Moving noiseware from old program to new1/31/2024 ![]() Business was booming for drug cartels in his jurisdiction and everywhere else in the US, as more people got hooked on fentanyl and overdose deaths climbed. In an interview after the hearing, Urben recounted shifts in New York’s drug trade around 2016, when couriers for Chinese money-laundering organizations started showing up at money drops in his zone. “Money is the lifeblood of the cartels, and the methods that Chinese was using enriched them and enabled them to traffic even more fentanyl and other deadly drugs into the United States,” Urben told lawmakers at the hearing. On 26 April, Mavrellis and Urben both testified at a US House of Representatives subcommittee hearing titled China in Our Backyard: How Chinese Money Laundering Organizations Enrich the Cartels. Photograph: Juan Carlos Cruz/EPAĪccording to the DEA and the justice department, since at least 2019 the bulk of the illegal fentanyl entering the US has been produced in Mexico using Chinese precursor chemicals.īut the cartel’s ties to China do not end there. “Now it’s ‘Hey, people are responding really well to this’ – for better or for worse.”Ī charred cargo vehicle in Culiacán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, on 6 January 2023 after gunmen fought with police following the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán, one of the sons of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. “This was originally just a way of they were low on product,” said Mavrellis. When fentanyl first started appearing in street drugs, it was almost all sourced from China, arriving in the US via “snail mail”, according to Channing Mavrellis, illicit trade director at Global Financial Integrity, a DC-based thinktank. “It’s a scaling-up of those resources and it needs to happen now.” Providing the cartel’s ‘lifeblood’ If you synchronize those efforts against Chinese organized crime and money laundering specifically, you could dramatically impact them,” said Urben, now a managing director at the investigation firm Nardello & Co. There are different authorities within our agencies and expertise. “We’ve talked a lot in the last 10, 15, 20 years about the ‘whole-of-government approach’. It is progress that a former DEA assistant special agent in charge, Christopher Urben, is eager to see. Now, deepening antipathy between Washington and Beijing, driven by accusations of intellectual property theft and spying, as well as geopolitical strains from issues such as Taiwan and the war in Ukraine, appear poised to spark action from Capitol Hill. US law enforcement and government agencies including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the military have all tracked the cartel’s supply chains and money-laundering networks as they expanded into China almost a decade ago. Yet the evidence of the relationship between the cartel and Chinese entities is not new. In April, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Mexico had yet to notify China that it had seized any illegal precursor shipments. The sanctions notice identified the younger Guzmán as a manager of the cartel’s “super labs”, which turn precursors bought from China and elsewhere into fentanyl.Ĭhinese officials have repeatedly denied any nexus between China and illicit fentanyl, often touting their country’s leadership as the first to schedule the opioid as a narcotic. On 9 May, three weeks after the US Department of Justice issued the sweeping indictments that caught Rubio and Wu in their net, the US treasury department followed up with sanctions against Joaquín Guzmán López, 36, one of the four sons of the Sinaloa cartel founder, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, who have amassed power and steered the cartel into the fentanyl trade since their father’s last arrest. The pair are just two links in a chain connecting the Sinaloa cartel to Chinese companies and criminal organizations, relationships that are now drawing increasing attention from the US government after years of investigation by law enforcement. The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, called the Mexico-based Sinaloa cartel “the largest, most violent, and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world” in a statement accompanying the sweeping indictments covering cartel bosses, enforcers and suppliers such as Rubio and Wu. “We are the biggest in Mexico so we can purchase a lot,” the indictment quotes Rubio telling Wu Yonghao, a sales representative for the chemical supplier Wuhan Shuokang Biological Technology Co Ltd, in an encrypted message before her arrest. ![]() According to the arresting agency and a federal indictment released on 14 April, for almost 10 years Rubio arranged illegal imports of controlled drug-making substances, sometimes hiding them in food containers and leveraging corruption to deliver the chemicals to the cartel.
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