If you've been enjoying Varnumtown and you're interested in more crazy stories from the wild world of organized crime, scams, gangs, cartels, mafias, drug dealers, and everything fun like that, have we got a podcast for you? The Underworld podcast is hosted by two investigative journalists, Danny Gold and Sean Williams, who have reported on all sorts of dangerous people in dangerous places. Every week, they bring you a new episode on international organized crime from a new corner of the globe. From Russian mobsters in to MS 13 hitmen, Nigerian cult gangs to Indian Mafia dons, Underworld goes everywhere. Recent episodes have touched on everything from Griselda Blanco's Miami drug Wars to French bank robber Robin hood to the Chinese triad Supra Syndicates. I was recently a guest on their podcast and had a great time talking about Varnumtown. We've got a clip from one of their recent episodes. It's about a headhunting tribe from the borderlands of Burma that became a massive heroine and meth cartel that got tangled up with the CIA and the DEA. You can find the Underworld podcast wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, iTunes, all that fun stuff. Enjoy.

It's the early 1990s in America, and we're well into the grunge era. Rock stars are ODing on heroine In Berlin, so are suburbanites. For models, that pale, wavy look is in. The media is talking about heroine chic. Heroine sales in the US, they're up, way up. More than half of it is coming from one country, Burma, now called Myanmar. What they call China white, see, it doesn't actually come from China. It comes from those wild border regions of Burma. That's where peasant farmers grow opium poppies, churning out the raw ingredient to all that heroine causing Americans to drop dead. The most potent poppies, they're grown by an Indigenous group of mountain folk with a feared reputation, the Waa people. They've got their own military, the United Waa State Army, that's part army, part government, part narcotic syndicate. No one can even enter their territory without permission, not even Burma's own vicious military. Even they don't want to mess with the Waa. The Waa's rep, as a people not to be trifled with, it goes back generations. And yes, they are actually headhunters, or they were well into the 20th century. And there was no shortage, too, of warlords in the region, funded off opium growing and trafficking.

Mostly, though, the wa, they just wanted to be left alone by outsiders. Then in the late 1980s, there's a man that takes the helm. He's quiet, unassuming, basically an accountant and genius logistics guy. He's got a crazy background with all sorts of traffickers all over Southeast Asia, and he's half Chinese and halfwa. Not a tough guy, cowboy headhunter warlord, the guy who looks like he shops at Costco. But even today, they still speak his name quietly, if at all. Wei Zhegong. He sets up a heroin trafficking operation to be one of the biggest the world has ever seen. But in 1991, the DEA has a breakthrough. They've got a small office in Burma's capital, a crumbling city in the country's military-run heartland. A figure from the United Waas State Army comes down from the mountains and reaches out to the DEA, a man named Saul Lou. Saul Lou is a stern man. He doesn't smile much. He looks people straight in the eye, and he acts like he's on a mission from God. We'd like to make a deal, he says to the DEA. We're ready to come out of the shadows. We'll actually quit the drug trade forever and make sure no one else ever grows poppies in our territory.

We'll help you save countless American lives. But if this is going to work, we're going to have to change strategy completely and embrace us instead of trying to lock us up. It's a dangerous move. It's a betrayal of that man whose name often goes unmention. This is the Underworld podcast.