1970s After hearing about
African American soldiers serving in the
Vietnam War becoming addicted to heroin while on
rest and recuperation (R&R) in Thailand, American drug lord
Frank Lucas travelled to Bangkok in the early 1970s in an attempt to set up a new trafficking route with his associate
Ike Atkinson. After Lucas visited the Golden Triangle region and made an initial purchase of 132 kilograms of uncut heroin (98–100% pure) from remnants of
Chiang Kai-shek's defeated
Kuomintang army (for a price of $4,200 per kilogram compared to the $50,000 each that the
New York Mafia charged), Atkinson used his contacts within the US military to smuggle the narcotics via US Air Force planes back to the eastern United States. It was then collected, cut to 10% purity, repackaged and distributed on the streets of
Harlem by dealers controlled by Lucas for a vast profit. This smuggling route operated up until the arrest of Frank Lucas by the
Drug Enforcement Administration in January 1975. In 1972, traditional European supply routes for American-consumed heroin (known as the
French Connection) were disrupted after
Turkey banned the growing of opium poppies, which led to an increase in production in South East Asia. With an existing
Triad organized crime infrastructure to service a large local population of addicts (consisting of an estimated 150,000 regular users), combined with its busy international
Port of Hong Kong and
Kai Tak Airport, Hong Kong soon became an important transit point for Southeast Asian heroin, as well as convenient money laundering center to reinvest the profits of international sales. Crime groups also used the city state as a location to process opium into refined heroin, with a syndicate controlled by
Ma Sik-chun estimated by the authorities to have imported over 700 tonnes of opium into Hong Kong between 1968 and 1974. In the mid-1970s, an organized crime gang headed by
Roland Tan and composed mainly of
Singaporean Chinese traffickers known as the
Ah Kong took control of the European heroin trade by smuggling heroin using
couriers via airplane from Thailand and
Malaysia to their headquarters in
Amsterdam, where it was then distributed to other major cities in western Europe. So successful were the gang that they muscled in on and ultimately took over the European territory of the
14K and
Wo Shing Wo groups of
triads. Heroin from Southeast Asia was originally brought to the United States by couriers, typically Thai and U.S. nationals, travelling on commercial airlines. Despite its strict
drug laws, Singapore was often used as a transit point, as traffickers believed foreign law enforcement agencies would be less stringent in checking passengers on arrival if their flight departed from Singapore.
California and
Hawaii were the primary U.S. entry points for Golden Triangle heroin, but small percentages of the drug were also trafficked into
New York City and
Washington, D.C. While Southeast Asian groups had success in trafficking heroin to the United States, they initially had difficulty arranging street level distribution. However, with the incarceration of Asian traffickers in American prisons during the 1970s, contacts between Asian and American prisoners developed. These contacts have allowed Southeast Asian traffickers access to gangs and organizations distributing heroin at the retail level.
1980s In the 1980s, after traditional
American Mafia groups were substantially weakened by a series of
Mafia Commission Trials, ethnic Chinese traffickers gradually took over the dominant role in the heroin supply on the
East Coast of the United States. A
Drug Enforcement Administration study identified the source of the heroin sold on the streets of New York: from 1982 to 1987, the percentage of Southeast Asian heroin rose from 3 percent to more than 40 percent of the market supply. As demand grew, Asian criminal organizations began trafficking large shipments of high purity heroin hidden amongst legitimate seaborne cargo to the United States of America. Notable incidents included: • The February 1988 seizure of 1,280 kilograms of 97% pure heroin hidden in bales of rubber sheets on a
New York City bound freighter at
Khlong Toei Port in Bangkok, with an estimated street price of $2 billion, was the world's largest single heroin seizure at the time. • In February 1989, a U.S. record amount was seized when
FBI agents in New York City raided a warehouse and discovered 380 kilograms of uncut heroin (with an estimated street price of $1 billion) hidden in lawn-mower tires, which authorities believed were shipped from
Hong Kong to
Los Angeles before being trucked to the New York area. • In early September 1989, the largest heroin seizure in the history of
British Hong Kong occurred when narcotics agents raided an apartment in the
Sai Kung District of the
New Territories and discovered 420 kilograms of 99% pure heroin, worth an estimated $420 million, packed into 30 travel bags. The drugs were believed to have originated in Thailand before being smuggled by sea to Hong Kong, where they were then transferred to a local fishing junk and afterwards brought to shore via speedboat. Police believed the haul was ultimately destined for the United States or
Australia • A new U.S. record was achieved in June 1991 when authorities seized 545 kilograms of high quality heroin (with an estimated street price of $3 billion) concealed in boxes of plastic bags from a warehouse in
Hayward, California. The shipment was originally smuggled from Thailand to the
port of Kaohsiung in
Taiwan within two shipping containers, then placed aboard a ship and brought to the
Port of Oakland.
1990s Although Nigeria had traditionally been used by foreign organized crime groups as a transit point for narcotics and as a source of drug mules, by the early 1990s
West African criminal organizations had themselves emerged as major traffickers of Southeast Asian heroin, with 660 West Africans being arrested in the United States for heroin trafficking in the year 1991. The issue became so widespread that in 1992 the
Nigerian government enacted a law that required its citizens to first obtain an official Clearance Certificate to prove they have no previous convictions for any drug-related offences issued by the
National Drug Law Enforcement Agency before they could apply for a Thailand
travel visa. Instead of attempting to smuggle a single large shipment, Nigerian traffickers would typically recruit many low level non-Nigerian couriers to transport a couple of kilograms of heroin at a time via regular airline routes from transshipment points in Asia, such as Singapore, Earlier on the same day, Dutch national
Johannes van Damme, who was employed by the same gang as a drug courier, was arrested in the transit lounge of
Singapore Changi Airport and found to be in possession of of high quality heroin hidden within two secret compartments of his suitcase. In a separate case in October 1996, U.S. law enforcement officials arrested members of a
Chicago based Nigerian trafficking group that smuggled heroin from Thailand via couriers for distribution to cities across the
American Midwest, that was believed to have supplied over with an estimated retail price of $100 million a year to various street gangs in the region. ==Present day drug trafficking==