Coming to America?

Touchstone Pics has just optioned Gerald L. Posner’s grim and ultraviolent “Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies--The New Mafia.” It’s the true saga of the secret Chinese Triads that dominate the world heroin trade. From McGraw-Hill in 1988, it was dubbed by a NY Times reviewer as “powerful, frightening and, unfortunately, nonfiction.”

The book spans generations and continents, and Posner is curious about how Hollywood will adapt it.

“It’s episodic,” he told us. “There’s not a central character who weaves throughout. You could almost make a dozen different movies from it.”

But, he continued, “(film) audiences have already responded to really wonderful movies--like the ‘Godfather’ films--about organized crime. This is even more sinister, plus it’s exotic.”

He said there’s an added twist to his mobster material: Because Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the crime syndicates there--which deal in “tens of billions of dollars annually”--are seeking “new homes” and are headed to the U.S.

Touchstone, said a source close to the film, is now looking for a writer “to research the book and create a story.”