The Chinese Mafia Takeover of America's Weed Industry
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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. November 20th, 2022, in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. Wu Chen is pissed. He's given $300,000 to invest in a weed grow-up run by a Chinese criminal syndicate, and he wants his money back. He drives himself over to the farm, where all the plants are, and bursts into the storage space.

The first thing he does is shoot the boss man in the knee. The boss's name is also Chen, and he himself is an ex-con and a gangster by all accounts. He's been in the weed game for years, starting off in California in the late 2010s, running secret illegal grow-ops in suburban houses, a gigantic problem in Cali that's ballooned since the penalty for running an illegal op changed to a slap on the wrist in 2016.

His operation got shut down in Cali. But around the time COVID hit, the massive Chinese syndicates that were starting to replace the cartels as the biggest weed growers in America cast their eyes on Oklahoma. The state had just legalized growing weed, with licenses costing only $3,000. And it was wide open and way less regulated than California. Not to mention law enforcement there, especially in the country areas, didn't have close to the resources needed to really do anything about it.

Millions and millions of dollars poured in from investors in China, many of them gangsters. A new gold rush was on. And to ensure those investors have a nice profit margin, some of those ops started using something close to slave labor, with Chinese immigrants trafficked over the Mexican border after paying traffickers hefty fees, or even some who saw deceptive ad postings in Chinese sites and immigrant hubs like Flush and Queens or New York's Chinatown and thought they would be making some serious money.

And besides that, many of the ops steal electricity and water, don't pay taxes, and use banned pesticides shipped in from overseas. Chen, the boss man, saw dollar signs and moved to Oklahoma to set up shop in 2020. Wu, however, the investor now running up in the grow house with a gun, he must not have been seeing dollar signs. After he shoots Wu in the leg, he tells the others there if he doesn't get his money back in 30 minutes, he's going to kill everyone.

Chen, though, is dying on the ground. He tells Wu to finish him off. Wu shoots him twice in the chest, and at that moment, two of the other employees rush him. Wu opens up with a gun and kills them both, then kills a third. When police finally arrive, responding to reports of a hostage situation, it's a bloodbath. Four dead, and Wu has already fled and is now a fugitive, wanted for a quadruple murder.

The grow house is finished, but it's only one of literally thousands of Chinese mafia or triad-owned grows in Oklahoma. In fact, there's thousands and thousands all over America, from California to Maine, New Mexico to Oklahoma, bringing in tens of billions of dollars, and in many cases, helping launder money for the Sinaloa cartel. It sounds insane, I know, but it's real. And the craziest thing out of all of this

Some high officials in the Chinese Communist Party are likely the ones at the top of the pyramid. Writes ProPublica in a massive investigation published a few years ago, quote, They had come to America and joined a wave of new players rushing into the nation's billion dollar marijuana boom. Chinese mobsters who roam from state to state, harvesting drugs and cash and overwhelming law enforcement with their resources and elusiveness. Wu, the fugitive, headed for Florida, possibly thinking of fleeing to Cuba.

he's caught a few days later in miami beach he tries to fight being sent back to oklahoma telling the court that his life is in danger quote if i go back to oklahoma i'll be killed in prison or jail he says through an interpreter i'm afraid i will be killed because these people are mafiosos this is the underworld podcast

Welcome back to the audio-visual experience known as The Underworld Podcast. We are your hosts, myself, Danny Gold, and my esteemed colleague, Sean Williams, who has become a podcast heartthrob.

We have traveled the world reporting on people who aren't very nice and do a lot of crime. And now we make this show for you, for your entertainment. As always, thanks to our friends at Spotify for letting us use their studios and to our advertisers who allow us to keep making the show. And as always, you can find bonus episodes and ad-free episodes over at patreon.com slash the underworld podcast or sign up right here on Spotify or iTunes. And you can buy our t-shirts, uh,

Solid, right? T-shirts? Yeah, get up just a little more. Just a little more. You've got to show off the merch. Yeah, there we go. Yeah.

There's t-shirts, hoodies, things of that nature at underworldpod.com. You know, don't Instagram your crimes, all that sort of stuff. Or you can email us at theunderworldpodcast at gmail.com. Please do so if you can put us in contact with whoever makes the radio stations at Grand Theft Auto. Although someone, a fan already has, so hopefully that will work out. Oh, okay.

Did they? Okay. That was for a fan. That's really cool. I don't know whether we should do our own shows. Can you imagine how good a podcast would be on that guy that Danny Dyer plays in GTA? I don't know. That would be so cool. Like about their characters? That'd work, dude. That'd be a great advertising campaign. Just throwing it out there. I'm probably just red-faced still from you describing me as a heartthrob.

It's not me. It's the fans. It's the fans, dude. It's the fans. We'll publish that picture of me going for a head of a football that will disabuse somebody. On the Patreon. Every other comment is about how you don't look like they thought. Maybe you sound like you're not handsome, but they're impressed. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Do I sound like a

or something. God knows what this voice may be. I don't know. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I'm pretty chuffed that you're mentioning Oklahoma. It's been a while since I've had Oki mentioned on the show, although the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma is pretty much like anywhere from Guymon to Myanmar. So, uh,

I don't know. I'm going to need some more specifics, but maybe we'll get there further down the show. This is nuts, though. You've been talking about this one for a while, right? It's a crazy story. First, though, so you guys know it takes a lot of effort to do all the research and reporting and write these scripts every week, and I generally just have terrible focus. I've tried everything to be more productive, and that's where our sponsor, Magic Mind, these guys, if you've ever seen them, come in. This stuff, it actually works. It

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That's magicmind.com slash underworld MF or use the code underworld 60 on the main page. Now there's actually been a whole lot of good reporting on this topic. This isn't one of those stories that hasn't been reported at all, though. I still kind of feel like somehow it's under the radar, right? Um, but it's not one of those things where it's like, well,

Why isn't mainstream media taught? You know, NBC News did two half hour docs on it. ProPublica did a huge investigation. Even the Daily Caller has been all over it. And of course, local outlets in Oklahoma and California and Maine, New Mexico, even congressmen and senators have been talking about it. But somehow it still kind of feels like it still shocks me. I don't know. Did you feel the same way?

Yeah. Yeah. When you were telling us about this, what, like a month ago or so, it was like pretty shocking. Yeah. Maybe because it's just insane. Like you're telling me the Chinese triads in affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party have come to dominate the American weed market. You know what? What can't they do? Taking over our industries. I was certainly skeptical before I started going deep and now I am not. Yeah. I mean, like China and weed in North America is a fascinating backstory, right? We did a bunch of this with the story about the Sinaloa cartel and how...

They kind of hijacked the Chinese migrants there. That was heroin, though. Oh, that was heroin, wasn't it? That was heroin in like the 30s and 40s, you know, or 20s even. Yeah. That's how it got to that area. But no, I haven't looked into the we thing. I think it's a relatively new phenomenon.

But, um, yeah, we did, um, we did a bunch of stuff on fentanyl, but you never hear about this at all. I mean, like out here, you would not hear a word. And a few years ago, I spoke to a guy who was a fan of the show who was telling me how crazy the grow up situation was in California, how out of control it had gotten because of legalization. And I think he was talking about like the violence that went along with it.

But if I remember correctly, he was talking about Northern California, and I believe he was operating in the Bay Area. And according to him, the recreational weed was legalized in 2016. The feds completely backed off from dealing with it, and the state penalties for even massive operations became a slap on the wrist. So you had a lot of major criminal elements that seeing it as wide open and moving in, it wasn't just legal.

You know, not just with grow ups, but like violent robberies and takeovers, stick up crews, that sort of thing. I think we, you know, think of it as like the good old boys in Humboldt County, but it certainly was not that around that time. I forget exactly where his warehouse is, but he was saying, you know, they had guys with like assault rifles standing guard because there were so many robbery crews, which makes me think probably Oakland, but definitely sounds like Oakland. Yeah.

He also said there was this weird gray area that a lot of legal ops are operating in where they grew stuff legally to sell legally, but they also had product. They were illegally moving to the black market.

And the girl ops weren't, like I said, good old fashioned Humboldt County rebel types. It was cartels and then more and more Chinese organized crime. And he was the first person to really tell me about that. I think it must have been 2021. He wanted me to come out there and kind of take a look at it, which I wanted to do. And then he just disappeared. We like talked on the phone forever. So hopefully he's still alive. And if he hears this, we'll we'll hang out, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. He just made it seem very chaotic and anarchic with all that. And hopefully he's all right right now. So fast forward a bit. This has obviously been a huge, like a gigantic growing issue. The Chinese ops have popped up in something close to two dozen states.

Another listener reached out. He's based in Oklahoma and in the industry. And he was entirely focused on telling me how the Chinese triad groups had just completely taken it over and how crazy it was getting. They had just come to completely dominate the market. Farms were getting raided every day. Some with a hundred thousand plants. Another had 950,000 plants recently, which I think is a $50 million a year operation. And he was just saying like they dominate the market, something like 80% of the grows there, um,

were Chinese mafia run. And a lot of them used, I guess what I would call indentured servitude to sort of slave labor of Chinese immigrants. You know, they were just causing chaos and just driving the market down completely. They just crushed the local growers. A few years ago, he said he was getting about 2,800, 3,000 for a pound. And now it's down to five to 800. That's

That's nuts. How is this not bigger news? I also like the fact that other people get ghosted on hinge dates and you get ghosted by Chinese sort of organized criminal. He's not the first. He's not the first. He wasn't Chinese. He was just dealing with it, but he's not the first one. Dude, another guy in the... Fuck, what's that guy's name? A nitrous guy got ghosted in me too. It's not very nice to reach out and be like, hey, dude, I want to... And stories I know about and then just like lean me on a string and then disappear. It hurts my feelings, Sean. Yeah.

It's a constant battle being a journalist, isn't it? It's just one day after the next on the psychiatrist chair. Anyway, he said the Chinese triads, they're working with everybody. Almost everybody that he knows that's on any sort of real scale is working with them in one way or another. Quote, what they've done in Oklahoma is probably one of the biggest grabs of value nationwide because he's talking about how they're also buying tons of land and properties and whatnot.

And he mentioned one of the big newest revelations, that many of these crews are connected to the Chinese Communist Party, or at the very least, CCP officials. Now look, I'm not like eyes wide shut when it comes to nefarious CCP stuff involving America. Like we've talked about the high-level situation involving fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, and why exactly there's not really any fentanyl in European countries with major heroin problems. But there's a ton in the US, and obviously TikTok is 100% an op.

So there's all sorts of shady stuff. With this though, like I wasn't entirely convinced at first. It sounds ridiculous.

But there's a lot of stuff that points to it being 100% fact. Does that mean it's like, you know, state level directed from the highest officials? No. But corruption is so endemic there with officials being intertwined with the triads. It certainly seems like it could be so, but we're going to get to that later on in the episode. Yeah, there's always like a sliding scale when it comes to US officials, especially pointing the finger at the CCP, right? You can say, like news outlets are always hedging saying like they could have links and stuff like this with the CCP. But then,

I mean, the Chinese Communist Party is definitely involved in all this high-level cybercrime, scam centers, fentanyl. It's really interesting because I don't think a lot of people recognize, because I guess we're sold how China is this perfect totalitarian state, that it's super corrupt as well, to the point where...

The army, they can't do anything with the army because the army is so corrupt. They're just like taking all the money and stuff like this. So yeah, I didn't know they're into the weed game though. This is like super fascinating. I mean, they're into everything, man. Where do you think like all the peptides coming into the US are coming from? And it's, that's a lot. I mean, we should look into that. I don't know if it's criminal, but it's definitely-

That'll be for another day, but okay. Yeah, we're actually I'm actually doing a show on on Scottish organized crime for the next one that we're gonna do for this and there's a bunch of Like nittazines and benzos and stuff like that coming in. I think that's coming from China as well. So it's getting there It's crazy, dude, but let's backtrack to

summer or just 2016 in general right there's no ig reels no tiktoks one dance is making summer nights get a little steamy sean's wearing all leather and just kind of like writhing around the floor of a basement in berlin

I think I was still, I might have still been advised for some of the year. And the Communist Republic of California has just passed Prop 64, which legalizes recreational weed and seriously decreases the penalty for growing it. But I actually like California. I just think it's funny to call it that. Like it's a good joke. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it. Now, the plan is for them to regulate weed and tax it and do everything, you know, efficiently, above board. It's going to clean up the industry. Right.

But again, it's California, so does that happen, Sean? No. No, it does not.

It's supposed to have all these like positive consequences. Obviously, less poor people being locked up is a good thing for, you know, possession. The creation of this new taxable market was going to bring in billions, which it has somewhat. All these noble intentions. But as the LA Times says, quote, California failed to address the reality that decriminalizing a vast and highly profitable legal industry would open the door to a global pool of organized criminals and opportunists.

For those sidestepping taxes and regulation, the reduced criminal penalties included in Proposition 64 lower the cost and risk of doing business. So what happens? You have all sorts of organized criminal groups or organized crime groups, OCGs, and criminal syndicates getting involved. And it used to be the big thing was, you know, parkland, farmland, public land used by the cartels.

But that shifted to this new residential stuff, which is crazy. And then in the last five years, Chinese organized crime has completely taken over and eclipsed the cartels even.

Yeah, I remember it might have even been Vice, actually, but I remember a doco from way back on how kind of loopy and loophole-y the laws were between state and federal in the U.S. And there's like guys could sell weed in Colorado, but they couldn't cash it or bank it there. So they were traveling across. What was it? They're traveling across state lines in like regular sedans with shotguns poking out the vehicles like they're in Mad Max or something. Is that still happening now? Well, the banking is a big issue.

You know, because you can't, I think the banks are still staying away from it. I'm not entirely sure. I haven't looked into like the nitty gritty details in a while, but banking is a huge issue. And a lot of this ends up being a lot of cash. And that's why you also see a lot of robberies, you know, like these places get hit. Yeah.

I don't know. There's not a lot of foresight there. It's been mismanaged and you have the differentiation between state law and federal law. So it's just been mismanaged on a level that I don't think there were bad intentions. I just think it's like anything else. I think there were good intentions. I think things have just kind of...

you know, unintended consequences that lead to, which is what happens a lot with good intentions with stuff like this. But hopefully it gets fixed soon. Also, because I invested in a weed ETF like five years ago. Oh, did you? It's down close to 95%. So MSOS, get it together, guy. Cost me a lot of money. And I haven't made it back. Still holding it until it goes to zero.

Anyway, I should do an investment advice podcast as well. Just do the opposite of what I say. You'll all get rich. But yes, I know we think of it as not a big deal anymore. But I mean, there's two dispensaries within like five blocks of my apartment. But the weed market is still 75% illegal. And there's big money to be made, like tens of billions of dollars. And this residential thing,

which is which is happening in cali instead of these massive outdoor grows these shady types start buying up suburban houses and then completely transforming them into massive indoor grows where every inch is used to grow weed they're called high yield covert indoor grows and they're happening in like suburban bedroom communities in california antioch which has just become something about like a hub or has become something of a hub years ago had 60 grow houses busted up in like 1.5 year period i think it's a town of a hundred thousand people and there's

And there's definitely hundreds more. I mean, there are so many grow houses started there that it's boosted the cost of housing. Man, that's a crazy, crazy way to gentrify a neighborhood.

Yeah, it's pretty wild, dude. These are straight up residential houses. Like, it could be your neighbor. And of those 60 grow houses, only two people were charged and they were given misdemeanors. And the authorities say it's, you know, the whole thing is super organized and it bears the hallmarks of organized crime with communication between the top players. Right, CNN, quote,

Illegal operators ignore the rules and fees of California's highly regulated system under which marijuana can be legally produced and sold. They also skirt taxes and can thus undercut the prices of the legal market, which in California is struggling, in part because of the surplus flows from the black market.

All the while, the rogue entrepreneurs enjoy the protection of doing business in a state where a voter-approved legalization law has a clause that effectively eliminates felony prosecutions when it comes to marijuana. And it also happens more and more in rural areas. A county sheriff told Fox News, quote, we've seen just tremendous explosion of Chinese folks coming in and buying land and then growing illegal marijuana.

The scale that we're talking, I mean, we're talking thousands of different illegal grows within our community. And it's just perpetuated a lot of violence.

And like we said, the feds, they've backed off considerably since 2016 because state law. So you have these local law enforcement kind of sheriffs and stuff, and they're just completely outmatched and overwhelmed. Though, as we'll talk about the end of the episode, things might be changing in the last few months. And another big issue is they use lots of gnarly pesticide stuff with stuff that's banned in the U.S. Cops are finding like bags with Chinese letters and skulls and crossbones and all that's going into the weed.

and into the environment in California, into the water supply, just really toxic stuff. Banned in the US, which is saying a lot. It's often used for fumigating the houses, you know, and it's just like these pesticides are getting into the weed supply. And like first, you know, first shady Chinese gangsters ruined Coke and Molly with fentanyl. And just now this, Chinese organized crime is ruining all of our drugs, Sean. Get down a t-shirt. I mean, I used to buy...

Is methadrone bath salts?

uh i think it might be it's like mcat or meow meow people called it but it was just like if you couldn't afford everything else then the guy would show up and he would have that and it was disgusting you know calling you a bath salts guy would be like a joke that i make about like old sean not a thing that i expected to be reality and yeah yeah

And look at you now. The thing that isn't true is the leather. I was wearing like exactly the same clothes. Yeah, but you, you were on the floor of basements. You were on the floor of a basement, just not wearing leather. Yeah, I was, I just thought I was falling through them and I was in a K hole. But anyway, thanks. Thanks. Uh, thanks for bringing that up. Yeah. Mom and dad, I'm having a good life. The thought of the thing about California is it's, uh, it's expensive and it's crowded and compared to many other states that actually do have, they actually do have active law enforcement with some resources.

So even if you might be getting a slap on the wrist, you could still lose your product.

And it certainly sounds like the market there is and was getting quite crowded. So why not look elsewhere to other states that are more wide open that have also been deregulated with less law enforcement resources where you could go. And that's exactly what these syndicates have done over the last five, six, seven years. They're showing up with suitcases of cash, buying farms and houses in Oregon and Oklahoma and New Mexico and Maine and law enforcement there in Maine is aware of 270 different areas where

where there are Chinese grow houses worth around $4 billion. And you just know it's got to be more. That is an insane figure. $4 billion. It's real. Here's a quote from Fox News again. A federal official who asked not to be named said the Chinese operations have been highly sophisticated. Multi-layer operations are very hard and very hard to crack. Most of the labor is trafficked and they won't give us any meaningful information.

The person on the deed is a nobody, and the cases have little prosecutorial appeal. Going marijuana without a license is a misdemeanor and subject to a $500 fine. The owners flip the house and move on. Yeah, in some cases, they make money selling the houses afterwards, which is also crazy. I think he was actually talking about Cali there, but you know, you get it.

There was a big Wall Street Journal article in 2023 looking at how these ops were popping up in small towns. And they looked at a chicken farm in Maine, a town of 3,000 people that all of a sudden has this huge electricity bill, which is a telltale sign. A construction company had registered it in Massachusetts, had bought it, and then the electricity bill went from $600 to $7,000 a month.

And there was no big construction equipment moving in. Neighbors complain. The local sheriff raids it and finds 3,400 plants and 111 pounds of processed weed. And they charge two Chinese nationals and two naturalized citizens for illegal cultivation and trafficking. Says the WSJ, quote, according to court documents, one of the defendants in the case told police that from exit 130 to exit 244 on I-95, a stretch of more than 100 miles, all the Chinese people are growing marijuana.

I should actually point out too here at this point, you know, one of the guys that I was speaking with who is in Oklahoma said that there are like Chinese investors that are doing stuff above board that are not gangsters that are, you know, doing it legally and are not, you know, trafficking in labor and cutting tax and doing that sort of stuff. So there are some legitimate ones of these, but there are a lot of them that are not legitimate and as we'll find out, super, super shady.

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In Maine, they've taken to calling it triad weed. And everyone talks about how you can see the managers spending thousands and thousands of dollars in cash at all the farming stores. The Maine Wire, which is a local paper that's done really good work on this, had a photo essay online of 100 different garop houses that they had identified and just like went around and shot photos of. Which again, amazing, amazing work here. And like we said earlier, these guys undercut the market completely. And a big reason why they can also do that is slave labor.

Take one worker who the WSJ interviewed. He had fled China because the government cracked down on an underground church he was a part of. He bribed some officials and pays off some smugglers, flies to South America, does that treacherous journey across the Darien Gap through South and Central America, across the border into Mexico. And he ends up, like many undocumented Chinese immigrants, working in a restaurant in New York City's Chinatown. Yeah, that does sound a pretty difficult journey, fair play to that guy. Yeah, definitely. He came to work, you know.

Then while he's there, he starts seeing ads for working on a farm, you know, making herbal medicine. I think it was in New Mexico with a $150 day rate. And that's common, these sort of false advertisements in Chinese neighborhoods in New York, you know, or in online sites for them like in Flushing in Queens or Sunset Park in Brooklyn. There's a lot going on in New York, actually. We'll get to that in a bit.

And the job offers could be for farming or gardening, things like that, things that make it seem like a normal job. So this guy makes his way to New Mexico, gets picked up by one of the managers at the airport, and then it's basically locked in. Forced to stay on the property, cold water bathroom, sleeping on floors, poor little food or little food, working 15-hour days. Some people not getting paid till the harvest is over or at all. They get beaten, they get harassed, and they're forbidden to leave, which is, you know,

Pretty, pretty, pretty bad, John, pretty bad. And he's one of the lucky ones because others are being human trafficked from China straight into the grow up farms and forced to work like indentured servants. You know, it's a typical sort of throwback human trafficker thing that you used to see with sweatshops and brothels, things like, you know, someone pays a trafficker tens of thousands of dollars. Or, I mean, they take out a loan from them to do it or guarantee that they'll pay it back.

you know, their promised work, and then they get to the states, they're forced to work in these really bad conditions to pay off that debt. And of course, they're paid below minimum wage. So yeah, essentially indentured servitude. Some traffickers are straight up selling these people to the farm growers themselves. Here's a quote from NPR on it.

The workers say they were trafficked to these farms, prevented from leaving, and never paid. They're part of a new pipeline of vulnerable Chinese migrants trying to escape China and who are now streaming into the U.S. And they're ending up at at least hundreds of Chinese-run marijuana farms that have popped up nationwide from California to Maine. I feel like all of this is leading to some crazy story where a Shen Yun dancer has ended up on a weed groin like New Mexico or Oklahoma. I don't know, man. I think they're doing well. They got the skills. You know, they can figure that out. They are.

They are absolute billionaires, I'm sure. And those at, you know, that advertising, they're doing all right. They don't need to traffic people in. They also, NPR tells a story of one worker who couldn't find work in China during the pandemic, then lost his house because the state bulldozed it for some, you know, other project. He got jailed for protesting it, then saw social media video about how you can come to the states and make a ton of cash, which again, is a lot of money.

Never trust any business plan or guru you've seen on social media. Do you think like Warren Buffett is out there making TikToks, like selling courses? He is not doing that, my guy. Do not be like this guy. Do not trust anyone selling courses online. So,

That guy gets in contact with an agent to help him get to America, flies to Turkey, then Ecuador, then the journey to Mexico, crosses the border into the States, and he ends up in Cali with the help of these agents he had paid $17,000 to. And he sees again an ad for farm work in New Mexico. And when he gets there, passports, phones are taken. He's forced to work 15-hour days. Same situation, not allowed to leave. ProPublica reports, quote,

Bosses threaten and beat workers, sexually assault them, steal their wages, confiscate their ideas, restrict their movements, and force them to work in dangerous heat with noxious chemicals and pesticides. Wrongdoing is rampant at many Chinese-owned farms, where immigrants are often so fearful of their employers and the authorities that they do not cooperate with investigations.

Yeah, this is nuts. I guess it's either head to Cali and some narco steals your wages or stay in China and the CCP steals your pensions. Am I right, fellow capitalist? But I mean, that's pretty much what it is. It's rough, rough either way. So he crosses in 2023, which saw 37,000 Chinese immigrants cross illegally, which was more than the last decade combined.

Which makes me think that despite the videos of like, you know, the drone shows, things might not be, might be not be doing so hot in the Chinese economy. You know, in some cases, like I mentioned, there are actually regular investors getting involved, like not organized crime. There's this guy, Irving Lin, who's in his 60s, serial entrepreneur. And this is from a publication called Searchlight, quote, this is what he, this is a story they did on him. Quote, we are making a fortune in Oklahoma and you can too. Lin, speaking in Mandarin, told me.

told a crowd of 30 potential investors gathered for a PowerPoint presentation at a Chinese cultural center on December 5th. The return on investment is as high as 1,200%, Lin explained eagerly.

Finance one greenhouse and you'll walk away with 300,000. Three greenhouses will make you a millionaire. The demand is huge and growing and so are the profits, he assured his audience, almost all of them Chinese immigrants. All you have to do is hand over the money and our team will take care of the rest. Which like, I would hand him the money at this point, dude. That's an insane return. Like I'm all about. Other than the fact he thinks three times 300 is a million. That's a bit of a...

No, 1200%. Yeah, I don't know. But he's giving PowerPoint presentations, dude, in conference rooms about investing in illegal gross, which is, I think, illegal. They could be grayer. But, you know, in that one, he was trying to sell them on grow houses in Oklahoma. He had been in big action in Mexico, but apparently New Mexico cracked down in the early 2020s and the investors there lost tens of millions in one project. And Lin himself

He was Taiwanese. He had been in the States since the 70s, started an IT company, super involved in the Chinese entrepreneur community. He also made bank on investing in mines in Southeast Asia. So probably a little shady there. Got involved in the weed boom in Cali in 2017. Then after Cali got oversaturated, he was in New Mexico, took a rare L there, and was trying to recruit investment to now head to Oklahoma.

So that article is from 2020, and what happens? A ton of people do head to Oklahoma to start grow apps, and that's where we get the cold open shooting from. It's kind of a neat callback to the Sooners of old, and now shabby Chinese PowerPoint guys doing illegal grows. It's

It's nuts. I'm going to ask a load of my Okie friends about this because I swear they must know about it. There must be so many of them. Oh, yeah. What do you mean a throwback? I don't know Sooner history. What's a throwback to the Sooners? Oh, the Sooners. They were the guys that... Someone's going to kill me for getting this wrong. But they were the guys that lined up. You know, when it was Indian territory, then they gave the land to white settlers and it was basically...

line up on the state border with your covered wagon, and then they would fire a gun, and you'd be like, okay, we're going to race off and get the best land we can. And some people went before the gun was fired, and they are called the Sooners because everyone's like, all right, yeah, you can just have the land, even though you jumped the gun. And that's why OU are called the Sooners. Oh, yeah, I knew they were called that. I did not know about that. There we go. I guess it's interesting, sort of. I know some stuff. Bar trivia sort of way. So... That's literally...

All of this stuff I know. Yeah. Oklahoma legalizes growing for medicinal purposes in 2018, and they make the license to run a grow house cheap, $3,000. And another stipulation is that the owner has to be local. And of course, you're not supposed to sell it across state lines. But within a few years, Oklahoma has 10,000 marijuana farms with a population of 4 million people. I think only 300,000 have medical marijuana cards. That is a lot of marijuana.

And California, with a population of 40 million and essentially the epicenter of the weed world in America, only has 2,500 registered farms, though I imagine a bunch more unregistered. And Sean, as our resident Oklahoma expert, what makes Oklahoma so appealing for this, besides the fact that no one cares about Oklahoma, there's not much going on there, it's super country, and the cops just don't have many resources?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head there. I mean, I guess you just throw in a bunch of like roughneck and native reservation communities where the rule of law is maybe a little more elastic than elsewhere in the country. I mean, you know, remember that story maybe 10, 15 years ago about

People had actually found the water white like blue meth from Breaking Bad that was in a grow or in a in a meth sort of lab in Oklahoma So they got pedigree when it comes to this stuff. Was that actually really pure method? Was it someone just using blue blue dye blue like food coloring? No, it was like super blue. It was super pure. Yeah that people couldn't sort of believe at the time But I'm sure half of my friends that worked on the oil fields probably took it and

Yeah, I mean, also, no disrespect to Oklahoma. We got some homies there. So we're just having a good time. Just making jokes, you know?

So everything is set up there for this massive marijuana boom. All sorts of criminal elements are getting involved. You know, you need a local owner. It's easy. You pay a guy 10K to serve as a straw man and put his name on the license. Can't move it legally across state lines. Who's going to stop you? You just put it in the back of a truck. You send it up the East Coast. Grows are sending millions in product up the East Coast in the back of trucks every single week where some of it magically turns into legal recreational weed that you can buy in the legal dispensaries.

So many triad grows are in operation. Chinese immigrants coming to work are getting picked up at the airport. Like it's a common sight, almost like, you know, um, in Ikea, like just picking people up to go work there and like work clothes and stuff like that.

Now, obviously, eventually the police and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics wise up. And in the last few years, especially in the wake of that quadruple murder from the cold open, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics has been rating the grow-ups like crazy. Something like 1,000 have been shut down from late 2020 to mid-2023, and 80 to 90% of them were run by Chinese organized crime. Though, they're making so much money, if one gets shut down, it doesn't matter too much because they have 10, 20 more.

And I think one of the guys in Oklahoma pointed out, too, that now ICE is getting heavily involved. So they're just really kicking down doors. All of it, by the way, is connected on a national level. New York is the center for it. It's for the money man and a lot of the organizing. It's where the gangsters come in from overseas to sort of set the stipulations. According to ProPublica, the DEA said in 2019, big triad bosses came to New York from China to have sit-downs with all the big-time local slash national players.

They basically laid things out to keep the peace between the players as New York City is where the command hub was both for organizing the weed industry and the money laundering that came with it. They quote a DEA guy, the discipline involved is incredible. How are we having thousands of workers moving to the country and among states? How are all these groups doing this without more conflict or violence? How do you ensure that all these mid-level managers get along with all this money, all this marijuana? The only way you can do it is with an organized crime apparatus. And I

And if you're trying to make the case that, you know, a lot of this is top-down organized from big-time players, international criminal syndicates, like, that's a pretty good point right there. Yeah, I mean, this is like, we've gone into it on a bunch of shows about Asian organized crime, but this is how it works there. There's little of the violence of Europe or Latin America. You actually have these summits that broker peace, board meetings, envoys, like, it's a completely different world out there. Is that the case, though? I mean, that's the case for, I guess, I would say Japanese organized crime, but for, you know,

you know, Cambodian, Thai, Chinese, Burmese. Like, is that really the case though? Cause they're pretty violent, dude. I mean, the episode we've done alone. I mean, if you look at the stuff about Sechi Lop and the syndicate out in the Golden Triangle, I mean, that guy was huge and he was, they weren't really, uh,

They weren't getting into like war. I mean, they had their own private army. So I was going to throw that one in there. Yeah. If you get your own private army, pretty, pretty solid. I mean, the stuff that you've done in the Pacific with all these Asian criminal syndicates, are they violent there?

No, not at all. Like, no. Because, I mean, they would stand out so far if they killed one person that that would be the end of it. So they've got to, like, operate in the shadows, really. Well, we did have, I mean, obviously at the turn of the century, the 20th century, 1800s into 1900s, you had extremely violent Chinatown or Chinese organized crime wars in America and Canada, too. And then you had periods of peace, I think, from the 30s to the 70s. And then it got violent again in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. We've covered all that. But, um...

Yeah, I guess they, you know, top-down situation here. They're really enforcing things. I think, you know, there has to be a level of violence for people to actually listen if you're doing that. But yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not good guys. No.

The real owners, the real investors are triads based in Southern China. Often the money men are in Beijing and we've done, I guess, a few episodes on the history of the triads, but they're basically Chinese version. China's version of the mafia. They evolved from secret societies started centuries ago to overthrow the, I think the Shang dynasty.

Qing Dynasty? Yeah. I wish I knew more about that. You did a full episode on them, but they morphed into massive criminal syndicates, often based in southern China, Hong Kong, and later Taiwan, and they're massive.

There are a number of different big organizations, but 14K is one of the most notorious when it comes to drugs and said to be involved heavy here. And Sean, you actually did an episode, I think, on 14K, right? Or some of those triad groups. Yeah, I've touched on a bunch. I mean, if people want you to know more about the dynasties of China, they should not name them like what the Song, the Shang, the Qing, the Ding. I don't know, like it's pretty hard to keep track. But yeah, I did. I did like.

I did a piece on Broken Tooth, who's one of the big guys in the 14Ks. He's big on the Golden Triangle drugs and the scam centers and crypto scams in Southeast Asia. But we both – it's weird that we both stumbled on the story of the Green Gang recently, right? I don't know which of us is going to do a show on them, but they're super interesting. Yeah, I got a book on them that I want to get through.

Yeah, early 20th century Shanghai. It's cool. Yeah, it is. It sounds like pretty wild stuff, the good old days. There's reports of some of these syndicates having over 400 grows, another shipping 20 million in product a week to the East Coast. Like money is being made. And what's happening to that money, right? It's all in cash. Well, there's a ton of it being laundered and there's connections to the Mexican cartels. And one thing that's important to note is that in 2015, 2016,

Chinese citizens transferred over a trillion dollars out of the country, and that is a huge flight of capital. So the Chinese government set the max amount of money allowed to be able to transfer out of the country at $50,000. And what to do if you're a wealthy Chinese citizen who wants to protect their money from the CCP?

Uh, real quick though, we've, we've, um, we've got the, the typical flying money scheme, Sean, I think you did an episode on that. Can you break that down into, into what it was? Cause then we have it being funneled through cash businesses, like restaurants, laundromats, all that sort of stuff.

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Yeah, we had a show maybe like a couple months ago about this. I did a story for The Wire as well, but it was called Fei Qian, Fine Money. It's basically like an informal Chinese Western union. It's been around for centuries, actually the first form of paper money. But it's thought to launder around $2 trillion a year now.

I just spoke about it on the Jordan Harbinger show, actually. It's crazy stuff. The money involved is out of this world, but I think you're going to get into how close in bed they are with the cartels. It's more and more, right? Yeah, yeah. Not a ton because it's still a little iffy. I'm not sure if I understand it all, but there's definitely movement there. But yeah, sometimes Chinese immigrants in the US, especially super wealthy ones who can't move their money out of China, will

will take some of this money here from the money launderers and then transfer money in China to their account. So no money to the people they get the money from, the gangsters' money. So no money ever crosses the border. And apparently, the cartels really want in on this too. This is not entirely relevant to weed money, but I thought it was a crazy enough side story to bear mention. NBC News reports on another scheme from the current DA boss for special operations overseeing LA and some treasury officials said too.

These are the same syndicates where we've been talking about. They help the cartels launder their proceeds by loaning out cartel dollars to Chinese immigrants in America. The criminal organizations are then repaid by the loan takers in Chinese currency back in China.

Now, the loan takers are usually somewhat innocent of where the money actually comes from. The money launderers, though, in China then use that currency that they're getting from the loan takers who pay them back in the Chinese currency to buy Chinese products with that money, which are then shipped to Mexico, where they are sold. And that money they're paid for in pesos and pesos goes back to the cartels. No money crosses international borders. But what does cross international borders is

is those products from China that are shipped to Mexico. And what are those products? The precursors for super meth and fentanyl. Yeah, this is, I think sometimes it's called smurfing, which is using or sometimes just outright hijacking the 50k max for Chinese migrants. A lot of them are students in like Europe and North America. Whoever the launderers can get their hands on basically is super common. It's only going to get bigger for like two main reasons, I would say.

One is just the sheer fact that I think when you use bag men from Latin America, if you're a cartel, I think the commission is like 17, 18%. And these guys can do it for one or two. So why would you not go with them? And the second is the politics of it, right? Which doesn't, it's sort of all wonky. So on the surface level, you would think America and China would want to stop all of this flying money because US wants your fentanyl deaths. China wants less capital flight. But

But like below the surface, there's a completely topsy turvy set of incentives. So the U.S. would actually love China to bleed billions from the economy. And China is actually pretty happy for the U.S. to have a fentanyl epidemic like killing people and causing chaos. So, yeah, I mean, all the while, the Chinese launders are getting more in bed with the narcos and whatnot.

Yeah, they're kissing. They're kissing on the lips, Danny, sometimes. They're really getting at it. It sounds like they're moving towards Tong. Yeah. I thought that was a pun on Tong, but yeah.

That's good. That's it. Actually, it's not bad. It's not bad, but I'm not that clever. But yeah, the situation in Oklahoma is out of control. And our guy there says that there are multiple raids every week. 700,000 pounds have been confiscated in the last year or two. And the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics says the feds know what's up and add some more interesting conclusions in this quote.

They're very much aware of what's going on in the U.S. with Chinese nationals. There are people in Oklahoma who have direct ties to the Chinese government. I know people don't like to hear that, and people don't even like me talking about it, but it is a fact, and our people need to know that. So, yeah. Again, this is the head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. I don't see concrete evidence provided there, but the Chinese Communist Party is alleged to be controlling some of these operations. And I guess the question is,

Is it state-sanctioned or just corrupt officials or officials where the government just kind of doesn't care because it's making American dollars and messing with Americans like with fentanyl? ProPublica's Sebastian Rotella, incredible journalist, has done incredible work here connecting a lot of these weed grow-ups not only to the triads but also to CCP officials, which we'll get to in a minute.

He finds that some of the weed money could be used for financing Chinese government projects. And this quotes from that big ProPublica piece he reported on. U.S. federal agents are investigating cases in which Chinese provincial officials allegedly work with criminal groups to get drug money that they then use to finance infrastructure projects in China or abroad in the Belt and Road Initiative, the international public works program that has expanded China's global might, according to current and former U.S. officials.

All these provinces are competing with each other and using criminal networks and triads to find revenue for governor projects, Donald Im, a former senior official at the DEA said. The marijuana industry in the U.S. is benefiting regional governors and provinces in China. Drug money is like an ad hoc bank for Chinese economic projects and policies. And Im goes further. He suggests there's an alliance between the 14K triad and major Chinese players in the U.S. and Chinese officials that are active in the U.S., quote,

Mobsters overtly support pro-Beijing causes and covertly provide services overseas, engaging in political influence work, moving illicit funds offshore for the Chinese elite, and helping persecute dissidents, according to Western officials, court cases, and human rights groups.

Chinese officials reciprocate by tolerating and sometimes supporting their list activities, according to those sources. Yeah, shout out to your man, Rotella, by the way. He's done some incredible stuff in this field. We'd love to get him on the show, actually. Maybe I'll reach out to him. You should. I mean, this piece is crazy. I'm sure he's working on something else that's crazy, too.

Anyway, to back this up, they've documented high-up officials like the Consul General of the Chinese Embassy meeting leaders of Oklahoma Chinese cultural associations with documented ties to the triads and a number of community leaders that have either pled guilty, been investigated, and been prosecuted for being involved with big drug dealing networks. They've also found a dozen national leaders of associations that are involved in Oklahoma's massive weed grow-ups who have met with CCP officials, diplomats, and Chinese security officials.

One guy involved in the Grop game was meeting with an organization called United Front, which is the influence and intelligence operation of the CCP. And if you don't remember that crazy story from 2023, United Front was accused of setting up illegal overseas police stations in states like New York and New York City.

among other locations that were basically spying stations to monitor and intimidate Chinese distance in the U.S. Yeah, happening in Europe too. I remember it was like in Germany and Italy and all over. It's also really instrumental in this part of the world, the United Front. It's a

This is the guys who set up like influence and criminal ops in plays like Fiji, Palau, Samoa. The OCCRP has done, Aubrey Belford, friend of the show, has done some great stuff for the OCCRP on that. But is the OCCRP still going? I think they've got all their money from USAID, right? I don't know if they're still going. That'd be something to look into. Yeah. Damn.

Now, that expose, the pro-publica one, came in August of 2024. So close to like, what, nine, ten months ago, that expose. But earlier in the year, the FBI director had said that they saw more ties between these growing ops and Chinese organized crime, but hadn't yet found direct links to the CCP. Again, that's before the expose. But just this month, I think we're in May, right? Yeah, we're hearing this in May.

Anyway, at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Senator Susan Collins, who represents Maine and has been all over this, asked the new FBI director, Kashmani Patel, what they were going to do about all the transnational Chinese criminal organization involvement in the weed industry. And he said that the feds are now prior to prioritizing collecting intel against the CCP about these girl ops. So they're really looking into it now and they're trying to find the direct connections. But you have heard it from

I mean, Susan Collins is not like a crazy senator, right? You've heard it from high up senators like that. They made the accusation. Congressman, I think there was like 50 who signed on to a call to look into this further. But it's definitely going around the highest echelons of the American government that they should be looking into. And they're redirecting resources and opening up a bunch of new investigations. But you heard it here first. So there you go.

But yeah, so that is the how Chinese mafia syndicates likely connected to the CCP took over the American weed growing industry, which is nuts. It's a pretty wild one, man. And I'm kind of embarrassed we didn't do this story a year ago when that first ProPublica expose came out or when this started popping up in Oklahoma. Sean, you should have been tuned into Oklahoma stuff, man. What's going on there? That's your that's your that's your world, dude.

Yeah. The problem is, well, the problem is divorce, isn't it? The problem is divorce there, Danny. That's why I wasn't tuned into that. Anyway, don't forget underworld.com. Get these shirts, buy them. They're right. They fit well. And what else? Magicmind.com slash underworld MF or use the promo code underworld60.

And, yeah, until next week, right? We're signing off here? Yeah. Why not? Sweet. Cool. Done. Nice. Enjoy, everyone. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

so