Fentanyl's Surge from China To Mexico to St Louis
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November 2018.

Gan Zhanbing 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's started new ones, just really diversifying.

Back in the day, Gan, 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, of all places, Guadalajara, Mexico, where he opened a seafood export business. And a little side note on that, I kind of feel like this is the third or fourth time that we've covered a dude in 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, Gan'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 we'll 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 in Manhattan.

The business person then uses their Chinese bank account to send the equivalent in yuan to Gan's Chinese bank account. And Gan, he usually takes a commission of about 5% for his troubles. Lim receives a smaller loan 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 pesos. Again, nothing comes into contact with U.S. banks, and Chinese authorities, they're unlikely to flag what happens to look like just a simple transfer between two domestic banks, between two businessmen, except for one big problem.

Ghan'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, Ghan 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, how's 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 new world podcast. We're putting up mini 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 and a there right now. 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, a big piece in Rolling Stone on, uh,

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. Yeah. I mean, I'll always be taking questions on how to put a joke together as well. Um, I think a lot of people want to know how to do that, but yeah, we, we published this story as we're recording this, I think like just a few hours ago, less than a day. And, uh, whenever the wires is like Chinese specific magazines, really cool run by former New York times editors. And, uh,

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 Walmart's in Oklahoma and the diabetic section is bigger than most supermarkets. Take it easy. Take it easy, but I'm just stating facts. But, uh,

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 Gan Jianbing 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,

said that there are several thousand people who are Chinese nationals in sort of Mexico, Canada and the US working these Hawala type mirror transaction schemes to get money into China and then back again to the cartels. And really the DOJ doesn't know exactly how many people are doing it. And it's really, really difficult.

kind of putting a fire beneath the cartels and 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 to 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 US right now, right? Yeah.

And it's kind of like, why is that the case? Are we going to see it hit places like where heroin's huge, like Russia, the UK, Scotland, places like that?

And then there's that big question. I don't know if we answer that or you can answer that. I don't know if anyone can answer that. It's 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, we're going to answer that question at patreon.com slash the underworld podcast because we have the answers. Beautiful.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've got every single answer, um, to this crisis that's killing what? 75,000 Americans a year at the moment. This is unbelievable. Um, I think the, the drug overdose was, was, it was over a hundred thousand Americans died this year. And I think, you know, uh,

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 yeah,

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 history.

hard history for the Chinese that is really baked into the communist parties and manifest those in history. Um, they call it the century of humiliation and it's a large part of what Xi Jinping, the current leader of China, a sort of like made a pillar of China's resurgence in the world. So, you know, that stuff is, that stuff is facts. Um,

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 laughable. So yeah, it's a growing problem. But

I mean, as far back as 2008, they were, they were even dishing out tax breaks for pharma industry, um, factories that were pushing out fentanyl, which obviously is used in medical procedures. Like I think it's a hundred times more powerful than morphine. Uh,

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? Yeah.

So pre then there was obviously this problem. You've been out in the streets of St. Louis and Philadelphia, like following dealers. Ezo is the guy you, you did a, 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, yeah,

It started emerging. I remember talking to this guy, the deal 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 Izo, 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?

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 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 it was developed in the 1960s, but it was like so, so powerful even back then. I think this went in the story that we just did as well, that it took I think even in the mid 90s, the U.S. 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

I think it gets, it gets exaggerated a lot of times by police and stuff as well. But people do die from, 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,

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, 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, this dealer, he's actually in the, uh, in the piece that I did for, um, uh,

For Channel 4, for Our Poor World, they only include a little bit of it. But, you know, fentanyl is deadly in tiny amounts. So when these street dealers are selling fentanyl in pills, usually, it's been cut to shit. Like a tiny percentage of what the person is getting is fentanyl. And the rest is totally, totally cut up. And 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 this is a big supply chain. 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. 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, 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, I was like, Oh, 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. Cause 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, the guys that are making this stuff very much are chemical experts. And that's one of the reasons 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're 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...

These are basically chemical compounds that are pretty easy just to tweak one thing here or there. You can take a compound that, or you can take a, you know, like an atom of oxygen out here and stick something else in. I'm clearly showing how good I am at chemistry. But you can, 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 unfortunately,

Up until 2019, the crazy thing was that it was just this crazy game of whack-a-mole, 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 Fentanyl 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 mom and pop pill presses that I saw out in the Golden Triangle. Yeah.

that were a very small part of this gigantic meth industry, you know, these billion-dollar labs and so forth. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to ask what the deal was with that, 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 pseudo, 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...

triad groups 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 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 because this is like

I mean, bear in mind that China is still thinking of itself as a country coming into its own power, right? So the chemical industry is a big part of this. It forms a lot of the five-year economic plans going back to the times of Mao. And now I think it's the biggest chemical industry in the world, just ahead 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.

Then going into these like rebel groups and ethnic army militias and, you know, you kind of couldn't saw successors out in the middle of the bivouac to the jungle in like Burma. And that's where you get your say, she lops and $17 billion syndicates and stuff like this. So, and another similarity with that is that throughout all of this, and I spoke to John Whalen, DA 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 decades

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 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

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 individuals

international shipments with the USPS and there was other stuff with Customs and Border Patrol where they didn't have the dogs and they didn't have the technology to check and sniff out all of these drugs. So people were just ordering fentanyl on the web and 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 anymore.

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, 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?

You're 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, wait.

They actually went over there and showed them how to do it. In some cases, yeah. And this is happening more now. So this gets to the what next part of this story as well. Because now people are worried. Now the cartels have got enough know-how and technology that they can pretty much make this 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. Yeah.

um and and um 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 expensive like deadly drugs yeah yeah um 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, uh,

the way that the money stuff was set up, right? Robert, right? Yeah. Robert for Humwik. He's a writer. He's working on a book about organized crime groups in China. Uh, so he was, he got passed on to me while one of our listeners, uh, 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,

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 gray area, always open for opportunity while constantly vulnerable to blackmail and prosecution. So I

I mean, we've looked at, I mean, you've done loads of stuff on Chinatown. This, this kind of right 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.

uh, in the, in the, in, you know, legal systems, but who, I, you know, I, I couldn't tell you, but, uh, yeah, I mean, for any, any group that came over at 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 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, for robberies, extortion and things like that. Cause 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, uh,

It's interesting to see how that has sort of been parlayed 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 who listened to the show that...

I did with Noah Hurwitz a while back as well. He was writing about El 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 Quimones. Yeah, you're right. They were growing. They came over and there were Chinese migrants who were growing opium poppies, I think for their own use.

in the, uh, or maybe to sell as well in, in like the thirties, maybe the twenties, thirties, yeah, twenties and thirties. And, um,

Because, 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 just took over the opium fields and the opium trade.

And that's how the heroin industry sort of took off in Mexico. 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 history.

kind of like black box banking system. I mean, it's just like perfect, uh, recipe for, for working together on illicit industries. Um, and yeah, then you get to Ganjin bang or, uh, Gan Chang Bing, sorry, Gary, uh,

who was picked up in May, 2018, as you said, and he essentially came out from Wenjiao, which is a city in the, on the Eastern 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, uh, who goes by Michelle. Um, so, uh,

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 scallops and jellyfish, he's like, bring it on, man. 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 Mencho's boys being one of them, that he mentions actually in wiretaps in Mexico.

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 he,

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, 10 grand a pop heat sealed. Uh, 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 and

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 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. The pretty even for.

I don't know, even for government's things, which are usually pretty florid when you're reading through the stuff because they're trying to 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 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,

And they start thinking that Gann 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 Gann,

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, that's like something you could have got from the room, but, um, yeah, it sounds like they're internalizing the, they've been hanging out with the cartel guys a little bit too much and going from, uh, you know, he's this man to, to thug life real quick. Oh, no. And all of the, all of the, uh, drug bosses in Guadalajara and like in major cities in the U S are called like Christian Louis fit on AMG. And then one of them is called who whole shoe. Cause I, I guess he didn't get the message. Um,

but yeah, it's like a really interesting thing. I mean, Gans definitely guilty of this. Like he keeps mentioning the drug bosses by name. He's, 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, pounced on the fact that they've got bank accounts that no one could even look into. Uh,

uh, 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 U S, um,

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, yeah,

US officials aren't really even sure how to deal with India if it starts pushing out fentanyl. I mean, 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. And 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, that's an extent to which the Mexicans can make this stuff in the Chinese. We'll 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, same stuff. And they're never going to get banned. And then the Chinese can just send that over and,

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, where 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 earlier.

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, is everywhere. And then, uh,

St. Louis, I, I, we, in January, I had done this doc from reporter world where we focused on, on the issue of fentanyl there. And we spent a lot of time in, um, in, in a clinic, uh, ARCA, I think assisted recovery centers of America. And they, um, 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, with vets that are going through something similar. And he handles an outpatient clinic as well, where guys live in, 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.

Um, and it's being found in uppers, right? And that has made a huge comeback apparently. And there's fentanyl in that too. Like they have situations where people are, are ODing off that. And then there's that story. Uh, 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 substituted with it. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it's kind of what we were talking about, right? Like you have some situations when you have cross-contamination, right? Stuff's being bagged up in the same thing or whatever, and you have...

You know, people ODing or dying, seeing these stories in nightclubs, kids doing coke, ketamine, whatever it is, MDMA, and not testing it. Always, 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, definitely.

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 different things. But according to Andrew, who, 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 real, it's harder to get off fentanyl according to Andrew. And he's someone that I, that I trust completely with, 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, they're not trying to sell heroin or trying to sell crack. It is just fentanyl all the time. Cause 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, it's even higher. So of course, you know, dealers aren't looking at their, they have no preference for, for the material that they're doing. It's also really easy to get. So,

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 reassuring, I'll say that. It's not a happy story, no.

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,

And there are 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 copy farmers are getting less than a 10th 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 has 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. Um, and this stuff is terrifying to be honest, like more that you learn, it's incredible that, uh,

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 liberal, but for want of a better word, more dovish on this and not want to crack down on China as the source and look to harm reduction and community responses to this drug epidemic, which are important. You need...

You need needle center exchanges. You need, what's it, that stuff called Naxalone, the stuff that stops you overdosing. Yeah, Naxalone is pretty, no, no, that's not Naxalone. That's, how am I blanking on that right now? Naxalone is a drug.

that you can take, uh, that, that like kills the, uh, the high fentanyl. Like you can't get high off it when you're on Axalon stuff. So there's, um, I think they're similar. There's, no, maybe it is an Axalon. 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. Narcan is what people say, the spray. Naxolone, I think, is the generic term for it. But there is a... Fuck, I forget the Naxolone shot that people take, and you get it once a month. Now, Trexone, that's what it is. Right.

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 Fenton anymore. So it's not like Suboxone where you've got to 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. He's nuts. Yeah. Yeah. And here's what he said. It's like, 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, he gave you some incredible quotes. Actually, I was reading through your notes for that. Um, but yeah,

These community responses are really important. I mean, they're saving lives, 100% saving lives. But I spoke to Vanda Feldbad-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,

Uh, if you look at places that are getting really bad effect, badly affected, Vancouver has got a really deep, uh, and successful harm reduction program. So is the Netherlands where this stuff is starting to creep into, to 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, uh, for fentanyl. I mean, it comes from the opioid crisis, obviously, but, uh,

you do need to find a way to stick a rod up the government in Beijing to make a difference to this. And that was, 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, a little terror organizations. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, he was in agreement with those of those of my, the contacts I spoke to for the story, uh,

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, this is a Chinese problem. I went out of China and it's Chinese companies that irresponsibly pushing this stuff into the market. You have to find a way to lean on China. So it stops doing this. Uh, the problem is that China and us aren't really getting on that well at the moment. So, uh,

finding a way to convince beijing to do something uh decisive is going to be really really tough and uh yeah i don't see it happening anytime particularly soon but you know it could be 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 in on the ground all over the world at the moment so uh

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. We'll save it, yeah. You can hear more at 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 also have the merch on underworldpod.com slash merch. And I think that's it, Sean. Anything to add?

Enjoy your life, guys. Not everything is as doom and gloom as we're talking about here, but it's certainly food for thought. 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. See you. See you.