People traded as commodities, iron cages used for punishment, severed fingers and even human sacrifice.

These grisly details, revealed during interrogations of some of Asia’s most notorious criminal magnates, expose the horror of life in the many scam factories that dot Myanmar’s rugged and lawless border with China.

The suspects were alleged members of powerful crime families whose political connections, wealth and thousand-strong private armies allowed them to build multibillion-dollar empires on illegal gambling, telecoms and internet fraud, drug production, prostitution, and other illicit activities with impunity.

Now behind bars in Chinese prisons, more than a dozen on death row, their confessions have been beamed through TV screens across China and their alleged crimes detailed in lengthy investigations in Chinese state media.

“Should I have had any feelings?” asked one suspect, during police questioning of his alleged killing of a man in a sacrificial murder.

“Wasn’t that a living person, a real human being?” asked the officer, in video aired by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV in October.

Wearing a blue prison uniform, his hands shackled to a table, the man said: “I felt nothing.”

The man was Chen Dawei, heir apparent of the Wei family according to Chinese prosecutors, one of multiple mafia-like crime syndicates which until recently operated in Laukkaing, a town in Myanmar’s northeastern Kokang region, just a few miles from China. Chen, Chinese police allege, shot a man dead in a ceremony to demonstrate his commitment to a business partner.

The victim, they said, was picked at random by Chen’s associates.

China’s investigations detail a cruel world of money, power and control.

“Fire all the bullets,” Chen had told his cronies after allegedly ordering them to execute the henchman of a rival financial backer he’d had a dispute with. Chinese police said in one documentary that they found the man’s remains bound in iron chains and thick ropes, with seven bullet holes in the skull.

CNN couldn’t verify the reports or whether the confessions were given under duress. China has a record of scripted or forced confessions and televising them to spread domestic propaganda.

But Laukkaing’s role in the global scam trade has been widely documented by analysts, academics, reporters and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Chen’s publicized confession was part of a concerted push by Chinese authorities last year to show its citizens that it is dismantling the scamming networks that have proliferated in the anarchic legal vacuums along Myanmar’s borders, ensnaring thousands of Chinese nationals into their operations and stealing billions of dollars from people around the world, including the United States.

Dozens of alleged cybercrime bosses and warlords have been extradited to China and prosecuted, some handed severe punishments, and thousands of other smaller players arrested.

But the story behind the rise and eventual downfall of the Kokang crime families is much more complicated and sinister.

It’s a tale of betrayal, revenge, and the shifting political sands in a country permeated by civil war, instability and organized crime.

(CNN)

• Bai Suocheng is handed over to Chinese police officers at the Naypyidaw International Airport in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, on January 30, 2024.

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