Fresh Air - The Chinese Mafia & The Illicit Marijuana Trade

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Marijuana has been legalized in some states, but ProPublica's Sebastian Rotella says there's still a thriving illicit market in the U.S., dominated by criminals connected to China's authoritarian government.Also, John Powers reviews the Romanian film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. When states started legalizing marijuana, one of the hopes was that it would cut down on crime because people could buy it legally from licensed sellers. But in some states, including Oklahoma, legalization inadvertently helped organized crime, especially the Chinese mafia, exploit new opportunities. Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the illicit marijuana trade in the nation, from California to Maine, according to a new series of investigative reports by a team of four journalists from two non-profit news organizations, ProPublica and the Oklahoma-based The Frontier. My guest, Sebastian Rotella, is the lead reporter on this series. For several years, he's been investigating Chinese organized crime in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.

He's reported on the connection between Chinese organized crime and China's authoritarian government and how that relationship is helping China expand its influence and power around the world. Rotella worked for almost 23 years for the Los Angeles Times before joining ProPublica in 2010. He covers international security issues including terrorism, intelligence, organized crime, human rights, and migration. Part one of the new series focuses on Chinese organized crime's grip on America's illegal marijuana market, which has led to increases in other crimes, including money laundering. Part one was published earlier this month. Part two emphasizes the ties between the Chinese mafia and the Chinese government and will be published tomorrow.

Sebastian Rotella, welcome back to Fresh Air. I thought, and I think a lot of people thought that legal marijuana was supposed to cut down on crime. So how did legalizing it actually help organized crime expand in a state like Oklahoma? you have this patchwork across the nation of laws as different states have legalized still a federal law that makes transport among states illegal and an opportunity to make much more money on the black market. And so what you have is, as you say, in theory, legalization is supposed to regulate and is supposed to eliminate organized crime. And what you see in places like California and Colorado and most recently and dramatically Oklahoma, is this feeding frenzy of organized crime groups rushing into these states and getting involved in cultivation and then in trafficking across the country. I think it would be helpful to know, what do you have to do legally? And let's use

Oklahoma as an example. What do you have to do legally to grow marijuana there? Oklahoma is one of the more wide open legal frameworks, but basically there it's a medical marijuana law. So you can cultivate marijuana theoretically for medicinal purposes. You have to have a resident of Oklahoma for at least two years. And there are a series of licenses and state regulations that govern paying illegally Oklahoma residents to be straw owners and farms that are producing far more marijuana than could be consumed in Oklahoma for medical purposes. And most of that marijuana is going around the country, particularly the East Coast, to be sold illegally. So organized crime gets people to front for them and get a license, and then organized crime can move in and grow, and it looks legal? And it has the facade of legality. And what's happening is then taking advantage of the fact that you can get a lot more money, say, if you're selling the dope in New York or on the East Coast.

There's smuggling of truckloads of marijuana and huge profits, billions of dollars being made in this marijuana that's grown in Oklahoma and being trafficked and sold elsewhere. Different states have different laws. And I'm talking about states that have legalized marijuana in one form or another. So how has the Chinese mafia exploited the fact that there are so many different laws in different states? You know, these are remarkably agile, mobile, sophisticated groups with lots of resources, partly because the backdrop to this is the way Chinese organized crime has come to dominate money laundering for Mexican drug

cartels in the United States and acquire lots of cash. And what they've done with that cash, one of the things they've done is moved into the marijuana business. So when California, in the middle of the last decade, becomes sort of a focus of places as it begins to decriminalize and legalize. You have groups mainly from New York and the East Coast going out to California, buying houses, buying farms, you know, sometimes going into subdivisions and buying, you know, half a dozen houses at a time and setting up indoor grows and producing all this marijuana that is then trafficked mainly on the East Coast. Then when law enforcement starts to crack down in California and Oklahoma becomes the new hotbed starting in 2018,

these same groups very sort of quickly and dramatically move to Oklahoma, sometimes using private planes. You have remarkable scenes of private planes flying from rural airstrips in California to Oklahoma with couriers carrying suitcases full of cash to go out and buy farms in Oklahoma where land is cheap and setting up new operations in the new hotspot where they can make even more money because there's really no limits on how big these farms are and how much marijuana they can grow. Yeah, you mentioned that a lot of the California illicit industry moves to Oklahoma. And like, why Oklahoma? You mentioned that land is cheap there. Is that the main reason why Oklahoma has become such a big state for the illicit growth of marijuana? It's partly because the land is cheap. It's also because that medical marijuana law they passed made it particularly easy just to move in, set up, and grow. In other

states, there are limits on how much you can grow. In Oklahoma, there are basically no limits. So you have these huge operations and thousands of farms growing marijuana. And, you know, law enforcement kind of overwhelmed and trying to keep up with it and prevent what is kind of wholesale trafficking to other states. Does the fact that different states have different laws make it harder to enforce the laws? Yes, it does. And it also makes it harder because at the federal level, though it is, you know, illegal under federal law to traffic among states. There is some reticence, we're told, some reluctance to get very heavily involved in enforcement of marijuana at the federal level because of this situation where you have lots of states where it's illegal or decriminalized. So the main way that you see federal law enforcement involved is when they're pursuing,

say in the case of the Chinese organized crimes groups, they're pursuing sophisticated groups involved in money laundering. And all of a sudden, they'll discover that those same groups that are laundering money for the Mexican cartels to sell fentanyl are also acquiring farms in Oklahoma and making even more money growing and trafficking marijuana. So there's this patchwork that makes things very complicated for law enforcement, and particularly with Chinese organized crime, which is very sophisticated and secretive. And there's these language barriers in places like Oklahoma, state authorities that just have a lot to learn and have had to work very hard to just figure out these groups and how they work, which are national and international in scope.

In order to actually grow the weed, a lot of workers are exploited. You compare some of the workers growing this weed for the Chinese mafia to indentured servants. Many of them are immigrants. Can you describe the labor force for this illicit industry? Sure. I mean, these are thousands of workers, most of them themselves Chinese immigrants, many of whom come across the Mexican border. I interviewed one who, you know, it's classic odyssey coming from China all the way through South America up across the Mexican border, gets caught, applies for asylum, gets released, makes his way to New York. And he hears that there's work in the marijuana farms of Oklahoma. So he shows up, he's in Oklahoma and gets to work. And he finds hundreds and thousands like him. And they are working on these farms. At best, they're working very long hours for low pay. And at worst, they're abused. Their wages are, you know, they don't get paid. There's physical abuse. There's control over them in terms of, you know, being held sometimes at

these farms. It's a very difficult, murky world. It's very hard to enforce the protections for workers. You also have prostitution where there was a case in Oklahoma, for example, where you had, you know, a brothel set up where women, you know, there were human trafficking charges because they were being forced into prostitution to serve the managers and the administrators of these farms at this brothel in Oklahoma related to the marijuana industry. And in terms of working conditions, you describe how law enforcement busted one of these illegal grows, and they thought they were stepping in mud, but it was human excrement. And that's correct. Yeah, that's an example of the working conditions in some of these places.

That's right. And I've seen, you know, and talking to people who have worked on the farms and seeing some videos, you have cases where you have people sleeping basically, you know, on blankets on the farms and seeing some videos, you have cases where you have people sleeping, basically, you know, on blankets on the floor and in the greenhouses, things like that, limited access to bathrooms, long hours, pretty much being held at these farms. I mean, it's a tough environment. How did the Chinese mafia become the organized crime group that dominated the illegal marijuana growing industry in the U.S.? I think, as I said, it has to do with this evolution where Chinese organized crime in the past 20 years, where law enforcement was focused on other things, and these are secretive, disciplined, sophisticated organizations, realized that there was a lot of money to be made in the drug industry, in the money part of the drug industry. In other words, not selling fentanyl, but laundering the money for the Mexican cartels that sell fentanyl.

And that generated this huge stockpile of cash. And marijuana became attractive because it was profitable and it was low risk in terms of the penalties. So I think that was something where the Chinese groups realized that this was a way to make money, to generate even more cash, which then circles back into the laundering and the migrant smuggling and the other criminal industries in which they're involved. And that became sort of this frontier that they got into. And they used the networks they already had. As I said, a lot of this is run out of New York. I mean, that's sort of one of the main places where Chinese organized crime bosses have sort of nationwide reach. You also have centers in places like San Francisco and

Los Angeles. But there was just this realization that marijuana was going to be this boom, and there was going to be all this money that could be made, and that that was only going to benefit these other criminal enterprises that were already going on. Let's talk about the organized part of organized crime. There's a loose confederation of Chinese criminal groups through the nation. How do they coordinate with each other? I think most Americans know something about the mafia in America. We've seen the movies, you know. So whatever the movies tell us, whether that's true or not, that's for most of us, that's our conception of organized crime in America. But, you know, how do the Chinese mafia organize? Tell us more about that.

You know, this is a particularly complex and challenging arena where even people in federal law enforcement will tell me that they're still struggling to understand it and get a grip on it, and they just don't have the kind of visibility and granular detail they have on something like, you know, Italian-American organizations or the Mexican cartels. But as you said, it's this confederation of different groups, you know, loose to some extent, but very disciplined in another. And as you move higher in the hierarchy and you move higher in the amounts of money being made, you have the presence of what are called the triads, which are very powerful and historic Chinese organized crime groups rooted mainly in southern China that have

international reach all through the diaspora and that call the shots. So, as I said, particularly in New York, there's in fact, there's even an expression in law enforcement of people who work Chinese organized crime. They say all roads lead to Flushing, you know, which is one of the big Chinatowns in New York, the neighborhood of Flushing. And you have bosses there who are calling the shots for a lot of this activity around the country, whether it's money laundering or the marijuana underground trade. In fact, the DEA detects some years ago meetings in New York of high-level triad figures, some of them coming in from China to sit down and sort of keep the peace and distribute territory and keep everyone in this very booming,

potentially dangerous world in line. So it's a lot of different groups, but at the highest level, you have specific triads, one of them known as the 14K, which are very strong in Asia and which also have a real grip on diaspora communities. And they are overseeing this in terms of the money, in terms of conflicts, and in terms of territory. I feel like I have to ask you here, how do you write about this? How do you expose all of this without fearing that you're going to cause like anti-Chinese sentiments? Because we see how that was exploited, like during the Trump administration, you know, accusing China of starting the spread of COVID. And Chinese people really felt endangered in America. So how do you write about this without preventing

that kind of fear and phobia from being fed by this information? And also, since you've described how many Chinese immigrants come to the U.S. through Latin America and then across the Mexican border, and some of them end up growing illicit marijuana. They're exploited, but they're part of that industry. So again, how do you write about all this without kind of playing on people's fears of immigration and of Chinese people in particular, of, you know, fears about the Mexican border? You know, it's a very good question, and it's one of my top priorities. And when I first started writing about these issues, I really focused first on what's called transnational repression, which is, you know, the persecution of Chinese dissidents and others in diaspora

communities. And I think the way you do it is, you know, my sources are above all the people I talk to, many of them of Chinese origin or Chinese Americans, and particularly people in law enforcement, particularly people in the human rights arena. And I make a point of talking to them and running things by them. And what I've tried to reflect is that often you have people in, say, in Chinese American communities who feel like they're in a crossfire, because there are the kind of forces that you talk about, you know, demonization, or, you know, attacks, anti-Asian attacks, suspicion by law enforcement, because, you know,

there's lots of Chinese espionage and organized crime that law enforcement is trying to figure out. Pressure from the Chinese state, if people get get out of line and, you know, in terms of their political views, pressure from organized crime. So I think the way to do it is to be careful and fair and rigorous and, you know, and try and get every perspective. And, you know, that's very important to me. But again, I think when you're talking about the dangers or the aggressiveness of the Chinese authoritarian regime or Chinese organized crime,

you have to remember who the primary victims are, and they are going to be themselves, people who are of Chinese origin, who are, you know, U.S. citizens and permanent residents and deserve all the protections of this country from that kind of a threat. So this kind of tightrope that you have to walk in covering these issues where you confront the difficult realities and the true threats without straying into excess or fomenting irrational fears is something I have a lot of experience with. And covering different kinds of immigration, covering the Mexican border, covering immigration in other countries and something I'm very aware of when I do this work. So you describe how there seems to be a mutually beneficial relationship between China's government and Chinese organized crime in America, that the government helps fund the organized crime and helps protect it in America, but they also get a share of the profits and are using

those profits to expand its power and influence around the world, in part between the International Infrastructure Program, the Belt and Roads Project, in which China is helping fund infrastructure projects in developing countries, hoping to expand its influence there and ingratiate itself to the people there. So can you talk more about that relationship and how China is taking advantage of the profits? On the Belt and Road Initiative, there have been public allegations and there are also cases that indicate in different places, including in Asia and the Pacific, that people in Chinese organized crime, including the 14K triad, seem to be aligning themselves with the Chinese government getting involved in the Belt and Road Initiative. And the trade-off in places around the world, according to people in Western law enforcement and human rights group, is this. You have organized crime playing a role of providing services, so money laundering for the Chinese

elite. A lot of the money laundering that happens of drug money involves the Chinese elite, which acquires drug money to move their fortunes offshore. You have organized crime involved in helping with transnational repression. And you have political influence operations that have been alleged where the U.S. government has publicly alleged that Chinese organized crime is working in places like the Pacific and in Southeast Asia to expand political influence. And so this is kind of a model that repeats itself around the world. Let me reintroduce you again. Tella, an investigative reporter for ProPublica. He's the lead reporter on a new series about how the Chinese mafia has come to dominate much of the nation's illicit marijuana trade from California to Maine, and how the Chinese government is profiting. We'll be right back after a short

break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. Hi there, it's Tanya Mosley, here to share more about my new series of Fresh Air Plus bonus episodes. I love when he casts his mom in movies. It feels so authentic. I know. You know, she was also in the film Goodfellas, which I also love. I need to get that screenplay, by the way. I don't have that one. For the next few weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, I'll be talking about all of my favorite movies with my colleague Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you want to hear what movies I love and which screenplays I actually own and use as creative direction,

sign up for Fresh Air Plus at industry in the U.S. They're involved with money laundering from Latin America, drug money from fentanyl. Is that right, too? That's right. What the DEA and Southern Command and other agencies in a lot of cases show is that Chinese organized crime in the past 10 years pretty much became the dominant money launderer in the Americas for the cartels, particularly the Mexican cartels that traffic in fentanyl and cocaine in the United States. And so that's become a huge boom area for Chinese organized crime, which is specializing in the laundering of drug money. And that's true also, by the way, in Europe and in Asia, you see enormous amounts of money being moved. You see a lot of cases, a lot of crackdowns in Europe now, where Chinese organized crime in places like Italy and Spain and France is becoming the dominant launderer for the different groups involved in trafficking of drugs, both laundering the money and doing things like

providing money. So if somebody needs to do a drug deal and they need cash rather than moving it from one country to another, there are money services provided by Chinese organized crime where cash is available to make those deals. But on the streets of the United States, it's been dramatic because the Mexican cartels had a real challenge. If you go back, you know, to 15, 20 years with all this cash that was being made on the streets of the United States from different kinds of drugs, how to get it back to Mexico, how to turn it into pesos. And what Chinese organized crime has done is come in and provide a service where for very low rates and very quickly they can launder that money, get the money back to the cartels in Mexico through networks they have there and through a series of complicated transactions in China, often involving the

Chinese elite who are acquiring that drug money in the United States. They've created this international system that has really benefited both Chinese organized crime and the cartels that deal drugs. Can you give us the basics of the system that Chinese organized crime uses to launder money? What you basically have is these two market forces that Chinese money launderers in the United States and in Latin America bring together, which is Mexican cartels making huge amounts of dollars on the streets of the United States that relatives, representatives who want to acquire dollars, and they want to do that in order to circumvent rules in China against moving money out of China in order to get their fortunes offshore. So to give a concrete example, let's say you have a million dollars that a Mexican cartel makes on the streets of Chicago. The Mexican distributors turn that money over to Chinese brokers who on the one hand direct

Confederates in Mexico to give the equivalent amount of money in pesos to the Mexican cartel so they're taken care of right there that money has been laundered and then what they do on the streets of Chicago is sell that million dollars to people in the Chinese elite at a high commission who then have gotten this money, have gotten this cash in dollars, and they pay the Chinese gangsters by moving money among bank accounts in China. So you don't have any money moving across border. You have exchanges of cash on the streets of the United States and then parallel movements of money in Mexico and China that take care of everyone. One of the many things that really surprised me in your articles is that there are environmental issues involved with the Chinese mafia now because they're sometimes stealing water and electricity

to grow marijuana. The indoor grows require electricity and all of it requires water. How do they steal it and what's the environmental impact of that? You had in California in particular, you know, where there were a lot of indoor grows, you had these groups that were very sophisticated and had sort of a piratical approach to this where they would do bypasses, where they would do makeshift plugs to divert and steal electricity and out in farming communities to divert water. And you needed huge amounts of electricity and huge amounts of water for these operations. So there was a real environmental impact there. You also have lots of chemicals being used and pesticides, sometimes banned ones. You have in these subdivisions where a bunch of homes have been bought up and turned into grows. They pretty much are destroyed because there's all these molds and all these chemicals being used. So in many ways, this is just a very

sort of rapacious approach that has a lot of impact on communities and on land and on water. How is this huge illicit marijuana industry affecting the legal marijuana industry in America? Well, you know, that's the classic problem that the legal industry is confronting is that when you have a black market, which is avoiding taxes and not providing revenue to the government, which was the point of legalization, the legal market suffers. It affects prices. There's a glut of product. So it's really a problem wherever you go when there's been legalization, which in theory was supposed to make things regulated and eliminate organized crime from the picture. And pretty much the opposite has turned out to be true.

So the black market is just this constant challenge to making legalization really work. Because the Chinese mafia has some connections to the Chinese government, you refer briefly to how the Chinese government uses the mafia to help spy on Chinese immigrants, including Chinese students. Can you talk a little bit about how that works and whether the people being spied on know that they are, if they have any clue about that? I think there are two separate things going on. I think the Chinese organized crime is used to spy on diaspora communities, that is immigrant communities of people who have come to

stay. And that I think is known and there's almost an ostentatious sense of sending a message to people in the diaspora around the world that, you know, we are watching you and don't get out of line. So you have cases of dissidents being persecuted. You have cases of where people who are fugitives from Chinese justice being pursued by people, sometimes by these associations, cultural associations, whose leaders include people who are underworld figures. Then the question with the students is separate. I haven't seen as much organized crime involved

in the monitoring of the students, but what you do have is a remarkable apparatus of Chinese student associations at universities all over the world that is in a position where if a student speaks out, say, at a rally, a Chinese student in the United States, let's say, speaks out at a rally about Tibet or the plight of the Uyghurs, that he will instantly get harassed by his fellow students, and that the information will get back to China so quickly that a few days later, his family back home will get a visit from the security forces,

warning them that their son or daughter in the United States is saying things they shouldn't be saying at a university. So you have a remarkable apparatus of planetary control in that sense. Well, let's take a short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Sebastian Rotella, an investigative reporter for ProPublica. He's the lead reporter on a new series about how the Chinese mafia has come to dominate much of the nation's illicit marijuana trade from California to Maine,

and how the mafia is connected to the Chinese government. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. So one of the people who you write about who's facing trial now reminded me of the character in Breaking Bad, Gus. And Gus was played by Giancarlo Esposito. And he ran the meth lab that the main characters worked in, and he was connected to, you know, organized crime. And like the person in your series, he ran a chain of restaurants, highly respected chain. And he was a respected person in the community, you know, seen as a very good and responsible businessman, and ingratiated himself to politicians. This is the same kind of profile as one of the people who you write about.

That really struck me, and I'm wondering if it struck you, and if you ever feel like you are living in a crime movie or a crime TV series. I think the thing, having covered this kind of thing for a long time, that reality often offers up the best stories. And I think the profile you're talking about is something I've seen in a number of cases where you have, I've seen it in the United States, I've seen it in Italy, I've seen it in Latin America, where you have people who are simultaneously considered respectable leaders of their community and who are interlocutors both with, say, Chinese diplomats and local leaders. Say, you know, they give campaign contributions to U.S. politicians or they meet in Italy with the mayor of the city or they meet with the consul. But they're also accused of being involved in an organized crime of drug trafficking, things like that. And I mean,

it's quite remarkable to see that. And some of these people have been convicted, others haven't. But I think there's a French expert, Emmanuel Jourdat, who talks about this. And he says that the Chinese Communist Party looks at the diaspora and sees the most successful wealthy people as sort of the nobility of the diaspora. And the deal with them, spoken or not spoken, is that if they toe the line and they're patriotic and they gather information on their community, that the Chinese state is fine with what they're doing and doesn't care how they made their money. That's the assertion he makes. And I think there are some cases that are remarkable in that sense, where you have people who are prominent and who interact with both Chinese officials and U.S. politicians and then turn out to be charged with criminal activity.

You know, you write that some U.S. officials argue that Chinese authorities have decided as a matter of policy to foster the drug trade in the Americas in order to destabilize the region and spread corruption, addiction and death here. Do you think this could be a kind of warfare? You know, that's a debate, I think, within the U.S. national security community. And I think I've talked to a number of people who I think are serious, you know, high level, both fentanyl, which after all, the precursors for fentanyl come from China, where a lot of those precursors are still legal to make and find their way to Mexico where the fentanyl is prepared in labs and enters the United States and has wrought great havoc and death and destruction in the United States, that China could be doing more in that sense to prevent that, or that with the money laundering that we've described, that there doesn't seem to be a crackdown on these groups that are doing money laundering around the world, because a lot of that money is going back to China. So is this a state that is where there's a lot of corruption, which I think there is, and that this corruption results in this kind of activity? Or is there a more intentional policy in some of these arenas because, you know, this can be something that weakens their adversary?

I mean, enough people have said publicly in the U.S. government and other governments that this kind of activity is going on, that it's something to consider and to give some examination to. There's a lot of people who want to be very conscious that they're buying clothing or food that isn't exploiting workers. And I'm wondering if you think that people who buy marijuana from the underground market might want to think a little bit about who's being exploited. I think that's a very good point. I think the conditions that have been described to us and that have been documented in places like California and Oklahoma, but also overseas in Europe, I've heard very strikingly similar stories told to me about people moved around the world, being kept in exploitative conditions, underpaid, abused, who aren't sometimes even sure where exactly they are. They have a vague idea that they're in Oklahoma or in Spain, but not even the city that they're in or the rural area that they're in. So there is systematic exploitation and abuse of these workers

in this industry. I don't think there's any question about that. And a lot of them are illegal immigrants and that is going to, you know, sort of create structural conditions for abuse. I think it was back when you were writing, when you were reporting for the LA Times and you were covering the Mexican border, that one of your border reports inspired two songs on Bruce Springsteen's album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, which was released in 1995. Which two songs? Bless you for mentioning that, because it was a high point in my career at a relatively young age. The songs are Balboa Park, which is a song about illegal immigrant kids in San Diego. And then there's another song called The Line, which is sort of from the point of view of a border patrol agent at the border in San Diego. And it was very funny because I got a phone call

one day when I was in San Diego. And it was somebody from a music magazine who said, do you know that Bruce Springsteen thanks you on the liner notes of his new album, The Ghost of Tom Jode? And I said, no, I did not know that. And one thing led to another. And it turned out that he had been reading my coverage of the Mexican border and had, you know, especially in the case of that song, Balboa Park had really sort of put the article, you know, to music. I mean, he used, you know, the images and the scenes very much and the emotions of that article and put it into this beautiful song. And I ended up being invited to the concert he gave where he launched Tom Joad in Los Angeles

and meeting him and having conversations with him over the years about these issues. But it was a high point. Oh, that sounds great. A lasting relationship. We remained in touch. And I saw him at several of his concerts in Europe. And it was striking that he was so interested

in those issues as I was, you know. And then there are issues about, you know, which you become very passionate, you know, covering the Mexican border, about the plight of illegal immigrants, about the dangers of the drug wars. You know, I knew quite a few people covering the Mexican border, you know, brave Mexican law enforcement officials who were killed in the line of duty, people I knew, people who were sources of mine. So that has an impact. And then I very much draw on those experiences and others I've had as a reporter around the world.

Sebastian Rotella, thank you so much for talking with us. It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much. Sebastian Rotella is a senior reporter at ProPublica. He's the lead reporter on a new series of articles investigating how the Chinese mafia came to dominate much of the illicit marijuana trade in the U.S. The series is a collaboration between ProPublica and another nonprofit news organization, The Frontier. Part one was published earlier this month. Part two will be published tomorrow. So here's one of the two Bruce Springsteen songs inspired by Rotella's earlier reporting on the Mexican border. This is Balboa Park.

He lay his blanket underneath the freeway As the evening sky grew dark Took a sniff of the council from his cocaine Headed through by Boa Park Where the men in the Mercedes Come nightly to employ In the cool San Diego evening The services of the border boys He grew up near the zone on a northerly

With the hustlers and smugglers he hung out with He swallowed the balloons of cocaine And brought them across to the 12th Street street Sleeping in his shelter If the night got too cold Running from the meter To the border patrol That's Bruce Springsteen from his 1995 album

The Ghost of Tom Joad. This is Fresh Air. The Romanian filmmaker Radu Zuda has become known for making smart, wild movies with very long titles. His latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, spends a day following a beleaguered Bucharest woman doing low-level work on an industrial film. But it's far more than that, says our critic-at-large, John Powers. Giuda gives us a hilarious and biting portrait of a modern world spinning out of control. It's easy to feel overwhelmed these days.

Squeezed by a constantly changing economy. Bombarded by the shrieking of social media. Surrounded by angry people who genuinely believe that their worst instincts lead them to the truth. This is the world in 2024. Yet I can't think of a single American filmmaker who's managed to capture it on screen. I can think of a Romanian one. His name is Radu Jude. A world-class troublemaker whose rambunctious movies remind me of everyone from Jean-Luc Godard and John Waters to Lenny Bruce. His latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, is a freewheeling provocation, a black comic road picture that cannonballs into the madness of our time. Clacking into a resolutely unboring two hours and 40 minutes, the movie crackles with

brains, obscenity, political anger, and jokes that had me laughing out loud. Shot in a high contrast black and white, it follows a day in the life of the 30-ish Angela, played by Ilinka Manolak, an underpaid production assistant on a film about workplace safety being made for an Austrian multinational. Almost from the moment she wakes up, she's frantically driving around Bucharest to pre-screen industrial accident victims for the film. Constantly stuck in traffic jams with their blaring horns, she blasts heavy metal, blows chewing gum bubbles, and flips off men who say lewd things to her. There are many. She's constantly getting calls on a cell phone whose ringtone, ironically enough,

is a tacky digital version of the Ode to Joy, the official anthem of the European Union. In addition to everything else, Angela takes her mother to visit the family plot at a cemetery, stops for a backseat quickie with her boyfriend, and rushes to the airport to pick up one of her company's clients, Doris Goethe, a smug Austrian marketing exec played by the great German actress Nina Hoss, whose nastiness comes with nice tailoring. Way too smart for her job, Angela frequently pauses to record hilariously filthy TikToks in the guise of her male alter ego, Bobita, a gleefully sexist, racist, pro-Putin gasbag whose stupidity she's satirizing. Now, at one level,

Jude uses Angela's day to look at Romania with a keen, roving eye, moving his camera away from the action to show us dilapidated streets and billboard ads filled with bogus promises of fit bodies and high-tech prosperity. Meanwhile, the characters we meet tend to be rude, nasty, bigoted, and struggling to survive in a poor, corrupt economy. In a stunning silent sequence, Giudice shows us the scores of memorials to people

who've been killed on a single stretch of badly designed road. It's a metaphor for Romania itself. Yet even as he highlights his own country's failings, he reminds us that one reason Romania is poor is that richer countries exploit the country's low salaries and cheap natural resources. When Angela asks Doris Goethe whether it's true that her company is chopping down all of Romania's forests to make its products, Doris goes all zone of interest. I don't know, she says. It's not my department. In his earlier films, Giuda explored how our lives are shaped by images,

digging into the way those images are created. He does that here, too, even intercutting Angela's story with an actual 1981 film about a woman taxi driver, also named Angela, from the communist era. It makes us reflect on the parallels between the two Angelas' lives. Are things truly better today? The film builds to a tour de force of a finale, a single 20-minute shot, in which we watch Angela's colleagues shooting an interview with a wheelchair-bound man who's talking about his workplace accident. Jura lets us see how the man's story gets massaged by the filmmakers to serve business interests antithetical to those of the accident victim. Touching on everything from Zoom calls to action movies to reflexive anti-Semitism,

do not expect too much from the end of the world is about nothing less than the way we live now. Although obviously heightened, the emotional contours of Angela's story will be familiar to viewers here. She's caught in a system that she finds oppressive and hateful. Yet for all her anger, she doesn't know how to change it. She can only mock it profanely on TikTok. John Powers reviewed the new Romanian film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salat, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Boldenato, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Teresa Madden directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. This message comes from Grammarly. Back and forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing,

better results. Learn more at grammarly.com slash enterprise.