“3 Body Problem” and “Better Days” filmmaker Derek Tsang is attached to direct and executive produce “Group 41,” a true-crime drama series about the first Asian-American squad at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The project, from Jonah Greenberg’s Salty Pictures, is at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei.
The 10-episode series, with 45-minute episodes, opens in New York in 1986. While the DEA has its sights set on Colombian cocaine cartels and the city’s “Five Families” of the Mafia, a scrappy crew of Asian-American agents teams up with a hard-charging Irish prosecutor nicknamed “The Dragon Lady.” Together they form DEA Group 41, which becomes the first squad to chase the No. 4 heroin pouring into the U.S. through a network few had noticed.
Over the next decade, the underfunded unit grows into an elite international task force. Its targets include Johnny Kon, a Hong Kong boss whose billion-dollar triad spans five continents; Johnny “Onionhead” Eng, a brutal Chinatown gangster; and Khun Sa, a warlord in the Golden Triangle with a 20,000-strong narco-army. The show explores immigration, prejudice and what the American Dream costs, with stories from both sides of the law.
Greenberg, a former managing director of CAA’s China office whose producing credits include Zhang Yimou’s “Shadow,” wrote the source book with Marc Iserlis and Aidan Swift, who are also producers and writers on the series. Greenberg says shows about present-day law enforcement can be great, but surveillance technology now gives cops the upper hand.
“Back in the 1980s when you went undercover, you went deep. And all the bad guys carry guns, and the danger to cops and informants is real,” Greenberg says.
The crimes, and the agents who solved them, were largely overlooked at the time, he adds.
“It simply wasn’t considered as sexy to work Chinese cases in the 1980s. People were busy watching ‘Miami Vice’ (myself chief among them!) and watching Rudy Giuliani convict the Italian mobsters,” Greenberg says.
Neither the media nor even the DEA made Asian cases a priority, according to Greenberg. “So it’s an underdog story. It’s literally the war on drugs we actually won but which no one knows about.”
He also sees room for several seasons across the 10-year saga, with Khun Sa looming over the whole show as a Colonel Kurtz-like final target, giving the series what Greenberg calls a “save the best for last” advantage.
The source material, a 180-page nonfiction book titled “The Incredible Story of D.E.A. Group 41 & The Rise and Fall of the Asian Heroin Trade,” will be published next year. Greenberg says the team has the trust and cooperation of the real people involved. Taiwan’s Each Other Films, co-founded by co-producer Tiffany Yu-chia Chen, is on board as co-production partner, and former CAA TV co-head Adam Berkowitz of Lenore Entertainment Group serves as executive producer.
After seven years of development, the next steps are to find a writer-showrunner and possibly attach cast before pitching to platforms next year.
Greenberg says what has kept him with the project is a wish to tell stories about people driven by purpose, pointing to Cathy Palmer and the agents of Group 41, who took apart a heroin pipeline running from Southeast Asia to the U.S.
“‘Serpico’ was always a foundational film for me and well, maybe nobody liked the guy, but he lived by a certain code. And that’s what interests me,” he says.
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, so that production, financing and perhaps even distribution are lined up efficiently before pitching to U.S. platforms.
The Taiwan Creative Content Fest, organized by the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA), runs Nov. 6–9 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center.