Sociopolitical Documentary hosted by David Jeremiah, published by National Geographic in 2009 - English narration
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Wherever there is a Chinese community, including almost every city in the Western world, groups of Secret Societies known as Triads control the hard drug trade through bribery, extortion, and murder.
A major portion of the world's raw opium is grown in the Golden Triangle, the mountainous country on the borders of Laos, Burma, North Vietnam, and Thailand. After processing, the distribution of this heroin is under the control of Triad leaders in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, who distribute it worldwide through their couriers. Western police officials did not realize either the extent of the heroin traffic or its organization until well into the 1970's.
In modern times, competing Asian street gangs and organized crime, such as the Tongs and the Hong Kong-based Triads, continue to plague the metropolitan Chinatowns worldwide where Triads have their operations, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. There have been 'Tong wars' or Chinatown in-fighting, between the Tong groups in the older Chinatowns. The Chinatowns of the 1960s and 1970s experiences a rapid influx of working-class immigrants from Hong Kong. In the late 1970s, some amount of the ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam would also start gangs.
When Hong Kong mobsters, known as a Triad, move into San Franciscos Chinatown, the traditional Chinese underworld collides with modern American gang culture leading to a brutal turf war. In 1977, a shoot-out occurred in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant, in which two tourists and three waiters were murdered by stray gunfire in an assassination attempt on a Wah Ching gang member. Eleven other people were injured. This incident is notoriously known as the Golden Dragon massacre and it mobilized the San Francisco Police Department to create an Asian crime unit. The five suspects involved in the attack were sentenced and convicted. With dead bodies piling up on the street law enforcement struggles to smash the secretive world of the Triads.
This documentary about criminal gangs operating out of San Francisco's Chinatown area highlight the gang violence of Tongs such as the Hong Men, also called the Chinese Freemasons and the Hop Sing Boys.
Directed by Marcy Cox ; UK-Canada Treaty Co-Production by Wall to Wall Media Ltd/Underworld Gangs III Productions Inc. and E1 Television Production for Canwest Broadcasting
Video Codec: x264 CABAC [email protected] Video Bitrate: 3 013 Kbps Video Resolution: 1280x720 Video Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Frames Per Second: 29.970 fps Audio Codec: AC3 Audio Bitrate: 384kb/s CBR 48000 Hz Audio Streams: 6 Audio Languages: english RunTime Per Part: 45 min 59 s Number Of Parts: 1 Part Size: 1.09 GB Source: HDTV Encoded by: MOMENTUM
