True Crime

True Crime

The Company: How Tse Chi Lop Built the World's Largest Drug Syndicate

In remote hills of Myanmar's Wa Territory, workers with chemical-blistered hands loaded vacuum-sealed tea packets into crates. Days later, these packets surfaced in Tokyo apartments, Sydney suburbs, and Bangkok nightclubs. A single kilo made for $1,800 could sell for $588,000. The flood of methamphetamine changed the landscape of addiction worldwide–from Bangladesh to Slovakia, South Korea to South Africa. At the center of this web sat Tse Chi Lop and the organization called simply "The Company"–a federation of former enemies united under a revolutionary business model: why fight over market share when you can grow the market itself?