A quarter-billion dollar bust: Customs and Police showing off seized drugs after 65 staff raided properties across Auckland on September 6.

A labyrinthine international drug syndicate ruled by a man dubbed "Asia's El Chapo" is feared to be behind a surge in methamphetamine being smuggled into New Zealand.

Chinese-born Canadian citizen Tse Chi Lop is at the apex of a vast criminal network known as Sam Gor which is trafficking tonnes of methamphetamine, heroin and ketamine each year to a dozen countries including New Zealand.

Record recent methamphetamine seizures such as the 469kg found by Customs in a shipping container in Auckland, bore all the hallmarks of a Sam Gor operation, said Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific representative for United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

SUPPLIED Tse Chi Lop is Asia's most wanted man.

"Sam Gor have scaled the synthetic drug market in a way that we've never seen before anywhere in the world," Douglas said.

According to a Reuters special report, Sam Gor is a larger and more effective trafficking operation than the better known Latin American cartels in Mexico and Colombia, and works with a diverse group of distributors across the Asia-Pacific region from Japan's Yakuza to Australian biker gangs, which have gained a foothold in New Zealand.

The UNODC puts the syndicate's meth revenue in 2018 at $12.45 billion a year, but estimates it could be as high as $27.5b.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) is leading a manhunt to track down Tse, who is said to live a lifestyle of extraordinary wealth, flying by private jet and gambling millions of dollars at a time, all while protected by a phalanx of Thai kickboxers.

ROSS GIBLIN/STUFF/STUFF Detective Superintendent Greg Williams of the National Organised Crime Group.

Officers from the New Zealand Police's National Organised Crime Group are understood to be helping in the effort to locate Tse.

Detective Superintendent Greg Williams confirmed police were working with other law enforcement agencies to counter transnational groups including Sam Gor.

"We are aware that New Zealand is a target for multiple transnational networks, and expect the Sam Gor syndicate to be among those."

He said the collaborative approach had seen 20 transnational criminal cells identified and dismantled by the National Organised Crime Group and NZ Customs since 2017.

The amount of pure methamphetamine being seized in New Zealand has increased dramatically in 2019. About 1500kgs of the drug was confiscated in the first nine months of 2019, a more than 50 per cent increase on previous years.

Sam Gor is thought to have been in existence since around 2014, but kept under the radar of drug enforcement agencies until 2016, when a Taiwanese man named Cai Jeng Ze was stopped at Yangon Airport in Myanmar and found to have bags of ketamine strapped to his thighs.

Cai's phone revealed an "Aladdin's Cave of intel," an AFP officer told Reuters, of thousands of calls and text messages, social media messages and photos describing huge shipments of drugs to Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

SUPPLIED Suspected drug syndicate kingpin Tse Chi Lop.

"At the time everyone thought these crystal meth shipments as different," says Douglas, who monitors the Asia-Pacific drug trade for the United Nations.

"There was a lot of confusion. Different police forces were investigating different groups.

"It was through Cai's phone that they realised it was all interconnected. That Sun Gor had been the dominant player all along."

Tse was a "known drug trafficker" who had served time in prison in the United States for importing meth. But after being released in 2006, he was able to bring together several triads into a "super syndicate that we've never really seen the size of before", says Douglas.

The syndicate's vast tentacles spread from the meth factories in Myanmar, where it has access to limitless quantities of precursors and talented chemists, to the huge ports of neighbouring Thailand, where drugs are smuggled to every corner of the Asia-Pacific region, often embedded in industrial products such as the electric motors that the massive September bust in Auckland.

Sam Gor members include nationals of Canada, Vietnam, China, Thailand, Myanmar and Korea, Douglas said.

NZ POLICE Forty-nine kilograms of methamphetamine has been seized by police in Christchurch as part of Operation Grandeur.

Douglas says Sam Gor are so dominant that they're able to guarantee shipments will reach distributors. If one consignment is seized by police, they will simply send another one.

"They can afford to lose shipments because meth is so profitable.

"Even though it's a small market, if you can get it to New Zealand you can make many, many more times than what you can elsewhere."

Tackling such a dominant force requires a different strategy, with greater cooperation between international law enforcement agencies, and greater emphasis on education and health treatments, said Douglas.

"You're not going to police your way out of this. This is going to require a very different approach. Synthetic drugs completely change the old war on drugs paradigm."

The UN agency estimates that the Sam Gor cartel has a 40 per cent to 70 per cent share of the wholesale regional meth market that has expanded at least fourfold in the past five years.

In a report released in July called Transnational Organised Crime in Southeast Asia: Evolution, Growth and Impact, the UN said gangs were taking advantage of increasing social exchanges, trade and investment between countries to conceal drug shipments.

Tse has drawn comparisons with Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the former head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, who is serving a life sentence in the United States.