North Korea and the triads: gangsters, ghost ships and spies | FT Film

foreign

ghost

ships

Oil traders Casino operators North Koreans spy on a Hong Kong gold trader and a cow racing driver there have been some arrests some suicides in this joint investigation with the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London which We reveal for the first time, some of the faces behind the organized criminal networks that have facilitated North Korea's sanctions in Asia North Korea has been using the Triads and others to help it in its operations, it has had to obtain oil illicitly and the end result is that the weapons program continues. No matter what they find, they will find oil to feed themselves.

What we found time and time again were connections to casinos. Connections with Sun City. These weaknesses in the global financial system are exploited by a wide range of illicit actors, making the ability to launder money critical. For North Korea's weapons program, this is a country whose ballistic missiles can reach half the world. The Triads and these high-level criminal organizations are a strategic concern for all of us. This is a story about how the Triads facilitate the oil trade that keeps North Korea's weapons program alive without oil and without petroleum products like gasoline and especially diesel, not only North Korea's economy but also its enormous army on which the regime bases its power would simply be paralyzed.

My name is James Byrne and I. As Director of Open Source Intelligence and Analysis at the Royal United Services Institute in London, I have been working on this research for over a year. We have been tracking illicit oil imports from North Korea attempting to identify the individuals and entities behind these imports. and how North Korea is evading UN Security Council resolutions and this brings us to the story of a ship called Unica. The Unica is really one of the key parts of this story because it is the tanker that the North Koreans have been able to rely on. to regularly deliver fuel to North Korea, have continued to do so despite all the sanctions, despite the patrols carried out by a number of countries, has been operating in the East China Sea for a long time and has continued to do so from the waters . from Taiwan, where she meets intermediary tankers that load oil from those ports and then transports that oil regularly to North Korea, where it is picked up by North Korean tankers and moved to foreign ports.

They try to use other methods to avoid being seen. they make the transfer from ship to ship in the afternoon or midnight or in the area where normally

ships

should not anchor now these ships cannot be tracked they go dark the ships are almost

ghost

ships they live at sea without going to port for months my name es Hugh Griffiths for five years I was coordinator of the UN panel of experts that oversees sanctions against North Korea boarding North Korean ships are you the operator of the radio room where are your communications log books? meeting with the bank executives who inspect the confiscated items? shipping container weapons witnessing the destruction of North Korean weapons that sort of thing Even in our early investigations we discovered that the foreign flag tanker meeting the North Korean tanker would have a dialogue using WeChat and that code was used and only you knew they met the correct ship because a remimbi ticket that had been torn up on the supply ship, the captain of that ship would have half the ticket and the real ship he was supposed to meet to supply fuel would have the other half of the ticket.

Abroad, only finding out who is moving the oil to North Korea will allow us to stop them from doing so. To understand how North Korea obtains these oil products, one must first understand the methods by which for decades it has used irregular oil and illicit channels to raise money for all our efforts to impose sanctions to ultimately bring North Korea into The table should also focus on seeing North Korea as truly a criminal organization, but with connections to high-level organized crime figures. My name is Sumi Terry. He previously served in the U.S. government, being a long-time CIA official and also on the National Security Council.

North Korea after the Korean War was actually in a better economic situation than South Korea, but in the 1970s its economy began to perform very poorly and after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s it suffered. economically, so there is no other way for North Korea to make money than to resort to illicit activities, according to the UN and outside analysts. The Kim regime sells weapons on the black market. It uses its diplomats to move illegal drugs like methamphetamine, they have trafficked in counterfeit US dollars, fake Viagra, foreign countries like Iran and Syria, and even pirated DVDs and pornography. um your activity is greater is your demand for interaction with local organized crime, so I say drugs, I don't.

I believe that North Koreans have sometimes sold drugs themselves, they reach out to local criminal groups and sell the drugs through them. My name is Andrew Lenkov. I've been working in North Korea since 1984, essentially visited many times, sometimes blacklisted, sometimes not essentially studied how the North Koreans reinvented themselves. capitalism in the last 30 years imagine you have a mission, your missile engineers asked you to get some equipment, are you expected to fly to any country and you know that just going to a missile factory is not going to work, so the only way Is it trusting again? about people who, for a good commission, are willing to do practically anything related to criminal gangs, this historical relationship between North Korea and East Asian organized crime groups is of crucial importance to understanding how Pyongyang reacted to the limit of oil imposed by the UN Minister and I spoke about the importance of the full implementation of resolution 1718.

North Korea's number one objective is the survival of the regime and for that survival of the regime they have to have a strong army and part To have a strong army is also to develop a nuclear weapons program. They will meet with fire and fury. As if the world had never seen the hope was that by putting a lot of pressure through sanctions on North Korea, this would lead to North Korea abandoning the nuclear weapons program, of course, what didn't happen abroad is that North Korea has no oil. so every drop of oil consumed in North Korea is important, you need oil to move your vehicles and if your vehicles don't move your soldiers won't get ammunition and ballistic missiles won't fly.

The North Korean tankers they previously used to travel to China. travel to Russia to pick up refined diesel gasoline, but after 2017 sanctions increased, several UN member states sent patrol planes to document all ship-to-ship transfers involving North Korean tankers or ships that had already been designated by the Security Council for an asset freeze or a global port entry ban, some people were designated by the UN, others are now wanted for money laundering, there were some arrests, some suicides and many of the people who provided oil were finally released. burned, it became more difficult for North Korea to participate in all that time North Korea had to adapt and what is left is that there are really groups left that have a big appetite for doing illegal things and that have a successful track record of not only doing activities that were against the law, but also successfully laundering those funds and staying free and, in fact, prospering and who are those people, well, the organized crime groups, like the Triads in Hong Kong, are the local Triads that They have always been quite powerful and a lot of us have to engage in, let's say, all kinds of trade, including oil trade for the North Koreans, ship-to-ship transfers and whatever groups those people will join up with because they provide protection and they can also physically intimidate ship captains and ship crew, because if you talk to authorities, if you become an informant, you really have to think about the consequences that North Korea not only has long-standing ties dates with these organized criminal groups, but we know that these groups are also deeply immersed in an illicit oil trade in East Asia, that market is a multi-billion dollar business.

Huge volumes of oil are smuggled into China annually and the people responsible for smuggling that oil make huge profits. Many of the actors involved are originally from the continent. China and these connections were established with the North Koreans long before the Security Council implemented sanctions. We believe that some of the largest tankers that have gone to North Korea are operated by a network of people who live and work in Hong Kong. with high level connections to organized crime, the Triads, it is one of the first pieces of evidence that has actually been published in open sources, that is what really showed this and how it works in detail.

My name is Aaron Arnold. I am a senior member of the Royal Royal. United Services Institute I am a former American member of the UN panel of experts. We often found that North Korea would rely heavily on jurisdictions like Hong Kong to facilitate its sanctions on Asian activities. Hong Kong's internal rules and regulations offer a level of privacy to the North. Korea that allows him to hide his activities, the people we believe own and operate the Unica and we suspect that there are other tankers who have been delivering oil to North Korea and to citizens of Hong Kong, including one called Gary Tow.

We visited his offices at the Golden Financial Center in Kowloon Bay, which is a fairly normal office block. Gary Tow, as well as being on Unica's ownership documents. The ship that delivers oil to North Korea. He also runs one of the largest gold trading stores and outfits in Hong Kong. It's very normal. Part of you knows the business district there, so you otherwise seem to be a legitimate businessman, that store and that entity in Hong Kong until recently was called Sun Gold Holding. We believe he was closely connected to Sun City Group. The Sun City group was. at the time it was the largest casino and travel operator in Asia, had been in the gambling business for a long time and was operated by people who were arrested in China and were allegedly high-level members of the Triads.

Sun City was run by a man called Alvin Chao and Alvin Chao is quite famous not only in Hong Kong but also throughout Asia because the authorities have been investigating his companies and how they operate. Macau tycoon Alvin Chao has been arrested after authorities in the mainland city issued an arrest warrant for him, the businessman is accused of running illegal cross-border gambling rings. It is a really effective way of mixing legitimate money with illegitimate money and makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for banks to identify the real source of the funds or one of Asia's most famous

gangsters

Broken Tooth basically known for his role as member of the 14k Triad the same group that Alvin Chao is also accused of being a member of photographs of social occasions and important business occasions also demonstrate this fairly close bond between Gary Tow and Alvin Chow we regularly find photographs of Gary Tow at events with other members high-level Sun City Group officials, such as Cheng Ting Kong, who has been identified by Australian authorities as being involved in high-level money laundering and drug trafficking.

My name is Sharon Ingrid quark and my research area is trust society and I started during research from my PhD in Hong Kong, there are three key trust societies operating in Hong Kong on 14k um sunny day and also Wars and Wars, Their operations are quite vast and geographically spread throughout Asia, they still do what we call the traditional Triad businesses, such as the sex industry and also illegal gambling, but other than that, there are a lot of legitimate businesses that they do and the Triads are also known for their use of violence and such. Violence has been useful for some casino operators in order to enforce debts.

Sun City Group has closed all of its VIP gaming rooms in Macau after the arrest of its CEO. What we found time and time again were connections to Sun City and connections to organized crime groups. the people at the Sun City group casinos were moving huge volumes of money from China to Macau and even further afield, gambling is illegal in China so it is inevitable that they would use the illegal channel to get the money out of China Sun City. I knew on paper basically agambling promoter, but it was much more than that, not only did it have these publicly traded companies, but it also had other networks of companies throughout Asia, people talking about Sun City and law enforcement in the region In fact, it characterized it more as a pan-Asian underground bank that enabled both legal and illicit money flows throughout the region.

Underground financial networks, like those operated by Sun City, are ultimately key to North Korea's ability to to operate abroad; Often, North Korea will seek jurisdictions. that have secrecy laws that allow the country to hide its identity so that it can repatriate those illicit proceeds to support the regime's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, so the ability to launder money and the ability to move money through the international financial system without being detected is essential for North Korea to continue building its weapons program. In the course of our investigation, we also discovered a connection between the Sun City group and a family of Emma Gray in Macau.

The patriarch of the family was named Sun Chanpan according to the testimony of a defector. Official records suggest this. Man Sunshine Pan was sent in the 1950s by North Korea to Macau as an agent in charge of raising money for the regime. Sunshine Pan was the head of the Song family who have since established a wide range of businesses in Macau and beyond. Believe they were paying for oil being shipped to North Korea through the international financial system which provided a lifeline for Pyongyang, so the only place a North Korean trader acting on state orders or a spy could go to find themselves with someone and do it more or less unnoticed was Macau and North Korea.

Intelligence Services Macau was a dream job for a foreigner. Many of these people at the heart of this network have been operating in Hong Kong and Macau for a long time. We believe that one of the most important people is a person named Sun tit fam according to the family. Sources: Suntit Fan is the grandson of the original patriarch who went to Macau and has been in business with several people who are supposedly Triads and others who are closely related to identified Triads. He is on documents next to me, I believe he is the owner of the roar.

Corp that has supposedly been involved in narcotics smuggling, so the Sunset fan is a key part of this story, but not only is he connected to North Korean intelligence operations in those smuggling operations, he is well known for drive a race car in sponsored races. In Sun City, he operated a joint venture with Alvin Chao called Sun International Automotive Company. He had a store in Macau where everything was Ferraris, Lamborghinis and was arranged by foreign luxury cars. We still don't have the last piece of the puzzle. But so far no one has been able to put together such a detailed picture of these Networks, so we believe what we have here is a person intimately connected to North Korea's overseas intelligence apparatus in business with Alvin Chao and Sun City.

Group, a son of Alvin and The Sun City Group was also ultimately connected to modern oil smuggling operations to North Korea through several Hong Kong nationals, including Gary Toad. This race is a much bigger question that has to do with China, why does China seem to allow this type of criminal activity? China's overwhelming antipathy toward the United States and, by extension, many of the other Western powers, has led it to close relations with countries that participate in organized crime or are considered by the West to be international pariahs when I was on the panel As UN experts we often notified China of possible violations of the sanctions regime, unfortunately in their jurisdiction this included things like ship-to-ship transfers and it was common not to receive a response from China many times.

Of the oil tankers continue to take refuge in Chinese waters, many of these networks continue to move money through the international financial system, but the starting point is the Chinese banks that have accounts secretly controlled by North Koreans, so the North Koreans have a lifeline. in the

north

. Korea represents a real enigma for China, on the one hand China fought with North Korea in the Korean War in the 1950s and North Korea shares a border with China, but on the other hand, Beijing considers that South Korea's nuclear missiles North are the crucial pretext that allows the United States to maintain its aggressive and advanced posture in Asia in 2017 China and Russia were able to cooperate to impose the oil limit on North Korea, but now they are pushing not only to ease sanctions on North Korea, but which in fact they have been trying to publicly excuse and To justify North Korea's most aggressive behavior since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we know that North Korea has a relationship with Russia by supplying artillery and other weapons in exchange for Russia not implementing sanctions and potentially help this cash-strapped regime with cash or fuel.

China was until recently quite willing to calculate with the United States, but it is an old story now the reality is that those who protect the DPRK from the consequences of its exclamatory missile tests put the Asian region and the entire world at risk of conflict, it is a kind of large-scale call for Visa The United States creates potential for instability near airports North Korea to stay afloat they need the Korean Peninsula to be stable and divided North Korea's foreign trade is with China yes China would really like to cut off trade cutting off oil it's called cutting off fuel food supplies they can do that but of course China is not willing to do that thank you it is extremely unlikely that Kim Jong-un will ever give up nuclear weapons and we have tried almost everything except a military conflict, from bilateral negotiations to multilateral negotiations and the maximum. pressure on symmetry and diplomacy and yet we are here where North Korea has up to 60 nuclear warheads, yes, missile and nuclear development, these programs in themselves already worry Japan because it is just a neighboring country, any failure of the test or any falling debris could cause serious damage to Japan, imagine who wants your children to tell you that this is a missile alert at any time, if you hear this, you have to find the underground shelter, who wants May you know that your life is like this in any area of ​​the world, look back.

In the 1980s they were seen as a joke, but what happened to the ruling elite of other communist countries? You know they are in the previous History container, but it's not scary, it's still run by the second and third generation of the same unit and they will likely eventually be run by the fourth generation as well but of course this story is a lot more than North Korea itself. I don't think it's right to blame only China and Russia for the weaknesses of the sanctions regime. You'll see British criminals, French criminals, Germans. criminals teamed up with the North Koreans when they felt they could make money, including white collar criminals, so when we see a ship-to-ship transfer unfold, what's behind it is not just one point of failure, but the entire a series of failures, it's not just let's say the government's responsibility is not to seize the ship or prevent this from happening, but it's the bank that failed in its due diligence, it's the insurance company that didn't collect the proper documentation, it is the ship registry that perhaps did not look behind the The curtain opens a little more, so there is this whole chain that is required for the effective implementation of sanctions.

The real problems often lie with the so-called gatekeepers, the lawyers and accountants who create shell companies and special purpose vehicles that allow funds to be transferred relatively anonymously. North Korean sanctioned evasion activities are not only occurring in Asia but also in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America because North Korea's activities can easily go unnoticed by the authorities of these countries. The weapons program continues, the nuclear program continues, it does not diminish and therefore we must increase the pressure again, we must recognize globally that this is now an organized crime problem and we must try to dissipate some of the national tensions and the blame game around sanctions and encourage international law enforcement cooperation based on solid criminal charges that would result in convictions to send a very clear message to certain high-profile individuals: Western countries could do much more At this time the Unica continues sailing towards North Korea but the only countries that have sanctioned it are the European Union, the United States has not sanctioned it and, critically, the United Nations has not sanctioned it despite being very aware of the fact that it continues to deliver oil to North Korea.

We think we should more aggressively attack these networks and we should also attack the supply chains. that are helping Unica bring oil to North Korea, all of that could and should be done to achieve truly effective action, it will depend on the law enforcement agencies of certain Member States, including the People's Republic of China, There is no doubt that the central authority of Beijing and the Communist Party is aimed at trying to clean up this type of institutionalized crime, but it certainly still exists and the question is: will a more opaque China like the one I think we are going to create now create? more shadows? nooks and crannies for members of organized crime groups to prosper in the issue of Triad operations of Chinese organized crime groups is not just a criminal issue, it is a broader strategic issue and is something we should all take much more seriously.

What we are currently doing when it comes to dealing with the holes in the global financial system, there is a lot that can be done to sanction individuals, companies, intermediaries, even catch and arrest criminals, but the stark reality is that sanctions have not worked, diplomacy is going nowhere and North Korea responds very poorly to threats of force, so when Kim Jong-un appears with his little daughter and sends the message to the world that he is not going anywhere and that it also does not have nuclear weapons, the question arises: is this something that we? I'm going to have to learn to live with thank you thank you