- Opiated Thai Sticks: Myth or Truth? -

[Hammerhead]

IMO cannabis oil was used. This is what people thought was opium dipped, including myself. None of us can prove or disapprove what was going on at that time.. People will believe what they choose to believe. I also dont belive opium was used on Thai sticks. I dont think much more could be added to this thread..

 

[Chi13]

I don't think either hash oil or opium was used. Hash oil is difficult to handle, and both are just another process in a very labour intensive process (making sticks). Plus we may have been a bit behind the rest of the world but I didn't even see hash oil until the early 80s.
But, yeah, no one can prove or disprove.

 

[Donald Mallard]

i dont think either products added to good cannabis was value adding at all ,
all best done separately ,
do as you like with them yourself obviously ,
but commercial examples of either would be a bit of a waste and no evidence any were done on any large scale ..
If you can score opium , why do u need cannabis with it , and visa versa ...

we used to put some full melt hash on top off our cones for a bit of an extra ooomph ,
but that is the same product , just a little purified ...

 

[CannaRed]

It's down to us to make these opiated Thai sticks. Anyone have Thai seeds they wanna send me for the project? I have some Hungarian Blues and some Peshawar and other poppie seeds. I can find a bamboo sliver.

 

[mexcurandero420]

Can't find some literature either about opiated Thai sticks.

 

[Hammerhead]

I use to add oil in weed back in the 80s.. Oil was not around often. when it was the only way to use it was to mix it with weed or dip a doobie. Those that imported Thai Sticks only cared about $$. Oil dipped sticks could get 2x the price. I do remember some were darker in color. Most were not. Its not like I could prove if they were dipped lol.


This is 2021 Thai stick. Maybe todays Thai stick needs ti be dipped as its not as potent as it once was. There is a lot of info about using cannabis oil being used on Thai Sticks
The term Thai stick (otherwise known as the Buddha stick) refers to a unique method of making a sativa blunt by skewering seedless cannabis buds on a stem then further wrapping it with threads of marijuana. After this, the blunt is then dipped in cannabis oil to increase the potency boost.

 

[right]

It's down to us to make these opiated Thai sticks. Anyone have Thai seeds they wanna send me for the project? I have some Hungarian Blues and some Peshawar and other poppie seeds. I can find a bamboo sliver. View attachment 19077846

Crude ,raw unrefined opium is not for smoking.

 

[KITCHA]

We used to get nice Thai here is Australia that was strong at the time, I remember vomiting more than once after a big sesh. Having travelled so far from Thailand over water and packed tight I think the COB effect had occured in transit hence the power some of the batches had. Peace Kitcha

 

[wh1p3dm34t]

2 minutes search ...

https://www.leafie.co.uk/articles/thai-stick-history-cannabis

What is Thai Stick?​

Thai Stick was the traditional method of layering and binding cannabis bud around a stick or hemp stalk, treating it with hash oil and wrapping it in fan leaves to cure underground for a month or so. Developed in the northeast of Thailand where the climate is especially generous to growing weed. It was a long and time-consuming process that when finished produced a cigar-like spliff that legend claims burned for hours and produced a superb high.

-------

www.greenstate.com/explained/thai-stick/

The opium theory is often contested but is plausible since the substance was legal in Thailand until 1958. Others believe that hash oil and kief were used to adhere buds to the sticks rather than the addictive narcotic. Once the sticks were dipped, the cannabis flower was pressed against the hemp or bamboo.

-------

Thai Stick: Everything You Wanted to Know About This Legendary Blunt

Learn about the culture, history, and background of this exotic blunt and how to make Thai stick on your own.

greencamp.com

In fact, Thai sticks were so strong that rumors quickly spread that these sticks were heavily laced with opium. Although never proven, this could easily be true.

------------------

The Thai Stick: Its History and How to Make One

Learn about the history of the infamous Thai Stick, what it is, and how to go about making one.

www.strainlists.com

There is a lot of speculation about what initially made the Thai Stick so special.

Was it that it used to be drenched in hash oil or even opium? Was it the mixes between various varieties growing in that part of the world at that time that made it so strong?

History will probably never really know.

Most people realise that the modern Thai Stick has little to do with the original. But nevertheless, attempts to recreate them are great fun.


--------------

Thai Stick: Unraveling the Legacy of Timeless Cannabis - Phuket High

Thai Stick cannabis, with its rich history and legendary reputation, has captured the hearts of enthusiasts worldwide. From its origins steeped in folklore to

phukethigh.co

The Legends and Folklore Behind Thai Stick Cannabis​

Thai Stick cannabis carries with it a tapestry of legends, whispered tales of its mythical origins. According to folklore, Thai warriors in the past would impale buds onto bamboo sticks and infuse them with opium to create a potent and long-lasting smoking experience. While the opium infusion is disputed, the image of Thai Stick cannabis tightly bound to bamboo sticks has become synonymous with its mystique. It is believed that this unique presentation method also served as a practical way for Thai farmers to transport and cure their cannabis crops.

 

[Donald Mallard]

We used to get nice Thai here is Australia that was strong at the time, I remember vomiting more than once after a big sesh. Having travelled so far from Thailand over water and packed tight I think the COB effect had occured in transit hence the power some of the batches had. Peace Kitcha

I smoked it in joints first but in a bong it really packed a wallop and I vomited too mate..
I'm sure the long cure helped give it that extra kick..

 

[@hempy]

Any one that thinks a lot of Thai sticks were not produced in the Golden triangle and the CIA needs to do a little research and go into it a little deeper.

In 1975 the connections forged between Southeast Asia, Sydney and the USA during
the R and R years flowered into a reincarnation of John Wesley Egan’s Sydney
Connection. Around this time drug seizures in Australia increased massively. Many
of these seizures belonged to the USA/Southeast Asia drug trade which appears to
have been pushed south to Sydney after the fall of Vietnam. According to David
Deane-Spread, a former senior narcotics agent, Sydney became a favourite place for
shipping drugs bound for America at this time because a load of cargo marked as
coming from Australia aroused much less suspicion than one from Bangkok. Deane-
Spread pointed out:

The Americans combat the problems of trans-shipment to other ports by
having over 200 narcotic agents stationed around the world, mostly in South-
East Asia. They help local police raid heroin exporters and warn their
colleagues at home about shipments on their way. Australia has only one
narcotics officer in Asia - he is in Kuala Lumpur at the embassy.

The details surrounding the birth of this second Sydney Connection are somewhat
sketchy. Unlike John Wesley Egan, the members of the second Sydney Connection
never confessed their conspiracy. Indeed, they perjured themselves in court, denying
they even knew each other. But the evidence indicates that another Sydney
Connection was formed sometime in 1975.
* In 1975, a U.S. mobster named Danny Stein, who had links to Jimmy
Fratianno and the San Francisco Mafia, visited Sydney to organise the importation of
drugs for the U.S. market. The idea, recycled from the Corset Gang, was to use
Sydney as a transshipment point for drugs between the Golden Triangle and the U.S.
west coast. Amongst the organised crime figures Danny Stein visited in Sydney was
ex-NSW detective Murray Riley.

Later in 1975, Murray Riley met Frank Nugan. Present at that first meeting
were two former U.S. citizens, Harry Wainwright and Duke Countis, associates of
Jimmy Fratianno, whom the Joint Task Force believed were acting as Fratianno’s
agents. There are no records of what they discussed, but since what emerged from
this meeting was a drug-smuggling conspiracy, it seems likely that the establishment
of a new Sydney Connection was their object. In the following years, Murray Riley
emerged as a major trans-Pacific drug smuggler. Meanwhile Frank Nugan set up the
Nugan Hand Bank, and Harry Wainwright helped finance Riley’s drug activities via
his Nugan Hand account.

This second incarnation of the Sydney Connection was in its heyday between
1975 and 1978: its rise and fall was responsible for the mega-features of the
Australian drug trade in this period: the criminal takeover of the drug scene, the
massive drug seizures, and the heroin plague. Conforming to John Wesley Egan’s
description of the top level of the drug trade as being composed of CIA agents and
ex-NSW detectives, it contained three US spies, Frank Nugan, Mike Hand and
Bernie Houghton, as well as an ex-NSW detective, Murray Riley. The size and
sophistication of its operation was on a scale unimaginable in Australia. It was a
creature of the US market, made in the USA and with substantial involvement by the
U.S. Mafia and U.S. spies.

Michael Hand:
The Hero with the Heroin

Michael Jon Hand, the American hero who played a key role in narcoticising
Australia, was born in New York City in 1941, and enlisted in the United States
Special Forces (the Green Berets) in 1963. Michael Hand won a Silver Star, a Purple
Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam. He went on to become a
contract agent working for the CIA with the Hmong army in the secret war in Laos.
According to Andrew Lowe, his involvement in the heroin trade began there,
smuggling heroin home in the bodies of dead soldiers.
Hand came to Australia in 1968, making contact with Bernie Houghton who got
him a job with Sir Paul Strasser’s Parkes Corporation. It was through Houghton that
he met crooked lawyer Frank Nugan with whom he opened a number of companies
which would later became fronts for drug dealing, and would act as a ‘black bank’
for CIA activities. He was employed selling real estate at Ocean Shores in Northern
New South Wales; and there are allegations that Hand, together with an ex-Air
America pilot, Kermit ‘Buddy’ King, was involved smuggling drugs through Byron
Bay.
There was much about our man of mystery Michael Hand— from his military
background, to the people he knew, to the way he disappeared— that suggested he
was a US spy. He was the kind of man that intelligence agencies like the CIA recruit
as their field operatives; an elite soldier, an ex-Green Beret, a man trained in
assassination, smuggling and leading guerrilla armies. While the romantic image of
the field operative was someone like James Bond, in the real world, the field
operative was someone with the career profile of Michael Hand. Such a career
normally included a time, shortly after recruitment, when the field operative went
under deep cover; becoming ‘a sleeper’, stealthily penetrating the designated target.
Hand was recruited for the CIA in Laos, and his early days in Australia were
‘sleeper’ years.
After this time of deep cover, agent Hand became active again. In 1975 he left
Australia and spent a year smuggling arms to US supported rebels in southern
Africa, working for Ed Wilson and US Naval Intelligence. Agents of the Eastern
Division of the CIA, run by Ted Shackley, were also involved in this shipment.

Hand occasionally returned to Australia, and there are allegations he helped forge
documents during the Loans Affair to discredit the Whitlam government.
In March 1976, Hand returned to Australia to set up the Nugan Hand Bank, a
‘legitimate’ bank for black money, which he co-founded with Frank Nugan. Again,
it seems to have been Ed Wilson who arranged for Nugan Hand to get a banking
licence in the Cayman Islands.
To begin with, Murray Riley dealt with Frank Nugan, but with Hand’s return to
Australia, Hand took over the relationship with Riley. With Hand’s assistance,
Murray Riley’s trafficking moved from marijuana to Southeast Asian heroin. As
Michael Hand left behind his life of drug smuggling and gun running to re-emerge as
an international banker, his protege, Murray Riley, blossomed to become the king of
the trans-Pacific drug trade. The Nugan Hand/Murray Riley partnership was central
to the second Sydney Connection.

Shortly after the Nugan Hand Bank was incorporated on 23 August 1976, Hand
announced that he intended opening offices of the Nugan Hand Bank in Bangkok,
Chiang Mai and Phuket in Thailand. The Chiang Mai office would later be described
by its office director as a ‘laundry’ for the Hmong and other opium growers. Mr
Collins was sent from the Hong Kong office to Thailand, and Michael Hand took
over the Hong Kong branch of Nugan Hand in October 1976. Hand left Australia,
although he continued to visit at regular intervals, and he even became an Australian
citizen. Later on, he would claim that he was driven out of Australia by rising ‘anti-
Americanism’ ie the ALP’s witch-hunt for US spies following the events of 11
November 1975.

In December 1975, Riley resumed his association with William Charles Garfield
Sinclair, who founded Wings Travel. Sinclair provided Riley with an employee
discount on airline tickets and a letter of accreditation which enabled him to get 50%
off hotel rates. Riley operated a Pacific Rim circuit between Sydney, Hong Kong
and San Francisco. Over the next few years, Wings Travel was used by an extensive
network of drug couriers. According to Woodward Royal Commission counsel, Mr
Roger Gyles QC, ‘The manifest of Wings Travel reads like a who’s who of drug
traffickers’. The role of Riley, like the role of Egan, was to organise the trafficking,
allowing the CIA to stand at arms length from the drug trade, acting as the honest
broker, literally the drug trade’s ‘bank’.
As well as his flirtation with Nugan Hand and the CIA, Riley frequently visited
San Francisco with other members of the Sydney Connection, including Bela Csidei,
Duke Countis and Harry Wainwright. Csidei and Riley were photographed meeting
US Mafia bosses (including Jimmy Fratianno) in San Francisco, an ideal
transshipment port on the US west coast, completing the Southeast Asia/Sydney/US
triangle.

The Ocker Nostra

The criminal takeover of the underground dealing network (when an organised gang
moved against the old hippie dealing network, demanding that grass-only dealers
sell heroin or get out) happened in late 1976 in Australia, a convenient time for
Murray Riley, who was bringing heroin into the country, and who had plans to enter
the pot market in a big way.
Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith was a prominent member of the ‘Ocker Nostra’
that Murray Riley assembled for his venture into the drug trade. A street brawler
without equal, Smith was earning his living ‘the hard way’, by armed robberies and
as a standover man before he began his career in heroin in 1976 when he got a job as
a minder for Ken Derley, a big heroin dealer who worked for Murray Riley. Smith
rose swiftly to become the biggest heroin dealer in Australia by 1978, selling in 30
pound lots round the Double Bay area. As Neddy Smith recalled in his
autobiography Neddy: ‘I did millions of dollars of business with Murray.’
The Double Bay Mob, those associates of Murray Riley who came to dominate
the drug trade in Sydney after the criminal takeover, were part of a criminal milieu, a
group of standover men and SP bookies and other organised crime figures who
drank together and socialised in the Double Bay area of Sydney. For the bookies,
settling day was Monday at The Royal Oak Hotel in Double Bay. Standover men
like Smith hung round to get business collecting debts while discussing other scams.
In this milieu, Murray Riley was ‘the Prince of Promises’, a compulsive scammer
who, as Neddy Smith remembered, ‘was always talking in telephone numbers’.
‘Murray kept coming up with scams worth plenty of money’ wrote Neddy Smith:
‘Not a lot of Murray’s scams amounted to anything — hence his nickname the
‘Prince of Promises’ — but when one came off, it produced huge earns for one and
all’.
As Smith discovered, the Prince of Promises could work scams on both sides of
the law. At their first meeting, Riley paid Smith $30,000 for his role in a drug run,
then offered to ‘fix a blue’ for Smith, who was facing charges of armed robbery and
attempted murder. For $20,000, Riley ensured that Neddy Smith left court a very
happy man.


In June 1977, Murray Riley made the first of several trips to Southeast Asia to
organise the greatest scam of his career, a massive importation of buddha sticks
destined for both the US and the Australian market. Using contacts in Hong Kong,
he struck a deal to buy five tonnes of this potent form of Thai cannabis. Riley then
travelled to Bangkok, where he made downpayments to plantation operators,
trucking companies and the Thai military for protection.

Back in Australia, Riley put together a gang of cronies from clubland who would
oversee various stages of the operation, from guarding the cargo en route to
supervising its distribution. Riley’s budget gives a good measure of the scale of the
operation: According to Jarratt, Riley expected to make $50 million from his share
of the cargo (another part belonged to a silent partner who was never revealed) and
he promised his gang members between $500,000 and $2 million each. This still left
Riley with $25 million, with which he planned to purchase a casino in Las Vegas!
On 30 March 1978, Riley’s boat, the Chorya Maru, left Bangkok, having picked
up two separate consignments of cannabis in Thailand, the first on the west coast
near Sathip and the second off Pataya. On board was a cargo estimated at five tonnes
of buddha sticks, destined, in part, for drought ravaged Australia. ‘The Big One’ was
on the way!

By this stage, Riley had invested $750,000 in the boat and its heavily guarded
cargo. Unfortunately for him, the voyage across the Pacific proved a series of
misfortunes and the condition of the Chorya Maru forced the crew to offload the
cargo in the hull of a wreck on Polkington Reef near Honiara in the Solomon
Islands. To avert disaster, Riley had to buy a second ship, the Anoa, in Cairns and
send it to the Solomons. At the reef, Riley’s men loaded every crevice of the boat
with about 2.6 tonnes of cannabis, leaving roughly the same amount in the hull.
Another 1.9 tonnes of cannabis would later be recovered from the wreck on
Polkingon Reef, bringing the total to 4.5 tonnes.
As ‘the Big One’ made its tortured way across the Pacific, its progress was being
monitored by no fewer than four law enforcement agencies, and a large police
operation followed the Anoa’s progress down the Australian coast. The ketch was
due to rendezvous at Bermagui, but heavy weather forced the Anoa to put in near
Coffs Harbour, where a team of drug squad detectives and federal police watched it
unload before they pounced on 10 June 1978.

According to Murray Riley, he was driving north to meet the cargo when he heard
news of the bust on the car radio, so he turned around and headed south. Neddy
Smith tells a different version with Riley reaching the Anoa and departing with $2
million worth of buddha sticks. Whatever the case, the NSW police quickly rounded
up all the conspirators except Riley, who slipped away.

Three weeks later an Adelaide police constable noticed something familiar about
the fit, middle-aged jogger he passed at Henley Beach. Riley was arrested in
Adelaide on 29 June 1978. The phone contacts in his address book included a
member of NSW parliament, the NSW Police Commissioner, several senior police
officers and other organised crime figures. One contact was Harry Ikin, a former
NSW policeman who was John Wesley Egan’s partner in the ‘Corset Gang’ racket,
though, given Egan, Ikin and Riley were all NSW detectives and contemporaries,
shared friendship is not unexpected.

There was substantial evidence that there were two different cannabis cargoes on
board the Chorya Maru, possibly arranged by independent, although co-operating,
groups. The Chorya Maru picked up two separate consignments of cannabis in
Thailand, the first on the west coast near Sathip (1.5 tonnes packed in 45 cartonnes)
and the second off Pataya (about 3-4 tonnes packed in 150 hessian sacks).
Consequently, there was much confusion about whether Riley owned all the
cannabis on board the Chorya Maru or whether he was merely ‘the transportation
agent’ for one-third of the cargo, as he claimed at his trial.
In various interviews, Murray Riley gave three different versions of who owned
the cargo. Just after he was arrested, Riley gave the police his first version of the
importation. He said that he was approached by a man in Bangkok with a drug-
smuggling proposition and he agreed to arrange a shipment of 1.5 tonnes of buddha
sticks to Australia. It was only when he reached Honiara that the skipper of the
Chorya Maru told Riley that the boat ‘had picked up another consignment of 4
tonnes from another part of Thailand on its way down to Australia’. According to
Riley this consignment ‘was for another party whom I did not know’. Riley said he
and his associates were to receive $500,000 for their services in shipping the 1.5
tonnes, which represents a mere 1% of the estimated $50 million value he would
later give the Chorya Maru’s cargo!

 

[@hempy]

In this video, not sure on date it was filmed but looks like 70s to me, in the Golden Triangle there are 15 ft cannabis forests growing right next to the Opium.

Start at 32m.



This guy was the main Drug warlord of the Golden Triangle, think from 1974 until 1996.

 

[@hempy]

There is an old article I came across some time back on the "early water." and the Thai cannabis being dipped and re dried with pictures, I need to try and find it as it is a great article.

 

[@hempy]

Be great if I had an Edit feature Guys I could simply edit my post and not need to re-post to correct a previse post.

Anyone that thinks a lot of Thai sticks were not produced in the Golden triangle and the CIA had no involvement in the Golden Triangle needs to do a little research and go into it a little deeper.

Who do you think armed the hill tribes of the Golden triangle in the first place.

 

[Whip]

Kind of silly how you guys like to argue. Just moves to different threads. No disrespect to anyone just an observance

Have a great night everyone

 

[Dime]

It's down to us to make these opiated Thai sticks. Anyone have Thai seeds they wanna send me for the project? I have some Hungarian Blues and some Peshawar and other poppie seeds. I can find a bamboo sliver. View attachment 19077846

The Sumerians called the poppy the "joy"plant.

 

[Dime]

I don't think either hash oil or opium was used. Hash oil is difficult to handle, and both are just another process in a very labour intensive process (making sticks). Plus we may have been a bit behind the rest of the world but I didn't even see hash oil until the early 80s.
But, yeah, no one can prove or disprove.

It would take a lot of oil when your dealing in tons

 

[Donald Mallard]

Any one that thinks a lot of Thai sticks were not produced in the Golden triangle and the CIA needs to do a little research and go into it a little deeper.

In 1975 the connections forged between Southeast Asia, Sydney and the USA during
the R and R years flowered into a reincarnation of John Wesley Egan’s Sydney
Connection. Around this time drug seizures in Australia increased massively. Many
of these seizures belonged to the USA/Southeast Asia drug trade which appears to
have been pushed south to Sydney after the fall of Vietnam. According to David
Deane-Spread, a former senior narcotics agent, Sydney became a favourite place for
shipping drugs bound for America at this time because a load of cargo marked as
coming from Australia aroused much less suspicion than one from Bangkok. Deane-
Spread pointed out:

The Americans combat the problems of trans-shipment to other ports by
having over 200 narcotic agents stationed around the world, mostly in South-
East Asia. They help local police raid heroin exporters and warn their
colleagues at home about shipments on their way. Australia has only one
narcotics officer in Asia - he is in Kuala Lumpur at the embassy.

The details surrounding the birth of this second Sydney Connection are somewhat
sketchy. Unlike John Wesley Egan, the members of the second Sydney Connection
never confessed their conspiracy. Indeed, they perjured themselves in court, denying
they even knew each other. But the evidence indicates that another Sydney
Connection was formed sometime in 1975.
* In 1975, a U.S. mobster named Danny Stein, who had links to Jimmy
Fratianno and the San Francisco Mafia, visited Sydney to organise the importation of
drugs for the U.S. market. The idea, recycled from the Corset Gang, was to use
Sydney as a transshipment point for drugs between the Golden Triangle and the U.S.
west coast. Amongst the organised crime figures Danny Stein visited in Sydney was
ex-NSW detective Murray Riley.

Later in 1975, Murray Riley met Frank Nugan. Present at that first meeting
were two former U.S. citizens, Harry Wainwright and Duke Countis, associates of
Jimmy Fratianno, whom the Joint Task Force believed were acting as Fratianno’s
agents. There are no records of what they discussed, but since what emerged from
this meeting was a drug-smuggling conspiracy, it seems likely that the establishment
of a new Sydney Connection was their object. In the following years, Murray Riley
emerged as a major trans-Pacific drug smuggler. Meanwhile Frank Nugan set up the
Nugan Hand Bank, and Harry Wainwright helped finance Riley’s drug activities via
his Nugan Hand account.

This second incarnation of the Sydney Connection was in its heyday between
1975 and 1978: its rise and fall was responsible for the mega-features of the
Australian drug trade in this period: the criminal takeover of the drug scene, the
massive drug seizures, and the heroin plague. Conforming to John Wesley Egan’s
description of the top level of the drug trade as being composed of CIA agents and
ex-NSW detectives, it contained three US spies, Frank Nugan, Mike Hand and
Bernie Houghton, as well as an ex-NSW detective, Murray Riley. The size and
sophistication of its operation was on a scale unimaginable in Australia. It was a
creature of the US market, made in the USA and with substantial involvement by the
U.S. Mafia and U.S. spies.

Michael Hand:
The Hero with the Heroin

Michael Jon Hand, the American hero who played a key role in narcoticising
Australia, was born in New York City in 1941, and enlisted in the United States
Special Forces (the Green Berets) in 1963. Michael Hand won a Silver Star, a Purple
Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam. He went on to become a
contract agent working for the CIA with the Hmong army in the secret war in Laos.
According to Andrew Lowe, his involvement in the heroin trade began there,
smuggling heroin home in the bodies of dead soldiers.
Hand came to Australia in 1968, making contact with Bernie Houghton who got
him a job with Sir Paul Strasser’s Parkes Corporation. It was through Houghton that
he met crooked lawyer Frank Nugan with whom he opened a number of companies
which would later became fronts for drug dealing, and would act as a ‘black bank’
for CIA activities. He was employed selling real estate at Ocean Shores in Northern
New South Wales; and there are allegations that Hand, together with an ex-Air
America pilot, Kermit ‘Buddy’ King, was involved smuggling drugs through Byron
Bay.
There was much about our man of mystery Michael Hand— from his military
background, to the people he knew, to the way he disappeared— that suggested he
was a US spy. He was the kind of man that intelligence agencies like the CIA recruit
as their field operatives; an elite soldier, an ex-Green Beret, a man trained in
assassination, smuggling and leading guerrilla armies. While the romantic image of
the field operative was someone like James Bond, in the real world, the field
operative was someone with the career profile of Michael Hand. Such a career
normally included a time, shortly after recruitment, when the field operative went
under deep cover; becoming ‘a sleeper’, stealthily penetrating the designated target.
Hand was recruited for the CIA in Laos, and his early days in Australia were
‘sleeper’ years.
After this time of deep cover, agent Hand became active again. In 1975 he left
Australia and spent a year smuggling arms to US supported rebels in southern
Africa, working for Ed Wilson and US Naval Intelligence. Agents of the Eastern
Division of the CIA, run by Ted Shackley, were also involved in this shipment.

Hand occasionally returned to Australia, and there are allegations he helped forge
documents during the Loans Affair to discredit the Whitlam government.
In March 1976, Hand returned to Australia to set up the Nugan Hand Bank, a
‘legitimate’ bank for black money, which he co-founded with Frank Nugan. Again,
it seems to have been Ed Wilson who arranged for Nugan Hand to get a banking
licence in the Cayman Islands.
To begin with, Murray Riley dealt with Frank Nugan, but with Hand’s return to
Australia, Hand took over the relationship with Riley. With Hand’s assistance,
Murray Riley’s trafficking moved from marijuana to Southeast Asian heroin. As
Michael Hand left behind his life of drug smuggling and gun running to re-emerge as
an international banker, his protege, Murray Riley, blossomed to become the king of
the trans-Pacific drug trade. The Nugan Hand/Murray Riley partnership was central
to the second Sydney Connection.

Shortly after the Nugan Hand Bank was incorporated on 23 August 1976, Hand
announced that he intended opening offices of the Nugan Hand Bank in Bangkok,
Chiang Mai and Phuket in Thailand. The Chiang Mai office would later be described
by its office director as a ‘laundry’ for the Hmong and other opium growers. Mr
Collins was sent from the Hong Kong office to Thailand, and Michael Hand took
over the Hong Kong branch of Nugan Hand in October 1976. Hand left Australia,
although he continued to visit at regular intervals, and he even became an Australian
citizen. Later on, he would claim that he was driven out of Australia by rising ‘anti-
Americanism’ ie the ALP’s witch-hunt for US spies following the events of 11
November 1975.

In December 1975, Riley resumed his association with William Charles Garfield
Sinclair, who founded Wings Travel. Sinclair provided Riley with an employee
discount on airline tickets and a letter of accreditation which enabled him to get 50%
off hotel rates. Riley operated a Pacific Rim circuit between Sydney, Hong Kong
and San Francisco. Over the next few years, Wings Travel was used by an extensive
network of drug couriers. According to Woodward Royal Commission counsel, Mr
Roger Gyles QC, ‘The manifest of Wings Travel reads like a who’s who of drug
traffickers’. The role of Riley, like the role of Egan, was to organise the trafficking,
allowing the CIA to stand at arms length from the drug trade, acting as the honest
broker, literally the drug trade’s ‘bank’.
As well as his flirtation with Nugan Hand and the CIA, Riley frequently visited
San Francisco with other members of the Sydney Connection, including Bela Csidei,
Duke Countis and Harry Wainwright. Csidei and Riley were photographed meeting
US Mafia bosses (including Jimmy Fratianno) in San Francisco, an ideal
transshipment port on the US west coast, completing the Southeast Asia/Sydney/US
triangle.

The Ocker Nostra

The criminal takeover of the underground dealing network (when an organised gang
moved against the old hippie dealing network, demanding that grass-only dealers
sell heroin or get out) happened in late 1976 in Australia, a convenient time for
Murray Riley, who was bringing heroin into the country, and who had plans to enter
the pot market in a big way.
Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith was a prominent member of the ‘Ocker Nostra’
that Murray Riley assembled for his venture into the drug trade. A street brawler
without equal, Smith was earning his living ‘the hard way’, by armed robberies and
as a standover man before he began his career in heroin in 1976 when he got a job as
a minder for Ken Derley, a big heroin dealer who worked for Murray Riley. Smith
rose swiftly to become the biggest heroin dealer in Australia by 1978, selling in 30
pound lots round the Double Bay area. As Neddy Smith recalled in his
autobiography Neddy: ‘I did millions of dollars of business with Murray.’
The Double Bay Mob, those associates of Murray Riley who came to dominate
the drug trade in Sydney after the criminal takeover, were part of a criminal milieu, a
group of standover men and SP bookies and other organised crime figures who
drank together and socialised in the Double Bay area of Sydney. For the bookies,
settling day was Monday at The Royal Oak Hotel in Double Bay. Standover men
like Smith hung round to get business collecting debts while discussing other scams.
In this milieu, Murray Riley was ‘the Prince of Promises’, a compulsive scammer
who, as Neddy Smith remembered, ‘was always talking in telephone numbers’.
‘Murray kept coming up with scams worth plenty of money’ wrote Neddy Smith:
‘Not a lot of Murray’s scams amounted to anything — hence his nickname the
‘Prince of Promises’ — but when one came off, it produced huge earns for one and
all’.
As Smith discovered, the Prince of Promises could work scams on both sides of
the law. At their first meeting, Riley paid Smith $30,000 for his role in a drug run,
then offered to ‘fix a blue’ for Smith, who was facing charges of armed robbery and
attempted murder. For $20,000, Riley ensured that Neddy Smith left court a very
happy man.


In June 1977, Murray Riley made the first of several trips to Southeast Asia to
organise the greatest scam of his career, a massive importation of buddha sticks
destined for both the US and the Australian market. Using contacts in Hong Kong,
he struck a deal to buy five tonnes of this potent form of Thai cannabis. Riley then
travelled to Bangkok, where he made downpayments to plantation operators,
trucking companies and the Thai military for protection.

Back in Australia, Riley put together a gang of cronies from clubland who would
oversee various stages of the operation, from guarding the cargo en route to
supervising its distribution. Riley’s budget gives a good measure of the scale of the
operation: According to Jarratt, Riley expected to make $50 million from his share
of the cargo (another part belonged to a silent partner who was never revealed) and
he promised his gang members between $500,000 and $2 million each. This still left
Riley with $25 million, with which he planned to purchase a casino in Las Vegas!
On 30 March 1978, Riley’s boat, the Chorya Maru, left Bangkok, having picked
up two separate consignments of cannabis in Thailand, the first on the west coast
near Sathip and the second off Pataya. On board was a cargo estimated at five tonnes
of buddha sticks, destined, in part, for drought ravaged Australia. ‘The Big One’ was
on the way!

By this stage, Riley had invested $750,000 in the boat and its heavily guarded
cargo. Unfortunately for him, the voyage across the Pacific proved a series of
misfortunes and the condition of the Chorya Maru forced the crew to offload the
cargo in the hull of a wreck on Polkington Reef near Honiara in the Solomon
Islands. To avert disaster, Riley had to buy a second ship, the Anoa, in Cairns and
send it to the Solomons. At the reef, Riley’s men loaded every crevice of the boat
with about 2.6 tonnes of cannabis, leaving roughly the same amount in the hull.
Another 1.9 tonnes of cannabis would later be recovered from the wreck on
Polkingon Reef, bringing the total to 4.5 tonnes.
As ‘the Big One’ made its tortured way across the Pacific, its progress was being
monitored by no fewer than four law enforcement agencies, and a large police
operation followed the Anoa’s progress down the Australian coast. The ketch was
due to rendezvous at Bermagui, but heavy weather forced the Anoa to put in near
Coffs Harbour, where a team of drug squad detectives and federal police watched it
unload before they pounced on 10 June 1978.

According to Murray Riley, he was driving north to meet the cargo when he heard
news of the bust on the car radio, so he turned around and headed south. Neddy
Smith tells a different version with Riley reaching the Anoa and departing with $2
million worth of buddha sticks. Whatever the case, the NSW police quickly rounded
up all the conspirators except Riley, who slipped away.

Three weeks later an Adelaide police constable noticed something familiar about
the fit, middle-aged jogger he passed at Henley Beach. Riley was arrested in
Adelaide on 29 June 1978. The phone contacts in his address book included a
member of NSW parliament, the NSW Police Commissioner, several senior police
officers and other organised crime figures. One contact was Harry Ikin, a former
NSW policeman who was John Wesley Egan’s partner in the ‘Corset Gang’ racket,
though, given Egan, Ikin and Riley were all NSW detectives and contemporaries,
shared friendship is not unexpected.

There was substantial evidence that there were two different cannabis cargoes on
board the Chorya Maru, possibly arranged by independent, although co-operating,
groups. The Chorya Maru picked up two separate consignments of cannabis in
Thailand, the first on the west coast near Sathip (1.5 tonnes packed in 45 cartonnes)
and the second off Pataya (about 3-4 tonnes packed in 150 hessian sacks).
Consequently, there was much confusion about whether Riley owned all the
cannabis on board the Chorya Maru or whether he was merely ‘the transportation
agent’ for one-third of the cargo, as he claimed at his trial.
In various interviews, Murray Riley gave three different versions of who owned
the cargo. Just after he was arrested, Riley gave the police his first version of the
importation. He said that he was approached by a man in Bangkok with a drug-
smuggling proposition and he agreed to arrange a shipment of 1.5 tonnes of buddha
sticks to Australia. It was only when he reached Honiara that the skipper of the
Chorya Maru told Riley that the boat ‘had picked up another consignment of 4
tonnes from another part of Thailand on its way down to Australia’. According to
Riley this consignment ‘was for another party whom I did not know’. Riley said he
and his associates were to receive $500,000 for their services in shipping the 1.5
tonnes, which represents a mere 1% of the estimated $50 million value he would
later give the Chorya Maru’s cargo!

Reckon I'll wait for the movie to come out of that wall of text,
With the clips please mention how far along , like 26 min or whatever so we don't have to watch hours of it, I don't have time for that really unless it's important so point to the right spot please for us time poor people...

 

[@hempy]

With the clips please mention how far along , like 26 min or whatever so we don't have to watch hours of it, I don't have time for that really unless it's important so point to the right spot please for us time poor people.

I did

Start at 32m.

I highlighted the important parts in black for people.

 

[Donald Mallard]

not sure im missing something
but all i saw was a shot looking up of 1 cannabis plant ,
no one denies they grow cannabis there , its well known as they use cannabis ,
i dont see any evidence of commercial production of it though ,
is there any more pictures of the cannabis ???

he said forest , but never showed it , so it may have been a few big plants only ,
i didnt see any thai sticks , or mention of it , can u point me to the exact part where they talk about thai stick production , and any shots of a cannabis field ???