From Toronto Life, November 1, 2021:
The Company ManTse Chi Lop, the suspected ringleader of a $21-billion crime syndicate, may be the world’s most innovative drug lord. And Toronto was his training ground
Tse Chi Lop doesn’t look like the biggest drug lord in history. He looks like a bedraggled, exhausted, late-middle-aged trader in commodities, which is exactly what he is. Tse’s commodities just happen to be high-margin, addictive, illegal drugs—heroin, ketamine and methamphetamine. Tse runs a drug syndicate known to law enforcement as “Sam Gor,” Cantonese for “Third Brother,” and to its members simply as the Company. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Sam Gor’s annual revenue could be as high as $21 billion, the same as Citibank’s.
Practically every newspaper in the West has described Tse Chi Lop as Asia’s El Chapo. The comparison could hardly be less accurate. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, has claimed personal responsibility for up to 3,000 murders in a drug war that took some 300,000 lives. That is not Tse’s way. He achieved the size of Sam Gor not by murder and torture, but by industrializing his business, reducing the cost per unit, providing an excellent product at a fair price, and establishing well-maintained networks of key partnerships. There’s also the question of scale. El Chapo’s cartel was worth, at its peak, $3 billion—a fraction of Sam Gor’s value.
Toronto taught Tse his business. The seeds for what would become the world’s largest drug empire were planted during his days surviving what police still remember as the “wild wild west” of the heroin glut in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Insofar as a man as cosmopolitan and as mobile as Tse Chi Lop has a home, Toronto is his.
Tse’s career reflects the changing nature of crime, and of the methods of synthetic drug manufacture that are rendering traditional police practices null, but it also reflects the changing nature of business in general. Traditional organized crime was a 20th-century affair. Sam Gor is pure 21st-century innovation. Its success comes down to technological innovation, relentless focus on customer experience, and mastery of globalized logistics. Tse Chi Lop is much more effective—and dangerous—than El Chapo. He is the Jeff Bezos of the drug trade.
From early in his career, Tse Chi Lop was an innovator. He was born in 1963 and grew up in Guangzhou in Guangdong province, the mainland neighbour to Hong Kong. When he was 25, he moved to Canada, part of the wave of emigration before Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty. Tse brought his fiancée with him, and his parents soon followed. He and his wife had children in Toronto, first a daughter, then a son. He also got decent jobs, working for Fujifilm and Kodak.
Back then, Toronto was a cauldron of competing Asian criminal organizations, including a group of Vietnamese gangsters supported by Born to Kill from New York City, and the Boston-backed Fukienese, all fighting for territory. Maclean’s called the shocking violence of the time “Terror in the Streets.” In 1990, Peter Yuen, now a deputy chief of the Toronto Police Service, was a detective constable working undercover during the height of the violence. “You had gun battles, 15 rounds at the corner of Dundas and Spadina on a Saturday afternoon,” Yuen says. One night, he snuck into an illegal gaming house. Four gang members burst in, taking customers’ jewellery and wallets along with the house’s money. They found Yuen’s police badge on him, so they beat him until his shirt was soaked in blood. One thief put a .45-calibre automatic in his mouth, another put a .357 magnum to his head. He heard the click of a hammer, and the guys fled. A forensic test revealed the gun had misfired. It is pure fluke that Yuen is alive today. “It was like watching a triad movie,” he says. “And the cops were just like dogs, too. We wanted to tell them, ‘We own these streets.’ ”....
....MUCH MORE
