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Heroin smuggling trail led police t



Subject: Heroin smuggling trail led police to Burma

HEROIN SMUGGLING TRAIL LED FROM MYANMAR TO VANCOUVER
BurmaNews - BC:  June 24, 1999  (based on AP and Vancouver Sun stories)

Asian gang war investigation brings 32 arrests; hundreds of teenagers
implicated

VANCOUVER -- A Vancouver pool hall operator is a key figure in police
investigations into an Asian-based organized crime group that is linked to
heroin smuggling and extortion leading all the way from Myanmar to Canada.

Simon Chow, operator of a chain of pool halls in Vancouver, Burnaby and
suburban Richmond, was among 32 people arrested here and in other North
American cities in connection with with two cases that span several
continents and a half dozen law enforcement agencies.  Arrest warrants have
been issued for four other men from Thailand and Hong Kong.

"This organization was a lot bigger than we had anticipated," Staff
Sergeant Pat Convey of the RCMP drug section told a news conference.  "From
[Vancouver] it took us to Hong Kong, Bangkok and, quite frankly, it's taken
us right into areas of Myanmar and China -- right into the poppy fields."

Covey's case started with the RCMP drug squad and Canada Customs probing a
massive heroin importation-exportation operation run by an Asian organized
crime group.  "Vancouver is definitely one of the major areas for
distribution of heroin coming in from southeast Asia for the entire North
American market," the RCMP officer said.

A second related investigation focusing on spin-off criminal activities by
the group, such as extortion, gambling, loan-sharking and fraud, has led to
dozens of charges being laid against seven other persons.  Police say their
investigations in the case resulted from a probe into a gang war between
the Wo On Lok Triad of Macau and the 14K Triad of Hong that spilled into
Canada.  

Police also allege that as many as 200 Lower Mainland high school students,
mainly of Asian descent, were co-erced by gang members through threats or
assaults, into joining pool hall clubs that were fronts for the gangs.  The
young people were then expected to participate in criminal activity and
recruit other members, police said.

Covey said that hundreds of packages of heroin weighing 595 grams each were
moved from Asia to Vancouver for distribution across North America.  He
said the gang moved so much heroin it could control the price on the

streets.  Vancouver was considered to be a safe entry point for the heroin
because the smugglers were not afraid of the judicial system here.

Meanwhile the First Secretary of Burma's ruling military council found it
necessary to deny once again that his country was taking advantage of the
sale of heroin and other illegal drugs in foreign countries through money
laundering activities.

Gen Khin Nyunt told an ASEAN conference on Transnational Crime in Rangoon
this week that his country has stringent regulations against money
laundering and had even seized more than $ US 274,000 in financial assets
and property from drug dealers since 1993.

However, international law enforcement agencies have been skeptical of Khin
Nyunt's claims.  Burma is the world's largest producer of opium, the raw
material for heroin, and  successive military governments have worked out
cease-fire deals with drug war lords whose armies control opium and heroin
trafficking in the country.  Critics have charged that the deals allow the
warlords to invest their drug money in businesses in Yangon and around the
country, and even  continue drug trafficking. 

British Columbia's legislators are fed up with the military government's
denials, as well.  Citing among other things the effects of the heroin
trade on young people in the province, the House of Assembly resolved
unanimously in May to call for recognition of Burma's popularly elected
parliament through support of the Committee to Represent the People's
Parliament.  The CRPP was formed when the present military government took
steps to arrest and imprison a majority of Burma's popularly elected
parliamentarians last year. Burma's democratic opposition has put forward a
plan to get rid of the drug trade from the country when they take over the
government.

Canada's federal government has yet to respond to the BC initiative.