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Amsterdam was the natural rendezvous. The city's large Chinese community (1,500 legal residents and more than 7,000 free-floating illegals) had a long-established internal drug trade; easy Common Market border rules made Amsterdam the perfect hub for Europe-wide smuggling. In 1971 gangsters from triads (secret societies) in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore began infiltrating Amsterdam's Chinatown, forcing merchants and community leaders to help shield their operations. Ironically, many of the operators were corrupt drug cops purged from the Hong Kong police force.
Dope comes to Europe in small packets borne by an "ant army" of couriers. From the lawless wilds of the Golden Triangle, dried poppy extract travels by backpack, bicycle, mule and even army trucks to crude labs, some in jungles, some in Southeast Asia's sprawling Chinatowns. There chemists refine the caky black powder into two grades of heroin: No. 3, the 40%-50% pure "brown sugar" favored for smoking, and fluffy white No. 4, 90% pure "stuff" for needle addicts. The dope is ferried to Europe by air, ingeniously cached in all sorts of objects—mah-jongg tiles, false-bottom golf bags, hollowed-out melons.
Dodging Amsterdam's closely watched Schiphol Airport, couriers detour to Zurich, Frankfurt, Rome and other cities and then carry the dope to Holland overland. Penny-wise smugglers have even used Aeroflot's discount flights across Asia, though Soviet police crackdowns in Moscow are making that route more dangerous. Tactics change daily. "You know if we see a Chinese get off a flight from Bangkok, we're going to nail him," says one Paris-based U.S. narc. To avoid that, the triads are recruiting middle-class Caucasians as "mules" for $1,000 a trip plus plane fare.
European narcs are finding it hard to crack the Chinese Connection because they never made contact with their Chinese communities. Amsterdam police, for example, have only one Cantonese-speaking agent; hired translators face jarring death threats. Among street-level dealers and users, the triads enforce a ruthless code of silence that shields the trade's heroin "Godfathers." Time-tested techniques—infiltration, bribes, informers—have proved almost useless. "They're very closed," says a top French investigator, "and won't deal with anyone with round eyes."
Squealing. In belated recognition of the heroin problem, the Dutch States-General (parliament) this month upped the penalties for heroin possession from four to twelve years. In the short run though, the best hope for snipping the Chinese Connection lies in internecine gang violence. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, rival triads cannot peaceably split the spoils. At least twelve Chinese have been murdered in vendettas, which began last year with the killing of Chung Mon, a 55-year-old kingpin of the traffic. European narcs are now hoping for the type of squealer's revenge that helped smash the dope-dealing Corsican Mafia of Marseille in the early 1970s.