The rise and fall of ‘legit’ drug lord Chi Lop Tse
Drug lord Chi Lop Tse was described by one investigator as unlike other gangsters and more like a “gentleman”. While he flew under the radar he and his syndicate pumped more drugs into Australia than just about any single source before he was jailed in Melbourne.
Chi Lop Tse’s jailing by a Melbourne court after a marathon Australian Federal Police probe is one of the country’s biggest law enforcement wins.
Tse and his Sam Gor syndicate have pumped more drugs into Australia than just about any single source, but the man himself would be recognised by almost no one here.
And that’s the way Tse would have wanted it.
While he has been labelled “Asia’s El Chapo”, the fact is that they are poles apart as drug bosses.
A 2021 Toronto Life magazine piece pointed out that El Chapo – Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel leader, real name Joaquin Guzman – took personal responsibility for 3000 murders as part of his fight to control Mexico’s drug market.
The article stated Sam Gor was built not on killing and torture but through business world-style efficiency, good product and stable partnerships.
It was a model which, at one stage, was estimated to have had the group known as “The Company” importing more than 70 per cent of the methamphetamine coming into Australia.
But everyone has to start somewhere, even a bloke capable of blowing $60m-plus in a single night of casino activity while being guarded by a crew of kickboxers.
Tse reportedly became enmeshed in crime at a young age in his home city of Guangzhou, China.
In the late 1980s he migrated to Canada where, from a base in Toronto, he became heavily involved in moving heroin from Asia to North America while affiliated with a gang called the Big Circle Boys.
BCB would join forces with an Italian organised crime ring to move heroin into the US until the FBI and Canadian organised crime investigators started to take an intense interest, leading to a vast number of arrests.
Tse was arrested in 1998 as he visited a restaurant in Hong Kong.
Canadian police officer Mario Lamothe, a veteran in Asian organised crime investigation, would later say Tse was unlike other gangsters determined to look the part.
“Nobody is more legit than Chi Lop Tse. When I saw him, he could have been the manager of the local bank,” Sergeant Lamothe said. “He carried himself like a gentleman.”
Tse would do eight years in a US prison where he made new connections and got back into business, forging liaisons which would become the foundation stone of Sam Gor.
Disparate groups were persuaded to work together and Tse had a plan which would give them a major edge over his wholesale rivals.
He took the step of guaranteeing purchasers they would only pay for shipments which made it into their hands, an idea which must have seemed radical when it was first conceived.
But the rapid expansion of his business, combined with low production costs in Myanmar labs meant that, if a shipment was confiscated by authorities en route to somewhere like Melbourne or Sydney, the loss was easily absorbed.
And Down Under is one of the biggest prizes in the sector.
Australia has a ravenous appetite for drugs like meth and ketamine and, for those able to get them here, the profit margins are incredible, meaning Tse was able to spend years making astronomical sums from Australia.
His vast shipments, hidden in green tea packages, were to be linked to busts on some of the nation’s major underworld players in the past decade.
Only a small fraction of consignments needed to get through for Tse’s operation to turn a profit.
Sam Gor also cleaned up with vast money-laundering enterprises centred on junket operators bringing Asian high-rollers to the nation’s casinos.
Melbourne’s Crown was one of them, its operators later being hit with a $1m fine for their involvement.
But by the end of last decade, the heat was starting to come onto Tse. Multiple law enforcement agencies here and abroad were onto him and details of his activities became public, causing others to shy away.
The Australian Federal Police had been examining Tse’s activities for a decade prior to his 2022 extradition from The Netherlands.
The increasingly under-pressure criminal mastermind had in 2021 been deported from Taiwan and was on his way back to Canada when picked up by Dutch authorities.
There would have been times, especially early on in the investigation, when it seemed unlikely he would ever be sentenced to time in a Victorian prison.
In the end, Tse has copped a 16-year prison stretch, which, while maybe not as much as his many sins warrant, is a lot better than nothing.
It will certainly be something pondered by the legion of former Australian criminals based abroad who now control much of the organised crime landscape back here.
There have been a succession of high-level extraditions in recent years, and the new AFP Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, clearly has an appetite for more work in foreign jurisdictions.
“That includes targeting criminals who wrongly believe they are out of our reach,” she said on Thursday.
Originally published as The rise and fall of ‘legit’ drug lord Chi Lop Tse
