The Underworld Podcast - Fentanyl's Surge from China To Mexico to St Louis

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Over the last three years there's been an explosion of fentanyl on the streets of America and it's led to over 100,000 Americans dying from drug overdoses, the overwhelming majority because of fent. In this episode, Sean lays out the way producers in China have connected with Mexican drug cartels from shipping precursors to laundering money, where Danny speaks on the effects he's seen in the streets of St. Louis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hattery! Eye drops that work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner, by knockout, is Hatternay. Paradig. Bring it on. November 2018, Ganjambing has been following the path of many Chinese immigrants to the West. He's hardworking and innovative, and he's having great success with his businesses,

so much so that he started new ones, just really diversifying. Back in the day, Gahn, who everyone calls Gary, had a shoe factory in China. But in 2011, he decided to strike out for greener pastures and ended up, in all places, Guadalajara, Mexico, where he opened a seafood export business. And a little sidel on that, I kind of feel like this is a third or four time that we've covered a dude and organized crime who runs a seafood export business. Like what is it about buying and selling shrimp that attracts so many mafiosos?

I don't know. Anyway, Gahn's not just running scallops, though. In fact, he's actually laundering tens of millions of dollars for the Mexican cartels through Chinese banks. Money connected to fentanyl trafficking. Gary cooks up a scheme to do some money washing for the cartels, and he recruits one of his buddies from the shoe factory to help him out. A woman will call Lim. The scheme is pretty simple, and most importantly, it keeps the money out of U.S. banks.

Lim collects the drug money in the U.S. As much as $1.5 million in cash, delivered in $10,000 bundles and parking lots of shopping malls and things like that, and then brings it to a totally unrelated Chinese business person, the owner of like, you know, a small restaurant or a bodega in Chinatown of Manhattan. The business person then uses their Chinese bank account

to send the equivalent in Huon to Gan's Chinese bank account. And Gan usually takes a commission of about 5% for his trouble. Lim receives a smaller lump payment. I mean, it's all pretty simple, straightforward stuff to keep the money out of the U.S. financial system. Keep the records clean. Now, to get the clean money to Mexico, Gary performs the same kind of transfer,

only this time to a Chinese-Mexican associate with access to pay sores. Again, nothing comes into contact with U.S. banks, and Chinese authorities, they're unlikely to flag what happens to look like to simple transfer between two domestic banks, between two businessmen. except for one big problem.

Gahn's under surveillance, and Lim gets picked up at an airport in New York in May of 2018 and flips very quickly, gets convinced to wear a wire, and in no time the feds unearth a network of couriers, brokers, and launderers all over North America. A lot of them Chinese, working with Mexican drug bosses. Then in November of that year, Gond makes the mistake of having a layover in L.A. on a flight between Hong Kong and Guadalajara, and the feds bust him in the airport. In 2020, he's convicted on four counts of money laundering and sentenced to 14 years. This, though, is just a small part of the Chinese-Mexican organized crime connection that's been flooding the U.S. with fentanyl over the last few years.

This is the Underworld podcast. Welcome back to the Underworld podcast. I am your host, Danny Gold. I'm here, as always, with Sean Williams. We are two reporters who have traveled all over the world covering organized crime and every week we bring you new stories on that subject and others. Sean has it going. It's going.

All right, Danny. I don't think I've been quite as stressed as you have the last few weeks. You've just been getting over your jet lag from Ukraine, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm back. I'm back now. I think I got one more thing I'm going to finish up, but we're going full speed ahead with the podcast now.

Sorry if we let you guys down the past couple weeks. Patreon.com slash the Noreau podcast. We're putting up many episodes that are like 10 or 15 minutes on stories. that we can't really get an hour out of interviews, all that sort of stuff that's, I think, really, really excellent. We're doing a Q&A there right now, and we'll put the answers up shortly. We'll do an episode on that.

Anything you guys want to talk about from any of the work that we've done recently, Sean's big piece in Rolling Stone on pleasing drug lords and the rapper shine and politics there, the work I've done in Ukraine and Philly and St. Louis and all that. And actually, Sean, you just had, I guess we both did, even though you did most of the work,

a big story on the, Chinese-Mexican fentanyl connection. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'll always be taking questions on how to put a joke together as well. I think a lot of people want to know how to do that. But yeah, we publish this story as we're recording this, I think like just a few hours ago, less than a day. And whenever the why is this like Chinese-specific magazines,

really cool run by former New York Times editors. And yeah, like once we started digging into kind of all the sides of this, industry, which is killing almost as many people in America each year as diabetes, which is like unbelievable. I mean, I've been to Walmarts in Oklahoma and the diabetic section is bigger than most supermarkets. Take it easy. Take it easy, Britt. I'm just stating facts. But yeah, I mean, this closer cooperation between China and Mexico is something that I kind of thought was a little bit overcooked by various hawkish people in the White House. But I don't think it is. And like we went to in that intro through Ganjam Bing and his operation,

he ended up in front of a court in Illinois. It's just big stuff. And one of the people I spoke to off the record for this said that there are several thousand people who are Chinese nationals in sort of Mexico, Canada and the US work in these Hawala type mirror transaction schemes to get money into China and back again to the cartels. And really the DOJ doesn't know exactly how many people are doing it. And it's really, really kind of putting a fire beneath the cartels in pushing fentanyl into the states, which is obviously where you and your reporting comes in seeing people's lives devastated all over cities in the Midwest and far beyond.

It's just crazy how many people are dying from fentanyl and how it just like, you know, I think about this too, you know, is there, well, one thing I want to say is that it's two separate things, right, that are connected. It's the money laundering and then it's actually buying all the precursors fentanyl and making it. And they all come straight from China. And you don't see, I mean, heroin is a problem in many, many countries in the world. But you only really see this epidemic of fentanyl in the U.S. right now, right? And it's kind of like why is that the case? Are we going to see it hit places like, you know, where heroin's huge, like, you know, Russia.

the UK, Scotland, places like that. And then, you know, there's that big question. I don't know if we answer that or you can answer. I don't know if anyone can answer that. Is like, where is the Chinese state in all this? Are they letting it slide? Do they care? Can they be pressured into doing something?

It's a really, really big question, I think. But I don't know. Oh, wait. No, I mean, I mean, we're going to answer that question at patreon.com slash the underworld podcast because we have the answers. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we've got every single answer to this crisis that's killing, what, 75,000 Americans a year at the moment? This is unbelievable.

I think the drug overdose was over 100,000 Americans died this year. And I think, you know, obviously the math, I think, is always going to be a little questionable. But I think the high estimates of how many of those overdoses involve fentanyl, which makes complete sense. If you know just how prevalent fentanyl is in other drugs, how strong it is. in general was 75,000 out of that 100,000. Yeah, that's pretty incredible. And yeah, I mean, going back to China, it's really, really fascinating, right? Because no one's entirely sure what their motivation is in either letting precursor shipments,

you know, get across the border or maybe playing a bit more of a sort of belligerent role in letting this stuff getting into the States and now through Mexico and the cartels. And we'll get into that in a little bit, the reason for that shift in the logistics. But there's a lot of people that go back to the opium wars of the 19th century, fought between China and the UK and France to kind of control the opium supply into China and keeping so many, I think it's like 15 million Chinese addicted to opium. So there's a lot of like backstory there. There's a lot of real, real, hard history for the Chinese that is really baked in.

of the Communist Party's and manifestos in history, they call it the century of humiliation. And it's a large part of what Xi Jinping, the current leader of China, has sort of like made a pillar of China's resurgence in the world. So, you know, that stuff is fact. What's not fact is whether China is pushing this drug into the market deliberately

or turning a blind eye. But it is doing one of those two things. because there is no chance on earth that a giant sort of police state, which can crack down on organized crime and chemicals and drugs, as it has done with meth, heroin to a certain extent. There's no way that they don't know that this is a huge problem. It's the factories that it's coming out of. I think they said back in 2018 that it was 15 suppliers of thousands and thousands

of factories making pharmaceuticals, and that's like laughable. So, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, a growing problem. But I mean, as far back as 2008, they were even dishing out tax breaks for farmer industry factories that were pushing out fentanyl, which obviously is used in medical procedures. I think it's 100 times more powerful than morphine. I've got a close friend of mine who works in a hospital in the UK, uses it a lot for various sort of like internal operations because it's really good at getting through fatty bits of the body

stuff that morphine can't do. Anyway, I know that's why you're here at the podcast because you really want to know about surgical uses of fentanyl. But basically in 2019, everything changes, right? So pre-then, there was obviously this problem. You've been out on the streets of St. Louis and Philadelphia following dealers. Ezo is the guy.

You did a bonus episode of this show with him as well. that was starting to get fentanyl around, what was it, like 2016, 2017, starting to see it come into the market? Yeah, I think maybe it started emerging. I remember talking to this guy, the dealer that I interviewed, in 2019, and he had already been arrested for distributing it in 2018. So I assume, like, 2016, 2017 is when it started showing up. And I kind of remember, you know, the talk of it. And it was kind of just being something that, that, uh, back then it was something that I think people were just using to lace heroin to make heroin stronger as a replacement for heroin

without sort of doing it. But by the time I talked to my boy, Ezo, who's the one who got arrested for selling it, he was saying, I remember being a little surprised by this. He was saying customers were directly asking for fentanyl. That was all you heard on the streets. It's like, let me, can I get fentanyl? Can I get fentanyl? Uh, and, you know, before that, I think it was just looked at something.

And, you know, this could be wrong. I don't remember looking into it too deeply around then. But in the mid-2010s, it was something that was just seen as like a, you know, a little thing you slipped in there to make the heroin more potent or more powerful or just to replace the heroin in general because it was cheaper. Yeah. But you were saying, like, China's actually been making fentanyl for decades, yeah? Oh, yeah. It's been around for ages. It was developed in the 1960s.

But it was like so, so powerful even back then that I think this went in the story. that we just did as well, that it took, I think even in the mid-90s, the US authorities were thinking about banning it in certain cases, even in medical use, because it was so, so potent. You hear this stuff about, you know, one grain of rice worth of fentanyl can kill a 180-pound man, all this stuff about contact overdoses as well, which I think, I don't know, you know more about this. Is that being overblown in the media, or is that kind of legit? I think it gets exaggerated a lot of times by police and stuff as well. But people do die from, you know, their drugs getting cross-contaminated with very small amounts

of fentanyl. I know, like, one of the things I think people have their head, like a hard time wrapping their head around, right, is that, you know, we're talking about people buying fentanyl to take fentanyl, and we're also hearing, oh, a grain of this stuff can kill you. Well, the stuff that people are buying out on the street, you know, has been cut over and over and over and over and over, right? Like, it's barely, you know, it only is a tiny amount of fentanyl.

And I think one of the interesting things you have to realize with that is that, like, one of the reasons people, you know, we spoke to this dealer, he's actually in the, in the piece that I did for, um, for Channel 4 from our poor world, they only include a little bit of it. But, uh, you know, fentanyl is deadly

and tiny amounts. So when these street dealers are selling fentanyl in pills, usually, it's been cut, cut to shit, like a tiny percentage of what the person is getting, is fentanyl, and the rest is totally, totally cut up. And if, I think we showed in the doc, but if not, I might have posted it on Instagram or whatever. You know, we actually show him going through his process of, like, chopping it up and putting it in the pills. But, um, this is like, you know, this is a big supply chain, right?

I am, there's probably, I don't know about dozens, but there's probably quite a few people above him. And each one of them is probably breaking it down a level, right? But the thing is like, you know, these aren't the most trustworthy people. There's no real quality control. There's no fucking FDA looking at it, you know, and like every step of the way, however many it is from the Mexican border, there's someone mixing and matching. And it's a hard thing to do, I'm sure, because it's like if you cut too much and it's too weak, you dilute it too much, your product is worthless or it's not going to sell. Customers want it strong. But obviously if it's too strong, your customer is going to die or your customer's customer, whatever it is.

You know, it's not breaking bad. These guys aren't in the lab like testing stuff all the time, right? So I think that is one of the reasons that you have a lot of overdoses. And there's other reasons we'll get to, you know, as, as well. But these guys don't have chemistry degrees, right? There's no perfect recipe. And that's what they call it. You know, they kind of call it like almost like it's a recipe.

Every dealer I've ever spoke to who deals with. I was like, oh, and I know what I'm doing. I check up on my customers. They're doing okay. You know, and obviously these guys don't want to kill their customers because then, you know, most of their customers are coming to them buying four or five pills. a day. So they don't want to kill their

customers. I don't think that is the case. But like I said, it's not exactly the scientific method over there. So it is what it is. On the other side of the coin, I think what makes this whole drug industry so interesting is that on the other end of that

chain, I mean, the guys that are making this stuff very much are chemical experts. And that's one of the reasons that it's been so difficult to crack down on fentanyl because, you know, every time that anyone in the past has made an attempt to ban this stuff at its source, you pretty much banning the precursors, right? So these are the building blocks that go in to make fentanyl.

Don't ask me to name them. They've got like multi-syllabic names that I couldn't even reel off. It paid me $1,000. But these are basically chemical compounds that are pretty easy just to tweak one thing here or there. You can take a compound that, you know, an atom of oxygen out here and stick something else in. I'm clearly showing how good I am at chemistry. But you can make a million different analogs of this stuff.

So when you ban, you know, fentanyl A or whatever, someone's just going to make fentanyl B. So it's been pretty impossible through multilateral forums like the UNODC. They've been pretty good with trying to get everyone together in the same room to ban fentanyl. but up until 2019, the crazy thing was that it was just this crazy game of whack-and-wale, right? So you just had Ban one substance, the chemical makers are just going to make the next one along the line. And it just goes on and on and on.

And someone that we're going to get on the show, Ben Westhoff, who wrote Fentineau, Inc, which is a really, really great book. He actually went out to China, went to a lab posing as a potential buyer, and he said, quote, it was shocking to me. I went to a small fentanyl lab, five employees, and they were making huge containers of one kilo bags, and just two grains of rice worth of fentanyl can kill you. It's staggering to think just how much this one little lab is making. So yeah, he's like, he's visiting the equivalent of kind of like the mum and pop pill presses that I saw out in the golden triangle that were a very small part of this gigantic meth industry, you know, these billion-dollar labs and so forth.

And what, sorry, go ahead. I was going to ask what the deal was with, because I know you've drawn comparisons to the meth crisis in Asia, and I just don't know that much about what was done during that crisis. Well, similar kind of thing, right? So Chinese chemical makers, usually in Yunnan, which is the province that borders, the Golden Triangle, they're just shipping totally legal stuff across the border like Sudo, the other shit that you need to make meth.

And before 2014, it wasn't actually going across the border into the Golden Triangle so much. The Chinese had a triad group and various criminal organizations and pharmaceutical makers. They're just making it in-house and they're flooding their own market with it. And then the Chinese Communist Party is like, oh, hold on a minute. This is like fucking our own people up. So in 2014, they crack down, they execute a bunch of people, they break up some organized crime cells inside China, but they don't really want to shake up the chemical industry too much,

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of the United States. So they don't really want to rock the boat. This thing is making like, I mean, the chemical industry makes 10% of China's GDP. And I don't know if you know, but there's quite a lot of people in China. So this is like a shitload of money. This is like trillions of dollars we're talking. So they don't want to hobble that industry. So what they do is there's, again, depending on who you're speaking to,

there's a bit of a backdoor, you know, shaky hands deal. Don't make it here. Don't start getting everyone addicted to meth in China, but then they start becoming the suppliers of the main precursor drugs that are then going into these, like, rebel groups and ethnic armed militias. And, you know, you kind of Kuntar successors out in the middle of the Bivouac in the jungle in, like, Burma. And that's where you get your Sae-Chi Lops and $17 billion syndicates and stuff like this. So, and another similarity with that is,

Throughout all of this, and I spoke to John Whalen, DEA guy for a bonus episode a couple of weeks back, and he was like, whenever you spoke to China, whenever you spoke to Beijing, nothing's coming back. They're not speaking to you at all. They deny everything. They don't help with law enforcement. They don't really hook up with anyone from the DEA. So it's just like a black box, and we'll get to more of that with the money laundering stuff. But when it comes to this crisis, in 2019, under a ton of pressure and actually under Trump, I mean, Trump goes to the G20 in Argentina and has a word with Xi on the sidelines of that conference.

And actually, to give credit to Trump, he did something that Obama had never done, and that's to call it out as a crisis. It might not have been for the most altruistic reasons. But it was already huge. And in 2019, China actually banned a bunch of fentanyl and fentanyl analogs that did change the crisis somewhat. Before then, American addicts just go on, not even on the dark web, they could just order direct-to-mail fentanyl, and they could get it delivered through the USPS. And there was no electronic monitoring of international shipments with the USPS,

and there was other stuff with Customs and Border Patrol where they wouldn't, like, they didn't have the dogs and they didn't have the dogs, and they didn't have the, the technology to check and sniff out all of these drugs. So people were just ordering fentanyl on the web and, you know, overdosing and dying in massive numbers. After 2019, that changes, right? So China has clearly said, you can't just sell fentanyl from your factories online.

And you're not supposed to make it anymore, you naughty guys. So they get a bit craftier. The whole industry changes. Mexico is the second oldest economic partner of China in the whole of the Americas. So they go back to their old friend and they use these kind of legitimate ties that they have in the white market. And we'll get to GAN or Gary or whatever you want to call him in a bit. But they kind of use these connections that they've got to tap into the cartels. And they're like, well, why don't we just ship these chemicals over to you?

your drug dealers, you can make this stuff. We'll teach you how to. We'll give you pill presses. We'll teach you how to put these compounds together and you can make the fentanyl and you can ship it into the US with all of your connections that you have on the borders and stuff.

So that's how it turns into what it is now, which is a full-blown illicit industry. Wait, wait, wait, wait. They actually went over there and set it out and showed them how to do it. In some cases, yeah. Yeah. And this is happening more now.

So this, I mean, this gets to the what next part of this story as well, because now people are worried, like, now the cartels have got enough know-how and technology that they can pretty much make the stuff on their own. So soon, I mean, in a few years, we might not even be talking about China anymore. It might just be Mexico. And, and, but they still need the precursors to get them from China. but also like, so these were, these were ostensibly, you know, like scientists, like legal scientists in China who were not breaking the law, who all of a sudden are in Mexico, like with the cartels in wherever else, showing them how to make. Like deadly drugs. Yeah, yeah. And in some cases, like in the first parts of this, so like two, two and a half years ago, say they start mislabeling products.

to get it past the port authorities in Mexico, which aren't exactly known for being stringent. And then around 18 months ago, Amlo, the leader of Obrador, the leader of Mexico, he then puts the Navy in charge of all of the ports, which is considered the less corrupt institution. And then the Chinese precursor makers just go full cartel, and they're just dropping stuff off cargo ships.

There's cartel skiffs just coming to pick stuff up in the sea. just the same stuff as you get with the cocaine and other illicit drug industries. And then you get to, you know, our friend Gary and the use of launderers to, like, launder all these proceeds. And it just becomes huge, huge monster, which is, I mean, I don't know, it's going to be pretty hard to scale it back at this point. I mean, there's so many addicts in the US. Yeah. Yeah. Who does that guy you spoke?

Didn't you speak to somebody about the way that the money stuff was, set up, right? Robert, right? Yeah, Robert for Humwick. He's a writer. He's working on a book about organized crime groups in China. So he got passed on to me while one of our listeners, Matthew, so cheers for that. And he said some really cool things. So I'm just going to quote him here. He said some really interesting things to me. It says, quote, for cultural and societal reasons, the Chinese diaspora, though much more diverse and integrated than it used to be, still tends to be quite insular. This means many first-generation

immigrants didn't speak English much and weren't very integrated into Western investment systems. They tended to bank amongst themselves, and this led to a lot of income underreporting tax evasion and whatnot. Many began their lives in America by opening Chinese laundries and restaurants. Some now use the restaurant trade to launder Chinese money. And Robert goes on, quote,

it therefore shouldn't be that much of a surprise for law enforcement who identify precursors number of materials coming from China to see some of that money going back and forth. If anything,

it makes sense for the cartels to de-leverage the imbalance of having a one-way flow of trade. I'd hesitate to call them Chinese gangs though,

he says, as most of them are just your typical pants and polo shirt overseas entrepreneur types. Yeah, I know, we all know this, whose business activities

have long blurred the lines between lawful and illegal to the point where their entire business is one great area, always open for opportunity, while constantly vulnerable to blackmail and prosecution. So, I mean, we've looked at, I mean, you've done loads of stuff on Chinatown. This, this kind of thing is through with that. Well, it's not just, it's not just Chinatown, right? It's like most new immigrant communities, at least, I think now probably with the way banking work,

it's much easier for them to get involved in the, in, you know, legal systems. But who, you know, I couldn't tell you. But, yeah, I mean, for any new immigrant group that can, came over at 60s, 70s, 80s, 80s, they always had their own sort of system going and wanted to keep the money amongst themselves and whatnot. It's why they also made easy targets for robberies, extortion, and things like that, because a lot of it was done in cash without paper trails, you know, through their own insular banking communities or informal or formal, whatever, whatever they were, you know? So it's, it's interesting to see how that has sort of been parlayed into, into this money trafficking for cartels and whatnot,

but it makes a lot of sense that it has been. Yeah, and for those of you listen to the show that I did with No Huravit, so while back as well, he was writing about old Chapo in his book, but he also mentioned that Chinese migrants really kicked off the cocaine industry in Mexico in the early part of the 20th century before there was. No, no, I think that's the opium industry. It's in San Quinoa. Yeah, you're right.

You're right. Right. They were growing. They came over and they were Chinese migrants. who were growing opium poppies, I think for their own use in the, or maybe to sell as well, in like the 30s, maybe the 20s, 30, yeah,

20s and 30s. And the Mexican, like the criminal Mexican elements there, obviously they're not like what they are now. You know, they were just your standard bootleggers and smugglers and whatnot. They were involved with the alcohol trade because of prohibition. But then once alcohol got legalized, they needed something new.

And there was all this sort of anti-Chinese migrants sentiment that was being rallied at a time for political purposes. So eventually they kind of ran those migrants off and then this took over the opium fields and the opium trade. And that's how the heroin industry sort of took off in Mexico. So there's... Or opium, heroin, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah. So, I mean, when they go back to forging these ties, I think there's still quite a few thousand Chinese Mexican nationals who've got really long family ties to the country, connections back to China, which has this really opaque kind of like black box banking system. I mean, it's just like perfect recipe for working together on illicit industries. And yeah, then you get to Ganjing Bang or Gangxiang Bing, sorry, Gary, who was picked up in May 2018, as you said.

And he essentially came out from Wen Zhao, which is a city on the eastern sea. seaboard of China where he was running a shoe factory where he met this woman originally of Singaporean descent but had been living in New York for like two decades. Lim, who goes by Michelle. So they had kind of hit it off. He moves to Guadalajara. He does actually set up this seafood business because all of the shit that the Mexicans don't want, all of their like scallops and jellyfish.

He's like, bring it on, man. Like Japanese and Chinese people love that shit. So he starts cranking out. a load of these exports. But at the same time, he gets embedded with the local cartels, the CJNG, El Mancho's boy as being one of them. He mentions actually in wiretaps in by name, which is pretty fucking dumb. And he just sets up this entire network.

I mean, it's incredibly precise and intelligent. Like he's got guys in Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, I think, came up. I mean, and Guadalajara and Mexico City, I mean, they're all over. And essentially, you know, the cartels get their drugs, they sell them in the States, they get the proceeds. Obviously, you don't usually do a card transaction for that. So they get handed over in 10 grand, a pop, heat sealed. I think they are heat packs, right, those things that you'll see in the movies

that people are handing over drug proceeds with. And you give them to a courier. the courier then has a serial number for one of the dollar notes in the bundle and he or she will have a phone number of this person in China who will then take receive a certain amount of money in Chinese currency switch it to GAN's account and GAN will get his friend in Mexico who's a Chinese national with access to pesos and then suddenly I mean it could be within minutes the money's clean

and because it never touches the states, the DOJ and other organizations can't really see it. The Chinese don't care or they're just seeing an exchange of currency between two local banks. So it never really flags up anything. And even in the, I mean, I went through hundreds and hundreds of pages of his court case.

It's pretty, even for, I don't know, even for government's things, which you usually pretty florid when you're reading through the stuff because they're trying to like get, people on pretty flimsy evidence at times. This was a pretty interesting one.

You had Lim, Michelle, when she gets caught at JFK by the cops, she just immediately flips. I mean, she doesn't even think twice about it. She's also literally in bed with Gans number two, a guy called Pan. That's why it's nice to call GAN, but Gary, because otherwise it's GAN, Pan and Lim. And then he's got a toy distribution business. I mean, all of these guys have legitimate industries all over North America. So he's bringing in toys and sending out seafood. And they start thinking that Gan is stiffing them on the commissions that he's getting from the cartels.

So he takes 5%. They suspect that he's taking a little bit more. He's not passing the profits onto them. And then I have, there's this like wiretap where Pan is talking to his girlfriend, Lim. and he says, quote, this kind of person needs to die with no conscience, motherfucker. Without you and me, how could he make so much money?

He's so horrible, sweetheart. It's like, I don't know, that's like something you could have got from the room. Yeah, it sounds like they're internalizing. They've been hanging out with the cartel guys a little bit too much and going from, you know, he's this man to thug life real quick. And all of the drug bosses in Guadalajara

and like in major cities in the US are called like Christian Louis Fitton AMG. And then one of them is called Halshoe because I guess he didn't get the message. But yeah, it's like a really interesting thing. I mean, Gann's definitely guilty of this. Like he keeps mentioning the drug bosses by name. He's pretty sloppy. But it just shows that there are these already embedded crews of, yeah, like first and second generation migrant Chinese who have just.

pounced on the fact that they've got bank accounts that no one can even look into to start laundering drug proceeds for big, big old commissions. And even, like I said, even if you do manage to get China and Beijing to stop the flow of fentanyl into the US, these networks are really hard to stop, for one. And secondly, I mean, stuff is starting to come from India, which is pretty scary, because then you're fighting on two fronts. And the Indian government is, I mean, they're two really interesting countries to compare, right?

They're two giant countries. One is known for corruption from the top down, the other one is just corrupt all the way through in its system. So U.S. officials aren't really even sure how to deal with India if it starts pushing out fentanyl. And then you get... I would assume as an ally they're going to have more leverage, you know? Yeah, but that's the thing.

with India it's kind of different, right? They're a good ally, but they can't stop it because their system is so diffuse that it's really hard for them to crack down on people pushing out illegal drugs. Then you get to a point, this is where the whack-a-mole goes another step further, this fucking 3D chess kind of thing.

And then you start getting, if you cut down on the precursors, and if the Chinese and the cartels are sharing information enough, at an extent to which the Mexicans can make this stuff, then the Chinese will just send over the precursors to the precursors. So then you'll get chemicals, which are just like basic building blocks of anything from cement to sleeping pills,

the same stuff, and they're never going to get banned. And then the Chinese can just send that over. And then you've got a Mexican problem entirely. And then, you know, as the last 50 years have shown, it's pretty hard to stop drugs coming from Mexico. Yeah, as any city right now in the U.S. can show you that's not really, things aren't going well right now. So, yeah, I mean, I kind of focused on the other side of that story, what Sean was handling all the crazy, intricately detailed stuff coming over from China and scientists and whatnot.

You know, I did that thing in Philly we talked about. And that we didn't focus too much on fentanyl. That was more about the gun crime, but you have Kensington there, which is just the crazy open-air drug market that used to be known for having the strongest heroin. So people came from all over there. But now fentanyl is pretty much replacing everything. You know, fentanyl is everywhere.

And then St. Louis, in January, I had done this doctrine report of world where we focused on the issue of fentanyl there. And we spent a lot of time in a clinic, ARCA, I think assisted recovery centers of America. And they, you know, they're treating people in North St. Louis, which, as you guys know, is pretty depressed community. And they're on the front line of seeing fentanyl in poor communities and what's happening there. So it was fascinating to hang out with the guys there.

A lot of them are former addicts themselves. Andrew Robinson, who was at that point the director. I think now he's working with vets that are going through something similar. And he handles an outpatient clinic as well where guys live in a house essentially. And he's just saying, you know, fentanyl is in everything now, right? It's not just in downers, like our heroin or opioid. type stuff or on its own, right? You've got counterfeit pills,

whether it's like percocets or benzos even, so Xanax, stuff like that. People are buying pills that they think are prescription pills like that, but it's actually fentanyl that's pressed into something. And it's being found in uppers, right? Meth has made a huge comeback, apparently, and there's fentanyl in that too. Like they have situations where people are ODing off that.

And then there's that story, I think it was January or February. There was, I think, nine people OD'd on the same like two block radius in a weekend. Five of them, five of them died. And it was from one house and one dealer. And the thing is, she wasn't selling heroin or fentanyl or anything like that. It was crack. And the crack had been laced with fentanyl or a substitute with it. I'm not sure exactly what it was. But it's kind of what we were talking about, right? Like, you have, you have some situations when you have cross-contamination, right? Stuff's being

backed up in the same thing or whatever. And you have, you know, people ODing or dying, seen these stories in nightclubs, kids doing coke, ketamine, whatever it is, MDMA, and not testing it. Always test your drugs now. Like, you get the strips. They're cheap. If you're going to be doing it, test your drugs. You see them in nightclubs now, especially, you know, things that are electronic dance music oriented. They're passing them out, which is a very good thing. Yeah. But a lot of it is also people are putting fentanyl in these other drugs. And why is that, right. I mean, it doesn't really make sense to me to put fentanyl in an upper, right? It's two, two different things. But according to Andrew, who, you know, like I said, is on the ground for this stuff,

it makes the high itself stronger and it actually hooks people harder than other drugs do. It makes withdrawal much harder. So it keeps people coming back and makes it really hard for them to quit no matter what it is. Right? If it's in meth, if it's anything else, it's actually, it's harder to get off fentanyl, according to Andrew, and he's someone that I trust completely with this sort of thing. And he's just saying, like, it is everywhere now, right? There's been a massive increase in use the past couple years, and he's just really, really scared about what's coming. I think it was described. One of the quotes he gave us was, like, it's like a tidal wave.

And people, you know, it's not the kind of thing, though, where, you know, the water comes back and it's calm right now. It's not calm at all. people are ODing left and right, left and right, but they know that it's going to get worse because more people are getting hooked. And most dealers are just focusing on that right now. You know, they're not trying to sell heroin or trying to sell crack.

It is just fentanyl all the time because as we've discussed, the profit margins for fentanyl are so much higher than that of heroin. And heroin's already a very profitable drug to sell, but with fentanyl, it's even higher. So, of course, you know, dealers aren't looking. They have no preference for the material that they're doing.

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There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is our city. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100, and the Files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. It's really scary and really concerning to talk to these guys and have them kind of say stuff like that. And you know that they're the ones seeing the effect that it's having and obviously

it's going to trickle out from that and then we're going to start finding out about it. But they're all really, really scared about the potential for what's coming with fentanyl. And yeah, it's not, it's not reassuring. I'll say that. It's not a happy story. No. No. It's, I mean, this is not brand new news, but in the last two or three years, I mean, entire

swathes of like the Pacific Coast, rural regions of Mexico, they've just been emptying of people. And a lot of them are from indigenous communities, like farming communities, because they were, they were growing poppy for the cartels. And now that the cartels are making synthetics, they don't need any of this. agriculture to make their stuff anymore and their entire villages towns in mexico that are just emptying of all their young people trying to find work in the cities just because the heroin industry i think i saw some stat that heroin sorry not heroin farmers but opium

poppy farmers are getting less than a tenth of the price for their resin from the cartels as they first were so and that's just like in a couple of years so that their industry's fallen off a cliff and this is also going to have massive repercussions in Mexico. So it's screwing up communities all over the world. And this stuff is terrifying, to be honest. Like, the more that you learn, it's incredible that the US government doesn't place it higher on its list of priorities, to be honest, because it's killing so many people. But it is, I was surprised as well, because I expected a few people to be a lot more, I don't know, not for not liberal, but for one of a better word, like more doveish on this. and not want to crack down on China as the source and look to harm reduction and,

you know, community responses to this drug epidemic, which are important, you know, you need, you need needle center in exchanges, you need, what's it,

that stuff called Naxalone, the stuff that stops you overdosing. Yeah, Naxalone is pretty, no, that's, that's, that's,

that's, how am I blanking on that right now? Naxalone is, is a drug that you can take, that that like kills the high of fentanyl. Like you can't get high off it when you're on Axelon.

So there's, I think they're similar. There's, no, maybe it is Naxilon. Oh, fuck, what's it called? Um, but they, Andrew, Andrew,

and that clinic swear by, um, swear by, uh, no, it is not, you're right. It's, and Narkin is what people say

that spray. Naxalone, I think is the, no term for it. Yeah. But there is a, um, there is a,

fuck, I forget the Naxalone shot that, that people take and you get it once a month and now Trexone. That's what it is. You get, there's some controversy over it, but these guys who work at the clinic and the people who run it swear by it.

You get a shot, I think, once a month and what it does is you can't get high off fentanyl anymore. So it's not like Suboxone where you've got a line up every day or anything like that. It really helps people get clean. And they swear by it. Like I said, it's controversial. There have been some negative thoughts about it too,

but it seems to be working, at least from the people that I saw. And I think, oh yeah, Andrew was telling us, I just found the quotes he was giving me that he's seen an increase of fentanyl use from 75, like it's increased 75 to 95% in the last three years. Jeez, that is. Yeah.

Yeah. And he said, it's like standing at the ocean, watching the water going out and knowing that a tidal wave is coming and you're going to have to try to stop it. It's scary, man. Yeah, it is scary. Yeah, he gave you some. incredible quotes actually. I was reading through your notes for that. But these community

responses are really important. I mean, they're saving lives 100% saving lives. But I spoke to Van der Felferb-Brown of the Brookings Institute, long-time expert on crime and drugs, and we've used tons of her research in many of our episodes before. And she was saying, well, yeah, I mean, harm reduction is an important side of this, but it's not, the answer. Like, you do actually need a pretty hard political response to this. If you look at places that are getting really bad affected,

Vancouver's got a really deep and successful harm reduction program. So is the Netherlands where this stuff is starting to creep into prominent use. And they're still struggling and they're getting deaths. So that is not the way

to stop this drug. It's a supply issue. It's not necessarily a demand issue. For fentanyl, I mean, it comes from the opioid crisis, obviously, but you do need to find a way to stick a rod up the government in Beijing to make a difference to this. And it was kind of interesting to me. I expected it to be really, really politically divided people's ideas on how to respond to it. But I was speaking to John Waters, who was in the George W. Bush administration, like super crazy far to the right of hawkishness. And he was talking about bombing cartel facilities in Mexico.

which I don't think is going to happen anytime soon. That seems a little terror organizations. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, he was in agreement with those of my, the contacts I spoke to for the story, who I'd expect to be way, way to the left of that argument. And they were all saying, look, this is not overblown in the media. This is a Chinese problem. I went out of China.

And it's Chinese companies that are irresponsibly pushing this stuff into the market. You have to find a way to lean on. on China, so it stops doing this. The problem is that China and US aren't really getting on that well at the moment. So finding a way to convince Beijing to do something decisive is going to be really, really tough. And yeah, I don't see it happening any time particularly soon, but, you know, it could be a way that we come out of this huge trade war and start finding diplomatic solutions. but who knows, diplomatic solutions are been on the ground all over the world at the moment. So, yeah, I wouldn't hold your breath.

I actually know exactly what to do, but I think we're going to end the episode here. Save it, yeah. You can hear more. Patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast for bonus episodes, scripts, all sorts of stuff we put up there, Q&As, everything like that. And, yeah, we all still have the merch on Underworldpod.com slash merch. And I think that that's it. Sean, anything to add? Enjoy your life, guys.

Not everything's as doom and gloomers we're talking about here, but it's certainly food for full. We'll have some pretty crazy stories to come in the next few weeks, maybe not all as dark as this one, but it's an important story. Word. All right. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your...

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