Derek Tsang Takes On the DEA’s First Asian-American Squad

The "3 Body Problem" and "Better Days" filmmaker is attached to direct "Group 41," a 10-episode true-crime drama about a team of agents history mostly skipped.

The heroin was stamped No. 4, it was pouring into the U.S. in the 1980s, and hardly anyone was looking at how it got there. Derek Tsang, the filmmaker behind “3 Body Problem” and “Better Days,” is now attached to direct and executive produce a series about the people who did look: “Group 41,” a true-crime drama on the first Asian-American squad at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The project comes from Jonah Greenberg’s Salty Pictures and is being shown at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei, which runs Nov. 6–9 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center.

A crew nobody was watching

The series runs 10 episodes at 45 minutes each and opens in New York in 1986. The DEA is busy with Colombian cocaine cartels and the city’s “Five Families” of the Mafia. Meanwhile, a scrappy crew of Asian-American agents teams up with a hard-charging Irish prosecutor known as “The Dragon Lady.” Together they become DEA Group 41, the first squad to go after the No. 4 heroin moving through a network few had noticed.

Over a decade, the underfunded unit grows into an elite international task force. The targets are not small. Johnny Kon is a Hong Kong boss whose billion-dollar triad spans five continents. Johnny “Onionhead” Eng is a brutal Chinatown gangster. Khun Sa is a Golden Triangle warlord with a 20,000-strong narco-army. The show takes in immigration, prejudice and what the American Dream costs, with stories told from both sides of the law.

Greenberg is a former managing director of CAA’s China office, and his producing credits include Zhang Yimou’s “Shadow.” He wrote the book the series is based on with Marc Iserlis and Aidan Swift, who are also producers and writers on the show. He says the story stayed overlooked partly because of timing and taste. “It simply wasn’t considered as sexy to work Chinese cases in the 1980s,” Greenberg says. “People were busy watching ‘Miami Vice’ (myself chief among them!) and watching Rudy Giuliani convict the Italian mobsters.”

According to Greenberg, neither the media nor the DEA made Asian cases a priority. “So it’s an underdog story,” he says. “It’s literally the war on drugs we actually won but which no one knows about.”

Why the 1980s, and why undercover

Greenberg says shows about present-day law enforcement can be great, but surveillance technology now gives police the upper hand. The 1980s were different. “Back in the 1980s when you went undercover, you went deep,” he says. “And all the bad guys carry guns, and the danger to cops and informants is real.”

What has kept him with the project, he says, is an interest in people driven by purpose. He points to Cathy Palmer and the agents of Group 41, who took apart a heroin pipeline running from Southeast Asia to the U.S. He also cites “Serpico” as a foundational film for him: “Maybe nobody liked the guy, but he lived by a certain code. And that’s what interests me.”

The structure leaves room to grow. Greenberg sees several seasons across the 10-year saga, with Khun Sa looming over the whole show as a Colonel Kurtz-like final target. He calls that a “save the best for last” advantage.

The team around Tsang

The producing group has a pan-Pacific shape. Taiwan’s Each Other Films, co-founded by co-producer Tiffany Yu-chia Chen, is on board as co-production partner. Adam Berkowitz, the former CAA TV co-head now at Lenore Entertainment Group, is an executive producer. Greenberg says the team has the trust and cooperation of the real people involved.

The book itself is a 180-page nonfiction work, “The Incredible Story of D.E.A. Group 41 & The Rise and Fall of the Asian Heroin Trade,” due out next year.

The series has already been through seven years of development. The next steps are to find a writer-showrunner and possibly attach cast, then pitch to platforms next year.

Taipei is part of that plan. At TCCF, the team wants to learn how incentives in Taiwan and elsewhere in the region could offset the budget, and to explore distribution in Asia. The aim is to have production, financing and perhaps even distribution lined up efficiently before the show goes to U.S. platforms.

For now, “Group 41” is a project with a director, a book on the way and a story of Asian-American agents who spent a decade doing the work unnoticed. Tsang’s name on it suggests that decade is about to get its close-up.

Via Variety