The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - This is how the modern cocaine industry actually works | Ep. #4

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Johnny breaks down from A to Z the modern cocaine business, from street sales to mid level trafficking to the new kingpins of Europe and the power of the Sinaloa Cartel.  He also tells his own story of traveling to Colombia and getting connected to the Cartels.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

But I got a blindfold over my face. I'm in a foreign country. I'm exhausted. My head is spinning. And I got a gigantic guy with a gun sitting next to me. So now I realize I'm in a place where I really shouldn't be. I'm in no-go zone. And I fucking just shoot it up my nostril.

And it felt like I was sniffing air. It didn't taste like anything. In America, once that coat crosses the border, it's free market. What's up, guys? Welcome back to The Connect. I'm your host, Johnny Mitchell. We got new episodes coming out every Thursday, so make sure to turn on your alerts to get notified whenever we have new content out. All right, let's get into it.

So today's episode, we're talking about cocaine. Now, I had a very brief but torrid run in the cocaine business. As you know, my bread and butter was as a marijuana trafficker, but I would at times dabble in the cocaine business. Now, I was picking up my pounds of weed from the Sinalowans, and they had set up shop in the little towns of Northern California to do big marijuana growing operations. But they also, of course, had a direct contact to all of their other product coming up from Mexico. So I've told you guys about the drought season. And this was when the pot supply dried up. It was usually at the end of summer, August and September, when all of the pounds that were grown by the cartels and the

rednecks in Northern California were sold out. So I would go stretches two, sometimes three months at a time with no pot to sell. So of course, what I would do naturally is turn to other drugs. And a lot of dealers did this. So one time I went down there to make a pot buy, and they had completely sold out by the time we went down there, but they said to me in their broken English, they go, well, what about the cocaine?

And I said, yeah, let's give it a whirl. Why not? I was desperate at the time. So I think I purchased like four ounces of Coke from them, right on the spot. I didn't know anything about it, but they gave me a good deal, looking back on it. I paid $700 an ounce, and this is for good Coke. This is for blow that was coming straight from the border, Border Brothers, we called it. So I would buy an ounce for $700, and that's 28 grams.

I would sell grams back in Eugene, Oregon, where I was going to college, for about $75 a gram. So I could turn each ounce over and make about $400 profit an ounce. It was very easy selling Coke on a college campus. As you can imagine, it's kind of like being in the projects. It's a bunch of kids with no jobs and a bunch of government money and their parents' money looking to get high. And I was the only one that had Border Brothers shit. I was the only one that had Cartel Coke in that town.

So very quickly, I was selling six, eight, sometimes as much as a half a key, 16 ounces of Coke a week. and I was selling it all out to customers. I did not sell to any smaller suppliers. I was very disciplined about that. I only sold the people that were doing the Coke directly to consumers. And the reason I did that was because I never wanted to get caught up in a jam. I knew that if I sold to people that were doing the drugs right away,

there was never any chance that they could get caught by the cops and turn around or wrap me out. Well, the trick to making money selling Coke, number one, is, to not use coke. I mean, the majority of dealers don't make any money because they simply dabble in their product and then they get hooked. So Scarface and Tony Montana said it best, Don't get high in your own supply.

That's right, lesson number two, don't get high in your own supply. I never did any of my own product. I was very disciplined when it came to that because I was even more addicted to the money than I was addicted to the drugs. So I would put it up my nose sometimes and rub it around my gums just to test the purity of it.

But whenever I got an urge to do a line or do a whole gram, I would picture money leaving my pocket. And it was real easy to stay away from it. So the number one rule to making money in the Coke game is to not use cocaine. But how do you make money? You make money by having the best product. Product is better than the price,

because if you have the best product, users will pay more for it. The thing about a drug like Coke is, if somebody has $75 to get high, they've got $100 to pay for the better product. So it's very important that you have the best product. And you usually need to be connected with a wholesaler. And that means if you're in the U.S., you know somebody, usually Mexican,

who's bringing it up straight from the border or has one of their people bringing it up straight from the border. So I was blessed in a certain way because I was already dialed in with the Mexicans, the Sino-Lowans, buying my pot. So I was given Border Brothers Coke right away. Another way to make money is, of course, by stretching it or stepping on the Coke. And what that means is you take cocaine and you dilute it to make more of it. So if you have a kilo, a brick of 100% pure cocaine, you can cut that down into 85% or 90% pure and you take 36 ounces and you literally stretch that and create 42 or 45 ounces, thus increasing your profit that much more.

People use all kinds of shit to step on it. But the main things that I saw when I was dealing were B-12, caffeine pills, and creatine, the shit that you use after workouts. I never cut my own Coke. I was a firm believer that I wanted to give people shit that they couldn't get anywhere else, and they would just come back to me every time, and I was right. So to make up for not being able to stretch the Coke out, I just sold less weight. So say I was going to sell you an eight ball, an eighth of an ounce, 3.5 grams.

Instead of selling 3.5 grams, I might only sell you 3.2 or 3 grams. But it was the best shit around, and I knew that the people buying up the Coke probably weren't going home and weighing it. And it was the best Coke. So even if you did weigh it out, you might say, ah, whatever, it's the best shit. So I'll accept buying a little less of it. The way that you can tell purity in cocaine is by cutting open the entire brick. So when I went to pick up my coke, I would buy, let's say, nine ounces, a quarter of a key, and it would come in a big block. And I would cut that block completely open, and I would pick it up.

And if I could see crystals on it, if I could see what's known as fish scale, or basically little divvets in the Coke plus like a yellowish hue, like a little off white yellowish color to it, that's how I knew that I had really good shit. And I would explain that to my buyers, to my users, too. I would say, look, you can tell I have the best Coke because it's still chunky. It's still rocked up. You know you have bad stuff if you get that shit in movies where it looks like it's all broken down into powder. That's when you know you have diluted, stepped on Coke. So I was able to explain that to him. And pretty quickly, my cell phone was ringing from Thursday afternoon to Sunday night.

I mean, some days I wouldn't even sleep. I would be up running around Eugene selling to as many as 50, 60, 60. sometimes 70 people in a weekend buying Coke from me. And that's, of course, the downside to selling Coke is that it's a pain in the ass, and you are constantly running around, and you will have people hitting you up, knocking on your door at the crack of dawn, needing another fix. So just to give you a comparison, I would make the same amount of money bagging out and selling an ounce of cocaine as I would selling a pound of weed at wholesale. So there's good money to be made selling Coke on the hand-to-hand or street level if you have a good supplier. If you have 10, 20 people

that regularly buy Coke from you, you can make the same amount of money as a mid-level weed trafficker that has to sell bulk five to 10-pound pot orders at a time. And that's why to this day, I say Coke is the best game to get into if you just want to make some extra money on the side, or if you want to make an extra 35 or 40 grand a year, you could do that and have a part-time job and really keep yourself safe as long as you're just selling to users, if you're not selling to other dealers and still make, you know, a teacher's salary. And the reason that you're able to make so much money, even as a low-level cocaine dealer, is of course because it is a import product exclusively. Marijuana can be grown anywhere in the world, especially now. It can be growing in a

warehouse, it can be grown in a basement, can be grown in a huge greenhouse. It can be grown anywhere. Cocaine still has to be produce, exported, smuggled in, and distributed to whatever the consumption country is. So that's why the price is able to remain artificially high. And that's why dealers like myself who have exclusive access to product from the cartels could dominate whatever little market we were selling in because competition couldn't get their hands on the best product.

like I could. The biggest cocaine cartels are still based in Colombia. The Colombians, after all these years, are still manufacturing 80% of the world's cocaine. Now, they do have some competition from the Bolivian and the Peruvian gangs who have sprung up over the years because they actually grow the most coca. So they're starting to develop a trade in those countries as well. But the Colombians by far manufacture the majority of the world's Coke. However, they don't make the most money. That is a misnomer. They did in the days of Pablo Escobar, but they don't anymore, and I'm going to explain why. It was about 2009 when I decided to leave Portland for a while. I was really burnt out from selling drugs, and I just needed a break. So I gave the business to

my drug dealing partner, and I bought a ticket to, of all places, Colombia, Medellin. And before I left, I told my supplier, my guy from Sina Loa, who was supplying me with coke and weed, I told him, hey, yeah, I'm going away for a while. I'm actually going to be in Columbia. And he goes, oh, you're going to be in Medellin, okay. And he writes down a number on a piece of paper, and he hands it to me. And he said, when you're down there, you look this guy up, he's going to take care of you. And I said, wow, that's weird.

Okay. And I didn't really think anything of it. So I get to Columbia and I check into my hotel. And I called the number that he gave me. So it rings a couple of times and then a man picks up. And in Spanish, the first thing he says is, what do you need? So I tell him I need some weed. And he said, okay, text me your location.

We'll have a car there in 10 minutes. Eight minutes later, I get a text. Your car is waiting for you outside. So I walk outside my hotel and there's a taxi waiting for me, an old school yellow taxi. But the light is off on top. There's no service light going on. And later on, I was to find out that in Medellin,

that means it was a special taxi. lights off, that means it's there to move drugs from place to place. The back door of the car opens up and I jump in. And in the back seat, there's this huge Colombian dude built like a brick shit house and he's got a fucking gun sticking out of his waistband. He hands me a blindfold. And he's a nice guy. He smiles at me and he politely asked me. He says, could you please put this on, sir? Now I'm a little worried. I'm like, dude, it's not that serious. I don't need to smoke weed this badly. So I turn to open up the cab to get out. Before I can do that, it starts driving off. So I'm like, fuck it, I guess I'm in this now.

So I put the blindfold on and I really started to get nervous at this point. I mean, I knew in the back of my head that I was probably okay. I was familiar with Colombians. I knew they were very good business people. And since I had a referral from the United States, I thought, okay, surely these people know that I'm here to spend money. I'm not a cop. I'm not a DEA agent.

But I got a blindfold over my face. I'm in a foreign country. I'm exhausted. My head is spinning. and I got a gigantic guy with a gun sitting next to me. It was probably only a 10-minute taxi ride, but it felt like three hours. But finally, the cab comes to a stop, and the guy sitting next to me tells me I could take the blindfold off. So I get out of the cab, and I look around, and I realize, oh, I'm in the barrio.

I'm in the ghetto. There's little kids with walkie-talkie strapped to their chests, riding their bicycles around the streets. I glance up at the rooftops of the adjoining buildings, and there's lookouts with guns. kind of scanning for any sign of police. So now I realize I'm in a place where I really shouldn't be. I'm in no-go zone. But I know I'm getting good drugs wherever I'm going. So he takes me into one of these townhouses,

and it's real nondescript, but I walk in and in the living room, there's a bunch of young men, couldn't be more than 21 or 22 years old, and they're smoking weed and they're loading guns. And I look over into the corner, there's a guy being helped into a wheeled, a wheelchair. And I asked the guy who brought me in. I go, well, what's going on with him? And he told

me that's f***. He's one of our guys. He took one in the back last week in a shootout. I said, okay. So I was taken upstairs to the second level of the house, and I'm introduced to the guy who I was on the phone with. This little five foot three dude introduces himself and he says, hello, my name is your good friends with good people. I know good people. I said, yeah, very good people. He says, okay, what can I do for you? I said, well, I'm looking for some weed. And he said, okay. And he takes two gigantic garbage bags and he drops them at my feet and they're stuffed with kilos and kilos of weed. And he said, do you want the good shit or you want the bad shit? I said, well, give me the good shit. How much is the good shit? And he points to me and he says

the peso amount and I do some quick math and it's $50. American. $50 for a thousand grams of weed. So it was like funny to me. I was like, give me five of them. I don't give a shit. Two hundred fifty bucks will get me five kilos of weed. Yeah, give it to me. And he goes, well, what about the coca? I was like, yeah, fucking give me a lot of that too. How much is that? And he says, hang on. And he leads me into this room and there's a bunch of guys hanging around. Guns everywhere. One of the dudes is smoking, counting up a bunch of cash. And he's, and he, He opens up a safe underneath his desk, and he takes out a brick of cocaine and places it on the table.

And I said, that's good shit. And he goes, that's the best shit. He takes out a knife and he cuts it open. He fucking cuts up an earthworm-sized line for me right on the knife, and he holds it up to my face. And I fucking just shoot it up my nostril, and it felt like I was sniffing air. It didn't taste like anything.

Couldn't taste the chemicals. Couldn't taste the cut. That's how I knew I was sniffing 100% pure Colombian blow. And so I said, okay, well, how much will a kilo this be? And he goes, I'll give it to you for $2,000 American. $2,000 for 1,000 grams of Coke. That's $2 a gram. I said, well, if I can get this to Los Angeles, I can sell it for $100 a gram.

I can take this thing that's the size of an NFL football and make $100,000, thousand dollars from it. And that's how those cartels used to get rich is guys like Pablo Escobar and all those dudes from the 70s and 80s got tons and tons of Coke to the United States and they would sell it wholesale. So these guys can take a brick of cocaine that they manufacture for $2,000 and sell it wholesale in the United States for $35,000. And they can do that a thousand kilos at a time. That's how these guys made billions and billions of dollars. Now, the Colombians can't do that anymore. Their Coke routes have been shut down and they have been for decades.

So they rely on guys like me, but cartel members, to come buy the kilos from them and then ship it back to their respective countries. That's where the money's made. The money is made in the transport. I said this in a previous episode about marijuana and the same is true for cocaine. The money is actually made by the guys who are moving it from point A to point B. Now let's run down who they are. The cartels making the most money in Coke are the Mexicans, and then there's everybody else.

And by everybody else, I mean the people that are shipping it to Europe. Number one in Europe still are the Italian mobsters, specifically the Andrangetta, and they are out of Calabria, the region at the boot of Italy. And they make the most because they have the port. They control the port in southern Italy, where 80% of the cocaine that comes into Europe first gets offloaded. So they have gone so far as to actually move a lot of their members to the source countries in Ecuador and Colombia and Peru. So think about that. They could buy a kilo at wholesale from a Colombian dealer in Colombia for $2,000

and say they'd buy a thousand of those. That's a $2 million buy price. They can turn around and sell each of those kilos in Europe for $50,000. So even if it costs them, say, $10 million to get that kilo-dollar, shipment to Europe, they still made a profit of like $45 million. So that's why, as I said, the people who can transport it and actually get it in to the countries that are consuming it make the most money. The other big players in Europe are the Albanians.

The Albanians are killing it right now. And they've gone as far as sending their members to live in South America where they can set up shop and buy multi-ton loads of Coke from the Colombian kingpins and then ship it to their people in Europe who will buy it at wholesale for as much as $60,000. So the profit margins are enormous. And the Albanians actually control each level of their distribution. So they have a big foothold in the London market. So they actually sell their Coke the way the Colombians used to do it in America. They buy it from the wholesalers and they also give it to their own people to retail and sell it on the street so they make even more money. So they're not. So they're

They're making ungodly sums. Even the Irish gangsters, I think they're called the Kinnahan clan. They've also sent some of their members to live and set up shop in Colombia. And they are importing a lot of the Coke that comes into the UK and Spain and Ireland, which is actually a new Coke market. They're selling a lot of Coke in Ireland and Scotland. So as you can see, these guys are making the biggest money. The Colombians still own the manufacturing, but the ones who are making the huge money,

are the guys who can get it all the way from South America to Europe because they can charge the insane markup on each of their kilos. So the European clans are making the most profit per kilo, but the ones making the most money are the Mexican cartels, specifically the Sinaloan cartel. And that is because America is still the number one Coke buying nation in the world. And the Sino-Lowans have a monopolization on that 2,000-mile border that they share with us. It's that simple. We still have the most people, the most population, and are still buying up the most coke. So even though the cartels can only get $20,000 for a kilo of Coke rather than $60,000 in Europe,

they're still shipping the most of it, and they have a complete domination of it. There's no other competition. I think the Colombians might smuggle in like 10% of it through the Caribbean, but 90% of the Coke that makes it into America comes through the southern border from Mexico. So in Europe, the Coke game is very organized. It's very clannish, and it's dominated by gangs that organize themselves based off of ethnicity, usually. So I've talked about the Albanians and the Italians and the Irish,

you know, in Scotland, in other places, it might be immigrant groups like Nigerians that are in Paris, or it could be Jamaicans in North London, whatever it is, it's generally dominated. to buy gangs that have a top-down structure. So it usually stays within the hands of an organized group until it hits the street. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of independent Coke dealers

in Europe, just like I was. But the difference is the majority of the people that sell there are usually connected to some sort of a hierarchy. So whether it's people in the ghettos of London that have to sell drugs for guys from Albania who bring it in wholesale, whatever that is, Generally, it's much more structured like a mafia. In America, once that coat crosses the border, it's free market.

It's freelancers. Now, maybe that's Mexican guys. Maybe it's Colombian guys. Maybe it's black guys. Maybe it's just regular little redneck, honky white guys. Whatever it is, in general, nobody's giving commands from the top. I was buying coke from a lieutenant of the Sinaloa cartel. He was not taking orders from anybody back in Mexico.

He was buying his cocaine wholesale from other members of the Sinaloa cartel as soon as it crossed the border. And he was paying anywhere from $17,000 to $20,000 per kilo. He was doing whatever he wanted with that Coke. He was not taking orders. He was not being told where or where he could not sell it. It was completely free. And he was selling it to guys like me who would then sell it to whoever we wanted.

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B-21. Turf doesn't mean as much in the U.S. It doesn't mean as much in general. You know, all of these stereotypes you see about these drug gangs who are going to war over little corners, just like the wire on HBO, that almost doesn't exist anymore. Technology and the cell phone have made that irrelevant.

What matters is your product. If your product is the best, you can then go find and sell to as many people as you want. It's like ordering something on Postmates. You're a delivery guy. I operated like a pizza man, but my pizza costs about $100 a shot. So that's the way that the drug game and the cocaine game specifically is run, and especially in the U.S. where, you know, these factions of organized ethnic gangs don't really exist anymore. I mean, you can buy drugs online now.

We all heard about that guy from San Francisco. He was like a tech nerd, and he started the Silk Road. And he was literally selling drugs online, laundering money online. He fucking ordered hitmen online. Yeah, the turf wars, well, they do exist sometimes in ghettos in Europe, where you see big housing projects that are dominated by different clans. That does happen every now and them, but they, mostly a thing of the past. Violence in the drug game exists at the top and at the very bottom.

At the very bottom is, you know, the foot soldiers, right, that you see in big projects in Chicago and Brooklyn and in Europe in, you know, the northern parts of Naples. That's where you see the violence. It's amongst, you know, the most impoverished and the street level dealers who are not making a lot of money to begin with and they're killing each other over scraps. That is an age-old tale and a tragic one. The other level of violence happens at the very top, and this is usually Mexican gangs. And the Mexican cartels, as we all know, are responsible for tens and tens of thousands of killings a year because they are battling over the drug routes because they want the biggest market in the world, the United States. And they're also armed like a military.

They're armed with military-grade weapons, and they commit violence against each other as if they're in a war. But in the middle, you don't see a lot of violence anymore because the drug networks are so interconnected by technology that they're way better off working together and making money than they are going to war against each other. So I'm sure you do see people, you know, on the whole chain of the drug smuggling process, right, whether it's a guy working on a drug smuggling ship or somebody working in a, you know, a drug pressing factory. I'm sure people get ripped off every now and then and somebody's got to die. But for the most part, it's much more lucrative and much safer to work together.

So there really is not a lot of violence in the cocaine game anymore. It really only happens on the street level where it's just pure chaos and the very highest level. And that involves the Mexican cartels who are just taking. violence and brutality to another level. Number one place in the world right now is London, England. Cocaine is exploding in Europe and London is the best Coke market because it's very rich as a city, it's very expensive, and there's tons of users. So unlike America where the cocaine users have kind of given way to fentanyl and meth and

all this other kind of shit, in the UK, it's speed. And it's Coke. And people from all walks of life and every level of the socioeconomic spectrum are using Coke over there. So it could be a bus driver or a banker. Everybody is doing blow. And the consequences are less strict if you get caught. So the prison time over there is probably about a quarter of what you would get for getting caught selling Coke in America. And that's simply because Europe is just more liberal. And you get caught with a kilo coke over there. you're going to get out in a fifth of the time that you would over in the States. So London is a prime Coke market and one of the best places to sell drugs.

Also, there's less violence too. So, you know, you might get sprayed or shot up over in America. To get killed in London, they're stabbing each other to death over there. So if you get stabbed to death, you really had it coming because that is an intimate way to kill somebody. So your odds of doing major prison time or getting murder. by a rival are far less and you've got a way higher profit margin. Now the downside, of course, is that the wholesalers are usually the Albanians and the Irish, and they do not want to give a lot of their product away to outsiders.

Whereas in America, if you got the money, you'll find somebody to supply you. Another great market is Canada, believe it or not. Vancouver, BC, Calgary, and Toronto are great cocaine markets. cocaine markets. And that's because they're very international, they're big metropolitan areas, and places like Calgary got a lot of money. They got oil money. And the price is high, too. Just like in Europe, the further north you go into Canada, the higher and higher the wholesale kilo price is. So the more money you're going to be able to charge is very normal for people in Canada to pay 150 bucks a gram for good blow. But the number one place in the world to sell cocaine,

and the place where if I was a young entrepreneurial drug dealer, I would pick up and move to tomorrow to sell Coke, is Australia. That's right. Australia is so far away and so difficult to get Coke to that the wholesale price of a kilo over there is literally $150,000 to $200,000. So grams over there go for like $300,350 for good Coke. So if I could have gotten that kilo that I purchased,

that day in Colombia back in 2009, if I could have got that to Sydney, one kilo, I could have bought a house with it. That's how lucrative cocaine is in Australia. And that's why every other day on the news you see bigger and bigger and bigger shipments getting seized because traffickers are aware of this and they have dealers from every corner of the globe trying to get Coke onto that island. Police say this is the largest drug bust in the state's history. great it accounts for almost half the cocaine seized in Australia each year.

The suspects, age between 29 and 44, have been refused bail to face court tomorrow. The grain ship free to leave, but more arrests in the crime ring are planned. That is the number one place to sell coke right now is Australia. So that's it. Cocaine is still the best drug to be selling. Now that weed has basically become legal and the prices have plummeted, cocaine is number I know that Molly and Ecstasy and MDMA and meth and all these kind of different designer drugs are very in vogue, but cocaine is still the number one illicit drug besides marijuana,

if you're counting that as an illicit drug, in the world, and the prices are still the highest. So for my money, I'm selling Coke and I'm doing it in one of the countries that is furthest away from South America, the source country, and has the least amount of competition. So Canada, Europe, and Australia, and they don't have Mexicans who are monopolizing the market. So there you have it, kids. Don't do Coke. Don't sell it. But if you were going to do it, this is the way to do it.

And this is where to do it. You guys, that's been our episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. We work very hard to bring you this content. So make sure to like and subscribe and turn on your notifications. Follow us on all social media at Mr. Johnny Mitchell and at Not the Connect on Instagram. Listen to us on Spotify, iTunes, and we'll see you next Thursday with a new episode. Take care of yourself.