The piping-hot bear paw soup, made from limbs freshly hacked off still-living moon bears, is rumoured to be fresh local produce, along with the tiger bone wine, rhino penis, and pangolin scales it is paired with: There is no way to know for sure, for the local zoo discourages visitors.
A fleet of Rolls-Royce limousines ferries visitors from the jetty at Ban Mom or the road from Chiang Rai, gliding past the faux-Grecian columns and statues that line the entrance to the Kings Romans Casino, the kitschy golden jewel-shaped building from which Laos’ Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone or SEZ takes its name.
Low, lush-green hills holding it in their embrace, Kings Romans is among dozens of narco-states that have sprung up along China’s borders with Laos and Myanmar. Free-trade zones like Dubai or Singapore offer banks and multinational corporations security, efficiency, and order; Kings Romans provides the same services to drug traffickers, cyber-criminals, and money launderers.
On 31 August, 47 Indian nationals arrived home from Laos, rescued after months of being enslaved in camps running industrial-scale pig butchering scams. Luring the lonely and the gullible of the world to hand over their money, the workers had been made to pose as attractive single women on dating apps, weaving irresistible cryptocurrency deals into virtual pillow talk. Last year, Americans lost an estimated $4.4 billion to pig butchering cases.
Even though the SEZ has been named in multiple international criminal investigations and faces United States sanctions, an airport offering direct flights from Vientiane just opened, and there are plans to develop a port on the Mekong to offer narcotics cartels direct oceanic access.
Kings Romans is what happens when organised crime becomes the business of nation-states. As Myanmar implodes under the weight of civil war, this model seems set for inexorable growth.
The making of a crime lord
Little is known about Zhao Wei, the emperor who rules Kings Romans together with his queen, ethnic-Chinese Australian Su Guiqin. Thought to have been born in 1952, either in Heilongjiang or Liaoning, Zhao became involved in the highly-criminalised world of shipping timber from Myanmar into southern China. For several years, Zhao worked in the casino industry in Macao, known to be deeply enmeshed with Chinese organised crime groups, the Triads. The casino industry, experts believe, played a key role in letting Chinese elites launder their income and transfer wealth abroad.
Sometime around 2001, Zhao became a central figure in the booming casino industry in Mong La, a town in northern Myanmar held by ethnic Wa insurgent groups. Long held by the People’s Liberation Army-backed Communist Party of Burma, Mong La was one of several zones carved up among rival warlords after the collapse of the insurgency. The scholar Bertil Lintner records that insurgent commander Ling Mingxian allowed cartels to set up narco-laboratories guarded by his ethnic-Shan troops.
Ling used the profits from the narcotics operations to invest in casinos, as well as related operations like hotels, sex work, and karaoke bars. For a while, Mong La became a hub for Chinese tourists evading the domestic ban on gambling, with busloads arriving for day trips. The town, reporter Andrew Jacobs wrote, resembled “a neon spaceship that crash-landed in the jungle.”
In 2005, though, reports emerged that several Chinese had been made prisoners for their failure to pay casino debts in Mong La. Evidence emerged that Chinese public officials had also been gambling in the city—using state funds. The Chinese authorities introduced new rules requiring its nationals to seek permits while visiting Mong La. Even though illicit cross-border visits remained commonplace, top-end operators like Zhao saw the writing on the wall.
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Las Vegas on the Mekong
The move to Laos, the International Crisis Group would later report, wasn’t easy. Laos granted Zhao near-sovereignty over a 10,000-hectare area on the Thai border, ostensibly devoted to manufacturing, agribusiness, and tourism, in return for a 20 per cent stake in the project. Local crime lord Naw Kham, whose barges transported heroin and methamphetamine along the Mekong into Thailand, correctly saw the new arrival as a threat. In 2011, he kidnapped 13 Chinese sailors and gamblers hostage, demanding a $750,000 ransom.
Like 9/11, the eventual killing of the hostages would embed itself in the Chinese popular imagination. Journalist Jeff Howe recorded “10/5”, and its residue of beheaded tortured bodies demanded retribution. Led by Liu Yuejin, the head of the Narcotics Control Bureau in China’s Ministry of Public Security, a special team captured Naw Kham.
To the government in Beijing, proxies like Zhao seemed a tool to bring order and discipline to the criminal enclaves on its borderlands. The rise of European nation-states in the 16th century onward, political scientist Charles Tilly famously noted, was enmeshed with criminality. As pirates and outlaws massed influence, they came to exercise a monopoly over violence and the organisation of capital. China sought to replicate this model on its borders with client regimes.
Kings Romans, scholar Pal Nyiri has noted, wasn’t the only one of its kind. In 2007, the Lao government granted Fokhing, a Hong Kong-based company, a 16-square-kilometre land concession across the main border crossing at Boten, China. Again, a casino became the centre-piece of development, together with sex work and drugs. Fokhing also constructed hotels with an estimated 2,700 rooms and dormitories for workers.
For all practical purposes, Boten seceded from Laos: The Yuan served as the sole currency and even clocks were set to Chinese time. Chinese network providers supplied mobile phone systems and the internet. Like at Kings Romans, local police had no power to enter the SEZ, for which security was provided by private militia wearing uniforms resembling those of the Chinese police.
Scholars Jason Tower and Priscilla Carp have written that the criminal city model continued to thrive in Myanmar, too. From the casino town of Shwe Kokko, on the border with Thailand—a joint venture between Chinese investors and Myanmar’s Border Guard Police—one company openly offers to help move earnings out of the country using a dedicated encrypted digital currency platform. The town of Myawaddy, similarly, now has Saixigang Industrial Zone, led by Wan Kuok-koi, a convicted gangster nicknamed “Broken Tooth”.
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Free market criminals
For criminal cartels of all kinds, the casino cities on China’s peripheries offer security and immunity. In Kings Romans, Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy report, prison-like multi-storeyed dormitory complexes sealed off by barbed wire house the cyber-slaves used by the pig butchering operations.
Lured by high wages, workers from the Philippines, Thailand, and India soon discover that attempts to escape, or even failure to meet their assigned quotas, can lead to beatings or being tasered. Local residents told the journalists that suicide is common.
Even though the criminal operations at Kings Romans have been widely exposed, they continue to enjoy the very public patronage of high officials in both Laos and China. Kennedy and Southern reported last year that new constructions included “a shiny new Chinatown, complete with statues of Confucius and Disneyfied traditional shophouses selling knock-off Gucci gear.”
Even though diplomatic pressure has helped hundreds of Indians escape cyber-slavery in Laos, thousands more are believed to remain trapped in the cartels’ prison factories. The far more significant impacts of the casino cities, moreover, remain unaddressed: The flow of methamphetamines is a growing transnational threat, and the ease of laundering funds through the casinos facilitates the activities of organised crime across the world.
The scale of human suffering unleashed across the world by the criminal empires nestled inside East Asia’s failed states ought to be enough persuasion for the world to act.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)