The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Dominican Drug Lord Reveals Why Drug Trafficking Is THRIVING In The Dominican Republic

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

The Dominican Republic has quietly become one of the most important drug trafficking hubs in the world. In this episode, former kingpin Adam Diaz reveals how the island transformed into a critical bridge for cocaine moving from South America to the United States and Europe. Through firsthand accounts, he explains the systems behind modern smuggling—how drugs are transported, repackaged, and moved across borders using a combination of strategy, corruption, and global connections. From the streets of Washington Heights in the 1980s to the ports and coastlines of the Caribbean, this documentary explores the rise of Dominican traffickers, their relationship with Colombian suppliers, and the networks that allowed them to operate at scale. It also examines the role of weak enforcement, bribery within institutions, and the economic forces that continue to fuel the trade. Beyond the logistics, Adam reflects on the human side of the underworld—power, wealth, loyalty, and the personal consequences that come with it. This is a rare inside look at a system that operates largely out of sight, shaping the global drug trade in ways few people fully understand. Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Drug Smuggling Rebounds in the Caribbean 02:21 Why the Dominican Republic is a Trafficking Bridge 04:43 Inside Adam Diaz's Drug Empire 07:32 How Money and Goods Flow Back to the DR 10:10 Why the DR Became a Smuggling Hub 13:40 Military, Police & Corruption in Trafficking 15:31 Creative Smuggling Methods: From Luggage to Mules 20:06 Puerto Rico Route 23:25 Smuggling People and Pot in the DR 25:12 No Cartels, Just Quiet Drug Networks 26:38 Reflections on a Drug Lord's Legacy & Regrets 27:43 Wrap-Up & Where to Find More Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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anything a thing. Caribbean drug smuggling is back in a major way. And now that American bombs are falling on Iran and not Venezuelan fishing boats, 2026 will likely be a boom year for cocaine and marijuana trafficking throughout the greater Antilles. And nowhere in the Caribbean is drug trafficking more active than in the Dominican Republic. Is it just a place where the kilos land before they get sent off to elsewhere? Yes. It's like a big warehouse. Hmm. Dominican Republic is that we call it a bridge.

It's the bridge. We find every single way to get him there. We did the other day, they just confiscated a whole bunch of ceramic little monuments that were coming by the thousand to Spain. They had the ceramic built in a way that inside, not even pure powder, they just like painted it inside. Like what we used to do in the 80s, you get a liquid, quit cocaine to New York in a bottle of rum and you know and then you make it powder of cocaine. I recently traveled down to the island to interview former Kingpin Adam Diaz to learn about

why the DR produces more drug traffickers than any other nation in the Caribbean. What's up everybody? Just a quick reminder to please subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell. It really helps us out. If you love Adam Diaz, you can get the sit down interviews with him over at patreon.com slash the Connect show. We're releasing them early at the Patreon, and they're completely ad-free and uncensored. Thank you so much. Enjoy. Adam Diaz was 13 years old when his family immigrated from the Dominican Republic to Washington Heights, New York City. Like many first-generation Dominican immigrants, Adam actually comes from a well-educated, middle-class family. Some people might be surprised to hear that, but the

Dominicans who came to New York in the 1980s were a lot more refined, better educated, and upwardly mobile than the rest of their Caribbean immigrant counterparts. And perhaps this is why they were the ones who the Colombians entrusted with their cocaine. The Dominican guys, they have very similar culture with Colombians. They don't have a similar culture with Puerto Ricans or Panamanians or Venezuelans. have a very similar culture, so they get along. Like, I will sit down with Colombians and spend hours, and then we're going to end up drinking and fucking the same girls.

It was this relationship with the Colombians, who in that era held a virtual monopoly on cocaine in New York City that allowed enterprising young Dominicans like Adam to become kingpins overnight. Colombians, they, like, retired. They, like, they work from Colombia. They don't get out of the island because all the fucking tradition and all the bullshit that's going on. They stay on the low, low profile, you know.

How much money personally would you be sitting on in New York when you said to yourself, okay, I got to ship some of this down? $4,000, $4,000, $4 million. And then, you know, ship this out, stay with the money I'm going to use to pay connection. Sometimes I send it all because sometimes the Colombian guy that was dealing with me,

making deals with me, he had an agency in Dominican, that will send the money to Colombia. And it's easy to send money to Colombia, then send it to the States. With the proceeds from drug sales on the streets of New York, Adam and his generation of Dominican drug traffickers repatriated hundreds of millions of dollars a year back to the island.

There's a town, a province. It's called San Francisco de Macquarie. In Santiago, in San Francisco de Macquarie, that town in particular has mentions, like way five times bigger than this. huge. Like, Scars face fucking style. Yeah.

Big drug dealers they used to come from the States to the immigrant republic, and that was their hometown. And they built, like, whole big neighbors with big expensive houses. Because those are the ones that started buying visas, which I did too.

Buying visas with money to bring their home colleagues from Dominican to the States so they could work with them. Because they trust them. Right. And so those that can, they go back and also invest. And it was like the train, diamond effect. Then everybody's buying houses.

Everybody's making a lot of fucking money. And that whole time was famous for that. We used to send guns and money. Okay? You send it inside the television. How much money could you get in a big screen TV? Like a million dollar, easy. Break the furniture.

Put it in there. it up, send, we call it mudanza. You know, like when you're moving out, when you're moving from a house to another, we call a mudanza when you're saying your whole thing set up like if you're going or retired to your country. And they allow every Dominican citizen to do that every year. So you prepare that for that year and then you send it, you send your money there. As a matter of fact, there's agencies, what we call offices, agencies, professionally agencies, that if you're a big campaign, they do that for you. Indeed, to this day, there are many retired Dominican kingpins like Adam

who made their fortunes in New York City and who are back in the DR living off their drug money. People keep making fortunes. Like the last guy, they cut, one of the last guys, the big kingpins that they cut, two of them. One of them is even related to me. He was a senator. And they got them.

and they send him back. Now he's making a deal. He's going to keep all his fortune. He gave up a couple of fucking guys and he's going to come back here. All he's going to do is like five years. And he's going to live like a king? He's going to live like a king.

And he was a senator while he was trafficking drugs? Yeah. And that's how he controlled the point and everything. But not only that. I know this guy, he was in the military,

a corner. He was very famous. and they got them. They got them good with a lot of containers. And they extradized him. He got back there. Then he made a deal with the government, and then he came back. And Cape all his fucking for me.

He's living like a, you know, he's living like a real kingpin. So it doesn't seem like they come after Kingpin's money here and assets like they do in the United States. No, they don't. But remember, they make that deal. because you need to get convicted here. He never got convicted here. He got convicted in the States. So if you don't get convicted here for crime,

they can't confiscate your fucking... You make that deal with the government in the States. When you make that deal with them, if you don't touch my money, you don't touch my shit, I make it deal with you, I give up some of my partners, whatever. I told you how I got to make all this container to the state, and you leave my fortune along, ching along, I cooperate. What do you think the DA is going to do? No problem. Sure.

But the Dominican Republic does far more than just export drug dealers to the United States. The island has become a vital distribution hub for cocaine heading north from Colombia into the U.S. and east across the Atlantic and into Europe. After the crackdown on Caribbean drug smuggling into Florida in the late 1980s, it was no longer possible to move cocaine in large quantities from Colombia directly into the United States. It became necessary to break up the journey and contract with intermediaries who could repackage the product and then smuggle it in little by little. The Dominican Republic was a perfect partner for this.

It's one of the largest islands in the Caribbean with vast stretches of unguarded coastline. Where do they launch from Punta Cana? No, from everywhere. They do it from... Most of them from is called Banin. And Nagua, it's a coast island closer to Puerto Rico. So that's the shortest weight. Right.

And there's not a lot of police presence. Right. How far to get from Nagwa in the Dominican to the tip of Puerto Rico? Couple hours? Depends on the boat you use. A couple of hours. maybe a lot less.

It depends on the wing. It depends how the waves, because when the waves are high, they like to do it when the waves are high because that's when the government said, well, there's a warning. Don't go, you know, we don't want boats in the fucking sea.

Right. But they're already cheap off the fucking cronnell. And, yeah, they're not going to go after that guy. Right. The fucking waves are too high. Right. It contains two of the busiest ports in Latin America, the port of Santo Domingo and the port of Rio Haina, which handle large quantities of containers for commercial shipping 24 hours a day. We have a port in the capital, the most important one that most of the containers go through there is called Hainan.

Hina has dispensive donated by the states, dispensive X-Race machine that will actually go over. right through the fucking container and see any fucking thing that's in there. But like I said, too fucking many containers. It also has a booming tourist industry and of course the large Dominican diaspora in New York City and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. It's very normal for Dominicans with dual citizenship to travel back and forth from the island to the United States. All of this, of course, is good cover for drug trafficking activity. So when they come back and they ask them questions, you know, They'd be like, what was the purpose of your trip?

Oh, vacation. You know, I'm on vacation. So I went to see my parents or whatever. And I came back, oh, okay, that makes sense. You see the passport? Okay, every year you go on vacation. All right, boom, wow. Right.

I just made $15,000. The final piece of the puzzle are the Dominican military, the police, and the port authorities who are still very bribable. You always get the custom officers where you could buy them. When you're ready to chip a container around with 900 boxes, in those 900 boxes, you've got 500 boxes, two kilos each. So that tells you, that's a lot of fucking money involved. So you're gonna, you're gonna be willing to pay this guy $100,000.

Giving you $100,000, just tip me off, man. When the custom guys are gonna be around, told me if the fucking, you know, or look, I'm gonna send, I'm gonna send the container. Don't send them out. Hold it there. And let me know when I can send it so it won't be checked.

So the guy's going to tip you off. Yeah. You know. 100,000 just for let me know. Just with that container. That's a lot of money for a guy that worked in custom. That changed his life around. Here's how it works.

The cocaine arrives on the island via semi-submersible submarine or fishing vessel sent from the northern coast of Venezuela or Colombia. Now, unlike in Colombia or Mexico, there are no drug cartels, as we know them, in the Dominican Republic, just clans of drug trafficking families who usually have connections to politicians or high-ranking military generals. It seems like the politicians and the military have to be involved somehow. They have to, of course. They come on a plane from Colombia, from Venezuela, they go down, they drop the shipment, and they uplift and out. Now you got a couple of boats waiting for that, pick it up, bring it into the land,

and that's it. And who do you think is involved with the radars? There you go. Send the fucking radars off or look the other way. Here's your money. Let the shit go through. Simple as that. That's also something that makes the DR an ideal spot for drug smugglers. Shit is quiet here and violence is kept to a minimum, only targeted assassinations when someone when somebody really fucks up. Most of carios, they come from Puerto Rico, and they come from Colombia,

and they come from Venezuela. They kill somebody, and they back out. So bosses here, if they need somebody taking care of, will import the hitters? Like, when I had to make a couple of hits in New York for whatever reason, I don't hire anybody from my people. I go to Puerto Rico.

And from Petala, it's called Perla. I grab them, bring them, and they come do their work, and they're out. Why do you think Puerto Rico has more cicadios, more hitmen than the B.R. Drug addicts. They don't give a shit. Once the cocaine reaches the island, usually 1,000 to 2,000 kilos at a time, it's then stored in warehouses around the capital, where it's packaged and disguised,

before being smuggled on to its next destination. Still today, in the capital, in the Dominican Republic and in the capital, that's a whole bunch of buildings, and you're questioning yourself. You say, why are all these buildings empty? You don't have to ask. Even the government knows. Most of the cocaine that passes through the DR is on its way to one of two places, the United States, obviously, and Europe. To get product to the U.S., smaller traffickers still utilize drug mules on commercial flights. I'm talking check luggage with bricks built into the suitcases.

Sometimes they'll use flight attendants to bring luggage on board. I've even heard of traffickers paying airport workers to hide bricks inside of secret compartments within the airplanes. There's also fly attendants. I had a couple of fly attendants bringing me stuff too. I say, listen, I'm gonna pay you good, good, good money. And I need you to tell me, what do I have to do to get this shit right through custom to X-ray? They have, you know, the machines, the belt.

Yeah. And he goes, I tell you now. So he gave me the tricks. First, you get carbon paper. You know the carbon paper you use for for To make a copy? Okay carbon paper first you put a lot of carbon paper then you use aluminum oil you put it on put the other kilos already Cover with carbon paper you put it on aluminum oil or foil you cover it all up and then you put thick thick grease what you use at the car

to, you know, so the card won't sound. Like, we call it 50, the greasy 50. And then just put it in the luggage. The X-ray is not going to see it. Cruise liners, private jets, DHS packages. This is where the creativity happens. The guy that sends me the stuff that he sold me the heroin. He's the one that finds the mules.

And then, of course, there's swallowing, Juevos, or eggs as they refer to the drug pellets. They have this place. This is called the officina offices in Colombia. And the most popular offices, they're not even in Medellin. They're in Kali. And what they do is they have these big warehouses. And they have these machines where they compress what we call eggs,

webitos, you know. And it's about this size, like, just about that. You know? And they compress it in this machine, the compressor, and they put it in condoms, few candles, and they seal it. Then they use what is called, it's like a silicon. After they use all the eggs, they put it in this silicon. You know what they used to make candles, candles, when you light up a candle.

Yeah. They use that because the stomach won't, will repel that. The stomach won't absorb it, but also it won't break it. Right. It won't dissolve it. The stomach acid won't... It won't go through. So after they put all the fucking candles, then they submerge them in there and then they let it drive.

And then they make the people, you know, swallow that with oil. Most of the time with, you know, olive oil and stuff, they swallow, they swallow. And it's a gram per whivito? It's seven grams. Per whivito, okay. So if you're bringing 700 grams, it's 100 pellets, 100 whivitos. It sounds complicated and it sounds unhealthy. Trust me.

It happens all the time. This is most common with heroin coming out of Columbia, but it also still happens in the DR with cocaine. Listen to Adam talk about how lucrative his heroin mulling operation was. So when you have a Colombian old lady, poor, she just, you know, so they, they grant them a visa, fill up the stomach with eggs, send them through. That lady's depending how many grams. If she brings, let's say, 700 grams, that's like $10,000.

Just for her. Right. If it brings out, let's say, 1,500 grams, that's like $20,000. Wow. So an old Colombian lady could really fit a kilo and a half of heroin in her stomach? This is how it is. Back at that time, it was like $90,000 a kilo. Okay, 90,000, 85 to 90,000 a kilo.

So when you pay 10,000 or 15,000, the rest is yours. You only pay $2,000 in Colombia for that. Stuff. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, Total Wine and More is my go-to, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family. I'll grab refreshing beers, easy drinking wines, and some hard seltzers for the cooler. And with everything that goes into summer, it's nice knowing you're getting the lowest prices.

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You could make anywhere from three to 500,000 a day. The other method of getting Coke to the U.S. from the DR is through Puerto Rico. This is by far the most common method for drug traffickers moving large volumes. Using fast boats, fishing vessels, and private luxury yachts, 500 to 1,500 bricks at a time get shot across that narrow stretch of sea between the eastern edge of the DR and the western tip of Puerto Rico. Most of them are fish, man. So you give them a deal.

Say, hey, I'm going to give you a couple of guys, they're going to go with you with guns, who see. You know, we call it hardware, good hardware. You know, and you just get in the boat, Hit to Puerto Rico, they're going to protect you. And the guy is an expert. He smuggles people. But now he's going to smuggle drugs.

He's going to get a lot more money. And he's going to just speed that fucking shit to Puerto Rico, drop them off and turn right back. Come back to Dominican. Once the kilos make it to Puerto Rico, the PR drug clans package and hide the bricks inside large shipping containers and get them onto cargo ships bound for the U.S. Now, because Puerto Rico is an American colony,

containers coming into the U.S. are considered domestic cargo and therefore are not subject to the most invasive searches like international cargo would be. It's well known that if the cocaine makes it safely to Puerto Rico, the odds are very high that it'll reach the continental United States. This can be dangerous business, though. A friend of mine got killed like that, and I have a first cousin of mine involved, and he sent like 300 kilos to Puerto Rico. And when he got to the island, it's La Verde. They were waiting for him. They fucking shot him and killed him. Wow.

And took those drugs. The price markups look something like this. A kilo sells for $4,000 to $6,000 in the Dominican, is resold for $8,000 to $10,000 in Puerto Rico, and then $15,000 to $17,000 when it lands in New York City. The biggest money, though, is in Europe. Nowadays, the most sophisticated drug traffickers in the Dominican Republic are actually representatives of powerful European drug cartels

from countries like the Netherlands, Serbia, and Spain. Adam told me there's even Russian mafia now conducting deals in the DR. And it makes sense. The price per kilo in Europe is still much higher than in the U.S., and the demand is insane. This type of smuggling always requires help from someone on the inside. The military, the dock workers, the port authority, takes big money and connections.

In recent years, multiple politicians, have been implicated for connections to drug trafficking in the DR. Besides cocaine, human smuggling has also become big business in the DR, for the Haitian refugees entering the country from the west side of the island and the Dominicans trying to make it to the U.S. by way of Puerto Rico. So immigrants from the DR that want to get to the states, but they don't have papers, they want to go the illegal way. You go to Puerto Rico, and they're from Puerto Rico,

they buy fake IDs and they get in the plane. All you need is a legal ID, not even a passport, and you get a plane ticket, and you just call it in New York. That's super easy. Yeah, very easy. So that must be big business for Dominican smugglers. I did that in the 80s. I brought up from my borough from my neighbor in Dominican,

you know, very poor kids that I needed work for me there. I got them on the plane. I bought business. I send them and some of them are sending to Puerto Rico. Right. On the ranches, on the boat. Yes. Wow.

And sometimes you do it with fake paperwork for the week. Back in the 80s, you didn't even read if you're Puerto Rico, you don't need a passport. If you have a birth certificate and you show custom, yes, right through. How much does it cost now for somebody to get smuggled from the DR to Puerto Rico? $10,000. Wow. So that's really good business for the smugglers. Yeah.

Wow. That's like drug money. Yeah, and then you got the legal way, which is, you marry me, you're a youth citizen, you marry me, I gave you $25,000. Four months later, I probably get a visa, go to the state. I stay there, and then you're going to do the legal resident for me. As you can see, they follow the same route as the drugs. There's also a big demand for marijuana in the DR. Dominicans love their weed. I actually got a hold of some fire-ass weed while I was there, which looked a lot like it was brought over from the U.S. That's one of the more interesting phenomena I've noticed lately. Here in the United States, the price of marijuana has gotten so low that it's become more

profitable for traffickers to send their product abroad. All the time now I'm seeing headlines of mules getting busted at American airports with pounds in their luggage heading for foreign countries, England, Spain, Thailand, and increasingly the Dominican Republic. The lower-priced outdoor weed that most of the locals smoke in the DR gets implore. imported from Jamaica and smuggled into the country by way of Haiti, usually with the help of the military. You got the military of, you know, letting all this Haitian come right through the forest, right through the front door and get paid. And then when they get to the cities and they last a few months working, then they grab them again over there in the cities.

They send them back. And then 30% or 40% of them pay the cops and they let them off the truck. And while there is a small but growing internal market for cocaine in the Dominican Republic, especially in the tourist areas like Punta Cana and among elite circles in the capital, Santa Domingo, Dominicans in general are not big into hard drugs. I didn't see any junkies or open-air drug markets like I did when I was in Mexico and Colombia. Dominicans overall are chilled out, friendly potheads. And perhaps this laid-back culture is one of the reasons that drug trafficking is thriving there.

You won't find any militarized drug cartels engaged in drone warfare with the government in the DR. Just shrewd, well-connected trafficking organizations operating in peaceful cooperation to push record tons of cocaine onto the world. So there you have it. Drug running in the Dominican is on and popping. Ex-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro is a distant memory, and the eyes of the U.S. have moved on to their losing war in the Middle East. And although a few poor souls had to lose their lives for the cause, you can bet the high seas are crowded again with smuggling vessels,

most of which are headed for the Dominican Republic. And guys like Adam, he's the closest thing to a success story in the drug game. When you look back on your time in the game, your drug trafficking career, what was the height? What the height of it? The peak of your career? You mean money-wise or... Yeah, all of it.

a lot of money, a lot of fucking millions of dollars. And it's not only that. I consider myself back then a very powerful guy. I had the cops. I bought the cops in New York. I had a lot of respect, both over there and over here, a lot of respect. I have powerful friends in the military,

powerful friends in the workforce. I have, you know, it was like, I felt very, very, very, Very important. They don't call you Mr. Diaz. They call you, sir. Sir, sir, sir. Done.

I don't call on. Done. Done. Done. Because they make a salary of you. Because they know you could change their life around. He and his generation of deported drug kingpins own half the island at this point, and are enjoying the good life, far away from the drama of New York City.

What are your biggest regrets from the life? My biggest regret losing my family. How so? I lost a good woman. She married a cop later on. And she did great. She became a psychologist, a school teacher, and a nutritionist, Larissa, beautiful girl,

and a great person. She waited for me all the way until I finished my first sentence. And then she came up to me and said, please, I love you. I love you. I dated a couple of guys. I know I fucked up, but I love you. And I want to settle over.

Let's move out of States so nobody can, you know, mess with us. And get a job and let's start all over again. And I say, I'm sorry. Can't do it. Can't. All right, you guys, that's been today's episode. Make sure to check out our full sit-down interviews with Adam, which you can get early over at patreon.com slash the Connect show.

And as always, make sure to smash that like button and leave a comment below. My name is Johnny Mitchell and you've been watching The Connect. Take care. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants to switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

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