, while the walls were draped in floor-to-ceiling shocking-pink satin sheets. A large, faded, black-and-white poster of Marilyn Monroe, her dress flapping over an open grate, hung lopsidedly over the door. The wooden foundation pillars were tattooed like a sailor's arm with initials and dates and graffiti. At the far end of the room a giant-screen television flickered, while on the other three sides were low, narrow wooden benches on which women and girls were crammed together like fish for sale at the local market. Most were in their early to mid-teens, but a few veterans ranged in age to the mid-sixties, most of them dressed in silk dresses, chartreuse and black the predominant colors. Their faces were heavily made up with white powder, a touch of pink rouge, and crimson-red lips. All seemed to have had their hair cut by the same person, long over the ears and blunt straight bangs covering the forehead-the "China Doll" look perfected on an assembly line.
In the middle of the room a dozen girls sat around a low, round brass table, desperately trying to look older and sophisticated. Later I would learn that the oldest was twelve and the youngest was six.
When our group entered the room the girls turned, almost in unison, away from the television and started primping for us, smiling and squirming on the benches in order to give us a better view. Some were quite nervous and uncomfortable, but most seemed blasé and stared passively through us. A small black boy brought glasses of warm water on a teak tray. Hu, my moon-faced escort, now soaked in perspiration, gulped down the water. The rest of us sat on old packing cases covered with a native cloth, assembled near the table of young children. In a couple of minutes, when the girls realized we were just there to look, they lost interest and either pulled out small makeup cases and freshened their painted faces or simply turned back to the television screen. It was filled with a close-up news clip of former President Jimmy Carter.
My escorts had driven me to the town of Chiang Rai in Thailand, only twenty miles from the Golden Triangle. The building I was in was dubbed the "chicken coop," having been the town's largest up to five years ago, before it was taken over by local drug traffickers and transformed into one of Chiang Rai's biggest whorehouses. The girls are bought or kidnapped from their families in remote provinces. Then they are forced to be whores for the pleasure of locals as well as to earn some pocket money for the heroin dealers and provincial police who form the partnership that runs the chicken coop. The evening I was there Hu bragged that some of the girls had been taken off a rice paddy less than a week before.
Chan struck up a conversation with a girl at the table of young children. She was dressed in a neatly pressed red-and-white schoolgirl's uniform, her hair different from the others in that it was pulled into pigtails. She looked no more than ten years old. "She says she's been here about six months," Chan explained, looking at me over his shoulder. "She lives with her auntie, probably how she got into this in the first place. Auntie is probably an old whore." Chan laughed heartily at his own comment, looking at Hu and the police for a smile but not getting any response.
"Ask her where her parents are.
Chan put the question to her, and she hesitated and looked at the other girls before answering. "She says they are dead. I think she lies. She is real nervous, talking to us in front of everybody, they all pretend they don't listen but they all have big ears."
"You seen enough?" Hu looked at me. "We don't want to make things bad for other customers. Ready?"
"Just ask her how much money she makes here."
Hu shook his fat head. "No good. No one talks money here with the girls. Just not done."
"One last thing. Ask her how old she is."
Hu looked at her and shot off a query in Thai. When she answered my escorts and the young thug who had let us in all started laughing. The girl only weakly smiled. Hu looked over at me, his stomach still quivering from the laugh. "She says she sixteen. Every girl here says she is sixteen. That's because all men, especially American soldiers, like to have a sixteen-year-old never used before by other men. If not sixteen, then they are too young. Older, and they are soiled goods. Sixteen is perfect. So even the old ones here will tell you sixteen. This girl is maybe twelve. She's got a long way to go. Come on, let's get moving."
If the girls can avoid degenerative syphilis or AIDS, and if they are not battered senseless or killed by a drunken or drugged john, and if they show real promise as whores, they will eventually be shipped to Bangkok, where they will join an army of more than 500,000 prostitutes. To buy a girl for the night costs a local resident 100 baht, less than $4. For a foreigner the price is 300 baht, almost $12. If a customer wants more than one girl, the guards will negotiate a better price.
A customer can take the girl of his choice outside the chicken coop - the only rule is that the girl must be brought back conscious. Customers can also use the six-by-four-foot cells on the second floor, with curtains instead of doors and soiled mattresses as the only furnishings. I walked to the second-floor landing, and while the curtains may give some visual privacy, they do not suppress any noise. The moans and the grunts sounded much more like pain than pleasure-I hoped it was just my imagination. After hearing that, I certainly understood why the television was played at high volume on the first floor. Without the T.V., the waiting girls would have been constantly and graphically bombarded with the abuse from the second-floor cells.
The chicken coop left me rattled, a result I believe my escorts planned. On this first stopover with Hu and Chan I had an eyewitness view of the flourishing partnership between local criminals and the provincial police. You could tell the difference only because one group wore uniforms. Hu had no doubt about the role of the chicken coop. "It's only pocket money for us. But it also lets us keep track of police and politicians-most of them are regulars here. I guess they feel safer here than most [whore) houses because they have a piece of this one." The message was clear. Hu wanted me to know from the start that I was entering his world, and that my Western preconceptions of how police and government officials operated for the public good would have to be drastically altered. A local U.S. Drug Enforcement official would later confirm that what I saw at the chicken coop was not unusual: "The provincial police meet every requirement set forth by the FBI to define organized crime, with the single exception that they aren't that organized." The chicken coop also confirmed what a DEA agent had told me in Bangkok-that the Golden Triangle was one of the last "great lawless regions in the world."
The next morning we were on the road by sunrise, after a breakfast of fried rice topped with an egg at an open-air food stall in the town's center. "It's good you eat Thai style while you are here. Makes you stronger," Chan assured me. The grumbling in my stomach told me he was not right.
The police from last night were left behind. They are posted to the force in Chiang Rai and could not leave the city. About five kilometers from the town Chan turned off the paved two-lane road and started down dirt roads leading to the hills. "If you want to see the Triangle, you have to get off of the main road. You've got to see the mountains to understand how the opium can be brought here so easy.
For the rest of the day we drove along dirt roads that became ever narrower. The vegetation was dense and closed in on all sides of the jeep. As we climbed the back hills we had to keep the windows closed because otherwise the hanging plants and tree branches would have slammed into the interior of the jeep. "You should see in rainy season," said Chan, "then all this stuff is ten feet taller and you cannot even see another car until it almost hits you." Occasionally we saw a few towns-a gathering of small wood huts qualified for the title-but there was not a' sign of life in a single one.
"No one's crazy enough to go out in this heat," Hu explained. "They are all inside now-all the work is done in the morning or late in the day. And now there is nothing to do anyway. If you had been here a month ago, you would have seen all this covered in opium."
"I thought the government had done away with a lot of the opium crop."
"Bullshit. It's a lie. Sure, they are planting some coffee and other crap in some of the villages, but they are also growing opium on the next square of land. Come on, don't believe that stuff. These people have been growing opium for hundreds of years and they don't think anything is wrong with it. You come and tell them about heroin and they don't know what you talking about. It's just good stuff for them. So why should they stop growing because someone comes from Bangkok and says 'Please stop, it's bad because it is made into heroin and sold in New York and the King and Queen of Thailand would like you to stop."' Hu turned around in his seat to look at me, his voice rising as he was getting agitated. "Shit, they don't know where New York is. You might as well say the moon. It means no more to them. And the King and Queen want you to stop is crazy because these people don't even consider themselves Thais. They are Meo first or Ahka or whatever. None of them say they are Thai if you ask them. So why should they listen to people that come as Thai big shots and say stop growing opium because it's bad in some place you never hear about and we are Thai and you are Thai and this is Thai land, so you have to listen to us. Shit, they don't even know this land is part of Thailand. To them it belonged to their father and to his father and it goes back that way. So they say this land is ours to do what we want with, so fuck you. That's why this Whole area is covered in opium every year-it don't matter what they tell you in Bangkok."
As we continued al6ng the dirt roads Hu and Chan kept pointing at barren slits in the hills that were horse trails. "Those are the paths where the caravans come' with mules and horses and a lot of packs of opium," Hu told me as he offered me a canteen of water.
"I can hardly see them," I mentioned almost to myself as I squinted at the faint lines that snaked through the dense rain forest.
"That's just the point," said Hu, jabbing his pudgy finger into the air. "They can hardly be seen in this time of year, so imagine when the brush is all grown much higher-then you can't even see the trails with a helicopter, because the ground stays wide enough for the men and horses to pass but the trees and bamboo grow so tall that they touch each other at the top and make like a roof so you can't see the ground. And you have to remember, hundreds of trails like that come out of Burma into Thailand. So where are the cops and your drug agents going to look? Which ones are they going to sit and wait at? And new trails are always being made. It just takes five men and some tools and it can be done in a week. Kuhn Sa even uses bulldozers to open up new roads and then he 'uses them once and never again. And everyone who brings opium down these hills knows each of these paths like he made it. So they can escape and use them to get away. The cops don't know where the trails go so they get lost and everyone with the opium gets away."
"Aren't helicopters used to discover the opium caravans and then watch where everyone tries to escape to?"
"No way. Look how quiet it is around here. We are the noisiest thing they hear in a while. They don't' see many cars around here. If the cops try to bring a fucking helicopter in to watch from the air, you can hear the motor coming from a couple of kilometers away and the whole caravan is off the path and under the trees by the time it flies over. And the opium is only brought in at night. No one moves it in the day. So if that's the case, what can the helicopter see at night? I tell you-nothing!"
In only a day of driving through part of the Triangle it was possible to understand how caravans with hundreds of horses packed with tons of opium could move with total impunity. Insurgent armies could hide in the nearby villages or under the cover of the rain forest and be invisible. And never once during the entire day did I see an6ther car or jeep. With the exception of two Meo hill tribe girls who jumped out of the way of our speeding jeep, I did not even see another person. Except for the hill tribes who lived here, this part of Thailand was no-man’s land. I have trekked in the Andes, the Sahara Desert, and through northern Canada's ice fields, but I have never seen a region as rugged as that section of northern Thailand that led to Burma. Even if the insurgent armies did not populate the Triangle, the authorities would have difficulty in establishing a full government administration in this wilderness'. But coupled with 40,000 armed insurgents, the task seems insurmountable unless a major military operation is undertaken and then followed by large infusions of foreign aid to develop the area and to wean it off opium.
"That was the border," announced Hu. I turned around and looked through the jeep's back window. "What? I didn't see anything."
"Exactly," said a proud Hu. "The border only exists on the map. Up here it is just marked with little stone posts. That tells you you're going from one country to another. Otherwise, the trees don't know it-they grow on both sides of the border. Opium, it grows on both sides. Don't stop at the border. So that is why if you have a lab on one side of the border, close to the markers, if one side of cops comes in after you, you just run to the other side of the border and they can't come after you. It's great. They fucked. They just stand there and afraid to come because they afraid of international incident. It's really good, huh?"
Now I understood why Burma banned land entry into its borders. It was the hope that by announcing you could get into the country only by air into Rangoon, everyone would follow that rule. Because if Burma allowed land entry, there would be no way of checking the flow in and out of the country. Anyone willing to take the bumpy mountain trip to the border could cross without fear of detection. No customs buildings, no clearance points, no guard posts, no fences, no walls, no signs or declarations trying to stop you from crossing.
"You're in SUA land now." Chan broke his almost trance-like concentration on driving to say something. "This is Kuhn Sa land all around. The villages, everyone, works with SUA. It's true he has a lot to say in Thailand, like he has some of his people in every major Thai city. But there he has influence only-here he is the only law."
"Aren't you worried that SUA forces will stop you up here in the hills?"
Hu answered. "No worry, my friend. Before we left Chiang Mai we had to talk to the SUA man to say we are crossing this way. Everyone knows our truck so it's okay. And you are okay because we say you are. And for us, they know we are here as we cross the border. Word travel very fast from town to town. There ,is an old way of getting news out which never fails to let the SUA know that someone is walking on their land. They'll watch us here, make sure we don't get anywhere too interesting, and then watch us leave. I have something I want to show you not far from here. We can finish up and be back to Thailand by night. As long as we can hit the main road we can travel-I just don't want to be stuck in the hills overnight. No fun at all."
Near kilometer marker 15 Chan pulled the jeep off the dirt road and started a climb that took us over a small stream and settled in the middle of small hill. For the first time in nearly seven hours the jeep had its motor turned off. The silence was the most striking part of stopping. After stretching for a few minutes, Chan pulled the M- 16 from the jeep and signaled for me to follow him. I couldn't see a road, but Chan and Hu seemed to know where they were going in the brush. It took us almost ten minutes to go one hundred yards, my ineptitude in the rain forest holding them back. If the land seemed rugged from the perspective of the back seat of a four-wheel jeep, on foot it seemed much worse.
Because I was concentrating intently on getting through the brush I did not realize that I was about to walk right into the side of a building until Hu put, his hand out and stopped me by the shoulder. "Be careful," he chided, "never know what you can run into in Burma."
My face must have shown the surprise I felt, because both Hu and Chan found it all very amusing. I thought we had been climbing through the brush to get to a point where I would have a panoramic view of the Shan States. Instead I was at a large wooden structure, charred as though in a great fire, mostly covered in jungle growth. I stepped inside, following Chan. There was no ceiling, but within the long walls of the building were remnants of broken glass and beakers and contorted metal basins and oversized pans. Against one wall was a group of fifty-five-gallon black metal drums. Along another wall were makeshift lockers, rusted orange, their doors bent and hanging open.
"You are the first white man to be inside this spot," Hu suddenly told me. "It was one of the big labs for all the Shan States. This place could make 200 kilos a day." If Hu was accurate, that was two tons of processed opium a day. That is almost four times what the DEA thinks the average jungle lab can produce. "This place was built almost a year ago. Was in operation only two months and then was blown up with explosives. Planted very smart in the night with no one knowing and when it blew it killed twelve people and destroyed most things. Also blew some dope. SUA doesn't mind if you see it, because they think it was DEA or CIA here to do the blowup. No one else is good enough. And if that's the case, then in America you have to ask why they are here, because they are not allowed in Burma. This is off limits for them."
Hu obviously did not see the irony in a heroin trafficker, who lives by no rules at all, complaining because he believes that a law-enforcement agency did not play by the rules. Hu was getting agitated: "The people killed here, they were all peasants who get paid very little to work here. The chemist was not even here so they [American law enforcement] got nothing. In one week it's all up and going again."
"How did people get in and out of here? It's so thick with vegetation."
"Oh, that. When the lab was working there was a foot trail in. But that has been overgrown. Even though the place was always under the plants if you look from an airplane, now the green is all much thicker."
"How many chemists for a lab like this?"
"Only one chief one. This used to make number 3 [smokable heroin). When it opened it was run by Nat Sa'Kui. He is the greatest number 3 chemist in the whole world. He lives on the road just outside of Mae Sai at the tip of northern Thailand. But he come here for Kuhn Sa to make sure everything working right. I saw it when it was new and it had everything here-good equipment, good shit everywhere. And had lookouts and guns here and that's why we know it had to be CIA or DEA-no one else could get in without being caught. But won't happen again, because there are new changes made by Kuhn Sa since this happened."
I had seen pictures of labs seized in the jungle. I always marveled at how rudimentary the refineries were. A collection of
tubes, flasks, and measuring devices that could be found in any rural high school chemistry class. But somehow the picture always excluded the surrounding countryside and the quality of the materials used in the building itself. Now that I was standing in the middle of a heroin lab, I realized that the pictures made them look better than they are. They are dark in the middle of the day from the thick jungle canopy hanging overhead, and a roof is seldom placed on them because the noxious fumes from the refining process make maximum ventilation necessary. Stifling humidity and heat surrounded the building. When the fires that cook the morphine and boil the chemicals are at full force, the place must seem like hell. I stopped as my shoe twisted into some glass on the ground. I had stepped onto a pair of eyeglasses, the visible remains of one of the twelve victims whose body and clothes decomposed long ago in this tropical weather. It was hard to imagine that makeshift huts like this were a key part both of the heroin trail and the Triads' business. But without these refineries the opium would have to be shipped in bulk to Hong Kong or other refining centers. By placing labs at the source of the opium, the shipments leaving the Golden Triangle are a tenth of their size and weight for easier smuggling and are already processed for maximum profits. Even if the shipment is intended for Hong Kong or Dutch labs, these jungle refineries at least convert the opium into heroin base or morphine.
At this stage of the heroin trade there was no glamour. This was the blue-collar part of the business. Backbreaking work was done by low-paid workers in makeshift labs across the Golden Triangle. Only the chief chemist was usually a partner in the lab and reaped profits second to the warlord \\whose opium was processed.
We stayed there for almost a half hour before Hu said that if we did not start the return journey, we would never get back to Thailand by nightfall. The return trip was quiet. Hu slept most of the way, Chan was fighting to see over the dashboard and concentrating intently on driving, and I contemplated where I had just been. That heroin lab in Burma was a long way from the Triad headquarters in Hong Kong, or from the youth gang members that peddled the drug on the streets of' New York, or from the offshore banks that helped to launder the billions of dollars in illegal profits, but the laboratory was as integral part of the chain as any of the other elements. This was the source. Without the insurgent armies, without the crop and the refineries, the heroin pipeline was never turned on.
It was indeed Kuhn Sa's territory. I had seen that lab courtesy of his Shan United Army. Nobody was coming onto his doorstep, the Shan States, without his permission. I thought back to the Triad enforcer I had met at the Canton Disco in Hong Kong. His gold watch and fancy ways, much of what he owned, depended on the ability of these Golden Triangle warlords to continue to turn out bumper heroin crops. And the best business partner they ever had in these parts was Kuhn Sa.
He is the most aggressive and flamboyant of the warlords. To drug-enforcement agencies worldwide he is evil incarnate. To the veteran Chinese KMT generals he is an obnoxious upstart. To armed insurgents in the Shan States he is an opportunist who has misappropriated the independence movement to cloak his narcotics trafficking. To local hill tribes in the Golden Triangle he is a feudal warlord, a sort of modern-day Robin Hood fueled by opium. To some government officials in Burma and Thailand he is their most profitable and important source of money. But to the Triads in Hong Kong he is the most important and first link in the multibillion-dollar-a-year heroin business. Somehow, visiting one of his burned-out heroin labs in Burma had helped me realize that.
Copyright by Gerald Posner, 1988
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