The Jordan Harbinger Show - 860: Mitchell Prothero | Cocaine, Murder, and Dirty Money in Europe

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Project Brazen's Mitchell Prothero reveals Europe’s cocaine crisis through the stories of cartel thugs, cops, journalists, and victims caught in the middle. What We Discuss with Mitchell Prothero: Why European law enforcement is ill-prepared to deal with the influx of crime and violence associated with a cocaine trade that has grown to rival that of the US. How European ports that have been historically instrumental in the development of international trade have become thriving modern hubs for drug trafficking. What makes cocaine the "perfect" drug for illicit entrepreneurs who want to make a lot of money on their own terms? Why loose cannon drug trafficker and murderer Ridouan Taghi makes fellow criminals as nervous as he makes journalists, agents of law enforcement, and European society. What needs to change in order for the European cocaine trade to decelerate? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/860 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. What are the estimates of what smuggled? Because honestly, nobody can tell you. Since the wall came down, remember, there's like a million new middle class people every year in Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Ukraine, who can afford 100 euros on a weekend. So this is where the market keeps expanding each year. The more you build out a middle class and an upper middle class throughout the rest of Eastern Europe, the market keeps getting bigger.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional arms dealer, former jihadi, investigative journalist or legendary Hollywood actor.

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reanalyze them, and list the takeaways. We're going to be doing a lot more with the newsletter. Again, I would love to hear what you want out of these. A lot of really good feedback so far, very encouraging, jordanharbinger.com slash news. Today, I'm talking with journalist Mitchell Prathera. Turns out the cocaine market in Europe is now bigger than that of the United States. I had no idea. If you told me it was the same size as Florida,

maybe I would have believed you, but the whole U.S., quite unbelievable, and it's growing. We'll talk about the rise of cocaine in Europe and the absolutely wild mafia criminal syndicates that engage in cocaine smuggling and distribution in Europe. Frankly, Europe is just not ready for the level of violence and crime, and this problem is only going to get worse. So let's take a look inside Cocaine's Gateway to Europe. Here we go. You're in Albania, right? Yeah, I'm in Toronto. So maybe that's a good place to start seeing as you're sitting there now.

Why, Tarana? Why are you in Albania? You know, we're thinking cocaine goes into the port of Antwerp. Why are you all the way over in the Balkans? Well, I mean, I just spent a year living in Antwerp and Amsterdam for the project. There's been a couple of different reasons. One had to do with the Turkish elections, which Erdogan won, which means I can't live in Turkey. Go into that a little bit.

because for people who don't know Erdogan is, he's a president slash dictator of Turkey, but why would that affect your job covering cocaine trade in Europe? Well, it's not necessarily my job covering cocaine trade. Keep in mind this is a relatively new phenomenon. So I had been a Middle East correspondent for 15 years, covered ISIS, you know, I mean, I covered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, 9-11, stuff like that.

So I have a long history in the Middle East. and some of the intelligence services, they got tired of my bullshit after a few years. And so, because it was like a decade and a half and, you know, me covering stuff that was pretty uncomfortable. One of the reasons why I ended up in Albania was I cover the Balkans a lot

in my job as a senior reporter for Vice. And I'd spent a lot of time in Bosnia. I'd spent a lot of time in Serbia. I'd worked in Kosovo and things like that. So I knew the Albanians, but I'd never spent any time in Toronto. And there was a bunch of different, centric circles, it's sort of overlapped, like understanding the Balkans, aspects of the Albanian

mafia are deeply into the cocaine trade in certain parts of the world. And also, it's really beautiful and really cheap. And it's just, it's a lovely place. And so before I get accused to being on the tourist board, if you want a beautiful beach in Europe that's unspoiled and undeveloped, it'll cost you half of anything with amazing Italian food, Albania. It's really good. good. I will actually join you in saying that Albania was one of the coolest, most interesting places that I went to in Europe, in part because it's a little screwed up, man. I mean, you know, I was there a while ago. It's got edge that is not present in many other places. And when you're 20-something or you're a war correspondent, it's pretty damn cool. Not to mention, like you said, it's very cheap

compared to a lot of other places. And the food is bomb. So what can I say? And the people are cool, Like over, you know, the last 20 years I've been, you know, war correspondent, foreign correspondent, whatever. Now it's more of what I call drugs and thugs. I cover intelligence and cartels and law enforcement. But, you know, I lived in Lebanon for 10 or 11 years. I lived in Iraq off and on for two or three. You can really enjoy some of these places as screwed up as they can kind of feel. You also realize just how lovely everybody is.

And getting to know the Albanians has been really interesting, even though I've barely started. You know, they're a unique European people. They really don't have a root. I've spent a lot of time in Bosnia and Serbia, and they're southern Slavs. They've got this kind of connection, even if they're all different, on some level. They've got a shared language, a bit of a shared culture, and a shared history and all this stuff. Whereas the Albanians have pretty much been sitting here since, you know, the Iliad. They've got like the last proto-Oryllian language with no other root in any other Caucasian.

European language. So it's weird stuff like that. So one of the reasons why I decided to come here was even if I only spent about a year, you know, they pop up a lot in my work. They're really kind of unique, closed off, even though in the middle of Europe country that people really don't understand. So I thought I might be able to understand a little bit if I spent some time here. The food is great and I can sort out some of my immigration issues across the rest of Europe while I'm here. Yeah. Well, you have plenty of time, I suppose. I know you used to cover ISIS and Islamic terror, but then thought the cocaine trade was actually a bigger threat to Europe. Is that accurate?

Yes and no. I mean, I started off in the war on terror very early on. Like, I covered September 11th from Washington, D.C. And then I immediately got sent to federal court to start covering the trials of the first people, John Walker, Lind, Zakaria, Somali, and stuff like that. And then within a year or so, I was sent to the Middle East to start covering the wars. and that obviously you don't have a lot of focus for anything else. Like you're obsessed with Iraq. Like if you're a Baghdad Bureau Chief covering in 2003 or 2004, then 10 years later in 2013 and 2014,

you know, you don't have a really big picture view of anything. You're just trying to deal with like the country that's in front of you and the situation that's in front of you. But between these moments, I've been living in Lebanon and I've been covering Hezbollah, which was, you know, really interesting, but was a double phenomenon. Like there's Hezbollah, which is in South Lebanon, which faces the Israelis. And then they've got this like fundraising, intelligence operation that goes worldwide. So when I started paying attention to that, I realized that there was a bunch of overlaps with like criminal activity, diamonds.

Hezbollahs, obviously, they do a lot of what we call commodity laundering, which is you take one thing somewhere and then you sell it. and it's really hard to trace the money. I see. I was going to say that sounds like capitalism. Oh, wait, okay, there's another element here. No, but it's like the purest form of capitalism, which is like frozen chickens in the Congo are money if you're selling them in a supermarket. And you can bet on these things and make lots of money.

I learned a lot about that type of thing. And then over time, it started creeping a little bit more and more into organized crime. But once 2015-16 hit, I was the Bureau Chief in Iraq covering ISIS and I was getting burned out. I'd been doing it for almost 15 years. At that point, BuzzFeed offered me an opportunity

to cover basically the jihadis that were coming to Europe. And so at that time, I started covering ISIS attacks all over Europe. Or even attacks that turned out not to be ISIS, you know, and just evaluating, like, things that were going on, Bataklan, you know, a bunch of things like that. That's the theater in France that got attacked? Right. That was like the night where, you know, in November 2015,

there was like a widespread attack across Paris that hit a bunch of cafes outside of football stadium and this, you know, heavy metal concert that was going on inside a theater. Like 150 people died. And at that stage, it was clear that there had been cells that were working in Europe. Like, this wasn't a one-off guy. Like, these things happened from time to time. A crazy guy or a radicalized guy might run out and shoot somebody or stab somebody. But this was clearly like an organized effort.

So BuzzFeed basically asked me to go figure it out. out. And in that, I started running into organized crime across Europe because there's such a crazy overlap. And at one point, I got told that I was chasing a handful of Moroccans in this case. They were mostly Moroccans, a few of them were Algerians, who had grown up in Europe, and that I was chasing a handful of these guys. And cops kept joking with me that, like, we'll wrap these guys up, but you should understand who's running the ports in Rotterdam and Antwerp. Do you notice that like no kids are on off and join ISIS from Rotterdam?

You know, and then you check and you're like, actually the numbers are really low. Yeah, why is that? Brussels is sending like, you know, 100 guys from one neighborhood. Antwerp sent like six. Rotterdam said maybe two. So you start asking why that is

and then you realize that there's these networks that have been running the ports that are bringing in cocaine. And that was one of the first times that it really struck me on the overlap, at least in Europe. on the connection between these same communities. Because, again, it's not to condemn like any one immigrant community in Europe or the United States.

This is just how it is. These are the communities that, let's say, have working class jobs by the ports. So you mentioned that there was a neighborhood that sent 100 guys to ISIS. There was another neighborhood in Rotterdam that sent like six. That was a little unclear. So you mean these neighborhoods with a lot of extremist or guys that would fall into a bad subculture or fall into crime, they run off to ISIS in these one neighborhoods, but in the other one they don't because they go somewhere else, right?

Not because they're so good at keeping their kids home and safe and going to university. They fall into organized crime instead of going to ISIS. Is that what you're implying? I should have been a little bit more clear about this. So, like, to back it up and just tell a little story is the guys that did Bataklan and that cell from ISIS had been like small-time hashish and cocaine dealers in a neighborhood of Brussels called Molenbeek. and I ended up living in Brussels for two years.

I know it well. It's a perfectly nice, like, middle class, working class neighborhood. It's even got like brew pubs now in gay bars and stuff like that. But it had been like a bit of an immigrant neighborhood for the Moroccan guest workers had come to Belgium. And all of those guys without exception, maybe one or two I can think of didn't have a petty crime background. But almost everybody else had a history of like selling hash.

but it was like small-time stuff. The worst two were the brothers from the bombings in Brussels. The two brothers that did it, they had been pretty wild before they became jihadis. Like, they were famous for robbing a Western Union with a Kalashnikov, like in the middle of Brussels. Seems like overkill, but okay. Compared to America, man.

It's overkill for Brussels. That's why the guy's famous for it. They were considered a little bit of small-time thugs. But then when I was talking to guys, and there were people that joined ISIS from, let's say, the same community, 50 miles north in Antwerp in the port town, but it was a smaller group. And it was even smaller in Rotterdam, which has a port, and even smaller in Amsterdam. And one of the things that people had told me was that basically like the guys that are sort of on the edge,

because, you know, most people aren't going to join ISIS in the Moroccan community. Most people aren't going to become cartel guys. But through selection of the Yahoo's that might, the most people. Russell's guys were really small time and were sort of eking out in existence. And so they were easier to recruit. Whereas the guys in Antwerp in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, they were making a few thousand euros a month being drug dealers or being cartel guys. They were harder to recruit. They had a sense of self-esteem, even if it's misplaced. And so as a result, that community, they did send people. Don't at me with like the exceptions. But when you look at the numbers,

90 guys from within a square kilometer in Molenbeek went, whereas, you know, maybe 12 went from Antwerp. Got it, okay. That was the thing that flagged the cocaine industry to me at that time, and that was like 2015-16. And so at that point, it's still my job to cover jihadis. I'm covering international terrorism. I'm dealing now at that time with an increased Putin situation

across Europe, covering intelligence and stuff like that. But in the back of my mind, I kept going, like, how out of control is the cocaine trade in Antwerp in Rotterdam? Because cops were warning. We're going to round up the jihadis. You know, it'll take a year. There might be a few bombs. You know, like they're realistic guys. But we're going to get them because we're talking to like 100 assholes.

You know, but like the cocaine thing, they've got like an endless supply of 15-year-olds to raid containers for 100 bucks each who will face juvenile charges. They're making millions. You said raid containers? Yeah, when a container comes into Antwerp or Rotterdam, one of the ways to get your cocaine out of a container, particularly in Rotterdam is you send a bunch of 15-year-old kids over the fence that break into it, rip the cocaine out, and jump back over the fence because it's only a 150-year-old fine for trespassing.

So they're telling a bunch of teenage kids, hey, that red container over there stacked the third one up has a bunch of cocaine in it. Yeah, you and two of your friends, what we need you to do is like, here's 150 euros for each year. Here's an extra 100 euros for the fine if you do get caught. Wow. If you don't get caught, you get to keep it.

Here's the money for the fine if you do get caught. Don't call us. Right, yeah. You got caught. That's a good point. And you're going to go over the fence here. You're going to open container 314. You're going to pull the bags with whatever marking on them are in there.

And then you're going to run back over and jump over the fence and throw them in the back of this van. That is way less sophisticated than I expected. I thought, okay, they come in in in refrigerators, and they go to the factory, and there's guys there that do that. In Dutch, they call it the cocaine milieu. Cute. So there's other ways, like a notorious way is what we call the hotel containers, which

is they fill up a container full of cocaine in Ecuador or whatever and set it up and send it. And in a container next to it are three dudes with a chemical toilet, a bunch of power chargers, some iPads, and a bag of food for the week across the Atlantic in a container right next to it. And then when they land, it get dropped off in Antwerp or Rotterdam, they break out of their container, open the container next to them, take the drugs, jump over, and run off into a van and get driven away. That just sounds miserable and very dangerous. Ten grand? Yeah, well, not for me, but yeah, for somebody who makes that in a year and a half or two years, yeah. I mean, you're talking

average salaries in the EU were like 1500 to 2,000 euros a month. You can get six-month salary for a week of work. I thought these were illegal immigrants coming from overseas into the EU. Okay, so these are EU citizens. It's a mix. It's often like Serbs and Albanians who are from Europe, but might not be Schengen.

It's a mix of guys. They're not leaving like Colombian guys standing outside defense with no idea what's going on when they've got the drugs. Right, okay. It's somebody who's got to be able to blend in on the European side so they don't notice. Schengen, for people who don't know, that's referring to a visa arrangement of countries that people think of when they think of Europe, like Austria, Germany, all these countries.

So when you say they could be Serbian but not Schengen, technically still in Europe, like half of Turkey and Serbia and Albania, but not what you think of when you think European people eating a baguette at a cafe on a street in Paris. No, but I mean, you have to understand these. Everybody's got huge immigrant communities or a mix-up, you know, so like, you you know, the French guy eating a baguette in a cafe in Paris, he very well might be Algerian. Like, this is where it gets really interesting because, you know, Holland and Belgium, particularly the ports that I focused on on this season, they're really, you know,

very, very diverse communities in a positive way. You know, this is a place where like a lot of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs got refugee status in the 90s, Albanians and Kosovars, Moroccan guest workers, guys from Afro-Caribbean colonies of the Dutch. And these are, you know, a mix-up that has really made Amsterdam to, let's say, using Amsterdam as an example, you know, one of the best multicultural cities on Earth. I mean, like, I wouldn't say it's perfectly integrated, but it's better integrated than most places in a lot of ways. But these are the communities, because, again, there's, you know, situation in which,

like, you can corrupt an 18-year-old over a couple of grand. So you talk to cocaine traffickers every day? Is that a fair? No, not every day. Talk to terrorists every day. You talk to terrorists every day. Wow, okay, worse. Terrorists really have like a message they kind of want to get out and manipulate. The one thing I learned about cocaine traffickers is they really don't care. It's just about the money.

That makes sense. They don't have anything to sell me. Besides cocaine. That's what makes sourcing really hard is that like at least for Osama bin Laden, he needed to get his message out. Yeah. Whereas one of my guys that I track, let's say who lives in Dubai, he really doesn't want his message out.

He'd prefer if nobody ever heard who he was. This is what I was going to ask is terrorists can't wait to get on a microphone with a journalist. I mean, they'll line up for that. I mean, depending on what they've done recently. The spokesman can't wait anyway. Maybe not the bomber himself. But a cocaine dealer, it's like one of the 10 commandments of drug dealing is maybe don't just

blab about it to everybody. Besides, don't get high on your own supply. Don't talk to the media and brag about how much you're selling is probably one of the chief rules to longevity in the drug game. So how does that happen? How do you get in touch with these guys? It's not easy because, I mean, one of the things you have to understand is these guys are bottom line professionals. They're really good at what they do. And I consistently joke, and it's not a joke, but like two or three of the people that I've tracked. One is Ridwan Thagi, who's pretty famous and from the, you know, the focus of the podcast that I did for Gateway. Yeah, we'll talk about him in a minute. I had a couple of other guys who are still out there. People really don't know their names. They've got some indictments

here, there, and they're on the run. And they've kept a much, much lower profile than, let's say, Taghi or the Kenahans or some of these other guys have. And, you know, at the end of the day, they don't really have a motivation to really talk because it's a basic business arrangement. It's also why, like, in a lot of ways, people are always like, aren't you worried about, like, your safety? And, yes, like Holland had a couple of situations in which with Taiji people were killed. It was fairly personal on some level. But in general, if you're dealing with a rational cocaine cartel, at least for a guy like me,

I'm not a local journalist in Medellin or Mexico or something like that. Those guys are under a much different threat. It's not worth it. It's a terrible business decision. And this was one of the things that we found about Taghi was that his reputation in the underworld was very good in the sense that he was considered incredibly diligent and honest. But then his reputation was very bad because he was a psycho who'd shoot bloggers. And shooting bloggers is not like, you know, this is a. insane to a dude from the Andrangida, the Italian Calabrian Mafia, who probably run things

for the most part, or even the Serbian mafia, Albanian Mafias. All these different guys, like, this is nuts to that. Because at the end of the day, they're working logistics. They're the type of people that, like, other than the sociopathic murder part to enforce certain rules, their job is not that much different than Amazon. They could have dinner with Jeff Bezos and talk logistics on supply demand type stuff, you know, on time delivery, the downside to keeping your supply in a warehouse and the costs and the opportunity, you know, and all this stuff, and all these different ways that you bring a network together

in order to maximize profit and minimize risks through logistics and planning. They would much rather have that conversation with a Bezos-like figure than they would rather have a conversation about murdering people. Murdering people is like, you hire a guy and you go have a murder. Now, it's only really got to benefit you to do that. So that's one of the reasons why, like, I mean, there's certain people in Holland that I would say their coverage could get them into some trouble and they need to be careful. But in general, I am not worth the hassle. And that's one of the things that we learned.

That's funny. Yeah, these guys are making so much money. They would really be rather talking to, you know, executives who work with like, you know, shipping containers and on top. delivered. That's their thing. That's their thing. Right. It's logistics. They're looking at it like a business and the murder part is of unfortunate, inconvenient, dirty side of the business that they'd probably rather not have to deal with. So the last thing they're doing is looking to kill people for sporting reasons or because they're angry about something. Is that what you're telling me? They do have to do it because they can't go to the cops and they can't go to court. Right. It's like an enforcement thing as

opposed to a let me screw around because I'm bored today kind of thing. Well, the weird thing is, yes, except that we did learn that they do seem to really enjoy it, which was freaky. When you start listening to the Sky ECC and NCO chat hacks and stuff like that, you do realize these dudes are sociopaths. These are encrypted phones that have been cracked. Yeah, that were cracked. And they were like murdering each other for business reasons. But then they were also like sending each other photos of it. Yeah, there's a couple podcasters I'd take out if I could get away with it. I get it. Right. You know

what I mean? But like sharing the photos of the, like that was the weird stuff for a lot of us. That is weird. What somebody told me in Amsterdam was and I thought this was really interesting is back when it was hashish, if there was a problem, and I have a theory about this. It's like if you're a major cocaine

trafficker built around Morocco, Spain, Italy, your grandfather was a tobacco smuggler, your father was a hashish smuggler and you're a cocaine smugment. Like, it's the same routes, it's the same business, it's just developed money wise over the years.

And this dude was telling me, basically, it was like, man, when it was hashish, if something went wrong, you could get a load and fix it. Like, how much hashish can you really lose? Yeah, 25 grand, 50 grand, maybe 100, yeah. Right. Like

100 on a huge deal. You lose 100 deal. Nobody's going to kill you of 100 grand. They know that you can probably come up with that. And that, you know, you'll be able to work it off or whatever. But what if you lose 15 million in cocaine? There's no cops and there's no court. So, as somebody put it, you know, during the podcast, I have to break your spine. And the reason why I have to break your spine is to make sure everybody knows I broke your spine. It's not about you. It's about making sure everybody who does business with me knows I will do that if there's like a loss of money. So when I was

talking to guys that were sources of mine for this. You know, a lot of them were fairly low level. And I would ask them, like, what's your plan? And one guy I knew he was making pretty good money, but he'd stayed more or less retail. What's pretty good money in the industry? For this guy, this is where it would be a shock is. Consistently six figures. Wow. No real arrests. Goes on vacation. He's like 28. They'll send you a menu on the messaging service. and like you send in your order for cocaine and there's a running joke in Amsterdam. It will always be 50 euros a gram.

It'll always be pure and it'll always arrive in 30 minutes. From what I understand, pretty reasonable pricing and good service from the sound of it, if I can phrase it like that. I mean, that's interesting. It's very developed. From a history of buying drugs on the street, I would say probably 10, 15 years ago,

it would be a lot easier to get ripped off and buy bad drugs and stuff like that. From what I could tell in Amsterdam, there's so much cocaine flowing through the ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp, and even some of the fruit ports that are around Amsterdam itself, even La Harve and France, there's no incentive to rip you off. It's just easier to give you the drugs. Right. Okay. Are they cutting it? Every year it gets more pure.

Wow. And this is one of the problems that I had with this story is when I started out, I decided that there was absolutely no numbers that you could trust. like the government like okay what we know is how many metric tons of cocaine have been seized trying to come into Europe okay it's democracies they're probably not lying you know what I mean like we've got a rough number of how many metric tons of cocaine have been intercepted coming into Europe you can also for the most part tell what the retail price of a gram of cocaine is you can kind of check the availability like if you're a decent cop or narcotics detective you should be able to tell whether or not people can just find it whenever they want to or whether it's getting increasingly hard. And then the last thing that you can check is the purity. When you seize drugs, how pure are they? Other than that, we don't know anything about the cocaine trade.

And I just spent 15 months on this off and on watching for five years. And I got to tell you, I've had European officials put the trade at 8 to 10 billion euros a year. And then off the record say, we don't have any idea. We just use that number because it sounds good. Wow. And that means that it's probably far higher. you wouldn't want to exaggerate in the upward direction. Well, maybe you would for funding.

I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. This is where I get confused. If you do the math, last year, Antwerp took 110 metric tons of cocaine at the port. And that's all pure cocaine. Jeez. Even if you cut it, you're stomping those into container kilos.

Mm-hmm. And container kilos become like three street kilos or two street kilos at least. But back in the day, they became four or four. five, it's really become a lot more pure. And this is on the record from the head of Belgian customs, who I think is probably one of the most articulate and candid members of law enforcement working in the EU. It's just the guy who's in charge of customs at the poor Christian. I said, okay, you guys took 110 metric tons. This was before they had taken it, but we knew they were going to set a record. They were at like 90 at the time. What do you think you get? And he said,

it could be as bad as one out of 10. But then I did the math, and that means like 70% of what they estimate is the world cocaine production is going through Rotterdam and Antwer. So that's not right. That can't be right. Yeah, that can't be right.

The U.S. and Europe are split like 50-50. Europe has passed the U.S. in terms of consumption, but it's not by a big thing. Really? I had no idea. The EU is the world's largest market for cocaine in the last two years. Wow.

But not by like a massive margin. We're talking like 52-48. I would have thought you were going to say the cocaine market in Europe is the same size as the cocaine market in Florida, not counting the rest of the United States. I didn't realize it was the same slash actually larger. That's incredible.

Since 1990, since 1995 or whatever, like since the wall came down, remember there's like a million new middle class people every year in Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Ukraine, who can afford 100 euros? on a weekend. Like, not everybody can, but every year, more and more people have that kind of money, because you're not talking huge amounts of money. You're talking 50, 70, 100 euros for a night out with your friends. Guys in Poland can afford that. Guys in Romania can afford that.

Probably not on a widespread level. Romania is pretty poor, but they definitely have people in Bucharest again. So this is where the market keeps expanding each year. The more you build out a middle class and an upper middle class throughout the rest of Eastern Europe, the market keeps getting bigger. But when I went back and did that math, I realized that that was like way too much cocaine production. Right. So I started questioning the numbers that were given on what are the estimates of cocaine production? What are the estimates of what smuggled? Because honestly, nobody can tell you. And that's the one thing I learned. Even the street value, and they say like we took 100 kilos with a street value of whatever.

I've asked every law enforcement agency in Europe, more or less, where they get that number, and they either won't say or have a different formula. Like, how do you really, like, explain the value of 100 kilos on a container from Antwer? Yeah, interesting. Right, you go with the street value, which is... Like, what's the value?

Yeah. For me, what I learned is at each step of the way, they're worth about 4,000 euros each. The kilo. Yeah. A kilo of cocaine for 4,000. You know, no, no. Your value for it moving through you is 4,000. I see. Okay, gotcha. So at each step, while the kilo moves, and one of the things I learned is that a kilo has about a

two-year shelf life. It's about two years from production to consumption for a kilo of cocaine. Oh, interesting. I thought you meant it went bad, which, you know. No, it never goes bad. This is why it's the most pure capitalistic product. In fact, there's a running joke about it. It never goes bad. It's easily carryable and anywhere in the world you can sell it at a relatively understandable value price. Like there's a transparent market price. You have a kilo of cocaine. You can find people who will buy that from you at a fairly understandable price like a reasonable commodity. It's like the purest commodity. You can hold it for three or four years waiting for the value to go up. The only stressor about a kilo of cocaine is that somebody might find out you have a kilo of cocaine

and a rescuer taking. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Other than that, it's literally the perfect capitalist product. And that's one of the things that we learned because the values understood worldwide as a commodity. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show

with our guest Mitch Prothero. We'll be right back. Speaking of cocaine smuggling networks, I'm teaching you how to build your network for free for work purposes and personal purposes only, not for the distribution of illicit substances. But I guess you could use it for anything. It's our six-minute networking,

course. That course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is all about improving your relationship building skills. It's not cringy. It's down to earth. It's not awkward. It'll make you a better peer, a better friend, a better connector. I'm so tempted to make other jokes in here. But I think you get the point. It takes just a few minutes a day and many of the guests on our show. Subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now back to Mitch Pertharo. That's interesting. Why so long? Because it seems like it's produced in South America. Shipping takes a week. I don't know how long production takes, but it can't be that long.

And you're talking about from production to consumption. So that's negligible anyway. Where is it sitting for a long time and why? I think it's a long route. You know, like a month in the jungle, a month getting moved to a place, a month getting organized into a thing, getting put onto the container. When the container is ready to go, it might have to sit and wait for the proper opportunity to get on the boat, gets on the boat, gets offloaded on the boat,

it's got to get moved because the vast majority of the cocaine, particularly in Antwerp and Rotterdam, coming into Europe, it's feeding all of Europe. So, like, yeah, Antorp and Rotterdam have really cheap, high-quality cocaine.

But most of what's coming through the ports, going to Berlin, to Hamburg, to France, you know, it's moving out. It's too much. This is not serving the local market at any means. So, you know, there's a distribution cycle that goes through that entire thing, and people will hold on to cocaine. Like I said, it's a commodity.

So if you are a retail drug gang in Paris, you're trying to move out as much as you can, but maybe their wholesaler holds on to some kilos and waits for the price to go up. It's a commodity, and it gets treated like a commodity. So that's the estimate researchers came up with. But that came up during COVID, and that was the first time they were able to really track. There was such an interruption in the cocaine supply that you were then able to really track the half-life of a kilo

as it went throughout the entire system because there wasn't anything coming after it. Interesting. And so researchers were able to figure that out. But there's a money aspect to this too, and it's all quite regulated. You have to understand there's law firms and businesses and accountants and all the stuff that

sort of arranges the world cocaine trade. But one of them is, you know, if you sell a kilo to the United States and it goes through the Mexicans who mostly control the routes into the U.S., you get paid in about six months. You send off your kilo. About six months later, you get your money. With Europe, it's a year to 18 months. Wow.

Those payment terms are terrible. I thought podcasting payment terms were bad. It's net 540 or whatever from invoice. I feel like I made this joke just recently, but I'm not sure if it was about drugs. Yeah, here I'm at all net 60, net 90. They're really screwing us, guys. Meanwhile, 18 months later, you're getting paid for your drugs, and you could get killed and or thrown in jail for it.

I don't know. Maybe podcasting's not so bad. This is where things get wild in the cocaine trade economically, is particularly for the European guys. You know, I'm convinced that there's a financier level above them who simply make cash liquid available between those moments. Because a lot of the guys that I've studied, and we've seen this with Taghi,

and we've seen this with other guys from intercepting phone messages. We can kind of put together what they've got to do for the people that are under arrest. They've got huge organizations. They've got to support. Ridwan Taghi is frequently on the record

saying he's got to work deals from prison because he's got to pay dudes that are already in prison for him. He's got to pay family members. He's got to pay family members of people who are in prison for him. So even though he's in jail for life, he knows he's never getting out.

But he's still also got to try to get deals because he's got to try to shove money into the business, the corporation that he's got. So one of the things that we learned is that if you go down for a drug crime, let's say in Antwerp, working for one of the major cartels and you get thrown in prison, you just shut up and take it. Your family gets about 2,000 euros a month while you're in jail. And then when you get out of jail, you get a cash bonus based on how long you were in jail and kept your mouth shut, which is a very reasonable, capitalistic, human resource. way to look at things, but what it also does is puts tremendous liquidity pressure on the dealers.

Every month they got to get that money. So this is where things start getting weird intense when shipments get lost. I was shocked at how not liquid your average cartel dude is. Like, he's worth a lot, or she's worth a lot in some cases. But like, they always need cash. you know, by the end of this project, people kept asking me, so who's the biggest drug dealer in Europe? Who's the biggest cartel in Europe? And you're like, the last one to get one through. Huh. You think of cartels as having rooms filled to the top with money and everything like that,

but it sounds like that's not quite the case, especially when you're talking about these European smugglers. Yeah, just in general. Like, I mean, there's a middle manager at the, you know, Kali cartel or any of the Mexican cartels who's got a budget and who's stressed the fuck out about whatever, you know what I mean? And he's going to his boss all the time. I've worked for more than one company that's like got a billion dollar valuation that had some rough spots where suddenly expenses slowed down when they were getting paid. You know, it's the same thing. But these guys have incredibly volatile cash situations. If it takes even six months from the U.S., think about that you got to kill people, You've got to bribe guards.

You've got to pay people to drive the stuff. You've got to support the people that are already in prison for you. These guys are rich, but they're also cash poor in a weird way. At one point, I was told, and I don't know if this is true, but it's a shocking number because it's so high, I wonder. But if it is true, it really gives you perspective. So the Kinahan Organized Crime Network who are partners of Ridwan Taghi. Is this the Irish guys?

The Irish guys who we thought last were in Dubai. everybody indicted them and then they still hadn't been picked up. We all thought they were going to get arrested like six months ago. I still don't know why they haven't. But in any moment, they're all going to get busted. But they were running Ireland's biggest heroin and cocaine organization. They were running at Dubai. And I was told by a cop that they had to get about 20 million euros into Ireland every month.

Every month to pay for the network. To pay for the network. buying real estate in Dubai off your cocaine money isn't that hard. You know what I mean? But like every month you got to get millions and then distributed throughout Dublin. How do you do that? Mules, watches. One thing I've been told is that's pretty popular is you go into a jewelry store and let's say

a shady one in Antwerp and you go, I need five million in watches. Do you have a cousin in Dubai that can pick them up? You give the guy for $5 million And then you carry the watches over the border You go into some guy's shop You hand the cousin of the guy you bought him from the watches And he gives you 4.9 back Got it.

Right, okay. There's a lot of different ways to do it But once you start doing it into Dublin And once you start doing it into Ireland From Dubai Is when the cops can really start messing with you And that's when they start chasing your money trails The fall of the money part is

it completely disrupts these networks. So I think the guys that are out of Dubai that work Amsterdam and Antwerp and Rotterdam, they've got it a little easier because of the diamond borses and stuff like that. They can move the watches. They can move rocks. They can move gold. But when you look at places like Ireland, it's really hard, man. Think about the logistics of moving 20 million euros in cash every month.

That would be extremely tough to do. And like you mentioned, the diamond market. I mean, if you're moving 20 million precious gems in it, out. Yeah, that's still a lot of money, but it's a business with a lot of expensive stuff going to a lot of places, major cities across the world. Dublin, not necessarily known for that, going to stick out way more. It's like moving contraband or money out of New York. If you wire $20 million out of New York, it's a lot of money, but it's going in and out every day. If you wire $20 million in and out of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, somebody's going to go, why the hell is

$20 million moving out of Albuquerque every single month, or Mobile Alabama or something like that. It's going to be a different look. If the Irish police are desperate to arrest you and know you live in Dubai, they're going to watch. You know, and so this is why money laundering and what to do with the money turns out to be the biggest thing in a lot of these. So the way I look at a lot of these cartels, from what I can tell is these are guys who are pretty brutal, but are also really organized and good at logistics, good at managing, good at planning, and stuff like that. But they're pretty

pretty replaceable cocks. One thing that I kind of figured out, it's definitely true for the Italians, although they're set up more in a family thing, which is like, we can lose a couple of nephews if that's what it takes for the rest of us to, you know,

we can lose them to the prison system and take care of them or whatever. With the Moroccans, I always felt like there was a bit of a, like, steel cage grudge match going on in Antwerp and in Amsterdam where the guys who wanted to control on that level

were allowed to fight it out to see who got to be the guy. But at the end, the money still go into the same place and still probably go into the same people. And they aren't the people that we automatically think of. Interesting. Because like you've still got to do something with the Europol number of 8 to 10 billion euros a year. We don't know if it's 14.

We don't know if it's six. But it's a lot of money. That money's going somewhere. And it's entering into these different economies. and that's one of the things that I'm the most fascinated about now that I've kind of figured out the logistical violence side of the cocaine trade. There's a different level, which is a lot harder

and a lot less sexy to go through, which is like, how did the Collabrian Mafia, the Andrangida, end up with a GDP that Europol estimates is the size of Croatia's. Yeah, that's incredible. They're not doing that from drug deal. Do you know what I mean? Right, yeah.

Your podcast Gateway, which will link in the show notes, It talks about Taghi. You've mentioned Taghi a few times. Tell me who this guy is, because this guy is not the type of criminal Europe was used to dealing with in many ways. America really hasn't had a guy like this either for at least a really long time. Rithuan Taghi was a guy who, you know, he's in his mid-40s now. He was born to Morocco.

He came to the Netherlands as part of the guest worker program. His family had moved in. And as a young kid, he joined like a little scooter gang. and, you know, was known for, like, dealing some hash, small-time stuff. We have a cliche now. It's like a kid on a scooter in a North Face jacket, selling, like, grams of cocaine and small bags of hash. And this is like a bit of a drug-dealing cliche across Europe.

So he's like one of these kids. And for whatever reason, there were some family connections. Nobody's really sure why he kept low profile. Suddenly, it just goes back to Morocco, gives up his Dutch citizenship, and he goes back and forth. And what it turned out is that, again, like I was saying, is if you look at a lot of these families, the way the networks are the rat lines,

or as the Mexicans called, like the plaza, the route, these are developed over generations. These aren't like new things because of cocaine. This is how you smuggled tobacco back in the day. It's how you smuggled washing machines and dishwashers and shit that you didn't want to pay taxes on. You know, between Morocco and Spain and France and Holland. Like, there's always been this.

stuff prior to the EU. So Taghi's family had had sort of one of those setups, and they'd been known for like tobacco and hash, and he got into hash when he was young, smuggling it basically between Morocco and Spain. But he kept his connections to Amsterdam, was always going back and forth between Holland and both. Over time, he started turning these connections into moving cocaine. And this was right around the time of a Moroccan mafia war that had popped up around 2012 as the Moroccans had become more and more powerful in the ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam, Laharv. They kind of pushed out the Italians and were like shoving with the Serbs and the Albanians. But basically they were the immigrant community that was like living next to the ports and all had jobs at the ports. Like there was a natural thing.

And so the Moroccan community had been famous for if you needed a guy who knew how to get something out of the port, this was your guy. It's not nefarious. It's just it's every port that's ever existed. And so this is where these guys had come from, kind of. And so over time, they'd been the guys that you'd pay to get cocaine out of those containers, like I was describing. And at some point, somebody started paying them in cocaine instead of cash. Paying the dealers? No.

Instead of basically getting three or four thousand. euros per kilo for getting it through the port of Antwerp. They were giving you kilos of cocaine because it was cheaper for them. Yeah, it makes sense. You're selling something that has a lower cost for you, but you mentioned the cash poor thing. Now you've got one less guy to pay because you have the product in your hand. You don't have to wait 18 months, so you might as well hand them what you were already holding. And that's what they were thinking, but what they didn't consider was the part where it's crime. And so what you just did was you exponentially grew your employee and made your employee now not need you.

Right, because now they're a drug dealer. Right. They're not getting three or four thousand. They've got their own kilos, and they have the route. So now they're putting their own kilos into the fucking containers. And now they're asking other people

to put it in. And suddenly, they're the wholesalers, and you're a client. And that's what shift primarily since 2012. And that was a process that had been going on, and that's why we saw what they call the, macro mafia. And I mean, there's a lot of drama and cliche and like anti-immigrant stereotyping

behind it. But, you know, there is a legitimate, you know, loosely knit criminal organization in the Moroccan community that pulls drugs out of the containers and has taken over moving them across Europe. And this is how they forced them out. Are the Moroccans dealing directly with Colombians or they are? Okay. This is what changed after 2016. One of the reasons why we saw an explosion. And I'm no expert on this. You can bring back somebody who really understands the North and South American cocaine trade. I'm a Europe guy. But my understanding was that for the longest time, the Colombians paid the Mexicans to get it into the United States. And so they made the best money and the Mexicans got paid like three or four thousand dollars per kilo, as I was saying,

to move it across until the Colombians started paying the Mexicans in cocaine. And that's when these guys blew up. And that's when you started seeing the Cartel. and the Zetas, the Chapo. And these guys prior to that, and in fact, Narcos does this. If you see Narcos Mexico, it's an entire plot line where the guy negotiates getting paid and cocaine and said of money from the Cali cartel.

And this was setting the stage for basically the Mexican cartels taking over, and they control the American cocaine train. So a very similar thing happened is in 2016, when the Colombians cut a peace deal from their civil war, and they basically disbanded the FARC, which was the Marxist left-wing organization,

and they disbanded the AOC, which was the hardcore right-wing paramilitary groups, the AOC had supplied Europe, and they had supplied Europe through the Calabrian Andrangida, which is still overwhelmingly the most powerful organized crime group in the world. This is colloquially known as the Italian mafia?

Well, there's three Italian mafias, and one's from Sicily, one's from Calabria, and one's from Naples. It's Camorra, Andrangida, and La Cosa Nose. And the Andrangida, Andrangida is by far the most powerful of the three. They're the most low-key. They don't have movies made about them, but they have a GDP the size of Croatia, according

to Europol. And so those guys had always been the people that you had to go through if you wanted to import cocaine into Europe. You had to basically make a deal with the Andrangida, and the Andrangida would hook you up with their occ guy, and they would broker the whole deal, and you would get a decent percentage. Once the 2016 peace deal happened, everything broke apart. And so now if you had the guts, you could go to Columbia and source your own. The Andrangida didn't get weaker.

They just moved up a step into financing and insuring and money laundering. They're not in a worse economic position because of this. They didn't step aside a little bit because they knew their monopoly had been cut out. So now anybody who wants to go to Columbia and try to find somebody who can sell them five metric tons of cocaine can try. You might get ripped off. You might get killed. You also might become the new El Chapo. So that's what the Moroccans were able to do, is start sourcing it.

The Serbs have done the same thing. It's for the first time, I know guys that are actually producing their own kilos of cocaine from the jungles in Peru, smuggling them to Europe and selling them. And that's unheard of in terms of vertical integration. It's like farm to table, but for cocaine. Normally white boys from Europe do not get to roll into the Peruvian jungle and, like, run their own cocaine laps. Like there's a bunch of Peruvians and Colombians that think you shouldn't be allowed to do that. Yeah. But the thing is, something's changed.

And that's what I don't fully understand. And I'm a little bit curious about that is there are dudes that are going there and cutting these deals now. And Peruvians are working with them. Colombians are working with them to source. So we start seeing organizations. Taghi didn't last long enough to quite get there. But I'm watching organizations right now that might really be making them. their own kilos and selling them in Berlin.

Hashtag diversity. That's very weird. Again, why he would want to have dinner with Jeff Bezos is to understand how to dominate every moment in the profit and supply line. And, you know, in the past, you could be like a wholesaler, you could be a retailer, but you had to deal with a bunch of people along. This is why I keep saying the three to four thousand euros per kilo. That's about what you could expect for being a drug dealer, you know.

But once you can control the source, you control the whole. or suddenly you're making $25,000. It's exponential. Cutting out the middleman will increase profits in any industry. You mentioned some of the weapons seizures and straight out of narcos kind of stuff that you expect to see in South America where the cartels are fighting each other.

I think one of the examples he gave in the podcast was severed heads in front of a shisha lounge, headless bodies, massive weapons seizures, and you said follow the cars, not just the money. What's going on? How has crime changed in Europe since all of this? this has gone down. Crime in Europe is not even close to, of course, what we'd see in the United States in terms of gun crime or any of it. And definitely among street dealers and things like that,

the levels of crime that you'd see are much lower. There's fewer guns around. So, you know, if a cocaine distribution gang on a corner gets into a thing, let's say the cliches from the wire or whatever, you know, they're going to solve it by hitting each other with sticks and stabbing, maybe one gun shot here, one guy might get shot in the leg, but they don't have like seven murders a day and stuff. Like Amsterdam has like 30 murders a year at mass. But what I ended up finding was in each of these situations, depending on the gangs, so just from the Moroccan mafia standpoint,

since 2012, a third of the murders in Belgium and Amsterdam are directly related to the same community. So it starts becoming intense when you start realizing that, Yeah, there was 30 murders last year in this area, and 20 of them were involved in the same industry. You know, you do get like random crime, but it's rare. You get spousal abuse, but it's rare. But you do get, you know, every month or so, somebody's getting killed and found in a

burned out car. And one of the ways that they've kept attention off of this is by spreading it out. Because it's Schengen again, to refer back to the European Union, you can travel anywhere within the 27 countries without showing your passport. So nobody knows where you are. You know, you can be in Spain, you can be in Estonia. The cops have no way to really check.

But you also have different crime statistics in each place. So you kill three guys in Spain. You kill three guys in Belgium. You kill four guys in Holland. You just killed like 10 guys, but it looks small to each of the law enforcement people that are looking at it.

And then you disappear four other guys. whose bodies are never found. In the case of Amsterdam right now, there's a woman. Auntie Jamea, I don't mean to laugh, but she was a broker, one of the only Moroccan women who was a broker in cocaine. She factors into Taghi only peripherally. We know it happened to her because of Taghi, but she got involved in some deal as a broker

where she was, again, like what the Andrangida primarily does, like negotiate between the buyer and seller and sort of be the one to promise that everybody does what they're going to do. you do need some level of trust on these deals. And so she would put these people together. Something went wrong and somebody was very mad at her and she was kidnapped and disappeared. It wasn't Tagi who did it.

I think I know who did it, but for legal reasons, probably can't say. And we know what happened to her because she showed up on Tagi's phone being like dismembered in photos. Oh, wow. And tortured. Like, so the Dutch cops know.

She's dead. They've seen the pictures. Nobody ever found her body. But the only reason we know what happened to her is because somebody thought it would be amusing to forward those photos to Ridwan Taghi's Blackberry. He didn't even order the hit. It wasn't his guy.

Because we have all kinds of messages from Taghi being like, kill him, kill him, kill him, blood. He was a psycho guy who probably is responsible for 30 murders or attempted murders easily. He's on trial for like 12. But like, there's more. and he'll get charged with them as they come down or they can't make cases, but he's strongly suspected in dozens of attempted or successful murders.

And so he's yelling about that stuff. But then in the middle of it, there's just like one of his colleagues sends him like, here's what happened to anti-Gimila. Wow. And they're all laughing about it. You mentioned that you are not that worried, but the mafia, this organized crime groups, they do target journalists.

There was one guy that you mentioned in the podcast, ran a car through the front door of his office. is another guy had a rocket-propelled grenade shot through his window. I mean, that's not low-key at all. I mean, two of them got shot in the head. Blogger was killed Martin Koch and then Peter DeVries, probably the most famous crime reporter in all of Holland, was murdered by people that are strongly believed to be working for Rydwanthaghi.

How do I put this? I'm just a day trader on this stuff. Like, I'm not the guys that were, like, spending every day grinding on them, figuring out who they were and revealing them. you know, that's why, like, I joke, and I'm not joking. Like, if they'll let me into jail, I'll play this podcast for Taghi to his face. He knows what's in it. You know, I don't think that we're terribly unfair. Obviously, I point out that, you know, he killed a lot of people and seemed kind of brutal. But he knows that. We've heard the tape. Like, we've seen the text

messages. Tagi knows he's a murderer. You know, he just thinks it's justified. So in that regard, I think it's okay. But the biggest thing that you have to look out for, and this is why I'm not dismissive of it because somebody who's worked all over the world, constantly working with local journalists who have so much more skin in the game, you know, who are completely essential to me ever being able to get anything done. And these are the people that it's serious, you know, like I kept joking, they're not going to kill me, man, they're going to kill somebody we interviewed. Like, those are the people that I worry about. These are the people that are there every single day that are involved with them in their lives and stuff like that. One guy was

telling me he's got a nickname among the Moroccan mafia. They call him Smeagle, because I think he looks like Ghalam. You know, he's got a nickname where like Moroccan and, you know, Afro-Caribbean gangsters, even Dutch gangsters sit around joking about the physical appearance of these reporters. So they know. That's what's dangerous. You see a guy like Jan in Slovenia who got killed a few years ago, he was investigating local corruption. Daphne in Malta, who got killed. Her son, Paul, has become an amazing investigative reporter out of London for Tartis. Daphne got killed. She got killed investigating local corruption. Those are the people that really are at risk. When you're revealing corruption among your police and politicians in your local community, that's dangerous.

Like, what I do, you know, you got to be careful, like, you know, stuff like that. But I'm not messing with them in their homes. And I'm usually wrapping up something that some local kind already did. I'm not like, I'm not so high on my own supply to think that like I'm revealing the world of Redwan Taggi to our podcast listeners. What I'm doing is really like curating a bunch of different reporting and going through and figuring out what mattered, you know, over a 10 year period and trying to put my own spin on it. But like I didn't discover anything about this guy's business that people didn't already know. And so that's a different. You know, So, like, again, it's a business.

If you're going to kill a journalist, it's really got to be worth it, and it's rarely worth it. Or it's an emotional decision because it's local. Like with Martin Koch, it was definitely personal with him and Taghi. This is a journalist who was murdered. Martin was a blogger who was the first person to print Taghi's name. But he'd also been a criminal. He'd spent like 16 years in jail. He was really well known.

He'd committed two murders he was proud of. And he was a blogger who had made a good living, basically blogging about. like the cocaine meleu of Holland. And so he started messing with Taghi and started messing with Taghi's partner at the time, Nofol. And, you know, making fat jokes about Nofol and referring to Taggy as looking like a Muppet,

then printed their names for the first time in public. They tried like four times. It was like Keystone cops. The first three times they failed. It was amazing, but they did get Martin. And, you know, they killed him because he was the first guy to print their name and he was from the criminal world too.

When you talked about the RPG was shot into the newsroom of a friend of mine at night, and to this day, he goes, well, I don't know why they did. Well, he's being humble. They did it because he had printed Ridwan Taghi's name second after Martin Koch. But he doesn't, but he doesn't.

But he's got to, you know, I appreciate that he's humble like that. There's a lot of reasons why you might do that. But this is what these guys were trying to do. Peter DeVries, who was probably one of the most famous journalists in Holland, at least in terms of crime stuff, he was killed and we strongly suspect the evidence absolutely points to Ridwan Taghi, although he has not been charged and he does get a trial for it. It just really doesn't look great. You know, he had semi-threadened Peter

when Peter was just a journalist covering it. And Taghi put out this amazing statement saying, I'd never heard a hair on your head. But then Peter went to work for a crown witness that was testifying against Taghi. He changed sides on some level. And at that point, he became fair game. And they killed him. Just like they killed the same Crown Witnesses lawyer prior to that. And so this is what makes Taghi really interesting is that he's one of the rare European or even American. You know, Americans don't do this either, to actually go against the state, to actually attack the institutions of the state in order to intimidate it. And Taghi tried. He killed lawyers. He killed bloggers. He killed journalists.

the crown princess couldn't go to university last year. Why? Because she's in productive custody. Toggy was going to try to kidnap her, apparently. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Mitch Pertharo. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.

All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And you can always search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well. over at Jordan Harbinger.com. Thank you so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Mitch Prathero. Oh, my God. See, this makes it sound like Mexico-type narco stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how serious the threat was to the Crown Princess, but it was toggy, and it's serious enough, man, like she couldn't go. She's living under protective custody. Two lawyers I interviewed, they've since quit the case over reasons that I don't really know about. But for two years, they lived in safe houses with 24-7 protection from cops because their predecessor had been killed. And their colleague, Peter DeVries, had been killed who'd been doing media for the Crown Witness. You know, the Dutch have this amazing gimmick where the prime minister, like, rides his bike to work every day. It's their populist thing. And I'm sure

that he rides his bike to work a lot. But like, it's a political populism thing. He's got to take a car, man. They found guys following him. Wow. Like checking his route. They found that Belgian police, this is probably not Taghi related. It's definitely cocaine from the ports related. Two or three kids got arrested following the Belgian justice minister around with face masks and a Kalashnikov in the car. Wow, that is, this is crazy. They were at least considering a hit on the Belgian justice minister. They didn't try. They got a intercept it, but it happens all the time. Like, this is really on the edge. So when you look at the murder numbers, yeah, man, Amsterdam's a really safe city. Go visit, you know, but like, don't traffic

cocaine. When I was there, somebody got stabbed outside our youth hostel and I was like, oh, this is not a safe place. Yeah, you know, I mean, compared to what? A Walmart now? I mean, you know. I mean, too-shay, exactly. But seriously, it's like when you realize, like, it does kind of seem like this chill utopia, you know, when you're hanging out in Holland. It's one of the wealthiest countries on Earth. It's got one of the best, like, gaps. I mean, the rich people are very rich, but the poor people aren't as really poor as you see in a lot of different places. The inequality is bad, but it's not as bad as you'd see in the U.S. or UK or even France. But at the same time, there's this undercurrent of, like, darkness that's running through it. And part of it is just Dutch history. They're a bunch of drug dealers,

man, I say this with respect. The Dutch and the Flemish and Torp in Rotterdam did not become the biggest ports in Europe among the biggest ports on Earth by making people shit late. Like they get the sushi and the fruit off the port and out to decline.

They don't mess around. These are the people who basically invented modern capitalist. They invented the idea of futures, insurance, stock, international trade on some level was all organized by the Dutch in very early times.

These guys are actually experts on it. And so when you start looking at the stuff, a friend of mine joked is like, the Spanish took over South America and they exploit, you know, in Central America and they murdered everybody and they stole everything, but they told them they were converting them to Catholicism. So at least they were saving their souls. He's like, we showed up in Indonesia, shelled the locals and started an opium market. We're not here to save your religion, dude. We're here to make money. And then they follow this up with the legalization of cannabis or the semi-legalization of marijuana and cannabis.

So one of the things I learned is that if you take, remember our 8 to 10 billion in cocaine each year coming through Rotterdam and Antwerp, it's also 8 to 10 billion for cannabis running through Amsterdam because like it's decriminalized there. But like if you want to buy 10 kilos of marijuana and you live in Berlin, go to Amsterdam. It's probably the place to meet the guy. So it's an $8 to $10 billion industry for that. And then what I think people don't realize is like ecstasy, LSD, speed, every complicated club drug you can possibly think of. Virtually all of the world supply is made out of labs on the border between Belgium and Holland in Limburg.

And they're made rural labs. So they've got the club drug thing locked down, which is again worth 8 to 10 billion euros each year. I say this out of respect to their capitalist tendencies. But when you look at Holland on some level, they've got like a recession-proof, diversified drug-dealing economy that's like the envy of the world. We don't pick up if cocaine goes down. Let's put a bow on Tagi, and I've got a couple more general organized crime questions. So Tagi has caused prosecutors to resign without real explanation.

His lawyer, I think, is jailed because she was passing messages to his network. She has not been convicted of that. Okay. She has been jailed, but she was let out. She is currently free. Her name's Inez-Westky, and she's actually one of the more famous human rights lawyers in the world. She's repeatedly argued cases in the Hague, but usually on the side of the defendant, she was Charles Taylor's lawyer. The dictator of Liberia, yeah.

Yeah, the Liberian, she was his lawyer. Inez is like a legendary defense attorney, but she has been accused of passing messages from Taghi to his family, from maximum security. and possibly leading to him being able to partially run his drug empire. She denies the charges very emphatically. I've had other people tell me that there's a possibility that she was so threatened that maybe she thought it was the way to go. But it also came on the heels of the revelation that Taghi had convinced the courts to allow his cousin, who was also a lawyer,

and to visit him despite the fact he wasn't serving on his defense counsel. he had to be let in because he was a member of the bar. Got it, okay. But really, you know, they're in the preliminary stages of the investigation. The question is whether or not she can continue to represent him and whether or not he gets a mistrial. Because, like, we're two-thirds of the way through the trial and his lawyer got thrown in jail.

Yeah, this is crazy. Is there any danger of this guy? Because he's dangerous, dude. There's a lot of money. Another king will either pop up, but I assume he wants to escape. Is there any worry about this? How feasible is any of that? They worry he'll try,

because he's really tried about everything. When he was talking to his cousin, one of the intercepted conversations, was him explaining where the $3 million was that he had saved to pay the mercenaries to break him out of prison. He had a rainy day fund for like what he thought was going to be like

ex-Seal Team 6 or spetsnots guys like crashing a helicopter into the prison to rescue him. And as a result, you know, Dutch special forces had to sit on the top of the prison with Stinger missiles. because it's Rituontagia. Wow.

I mean, we can laugh at have preposterous it is, because on a level it is preposterous. But if anybody was going to try that, it would be Rydwanthaghi. So you've got to put the dudes up there. And this is why a joke is, in 2012, a Belgian gang might have stolen 200 kilos

from another Belgian gang. It set off a completely inexplainable gang war that ended 10 years later with Dutch special forces on the roof of a prison with Stinger missiles waiting for a helicopter. The cocaine market in Europe doesn't seem to be calming down anytime soon, and so I think we're going to hear more about this. What do you think?

Well, what I'd say is part of why we're seeing such a heavy amount of drama is that in the past, it had been more spread out to different places. Right now, like it's industrial flow of cocaine coming through Antwerp and Rotterdam Laharv, even Hamburg a little bit, what I call the northern ports. And so these are all controlled by the same gangs, and the money is so incredible. The traffickers that I've spoken with, none of them are fans of Rodwantaghi for drawing this much attention. Like, they really could have gone without killing all the lawyers and the bloggers and just kept their mouths shut, you know, and kept working. And there's guys that are in Dubai that know they're going to get extradited to Belgium eventually.

They're trying to stock away as much money as they can. You know, they're not trying to kill people if they don't have to. because they know it's bad for business, whereas Taghi was kind of special. He really did go Pablo, you know, where he thought he could intimidate the state into leaving him alone, and it didn't work.

But, you know, there's a lot of people who resent that because, like, a guy like me wouldn't come sniffing around their business if it wasn't for him. And I bumped into that a lot. You know, like, you're here because of Taghi, you would have left me alone if it wasn't for this asshole.

Right. No, true. You mentioned Dubai a few times. Why does Dubai have so many criminals in it? Not that the United States doesn't. I don't want to get 87 emails about that, but it seems like per capita, we're talking about a concentration of criminals here.

Look, if you're wanted for a murder in Belgium and get called in the United States, it's not a question. You're going home for trial. There's extradition treaties. There's a rule of law. Dubai doesn't really see it that way. They just don't really care.

It's strange. If you don't commit crimes in Dubai and you bring in lots of money and buy lots of apartments and invest things and pay for your visas and don't cause a huge stink, they're not going to extradite you. There's not treaties with Belgium and Holland. If the U.S. wants you, they'll probably give you up, but it's got to have something to do with terrorism or like Iran. Like, those are national security things to the Emirati.

So they take that pretty seriously. but like a cocaine trafficker from Antwerp, they don't care. And like, they're the UAE. They're not really worried about Belgium being mad at them. Yeah, it's interesting because the UAE is a police state, so it's a little counterintuitive that they don't care about crime. They care about crime in the UAE. Yeah.

Right, yeah. And also, like, let's face it. I mean, I don't want to disparage all of the UAE security forces. I'm sure they've got some innocent guys over there. But like when these drug cartel guys, whether it's the Kenahans or Taghi or, you know, a handful of other people whose names I won't use that I know are there right now, they're all eventually going to get killed or arrested and deported. Like they're not going to get away with this forever. And then like the UAE security services are going to like move into their apartments and take over their investments. You know, one of our characters Scarface, he owned a mall in Dubai.

Well, he got murdered in Spain in 2014. I'm pretty sure the mall didn't get turned over to his family. Right, okay. Yeah, interesting. You're paying a high price to live there in a weird way. That is interesting. And if you run out of money, you're done. The reason why they're not extraditing you is you're paying.

Got it. Okay. So you're essentially paying an extortion to be protected by the state from another state so you can continue generating revenue from your criminal activity as long as there's no victims in Dubai. Who cares? Or UAE? Yeah, and the second you can't deliver any longer, they'll send you back to Belgium and take all your stuff.

Wow. So it's not a life I'd want to live, man. What do you think? It's really not cool, man. Like, this is one of the things I keep telling people is like it's really not a fun business. Most people don't get up there. Like, the only person I've ever met who's actually legitimately content as a drug dealer is the Dutch guy I was telling you about who like does retail for a handful of clients. He can't really get caught.

He's never really got a ton of drugs on him at any time. It's only going to be a year or two or whatever if he does get caught. And his aspirations are so low in a weird way that he stays safe. Because I asked him, one of the things we'd encounter is what we call the 25,000 euro thing, which is that a certain number of these guys, as we say, North Face Jacket and Scooter Guy, selling grams of cocaine. A lot of these guys are saving up $25,000. And the reason is so they can buy what we call a kilo from a container.

Okay. And then they can like stomp that twice, sell three kilos, retail, buy two kilos, stomp that. And then in two years, they're living in Dubai, you know, by grown. Got this investment. So I jokingly said to this guy one time, are you saving up $25,000? And he looked at me like I was the biggest idiot on earth and said, yes, because last year somebody stole my Dukadi motorcycle and I want to buy a new one. And I was like, so, and he was like, no, man. And he was like, the minute you start doing that, you have to start storing kilos. You have to start asking people to protect kilos. Now people know you have kilos.

He's like, it gets out of control too fast. Interesting. Different game. Yeah, he's like, it completely goes out of control. You end up having to be a murderer or something. You know, you're terrified somebody's going to kill you. He's like, what I'm doing right now, nobody's going to kill me. Nobody's going to care.

The cops aren't even looking. He's got a lifestyle business instead of a growth company. That's what it is. And my man goes to like Barbados and shit for two weeks every summer and has a decent scooter in a nice car and a hot girlfriend. Works five hours a week. He plays Xbox all day. Yeah, I think it's like a little higher end than that.

He's a grinder. He knows that if he goes a step above where he is, he's entering the cocaine me lu. And that is a completely different freaking world compared to what he's doing. So, you know, that's like the one guy I met that I was like, all right, you kind of have to figure it out. Right, yeah. Do you have any suspicions about where the money goes?

Does it go back to Morocco? Is our palatial estates being built there? What's going on? I think like shopping malls in Eastern Europe, I think beach resorts in Albania, Italy, and Morocco, hotels, infrastructure, I think it's everywhere. Particularly, I think the rebuilding of infrastructure in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s

in the late 90s, right around the time the cocaine trade really kicked off, I think that was an amazing money. money laundering opportunity because infrastructure is really where you want to do it. You know, concrete, jobs, you know, there's a million different ways to pad figures and stuff. And then at the end of it, the cocaine cartel owns a mall, which is a viable asset. Sure. Yeah.

So, you know, a lot of what we tracked in terms of money is like transfers from Dubai to a Panamanian holding company that then come back to Morocco and end up invested in like a major beach resort. I'm not going to throw a company name out for legal reasons, but it's legitimate. The biggest question I came out of this podcast with is when does money go from being legal to illegal or illegal to legal? Okay, there's cocaine in a container. That's illegal.

The guy who showed up with the half a million dollars to buy the cocaine, that money's illegal. You see where I'm going with this? Yeah. You sell the cocaine, that money's illegal. Okay, but what about a year from now when it ends up in a piece? Pizzeria in Dresden. At what point does it start being legal? Because eventually it's legal.

It's salaries. It's pizza. It's real estate. It's this. It's that. So what's that line? And I would always ask law enforcement and analysts and stuff like that, and they'd all just shake their head. Europol joked that if I was going to ask questions like this, they were going to have to bring in a sociologist, a philosopher, and a statistician to help.

Europol, so your EU-wide police agency. Yeah. Exactly. It's not philosophical. When is the money legal and when it is illegal? And this is the problem with the integrated, globalized economy is when you deregulate finance to the extent that we all have across the world, that line gets so blurred so quickly. There is no more cutoff where this is drug money and this is proper investment. Nobody seems to want to define it. And I think that's because they like the money. If we follow the trail too far, we have to dismantle a hell of a lot of pizza Ria's. Also, the very best pizza. Yeah, the very best ones. I mean, let's face, like,

these are good pizza here. There's this Iranian dissident story that seems, it's almost like a non-sequitur in the podcast, but it's really interesting. This guy is at a wedding or something like that or a graduation party in a Facebook photo and gets murdered by the Iranian regime. What the hell is that? That's crazy. Okay, so Ali Mahmad, as his name was when he was killed, was actually a guy named Muhammad Reza, who back in this late 70s, early 80s, had been a revolutionary overthrowing the Shah, and it basically was part of a group that had come into conflict with what we call the Islamic Revolution, the guys that are in charge of Iran now. So they were rebels together, and if you ever know anything about a rebellion, rebels always

turn on each other when they win. For sure. And he's part of this organization called the Mujahideen al-Kalk, M-E-K. And the M-EK went violent. They'd been violent against the Shah, and they went violent against the Islamic regime, and in one case, it set off this bomb that it killed, like, 75 people in parliament. It crippled the current Supreme Leader of Iran, Khomeini. If you ever notice, he can't use his arm. Ah, did not notice that.

He's crippled from an explosion. Yeah, in fact, he's made it to 79. Nobody thought he'd really make it very long because injuries from that bombing were so terrible. 81 other people, I think 79 or 80 people were killed. and they were all like members of parliament. It was a really big deal. This bombing appalled everybody in Iran, not just supporters of the regime,

but it was considered like an act of terrorism against the state, even if you weren't a fan of the Islamic regime. It appalled all Iranians. Apparently, this guy was involved and had fled to the Netherlands. He was probably the bomber and had fled to the Netherlands

and had been living under a fake identity while the Iranians had been combing the earth looking for him. He was working at a... electrician in a suburban neighborhood in Amsterdam. He never was on social media except for one photo at his son's graduation. Within a few weeks or a few months, he gets shot dead. And a friend of mine, Paul Vutz, who's this reporter for Het Parole,

who's just a phenomenal reporter in Amsterdam, started looking into it because he just thought it was so weird that this Moroccan mafia had killed this random Iranian electrician refugee guy. And it turns out he'd been living under a fake identity. and had been hiding from the Iranian regime from all this time. So once they busted open the phone of a couple of Moroccan mafia guys, they realized that it had been a hit and that it had been a hit from the Iranian government, essentially,

and that the Moroccans had no idea who he was and didn't care. It was like $30,000. Somebody paid him $30,000 euros to go kill a guy. And we even have like Nofol, the guy who arranged it, he's in prison now for this hit, only because they decrypted his phone after he was arrested. but he's like, I don't even know what the guy did, I don't care. He's like just go shoot him in the head, man.

30,000 euros. Yeah, that's a big contract. Yeah, it took a year, you know, for them to figure it out. And then over time it came out, and it turned into a bit of a scandal because it was around the time the U.S. And a lot of Europe was pushing for a nuclear deal with Iran. So this is 2015-16 that this is going on. And the Dutch government decided to just let it go with arresting the gun. Like, they got noful.

They got the guys who did the shooting. Case closed. And that's something that I learned a lot in which I found really interesting in Europe, as opposed to some other parts of the world that I've done law enforcement is the Dutch and the Belgians have a tendency. Like, if you get caught with 100 kilos of cocaine, you're going to go to jail for like eight years. Wow.

But nobody's going to ask you where you got the cocaine. There's not going to be a plea. Like, you're not going to get to give up the guy who gave it to you and get a year. Got it. Whereas in the U.S., you'd be like, we're going to give you 30 years unless you tell us who gave you the cocaine, then we'll let you out and pay you or whatever. Like, it's a completely different malib, you know, in this regard. Like, you can get caught with a gun, a couple million dollars, 50 kilos of cocaine and do like four years in Holland. Probably like 12 in Belgium. Belgium's got stricter laws.

But in the U.S., man, you get caught with a gun, $5 million in cash and 90 kilos of cocaine. You're looking at like 30 unless you tell us. them where you got the money and the cocaine. And that's something they don't do. And one argument that the reason why they don't do it is there's way less violence. Because people don't try to keep you quiet by killing you. Yeah. They know you're just going to do four years and get deported back to Albania. So you're not going to flip on them. Right. It's not worth it. It's worth just stay in prison, take their little payout and then go retire. Three years in a Dutch prison just proves you can be trusted in the Serbian Moroccan or Albanian mafia. You're just going to come out to a promotion.

make sense. It's just three years, man. In a northern European prison, you're from Albania. Nobody's scared by that. Right. It's probably better than where you grew up. You know, a lot of 16-year-old Moroccan kids will tell me, or a lot of 16-year-old kids from Rotterdam, not just Moroccans, will tell me that when they do get arrested for occasionally busting into sealed teakilos, you know, and like it's supposed to be a $150 fine, sometimes they'll get locked up for like three weeks or something like that. They're like, it's fun. You get cable TV, you hang out with your friends. play pool. Huh, not a good deterrent, man. One thing that the question that I had when I heard this,

that I just can't let go. They found this Iranian guy because there's a Facebook photo of him. They must have suspected where he lived or where he was or had some other leads unless Iran is literally scanning every photo on Facebook with facial recognition technology to find people that they haven't seen in a long time. And if they're doing that and they have the technology is fine, okay, this guy 30 years ago, he did this, this is what he looks like now, here's the photo, it's unfit. That's extremely troubling technology. Is that how they found him? Do we know? No, we don't know exactly how they found him, but let's just be completely realistic. They're a nation state. And this was a serious person they wanted. This wasn't just some guy. So facial recognition stuff,

I don't know. I basically, my guess would be that Iranian operatives in European countries are tasked with following major people's Facebook pages and scanning stuff like that, just to keep an eye on the diaspora. I know they spy on the diaspora. I've been dealing with the Iranians for 15 years. So they're really aggressive intelligence service, and they've got people who work for them. I mean, the first secretary from the embassy in Vienna just had to be swapped by Belgium for a Belgian aid worker because the Iranian diplomat was in the process of setting off a bomb in Paris when they caught it. Like, you know, but everybody's got these types of guys in their embassies that are working as spooks. So the Iranians are very aggressive on this.

It would be easy to dismiss how big a deal some guy we've never heard of, you know, Ali Mahmad. He's a really big deal. I'd recognize his name just from my years of working in the Middle East when I first saw it. I was like, oh, they got him. So this is a dude that they were looking for. It's not quite on the Osama bin Laden level, but as you can imagine, like, if Osama bin Laden or, you know, whatever, posted one picture on Facebook at his son's graduation. If a nation state was really looking for him, that might get them there. It's kind of like how they found El Chapo, right? Wasn't it they followed a couple of actresses and or Sean Penn led them to him?

I don't know. I mean, I've heard a lot of stories about that. I don't want to speculate on that. Yeah, yeah, sure. But like, people underestimate how powerful countries are when they do stuff like that. because they can really like dedicate 100 people to it you know that's the thing that you forget like you think is it three hackers in a room man it's the Iranian intelligence service they could put 150 guys in a room looking at Facebook all day on everybody's page in holland if they want that's true

and not even be hard it's not you know like so when you start going up against nation states with their resources when they're truly committed what i always tell the paranoid people who think that the government's always spying on them or whatever it's like google's spying on you what have you really done today to justify overtime for a bureaucrat, you know, to spy on you. It's just not worth it. But in the case of somebody who had maimed the Supreme Leader, who'd killed the Prime Minister at the time, did one of the worst terror attacks in Iranian history, you know, they were going to be really, really looking for them. The Iranians also have a long history of hunting down dissidents and killing them in Europe. So this is an area where they've had success doing it in the past. But that's a whole

another podcast. Mitchell Prothero, thank you so much, man. This is really interesting. Gateway, we'll link it in the show notes. Great podcast. I binge the whole thing. And I highly recommend it. It's really been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. I just want to say, like, you know, everybody listened. We spend a lot of time on it. The bottom line, I recommend the podcast. Thank you very much. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show. There is a world out there, but we don't see it as it is. So this isn't philosophy, this is just laws of physics.

So if a tree falls in the wind, no is there to hear, it doesn't make a sound, no. It creates energy, but the sound is a construct of your brain. So the tree exists, the energy exists, but your brain then turns that into something useful, which is sound. Light, all the light that's coming around us, right? It's bouncing off objects,

and then it's changing when it's an object, and then it comes to our eyes. right but our retina has no access to the light directly nor to the surfaces all it literally has access to is energy and that's where your brain is actually constructing a meaning and it's that meaning that you're seeing you're not seeing the energy you're detecting the energy but you're not seeing it language is not a construct of the world think about perceptions of pain is pain an illusion of course it's not an illusion it's a meaningful perception but it's not something that exists in the world there aren't painful things in the world yeah

If we weren't here, pain would not exist. We can't hear the five sounds of A that people in Scandinavia use, for instance. Right, right. We can't see certain shades of red that Russians can see. Really? Yeah. And it's only when you have awareness of why you're doing what you're doing that creates the possibility of doing it differently.

Now, of course, if you don't have eyes, you can't choose to see. You still have to function in a world that has gravity, right, that has light. But we have more freedom than we think we do. We have more agency than we think we do. So the world is always changing and complexifying, and we need to complexify with it. And we never could if we always just see it as it really is. For more about how our brains produce vision

and the constructs our brain makes to build our world, check out episode 177 with Bo Lato here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, before I forget, Gateway Podcast, is the podcast from Project Brazen that Mitch runs. details about the crimes and the violence and the cocaine smuggling and the ins and outs of the cocaine business in Europe and the scale of the market. It's really something. I'm shocked by that. Many of you are surprised about what you learned on this episode as well. I mean, it's just it did not see that coming. And the violence is so much worse than what we discussed as well.

There's murders back in Morocco because of scores being settled from Europe. Some are botched. They get the wrong guy. Europe really looks like pre-mafia United States. The polite society that they have, they're just not accustomed to this level of violence. It's shocking, it's heretofore unheard of how they're going to deal with this is it's going to be interesting. I mean, you're really meeting some very uncivilized drug cartel type people being dropped into the middle of really safe and advanced civilized company. It's going to be, man, it's going to be quite a clash, especially over there in the Netherlands, which is traditionally very soft on crime. Criminals fight to stay there when they're in prison because they don't want to get extradited to the U.S., to Canada, to Morocco, to Albania.

They want to stay in the Netherlands, chill, watch TV, get a college education workout. God knows what you can do there. And then they can operate rather freely inside and outside of prison. It's just they're going to have to figure this out, man. They can only scan 2% if that of containers daily. So 98% of the drugs or whatever are getting through. And that is battle they can't win. so we'll have to see what happens.

Again, check out the Gateway Podcast. All Things Mitch Pothero will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot transcripts in the show notes as well. Once again, a reminder that the Stitcher app will no longer work for any podcasts as of August 29th, 2023. So if you're using the Stitcher app, time to switch. If you're on Android, podcast addict is a good one, cast box. And if you're on iOS, I suggest Overcast or Apple Podcasts. The Stitcher app is going away, folks.

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Six-minute networking also on the site at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm at, wait for it, Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Emilio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the cocaine market of Europe or lives over there and might not know about this problem, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime,

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