The script was about a resettled Cambodian dance teacher, Penn Savath, whose past and present merge when the former Khmer Rouge officer responsible for butchering Penn’s family and dance class in April 1975 walks into his grocery store in the United States. Even though the story is fiction, it is based on real facts. The main theme was revenge, but it was also about a man who lost his art and then, through a weird twist of time and geography, finds it again. When Dr Haing S Ngor gave an interview about our film project, The Man From Year Zero, to The Nation newspaper in Bangkok on September 16, 1994, I was ecstatic. I was in Bangkok, working on the script rewrite, when he was murdered in Los Angeles on February 25, 1996. In a Los Angeles Times article on January 21, 2010, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, recently sentenced for his participating role in Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge atrocities, claimed: “Haing Ngor was killed because he appeared in the film The Killing Fields.” Even as a conspiracy theory, there was no logic for the Khmer Rouge to kill the Academy Award winner, especially in California. But I also doubted the official version of Haing’s murder. It was hard to fathom that such a familiar Cambodian icon could be killed resisting a crack-fuelled robbery attempt by fellow Cambodians. One month before his murder, Haing had told me that he was planning to run for office in Cambodia, and I knew he had business and property interests there. There seemed to be more questions than answers. But all the years of pain and uncertainty would be put to rest in a small Phnom Penh bar on Street 51, called Victory. Victory (Home of Champions) has an unusual clientele – hip-hop raised, tattooed, former Cambodian/American gang members, male and female, forcibly exiled from their American homes to Cambodia. At the Victory, old gang rivalries are set aside and new arrivals can find help, advice and even hope. In the culture of honesty at the Victory, more of a sanctuary than a bar, the deportees do not gloss over their past, or anyone else’s. And it is here that I would learn more about the murder of a friend, that has haunted me for almost two decades. “OG Dicer” (not his real name) is an articulate, former Cambodian gang shot-caller, with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1980s and ’90s, gangland America. Dicer was “kidnapped” by US Immigration from his home in Long Beach, California, and exiled to Cambodia “against his will” in March 2004. Dicer tells me that he lived in the 3200 block of the Los Angeles County Jail’s gang module, in a jail cell beside Haing Ngor’s killers, Oriental Lazy Boyz Jason Chan, Tak Sun Tan and Indra Lim, where he spent two and a half years. “I knew ‘Silent’ and ‘Solo’ since they first hit the streets. Somebody told them that Haing Ngor had a suitcase with a hundred thousand dollars in the trunk of his Mercedes, and they knew he wore a gold chain, locket and a Rolex watch. They went there to jack [rob] him. “There wasn’t nobody big behind it. I know, because I asked them when I was the shot-caller in the gang module – they wouldn’t lie to me or the other homies.” At the Victory, with veteran photographer Al Rockoff, the conversations range from gang violence in the school system, injustice, the struggles of re-adjusting to a foreign country and the broken hearts of Cambodian families left behind in America. Most of the exiles feel betrayed by their punishment and speculate on why these deportations have increased under the presidency of US President Barack Obama. “He just uses minorities to get votes,” exclaims a deportee. But what also emerges is a startling history and insight into the daily robberies, extortion, shootings and home invasions that shaped the Cambodian communities in California and created the gangs. In hindsight, resettling war-traumatised Southeast Asian refugees into poor, violent, black and Mexican, urban neighbourhoods was probably not a good path to the American Dream, although it did work for some luckier Cambodians, like Haing Ngor. According to Dicer, Haing Ngor’s killing did not go down well on the streets or with the other Cambodian gang members in the over-crowded, LA County Gang Module. “We were all pissed off they’d killed a Cambodian icon. They told me they was all cracked out when they did it. Those fools didn’t even know who they killed until after they was arrested.” Sometimes, the authorities do tell the truth. Crime, and a violent death, can often be random, and mindless. And thanks to Dicer, the death of my friend, Dr Haing S Ngor, finally makes sense.

The US treasury department has put two sons of Mexico's most wanted man Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman on its drugs kingpin blacklist. The move bars all people in the US from doing business with Ivan Archivaldo Guzman Salazar and Ovidio Guzman Lopez, and freezes any US assets they have. Joaquin Guzman, on the list since 2001, runs the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel. Mexico has seen an explosion of violence in recent years as gangs fight for control of trafficking routes. The US administration "will aggressively target those individuals who facilitate Chapo Guzman's drug trafficking operations, including family members," said Adam Szubin, director of the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control . "With the Mexican government, we are firm in our resolve to dismantle Chapo Guzman's drug trafficking organisation." Ovidio Guzman plays a significant role in his father's drug-trafficking activities, the treasury department said. Ivan Archivaldo Guzman was arrested in 2005 in Mexico on money-laundering charges but subsequently released. As well as the Guzman brothers, two other alleged key cartel members, Noel Salgueiro Nevarez and Ovidio Limon Sanchez, were listed under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. They were both arrested in Mexico in 2011 and are still in custody. Under the Kingpin Act, US firms, banks and individuals are prevented from doing business with them and any assets the men may have under US jurisdiction are frozen. More than 1,000 companies and individuals linked to 94 drug kingpins have been placed on the blacklist since 2000. Penalties for violating the act range include up to 30 years in prison and fines up to $10m (£6m). The US has offered a reward of up to $5m a for information leading to the arrest of Joaquin Guzman, who escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001.

Eduardo Ravelo, born on October 13, 1968 was added as the 493rd fugitive to the FBI 10 most wanted list on October 20, 2009. He is originally from Mexico, however he holds permanent residency status in the United States which gives him free movement across the border. An FBI informant and former lieutenant in the Barrio Azteca, a prison gang active in the U.S. and Mexico, testified that Ravelo told him to help find fellow gang members who had stolen from the cartel. In March 2008, he became the leader of the gang shortly after betraying his predecessor, stabbing him several times and shooting him in the neck. (Eduardo Ravelo: Wikipedia) Eduardo Ravelo was indicted in Texas in 2008 for his involvement in racketeering activities, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, and conspiracy to possess heroin, cocaine and marijuana with the intent to distribute. His alleged criminal activities began in 2003. He is believed to be living in an area of Cuidad Juarez controlled by the Barrio Ravelo, with his wife and children just across the border from El Paso, Texas. He is also said to have bodyguards and armored vehicles to protect him from rival gangs as well as rival cartels.

The Brink’s-Mat curse even touched on the Great Train Robbery gang of 1963. One of them, Charlie Wilson, found himself in trouble when £3 million of Brink’s-Mat investors’ money went missing in a drug deal. In April 1990, he paid the price when a young British hood knocked on the front door of his hacienda north of Marbella and shot Wilson and his pet husky dog before coolly riding off down the hill on a yellow bicycle.

The heads from the decapitated bodies were found in ice boxes outside the city hall, according to local security forces, only a mile from the American border. Horrified motorists earlier encountered the blood-stained bodies of four women and five men hanging off a bridge, alongside an apparent message from a drug gang. The grim spectacles were extreme even for Nuevo Laredo and the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, which have seen some of the most gruesome episodes in Mexico's brutal five-and-a-half year drug war so far