Lo Hsing Han, 1933–2013

Lo Hsing Han went from being a rural drug trafficker to one of the richest and best-connected businessmen in Myanmar. Many suspected that he never left heroin manufacturing behind, but he seemed unperturbed by the inevitable scrutiny his reputation drew. While under investigation by the U.S. in 1998, Lo invited a group of American reporters to a sumptuous dinner in Yangon, and bet each of them $5,000 they couldn’t link him to drugs. “I welcome the whole world to investigate me,” he said.

Lo had his “bare-knuckle origins” in the drug trade in northern Myanmar, said The New York Times. As a young man, he drove “opium-laden mule caravans” through the so-called Golden Triangle across the borders of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, protected by armies of gunmen. “It stretched out for three miles,” he once said of a caravan traveling from Myanmar (once known as Burma) to Thailand. “If it went smoothly, it took about 26 days.” For decades the Burmese army protected his trade in exchange for his support in the fight against communist rebels. But he switched sides in the early 1970s and was arrested by the Burmese military regime in 1973. A death sentence was commuted to life in prison, and in 1980, he was released under a general amnesty.

Lo returned to northeast Myanmar and began slowly building ostensibly legitimate businesses in mining and farming, said The Irrawaddy (Myanmar). He regained the trust of the Burmese authorities in 1989, when he persuaded communist rebels to accept a deal with the military regime. Once again in the good graces of the generals, Lo set up a “new business empire” in 1992 under the name Asia World, a conglomerate with interests in everything from construction to retail.

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But Asia World was by many accounts an “upmarket front for one of the world’s biggest heroin rackets,” said The Observer (U.K.). Lo was said to be manufacturing heroin near the Chinese border, using the profits to build and manage Yangon’s main port, and to run a bus company that served as “good cover to ship the product.” Another of Lo’s companies made plastic bags using acetic anhydride, also a key ingredient of heroin. He allegedly laundered money through Singapore, even as Asia World ploughed $200 million into construction projects in Myanmar. In 2008, the U.S. Treasury—which branded Lo the “Godfather of Heroin”—banned Americans from doing business with Lo’s empire.

Lo never wavered in his insistence that his businesses were aboveboard. He had only sold drugs in the ’60s and ’70s, he said, to aid poor opium farmers in northern Myanmar. “My whole life,” he said, “has been spent just helping the poor.”