North Korean Meth, Motorcycle Gangs, Army Snipers, and a Guy Named Rambo
LITERALLY TONS OF BINGDU
By Keegan Hamilton
Read the extended post here, on vicenews.com.
At first glance, the meeting that occurred on January 24, 2013 could have been about any ordinary business deal. A multinational organization based in Hong Kong had cornered the market on a lucrative commodity. They needed distributors to bring their product to America, and so the organization dispatched a pair of representatives to Bangkok to meet with a potential client. That client claimed to have all the right connections in New York and money to burn.
But the deal was not ordinary. The businessmen were allegedly members of a triad crime syndicate, the would-be client was an informant for the DEA, and their lucrative commodity was a massive stockpile of ultra-pure North Korean methamphetamine stashed somewhere in the Philippines. The arrangement would eventually come to involve a shady pair of British drug merchants living in Thailand, the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang, and a team of assassins led by an ex-Army sniper nicknamed “Rambo.”
Two federal conspiracy cases unsealed in late 2013 paint a lurid picture of a stranger-than-fiction international underworld that uses North Korea as a haven for meth production. According to court documents and DEA sources, the meeting in Thailand last January was a pivotal moment in an ongoing investigation that stretches from Southeast Asia to West Africa. So far eight men have been arrested and extradited to face conspiracy charges in Manhattan federal court.
News of the cases was widely reported in the days after the indictments were revealed, but scrutiny of the evidence and extensive interviews with ex-diplomats, DEA officials, and independent experts has shed light on the shadowy dynamics of the international drug trade that extends through North Korea. Authorities have suspected for years that state-owned factories are used to make meth on an industrial scale. But now it appears the North Korean regime is outsourcing the work to transnational drug cartels, allowing them to operate with impunity inside the hermit kingdom in exchange for a cut of the action.
“The overwhelming preponderance of evidence points to official North Korean involvement,” said Sheena Chestnut Greitens, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies illicit activity in North Korea. “The triads, the Yakuza in Japan — the question is one of control. I don’t think North Korea exercises much if any control over these groups. It’s an arrangement for mutual benefit, and it lasts as long as it’s convenient for both sides.”
TONS OF BINGDU
North Korea’s participation in the illicit drug trade dates back at least to the 1970s. After defaulting on international debt, former leader Kim Il-sung (grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong-un) reportedly ordered his embassies to become self-sufficient, and so diplomats exploited their legal immunity and began smuggling hash and heroin. But by the early ‘90s, a number of DPRK diplomatic personnel had been busted and booted from their host nations, forcing the regime to change tactics.
At about the same time, meth started to become increasingly popular in the United States and Asia as economic collapse and famine gripped North Korea, creating the perfect storm incentivizing North Korea to produce the drug themselves. A 2007 report to Congress describes how Kim Jong-il created an agency called “Bureau 39” to oversee all “crime-for-profit activity” in the country, including illicit drugs, counterfeit currency, and contraband cigarettes. Massive pharmaceutical factories staffed by trained scientists were repurposed into meth labs capable of churning outbingdu, the Korean word for meth, by the ton. Police intercepted large North Korean drug shipments destined for the Philippines, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere.
‘There’s no such thing as organized crime in North Korea that doesn’t involve the government. Crime is disobeying the leadership. It’s a Sopranos state.’
“These are high-quality, chemically pure shipments that are professionally packaged and shipped in large quantities,” Greitens told VICE News. “That’s been the defining trait of North Korean meth seizures since the late ‘90s.”
In early 2006, North Korea staged a public crackdown on meth. The regime issued a decree announcing that all drug offenders would be sentenced to death regardless of their “status, services, or achievements.” Meth is still common — defectors have described a grim, surreal world where bingdu is used as medicine for headaches — but international seizures have tapered off. In a report to Congress last year, the State Department stated there were “no confirmed instances of large-scale drug trafficking” involving North Korea in 2010, and “if such activity persists, it is certainly on a smaller scale.”
But David Asher, a former advisor to the National Security Council who helped develop the US strategy against Kim Jong-il’s illicit activities, suspects the public crackdown was all for show. More likely, Asher says, it was a move to consolidate power.
“There’s no such thing as organized crime in North Korea that doesn’t involve the government,” Asher says. “Crime is disobeying the leadership. They passed a law solely to fool the West, and passed it in order to control the business internally to make sure people who were in the party weren’t operating behind the back of the leadership. It’s a Sopranos state. If they find somebody going around the senior leadership, that person gets whacked.”
The ongoing DEA investigation suggests the meth trade is still thriving in North Korea and is still ultimately controlled by the regime. The difference now is exemplified by men like Ye Tiong Tan Lim, a slight, balding 53-year-old Chinese man with Coke-bottle glasses. According to court documents, Lim and his 41-year-old Filipino associate told the DEA informant that their bosses in Hong Kong had exclusive access to meth manufactured in North Korea.
“It’s only us who can get from NK,” Lim said, according to his indictment. “The NK government already burned all the labs. Only our labs are not closed…. To show Americans that they are not selling it any more, they burned it. Then they transfer [the meth] to another base.”
Lim allegedly claimed his organization had squirreled away a ton of North Korean meth somewhere in the Philippines. He emphasized that the supply was limited for the time being due to the political situation in North Korea.
“We cannot get things out from North Korea right now,” Lim said. “We already anticipated this thing would happen between America, Korea, North Korea, South Korea, Japan — all the satellites are now — we cannot bring out our goods right now.”
DEA informants agreed to buy 100 kilos from Lim, who believed the load would then be sent to New York. Orchestrating a drug shipment that large and complex requires serious logistics and security planning, so the DEA enlisted the help of another gang in Thailand.
That’s where Rambo came in.
