North Korea is running a drug ring, and Kim Jong-un is its Bond-style Mr Big
By Tim Stanley
World
Last updated: March 21st, 2013
While the rest of the world watches James Bond movies for a laugh, North Korea’s communist leadership apparently take notes on how to be an evil mastermind. You might recall that in Live and Let Die, the President of a Caribbean island poses as a socialist revolutionary but actually uses his embassies to push heroin. Well, it’s obvious that a bootleg VHS of that particular yarn has been smuggled into North Korea strapped to a diplomat’s inner thigh because, according to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, Kim Jong-un has set up his own drug ring and reinvented himself as Mr Big. It’s hard not to imagine him in a leopard skin hat and white flares, dispensing orders in Seventies jive talk: “Hey baby, take this package to Poland and bust your conk – ya dig?†From the Chosun:
North Korea sent a large amount of illegal drugs to its embassy in an East European country last December and ordered diplomats there to sell it for cash by early April, a diplomatic source here claims … North Korea has ordered each diplomat to raise US$300,000 to prove their loyalty and mark the birthday of nation founder Kim Il-sung on April 15. Each North Korean diplomatic mission overseas is required to send back around $100,000 to the North each year, the agent-turned-defector allegedly said. They used to complain that new leader Kim Jong-un is too demanding.
And, presumably, anyone who disappoints Mr Kim gets pushed into a shark tank.