Myanmar Generals’ nuclear dreams are Asian crime bosses’ hope to defend their last citadel

The case is entwined with the story of centuries-old criminal clans in Southeast Asia, who forged empires in the crucible of the colonial era using drugs, guns, sex, and political power.

Takeshi Ebisawa, 60, and co-defendant Somphop Singhasiri, 61, trafficked in drugs, weapons and nuclear material | Reuters

From colonial Shanghai’s Avenue Edouard VII—named after the King of England and flamboyant playboy reviled by his detractors as ‘Edward the Caresser’—the Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg flowed with the hot tide of men entering the Great World. Like Dante’s circles of hell, the pleasure palace’s perversions grew as Sternberg ascended the stairwell: There was gambling, pimps and pickpockets, magicians and earwax extractors, fireworks, caged birds and a stuffed whale, “girls whose dresses were slit to the armpits”.

Looking out from the terrace, Sternberg could see the wide open ground below where hundreds, bankrupted by their pleasures, “had speeded the return to the street below by jumping off the roof”.

Earlier this month, United States prosecutors announced the prosecution of Japanese Yakuza crime boss Takeshi Ebisawa and his Thai associate Somphop Singhasiri, both arrested in 2022 for trafficking “weapons-grade nuclear material”. Funds raised from the deal, prosecutors allege, were to finance the purchase of weapons for a so-far unidentified insurgent group from Myanmar.

The case of nuclear trafficking, though, isn’t just about generals and geopolitics. It is entwined with the story of centuries-old criminal brotherhoods and clans in Southeast Asia, who forged empires in the crucible of the colonial era using drugs, guns, sex, and political power.

The empire’s criminals

The foundations of the Great World had been laid two centuries before Sternberg’s visit. Through the 18th century, as British demand for tea and silk rose, every ship that sailed from India to Guangzhou carried silver bullion. Early in the next century, though, there was a shortage of silver. The East India Company needed a product to pay for its purchases. The answer was found in India-grown opium. Faced with a devastating addiction crisis, the Chinese sought to shut down the rising tide of opium—but were defeated in the First Opium War of 1842.

Liberal politician William Gladstone, later to become Prime Minister, assailed his nation for forcing China to accept the flow of opium: “A war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know.”

Tracing their roots to the Heaven and Earth Society, an order of Shaolin monks and martial arts masters whom legend holds fought off barbarian invaders, the Triad criminal brotherhoods thrived in the chaos unleashed after the Opium Wars. Engaged in rural banditry and rebellion, the Triads were soon recruited to help prop up imperial rule in Shanghai. In return for the toleration of their heroin production, gambling and sex work operations, they ensured violence stayed within manageable limits.

Lintner shows the deal built a Shanghai where “sin, crime, politics and business coexisted as a new system of government”. The city’s Green Gang, for example, served as enforcers for stretched colonial police. French police, scholar Lynn Pan observes, “recognised the world of Shanghai for what it was, a jungle of bums, adventurers, opportunists, and swindlers”. “To the French, there were worse sins to a police force than having as its Chinese head a man who, by virtue of his influence in the underworld, kept the level of crime from brimming over.”

The Green Gang and other Triads also played a central role in propping up General Chiang’s military regime, with Green Gang crime boss Du ‘Snake Eyes’ Yuesheng even taking charge of his intelligence services.

The narco-state in Burma

Following the communist revolution, the cartels evicted from Shanghai reestablished themselves across China’s southern border, helped by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Guomindang military commanders, operating along with local ethnic-Chinese warlords, funded their operations by trafficking opium. Figures like Olive Lang—a convent school-educated girl from Lashio, who went on to command her own militia—pioneered a chain of opium laboratories and trucking lines linking Burma (now Myanmar) with markets worldwide.

As they battled multiple ethnic insurgencies, the country’s Generals struck deals with warlords like Lang, giving protection to their opium operations in return for ending hostilities. Funds from the warlords flowed back too to the Generals and the élite around them. A narco-state had begun to form, turning Myanmar into the world’s largest producer of opium.

Evidence began to emerge, around 2008, that the Generals ruling Myanmar, thought nuclear weapons might be needed to guarantee the state’s survival. Investigators in Japan discovered that North Korean businessman Li Gyeong Ho had evaded export controls to supply a magnetometer and cylindrical grinders to Myanmar. The equipment had applications in diverse fields but could have been used in missile control systems and uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

Two defectors interviewed by scholar David Ball in 2009 revealed the existence of two uranium-mining facilities at Thabeikkyin as well as a research facility and dedicated military support unit. The defectors claimed that the military was putting in place the elements of a full-scale nuclear weapons programme, using technologies from North Korea and Russia. Evidence in support of their claims proved thin, but alarms began to sound in world capitals.

Following the election of a democratic government in 2012, Myanmar seemed to roll back its nuclear ambitions. In 2023, though, Burma and Russia’s state-owned Rosatom, signed an agreement to build a small, modular reactor. The reactor wouldn’t, in itself, produce enough material for a nuclear weapon. There’s no clear answer, though, on why a country mired in a crippling financial crisis is investing resources in a nuclear-energy programme when it has abundant coal and hydroelectric resources.

The Yakuza uranium-export plot isn’t evidence that a nuclear weapons programme is underway. There are more disturbing questions, though: Who held the stockpile of 2,000 kilograms of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of Uranium-308 that Ebisawa offered to sell? Where did he source the sample of weapons-grade Plutonium he supplied to undercover United States agents, posing as Iranian buyers? How did an insurgent group obtain access to this stockpile, which would take the resources of a state to maintain safely?

The globalisation of cartels

Late in 1953, the elderly man who’d spent his last years hunched over his broomstick, sweeping up the streets outside the Great World, finally passed away. For decades, that sweeper, Huang ‘Bigshot’ Jinrong, had run the Great World as well as a string of other gambling dens and brothels. As a leader of the Green Gang and the affiliated Big Eight cartel—and as a police chief of the French colonial section of the city—he’d battled the communists, breaking up trade unions, beating up protestors and arresting radicals.

The People’s Republic, which took power in 1949, Lintner writes, chose to punish Huang with humiliation, instead of a bullet through the head. Even as Huang’s life ended, though, the networks he ran were putting down new roots.

Thailand, from where Ebisawa trafficked narcotics shipped from Burma, emerged as the hub for the Southeast Asian cartels from the 1950s. Investigative journalist David Kaplan points to studies estimating that gambling, drugs, arms trafficking, prostitution, people trafficking, and diesel smuggling generated $8-13 billion, or up to 13 per cent of the country’s Gross National Product in 1998.

Following the Second World War, scholar Eiko Maruko writes, the Yakuza worked with the Japanese government and the CIA to combat trade unions and the Left. The crime cartel—whose membership is estimated to have swelled to over 1,80,000 in the grim, post-Second World War years—was allowed to run Tokyo’s red-light district, extort money from businesses and extensively traffic methamphetamines.

The Yakuza soon expanded region-wide. In 1990, more than 200 yakuza and associates were believed to be active in Thailand, Kaplan notes, with interests in activities from drug trafficking to property and prostitution. The Yakuza has also been involved in customised trafficking for élite Asians, ranging from lemurs to endangered poisonous snakes.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, mafia organisations from Russia—collectively known as The Brotherhood—also embedded themselves in Southeast Asia. Ties with criminal groups in Siberia were established when Shanghai received large numbers of refugees from the Soviets in 1917-1919, some of them so-called “taxi girls” or upmarket sex workers. The Russian mafia is now deeply embedded in heroin trafficking out of Thailand as well as sex work and money laundering.

Macau also became an important centre for the cartels. Led by Triad-linked tycoon Stanley Ho, the gambling industry in Macau grew steadily after 1961, catering to affluent ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong and the wider diaspora. Though China has cracked down on illegal gambling, underground banking, and money laundering, former police officer Martin Pubrick writes, the island’s casinos continue to have significant Triad influence.

For the most part, though, the cartels have lost the patronage and political influence that helped build their empires: A world made up of modern nation-states does not need gangs to keep order. The nuclear dreams of Myanmar’s Generals might be Asian crime bosses’ last hope for a haven where they might escape Huang’s miserable end.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)