Sihanoukville

live, work jobs where they were going to be a computer operator or some sort of data scientist, or they were going to essentially have a desk job and make enough money to send it home.

But what they found out when they arrived in Sihanoukville was that they had been hired to be scammers.

And these organized criminal organizations were filling these hotels.

They had encircled them with a cement wall with one way in, one way out that was guarded with men with AK-47s.

And that's because the Ho Chi Minh Trail comes down from North Vietnam through Laos into Cambodia, and as you say, branches into South Vietnam from there.

But there's also a trail coming up from the port of Sihanoukville, which is in the Gulf of Thailand in Cambodia.

And Chinese ships could land there, unload supplies.

These would be driven up roads in Cambodia to the border with South Vietnam provided to the VC and the NVA that were operating in the Mekong Delta or the Three Corps in southern South Vietnam.

These questions about Sunrise's past, I wouldn't have been asking them if it wasn't for the arrest and the death of Mark Dennis.

And given the way I started looking into this story, there was one more place I wanted to go before leaving Cambodia, the beach town of Sihanoukville.

This is the place where Mark Dennis traveled year in, year out with the Sunrise children.

And where he was photographed with that girl in the red dress, the, the picture that sort of set off your whole investigation.

Kyle sort of starts doing some field producing out the front, and he's like...

So where are we, Charlotte?

We're standing outside Sunrise3 in Sihanoukville.

Is it what you expected?

But this former staff member I'm talking to in her home, it's not just Mark's behavior towards the children that was distressing her.

She starts telling me about one of those beach trips to Sihanoukville that she'd joined.

Some female staff, including me, I could not swim.

She says that she can't swim, so she's sitting in this sort of floaty tire.

It ran from the Vietnamese border where Quinn was standing right across to the Gulf of Thailand, and its top edge was basically the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

The roads south out of the capital ran through it, Route 2 to Takeo, Route 3 to Kampot, and Highway 4, which went to Kompong Som and was Lon Nol's only road to the sea.

In the middle of it, the Elephant Mountains run down toward the coast, and at their northern end is Phnom Aoral, the highest mountain in Cambodia, which is where the zone's leadership had its base.

And when we're talking about the infamous Southwest Zone and its leader, we're talking about one very influential man, Tha Mok.

In 2018 and 2019, Cambodia banned online gambling.

Beijing went after Macau's junket operators in the same window and the money that had been packed in Sihanoukville needed somewhere else to sit.

In 2019, casino operations started moving to a village on the Moi River called Shwekoko.

Then COVID happened.