OPIUM CONFISCATIONS SET RECORD

Customs Agents: Nearly Half A Ton Of The Drug, Packaged Ingeniously, Has
Been Uncovered This Summer At The Oakland Inspection Station.

OAKLAND -- U.S. Customs Service agents seized unprecedented amounts of
opium at their Oakland inspection station this summer, finding nearly 1,000
pounds of the drug ingeniously hidden in shipments of everything from
buttons and clothing to furniture and gardening tools, officials said Thursday.

The opium was shipped from Laos and Thailand to home addresses in the
Central Valley, Northern and Southern California and the state of
Washington. Customs officials have arrested four people in Sacramento,
Redding and Merced who allegedly received packages over the past month.

The opium was found during routine Customs inspections of air-mailed
packages passing through Oakland's main post office, the largest on the
West Coast handling mail from Southeast Asia.

Since June, inspectors have found 923 pounds of opium, worth an estimated
$8 million on the streets, tucked into 88 packages of food, furniture,
herbal medicine, tools, tea and chopping boards.

Some of the opium was soaked into fabrics and clothing meant to be washed
to extract liquid opium. Agents realized a stack of harmless-looking
trousers had been soaked in opium primarily because of their strong sweet odor.

Agents also found opium crammed into the wooden rim of a decorative bamboo
screen, stuffed into dried mushrooms and tucked into the metal bottom of a
gardening hoe. During a news conference Thursday, agents still opening
boxes unsealed 16 cans of curry paste and found two of them contained a
large block of pure black, taffy-like opium. It was carefully encased in
the same type of plastic wrap as the curry paste and repackaged to look
like the cans had never been opened.

Thomas O'Brien, assistant port director for the Customs Service, said the
seizures over just three months netted the most smuggled opium in memory
for such a short period. The summertime flood of the drug brings the total
amount of opium uncovered at Oakland since January to 1,188 pounds, the
most in about a decade, he said.

"It's a mystery to us why we're seeing this all of a sudden," he said.
"It's about three or four times the activity we've seen in past years. You
can see the lengths to which people will go to hide it. It takes great
creativity and a lot of work."

O'Brien said he believes the opium was shipped by a ring operating in
Southeast Asia and was intended for distribution among Southeast Asians
living in the United States, mainly in the Central Valley of California.

But a lot of opium eventually ends up on the streets in the form of heroin,
which is chemically derived from opium, said George Chinn, program
assistant at the East Oakland Recovery Center for drug addicts.

"There's probably a little opium being smoked, and (smugglers) are probably
giving some of it to their friends who smoke it, but the bulk of opium
coming into the United States is being sold to drug dealers who process it
into heroin," Chinn said. "That's how they get heroin -- from opium."

Authorities have arrested Weun Saelee, 54, of Redding; Vern Saetern, 46,
and Farm Saetern, 44, of West Sacramento; and Mai Vang, 25, of Merced, each
on a state charge of possession of opium for sale, for allegedly receiving
packages containing opium.

Customs officials said it was difficult to identify many of the intended
recipients, as some of the packages were mailed to homes whose occupants
had names other than those on the packages. In some cases, prosecutors
declined to press charges, said Wayne Yamashita, a Customs assistant
special agent in charge of field operations.

"You think of the 1920s with the opium dens in the Far East, and you don't
see that happening here," he said. "There's no street crime associated with
opium. There's no gang affiliation, so it may not be a high priority for
law enforcement."

"The thing that concerns us is that some shipments contained large amounts
of 15 or 20 pounds of opium, far more than one could smoke in many years,"
Yamashita added. "It could be they were sharing it in the (Asian)
community. But we want to know is there an organization behind it, and is
there a tremendous amount of money behind it?"

O'Brien said agents were following their usual procedure to open or X-ray
every package mailed from Laos and Thailand because they are "source
countries" for opium, and they began discovering the drug in several of the
packages in June.

Contact Renee Koury at rkoury@sjmercury.com or (510) 839-5321.