Heroin Rides an Orient Express

> Whirring over the highlands near the borders of Laos and Thailand, American-supplied Huey helicopters disgorge Burmese troopers; despite a fusillade of small-arms fire, they capture and-destroy a ton of raw opium at a secret jungle laboratory.

> At Rome's Fiumicino Airport, Italian plainclothesmen arrest two Orientals on a flight from Bangkok, whose suitcases yield 44 lbs. of lumpy gray-brown No. 3 heroin, hidden in carvings of elephants, pagodas and lotus leaves.

> In a Skid Row room in Amsterdam's Rosse Buurt (red-light district), Dutch narcotics cops find a young addict dead, a syringe spiked in the hollow of his elbow.

The gun battles, arrests and deaths are stages on the main line of the "Orient Express"--the lethal route from Asia's opium-rich Golden Triangle (the intersection of Burma, Laos and Thailand) to Amsterdam, distribution center for Europe's booming dope market.

Drug busts in Europe are mounting geometrically. So far this year, Common Market narcs have seized 440 kilos of heroin, as much as was intercepted from 1972 to 1975. By the police rule of thumb that seizures equal 10% of the traffic, Golden Triangle dope routed through Amsterdam is now rivaling the volume of the old Turkey-Marseille-New York French Connection. Many European experts see the Continent approaching the type of heroin epidemic that swept the U.S. in the 1960s.

From a handful in 1972, Amsterdam's junkies have increased to an estimated 7,000, Italy's from 1,000 to 6,000. Overdose deaths in Europe will top 300 by year's end. Yet supplies are so plentiful that street prices in Paris have dropped from $120 to $60 a gram in the past six months--thus making it cheaper to lure new addicts. Profits are enormous. A kilo of No. 4 heroin bought for $1,650 in Thailand or Burma commands $32,000 on the streets of Europe.

Heroin Rain. Amsterdam has long been a mecca for addicts and dealers because of The Netherlands' wrist-tapping drug laws. But the mounting flow of "horse" through the city has become a narc's nightmare. Says G.J. Toorenaar, chief of Amsterdam's criminal investigation division: "It's raining heroin in The Netherlands." Worse, Europe's swelling addict population is now getting its dope from overseas Chinese gangs that police cannot understand or penetrate.

The big new market for heroin followed the classic laws of narcotics economy. When the French Connection was cut in 1972, the slack in the American market was soon filled by Mexican heroin, but European addicts were temporarily strung out. At the same time, American withdrawal from Viet Nam cost Southeast Asia's Chinese Tai Los (dope bosses) their most lucrative market. According to one American narcotics expert, "It was simply natural that the twain [Asian supply and European demand] should meet."

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.

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