Heroin smuggling, subterfuge and adventure at sea: historic drug bust off Hong Kong recalled in new book
- Former Hong Kong police officer Rod Mason’s book, Operation Clinker: Heroin Smuggling, tells the intriguing tale of a major 1988 drugs bust
- It involved three jurisdictions, a double sting, and the largest amount of heroin a Hong Kong gang had then attempted to smuggle abroad
A popular scene in 1980s police crime dramas features a lead detective slicing open a bag of suspected heroin, dabbing his finger inside and tasting it as though it was sherbet. Utter rubbish, it would never happen, says former police officer Rod Mason, the principal undercover investigator on a major international drugs case in Hong Kong in 1988.
“Police are taught about risk assessment, and you should never do anything that is unknown,” Mason says from his home in Scotland. “A packet of white powder, you’ve no idea what’s inside it.”
Mason should know; the major investigation he helped lead concerned heroin smuggling, and was unique because it covered three jurisdictions, used double sting operations, and involved the largest amount of the narcotic a Hong Kong gang had attempted to smuggle abroad. Two syndicates planned to export a record 43kg of pure heroin from the city to Australia.
The police sting was called Operation Clinker and involved more than 100 officers, the Australian embassy, Australian Federal Police, two yachts and members of the 14K triad gang.
Mason, who retired from the Hong Kong Police Force in 2016 after 32 years’ service, has written a book about the case, called Operation Clinker: Heroin Smuggling, which was published in November 2020 by Austin Macauley.
Mason joined the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1983 and was assigned to its Narcotics Bureau in 1988. He grew his hair and wore a hoop earring to be deployed undercover in Wan Chai bars if someone was suspected of selling drugs, usually cocaine or cannabis.
