The Hunt for Asia’s El Chapo: How Tse Chi Lop Built a Quiet $17 Billion Meth Empire

For more than a decade, the most powerful drug trafficker in the Asia-Pacific lived almost invisibly. He did not pose with gold-plated rifles, post videos from mountain hideouts, or tunnel out of maximum-security prisons. He flew on private jets, travelled with a detail of Thai kickboxers, and once, police later claimed, lost about $66 million in a single night at a Macau casino. Law enforcement called him Asia’s El Chapo. His own people called the organisation simply “The Company.”

His name is Tse Chi Lop — also known as Sam Gor, or Brother Number Three.

From Guangzhou to the Golden Triangle

Tse was born in China and immigrated to Canada in 1988, later becoming a Canadian citizen. In the 1990s he moved between North America, Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asia, rising as a mid-level figure in a heroin pipeline that sourced product from the Golden Triangle — the lawless borderlands of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and China.

In 1998 he was arrested and charged in New York’s Eastern District, the same court that would later sentence Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to life. Facing a possible life term for conspiracy to import heroin, Tse pleaded guilty. He told the judge his parents were ill, his young son had a lung disorder, and his wife was overwhelmed. He said he wanted to open a restaurant. He was sentenced to nine years and served much of it at a low-security prison in Ohio before being deported to Canada around 2006.

Police say he did not stay out of the trade for long.

The Company

What emerged after his release was something larger and more industrial than the old heroin networks. Investigators later described Sam Gor as an alliance of five triad groups that set aside old rivalries to dominate the booming market in synthetic drugs. Members called it The Company. Law enforcement called it Sam Gor, after Tse’s nickname.

The business model was different from the Sinaloa Cartel’s. Instead of ruling through spectacular public violence, the syndicate scaled production, cut unit costs, and built reliable supply chains. Labs in poorly policed parts of Myanmar’s Shan State turned out methamphetamine — known as ice or shabu — along with ketamine and other synthetics. Product moved through Thailand and other transit points into Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and beyond. Some shipments bound for Australia were hidden in packets of tea.

By 2018 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated Sam Gor’s annual meth revenue at between $8 billion and $17.7 billion. The market had expanded at least fourfold in five years. Australian police said that at its peak the syndicate was the biggest trafficker of methamphetamine into Australia, accounting for as much as 70 per cent of supply. Jeremy Douglas of the UNODC put Tse “in the league of El Chapo or maybe Pablo Escobar.”

Money was washed through casinos, hotels and real estate across the Mekong region. Tse himself lived lavishly but quietly — private planes, grand birthday parties at resorts, eight Thai kickboxing bodyguards. He was a heavy gambler. An Australian Federal Police investigator told Reuters that officers believed he lost 60 million euros, about $66 million, in one night on the tables in Macau.

Until 2019, a search of Chinese-language sources turned up almost nothing on him.

The hunt

That changed on 14 October 2019, when Reuters published a special report titled “The Hunt for Asia’s El Chapo.” Drawing on law-enforcement officials from multiple countries and internal police documents, the investigation named Tse as the suspected senior leader of the syndicate and revealed Operation Kungur — a previously unreported, AFP-led task force involving about 20 agencies across Asia, North America and Europe. It was described as the largest international effort yet against Asian drug syndicates.

The publicity was a turning point. Tse’s business depended on secrecy. Once his name and photograph circulated, associates began to pull away. He spent time in Taiwan. International pressure mounted. In January 2021, while flying from Taiwan to Canada with a layover in the Netherlands, he was arrested at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on an Interpol red notice requested by Australia.

Dutch courts approved extradition. Tse fought the move. He arrived in Melbourne in December 2022 in handcuffs, escorted by armed officers. Australian police called it one of the most high-profile arrests in the AFP’s history.

A narrower charge, an unusual deal

The case that finally put him in an Australian dock was narrower than the empire police described. Prosecutors charged him with conspiring, between March 2012 and March 2013, to traffic a commercial quantity of controlled drugs — including about 20 kilograms of methamphetamine moved between Melbourne and Sydney, then valued at around A$4.4 million, along with PMMA, a stimulant with MDMA-like effects.

The maximum penalty for such an offence is normally life imprisonment. That option was taken off the table before Tse ever boarded the plane to Australia. As part of the extradition request, then attorney-general Michaelia Cash gave an undertaking to Dutch authorities that he would not face the Australian maximum. County Court Judge Peter Rozen later called the arrangement “unusual.” The effective ceiling became 25 years. Cash later said that without the undertaking the Netherlands would not have extradited him, and he would have remained beyond Australia’s reach.

On 7 November 2025 Tse accepted a sentence indication and pleaded guilty. On 4 December 2025, in a Melbourne courtroom opened to the public after years of closed hearings, Rozen sentenced the 62-year-old to 16 years’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of 10 years. Pre-sentence detention of 1,778 days was counted. With time served, he could be eligible for parole around early 2031. He faces deportation on release.

What the hunt proved — and what it did not

Tse’s career is a study in two styles of organised crime. El Chapo became a global celebrity through prison breaks, firefights and a public cult of personality. Tse built something that, on paper, was larger in revenue while remaining almost unknown even in the region his product flooded. The 2019 Reuters investigation and Operation Kungur showed that a low profile is not the same as invisibility. Once the name was public, the network that had protected him began to crack. An airport layover in a third country was enough.

The Company did not vanish with its alleged chief executive. Synthetic-drug production in the Golden Triangle continues, and trafficking routes across the Asia-Pacific remain active. Tse was convicted on a specific 2012–13 conspiracy, not for running a $17 billion annual enterprise in open court. The gap between the empire police described and the charge that produced a 16-year sentence is itself part of the story: how hard it is to put a whole transnational syndicate in the dock, and how extradition politics can cap even a landmark case.

For years the hunt for Asia’s El Chapo was a search for a man who refused to look like a kingpin. In the end, the man who once moved unseen between casinos, private jets and Golden Triangle supply lines sat in a Melbourne court in thick glasses and a blue shirt, head bowed, as a judge closed a 14-year investigation with a number that was both historic and, by Australian standards for this offence, constrained. The nickname stuck. The empire, or what remains of it, did not need him in the same way he had needed its silence.

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