The Ezra brothers, Judah and Isaac, had a different pedigree and modus operandi. Their father had dominated the legitimate opium business in Shanghai prior to the First World War, and according to scholar Terry Parssinen, “once headed the city’s powerful Opium Combine.”7 Unlike the Eliopoulos brothers, the Ezras had a huge stockpile of opium and were making large profits in 1912, when the Hague Convention made it illegal to import opium from India into China.
