♪ ♪
(gunshot).
♪ ♪
PRESENTER (over TV): Shake this square world and
blast off for Kicksville.
NIXON: America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.
MAN: Heroin destroys everything, everything.
MAN: Prescribing pain pills created huge numbers of addicts.
DEMONSTRATORS: People die.
MAN: Opium is cash.
It's like you're growing bills on the bush.
PRESENTER (over TV): Crime and drug abuse go hand in hand,
it's like peanut butter and jelly.
HARRIS: There's now an understanding that the
war on drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here?
(sirens, honking).
♪ ♪
MIKE: 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 fear.
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 16 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 60s 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 19 years old and he would live till age 33.
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.
RICH: In the early 70s, 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.
♪ ♪
MIKE: The really big breakthrough came on July 4th, 1971,
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.
Now 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 South East Asia.
And I said, "Who's your source?
Where did you get this?"
And he said, Gary and a guy called Mr Geh in Bangkok.
And 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 them. 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 want to 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 smiles,
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 in
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 don't trust me.
Whatever is going on, you're gonna get me killed."
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: 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 1950s,
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.
(dog barking).
His operation moved so much heroin.
It changed the landscape of the United States.
He is like Skeletor.
He's villain supreme.
REPORTER: Are you Khun Sa?
(laughs).
♪ ♪
KHUENSAI: 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.
PATRICK: 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, guns, 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 90% 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.
Shoot 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 1970s Khun Sa is a rising star.
♪ ♪
RICH: 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,
50, 100 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.
♪ ♪
PATRICK: 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.
KHUENSAI: Khun Sa says he was fighting for the
freedom of Shan State.
PATRICK: 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 gun, 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 3,000 fighters and
he creates his own Shan narco army.
Circa 1977, 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 is in a sense, a declaration of war.
Khun Sa was very squarely in their cross-hairs.
He was the person that they most wanted to take down.
POWERS: Like most DEA agents, you go in ready for a fight.
And bad things happen in this world.
That was a bad one.
♪ ♪
POWERS: 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 1978.
RICH: 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.
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 50 kilos of
heroin which is an awful lot of dope.
RICH: 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.
(chatter).
INTERVIEWER: Do you have anything you wanna say
about the events of October 1980?
POWERS: That's a fair question and I knew it was gonna come
here at some point.
So...
I don't wanna talk about it.
VIRAJ: It was a very, very warm, very hot day.
At least 32, 33 degrees.
My name is Viraj Jutimitta.
I work in the Thai police organization for 32 years.
Mike Powers' wife was coming to town from her
residence in the U. S. Consulate area.
PATRICK: 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.
VIRAJ: 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
gunman 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.
PATRICK: Mike Powers is summoned to the scene
and goes through the crowd.
He pulls open his shirt to show the gunman,
I'm not armed.
He goes up as close as he can get to the gunman and says,
"At least give up the kid."
The gunman complies.
He gives up Mike's three-year-old daughter.
VIRAJ: They spent about six hour negotiating.
The gunman didn't want to kill her but finally I think she
was moving or something and the gun went off.
She passed away.
POWERS: Anything I wanna say?
Yeah, wish it had been me.
PATRICK: After the murder 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.
♪ ♪
IVAN: 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, on 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. IVAN: Your girlfriend?
What kind of story you're giving me.
IVAN: 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.
DEPUTY: Yeah.
IVAN: It was amazing.
It was kinda like, wow, like all this is inside this vehicle.
RORY: Excellent work, dude.
IVAN: This was the biggest stop I've ever had
in my whole career.
♪ ♪
PATRICK: One chilly morning in Khun Sa's territory,
(rooster crows).
the locals see all of these armored vehicles,
trucks and motorcycles roaring into their territory.
And hopping out of all these vehicles are 800 troops
from Thailand's Border Patrol Police.
(explosion).
(gunfire).
(explosion).
They are going dusty street by street,
seizing Khun Sa's base.
REPORTER (over TV): 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.
PATRICK: The border patrol police get all the way
to Khun Sa's villa.
And Khun Sa is not there.
(thunder, rain).
(shouting).
(singing).
KHUN: No one has known where I was for the last four years.
Not the CIA or the DEA or even the KGB.
The DEA may wish I was dead but I'm not.
(chanting).
PATRICK: 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 20,000 fighters.
And now he's got a territory as large as Florida.
KHUN: Machine gun. Boom boom boom boom!
(laughs).
(sirens).
RICH: In the United States the situation was horrific.
In New York alone, there were around 250,000 heroin addicts.
He was so powerful.
He was the biggest drug war lord 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.
NICK: 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.
(drumming).
PETER: 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 23 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.
NICK: In the summer of 1986, 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 41.
And there were only eight of us in the group.
PETER: Group 41 was a unique animal.
We weren't about knocking down doors.
RICH: We were able to start building our intelligence base
in knowing who's important, who isn't.
PETER: 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 41 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
20 units or 30 pounds of South-East 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 hole and put a PVC pipe.
Within the PVC pipe they packed the South-East 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.
(laughs).
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 South-East 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 25,000 people.
(chanting).
NICK: We were getting closer and closer.
Then we started to realize that, yeah,
well this just might be possible.
PETER: It was an absolute monster of a case.
We were focusing on arresting the upper echelons 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.
♪ ♪
VIRAJ: 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.
PETER: I was home.
I had a satellite phone and we were communicating with
the agents in country and just kinda waiting.
VIRAJ: And every unit hit the target at 6:00 in the morning.
PETER: And we got one, we got two, we got three,
we got four.
And then six.
And it was an exciting day.
REPORTER (over TV): DEA agents working in Northern Thailand
with the Thai military, have arrested ten leaders of the
Shan United Army drug cartel.
ROBERT: These individuals, all associated with the drug
trafficking organization controlled by Khun Sa,
have been taken into custody by Thai authorities.
VIRAJ: 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?
PATRICK: 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.
PETER: We accomplished something that rarely
had been done.
You rarely hear of drug cases where you actually remove
a product from the table.
The South-East Asian heroin in New York City was almost gone.
PATRICK: 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 Columbia.
Think about what happened to El Chapo.
He's in a super-max cell in Colorado.
Khun Sa got out of the game pretty cleanly.
KHUN: Whew.
RICH: 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
manor in Rangoon.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.