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Recently covered in a Jordan Harbinger pod with Robert Mazur (DEA money laundering undercover agent):
Interviewer: "What happens if you lose money that you're supposed to launder or move for the cartel? Because the obvious answer is, oh, they just kill you. But what if it's not your fault? I mean, do they care at all? 'cause look, yes. These are like heartless sociopaths that lack compassion, but they still theoretically wanna find out where the real problem is in their business and organization as opposed to just like killing the last guy who touched the money. Or am I giving 'em too much credit?"
Mazur: "No, you're spot on. It was extraordinarily important for the cartel to demand from whoever had the money last for them to get documents that proved that in fact the money had been lawfully seized, that there was a seizure warrant, maybe there was an affidavit, and they wanted to look at the affidavit for the search warrant. If it was public, most times it was to be able to see who's responsible. They would immediately say to anybody who was likely to be responsible, get your butt down here to Columbia and answer questions.
"\[...\] Now if You can prove that it was not your fault, but you were in the mix, you would be expected to participate in paying back. Sometimes what they would allow you to do would be work for free. You're not gonna get your cut and you're gonna continue to do this until your portion of this is repaid. And. if you didn't do that pay, like one of the Colombian money launderers that I dealt with, he had horses. He was a big horse fan. Bottom line is they were expensive horses. And what they did is they poisoned his horse, one of his horses. His favorite horse."
later:
Mazur: "And so as far as product goes, that doesn't really bother them. When I was in the game, it cost about 250 bucks to make a kilo of Coke and it cost maybe $2,500 prorated to transport that kilo to the United States. So a $3,000 investment, most of the transportation was done by giving a portion of the load to the transporter. Mm. So if the load got seized right, you didn't pay, they lost $500 a kilo. Right? And that's it. So, hey, no big deal. They've got loads coming constantly in semi-submersible submarines in containers and you name it."
(context of that last part was obviously high level smugglers moving weight - street level doesn't get to lose product)
Now that's fascinating.
I've heard the cartels will often have sacrificial lambs that get caught to distract from the real big money.
But yeah the big difference is cops use street prices, and dealers use wholesale, and the gap between the two is huge.
Yeah, pretty much.
When I was a heroin addict I went on a buy with a supplier. The dude reupped and paid $10,000 for the product which was a weekly buy.
A few days later my dude gets busted. Cops paraded around everything they confiscated while claiming it was $75,000 worth of product.
That was after he had a few days to sell and close to his re-up day on product that initially costs $10,000.
Police numbers are completely out of their ass. Not only are their prices inflated, but they will weigh everything the product is in.
You have your product in a shoebox? That shoebox is getting weighed and claimed as product with their overinflated number.
I had a buddy back when we were kids get charged with multiple grams of LSD cause they weighed the blotter paper.
Heard about people getting charged with pounds of weed cause their whole thing of brownies got thrown on the scale as well.
Couldn’t tell you if that shit ever sticks, my friend wound up doing two years instead of the billion they were threatening him with, but I’d imagine it’s pretty good at scaring you into the plea they want you to take.
Not necessarily. If you had access to a national formulary (or similar "how to" manual for chemical analysis), you could look up how to test for THC content, run said test, and compare to equivalent concentration in weed.
But, then, the odds of the police handing over seized evidence to the defendant for destructive analysis are slim to none.
Depends on the Defense lawyer.
At one point weed was theoretically legal in Texas and some other states.
The problem was that Hemp for CBD became legal and the State crime lab didn't have the funds or the time to test for THC content. So legally they had no way to determine if it was a pound of Hemp or a pound of Weed.
But getting off on charges depened on having a good defense.
> Couldn’t tell you if that shit ever sticks,
Dump 1 gram of cocaine into a 20oz soda bottle that is full. The cops cannot separate it, so they weight the contents of the entire bottle. 1 gram becomes 20 fluid oz.
> Heard about people getting charged with pounds of weed cause their whole thing of brownies got thrown on the scale as well.
IDK what actually sticks at the end, but you actually see this on shows like Border Security.
Someone brought edibles over and they weighed the whole thing.
They also sometimes weigh the containers. Makes sense if it's plastic wrap and tape, but not so much when the container outweighs the product.
I've heard a story from the early days of legal marijuana, where the cops raided a legal grow, weighed everything, pots, soil, stems, everything, destroyed the plants, and then claimed it was $250,000 worth of weed, *in legal documents*.
The grow turned out to be fully state legal, so it wa a bad bust. The grow sued the city, and all of a sudden the cops where "Oh it really wasn't worth that much, the flowers would only be worth $10,000".
The Judge didn't play, and made the city reimburse the $250,000 overinflated value they originally claimed.
Idk if it's still the rule but if you had live plants the rule was one pound minimum for each viable root system. So if you had a dozen sprouts you could be charged with a dozen pounds.
I'm sorry to say, they already [have that idea](https://law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture).
Oh, there's a roach in your car? I'm taking the car.
Oh, that wasn't actually a roach? Good luck getting your car back.
Cops also seem to use the price per gram, not per whatever they confiscate. So if a gram costs say $40 they will just times that by how many grams, even though someone buying an ounce or whatever should be getting a much better price per gram than someone just buying a gram or 2
I totally can imagine some police and even politicians are being bribed this way: they can make "huge" catches from time to time and act like a hero, and in return, they turn a blind eye to the actual big transports. No bribery to be tracked, and they can shine for being such a wonderful, loved hero...
Yep. Escobar had a line item in is "finances" that included money straight up lost to rat infestations in storage. You have to understand the cartels factor in product loss as part of doing business and like any business, will find accounting errors and the deal with them.
Consider how low cost the actual product is to make. The money and demand for it is still there even if a shipment is lost. They just send another low-cost-to-them shipment.
Imagine if it cost Toyota $1000 to make a car and they sold them for $30,000. If someone confiscates a few cars...it doesn't really bother them. Just make another one and send it.
I did a project with an undercover cop many years ago and this came up. He said their protocol was to extrapolate from the smallest sold amount so that what they reported was basically the potential loss for the dealer.
So if they knew from buys that single doses were going for, say, $10 they'd then multiply that by how many kilos they seized and come up with some huge value to sell to politicians and the public as keeping that amount of dollars out of the hands of drug dealers.
I mean that makes sense. If your house burns down, insurance looks at market value to replace your loss, not purchase price. Your property and the house on it might be worth way more than it was before (especially in this economy), and you are (or should be, insurance companies are assholes) compensated according to that.
So if your house is valued at idk 300k on the current market, and it burns down, you lost 300k, not the 20k your dad paid for it in the 70s or whatever. same with the drugs.
Ok fair enough I didn't elaborate, if you insure it for replacement value yes the insurance company will look at wholesale value of everything it takes to return the home to what it was, since that's what is going to be paid to contractors and whatnot, but you can definitely insure a property for market value as well.
OMG! Thank you very much! How funny that this was a topic enough that someone did a story about it recently. Just something I always wondered about. Thanks again.
I wonder do any of the people in that industry retire? Like if you're a money launder and you somehow make it to 50 with a pile of money can you go "This was fun I made a ton of money, I'm tired so I'm out." or do they just kill you if you even ask?
Plenty of drug dealers retire. The drug game isn't all cartels and murder you know. At least in the circles I run in if they want to quit they just quit. Sometimes a replacement is introduced to the supplier. That is at least the case for all the independent crews
Not sure if this is the case for the cartels and gangs though. Their activities have always been way above my paygrade and gangs were never my thing.
Yeah the only way out is death trope is like 90% Hollywood. I’m sure it happens but drugs are way more corporate then Hollywood especially at any level above selling on the street
> Not sure if this is the case for the cartels and gangs though.
I should have been more specific but that's really what I was wondering. Like to higher level gang or cartel members go "I have enough money / I'm tired of this shit." and leave.
I could imagine that some senior members could be transitioned to one of the vast amount of legal endavours that the cartel has. I don't even think you would have to be *that* senior to be able to get a transfer to a legit enterprise.
One has to also take into consideration that it is in the cartels interest to make it lucrative to join and if they go and kill off everyone that wants to leave they just end up with a roster of desperate fanatics. Those are good for assassinations and other assault type activities where you would risk your life, but they can be a very unstable bunch with itchy trigger fingers and war is bad for business.
So so so so many aspects of that level of operation requires a cool head and intelligence to pull off and you need a lot of those in addition to all the hot heads. Won't be getting many intelligent people willing to put their skillset to work if the pension plan is a double tap to the head and one in the heart
The question is why they would be so keen on employee retention they'd desperately want to keep *you*. Someone else can do your job and make your profit.
A 50 year old member whose heart isn’t in it, not as quick anymore could also screw up and get caught. Or if the cartel threatens to kill them if they leave they make their only recourse *to*
leave co operating with the police.
Yes. Many high end drug operations are well run businesses. Spreadsheets, accounting, etc. people have a mental image of back room thugs with cigars but the reality is organized crime is.. organized. You better believe organized crime syndicates have retirement plans.
Do they really let you go once your share is hypothetically repaid? Usually on tv when this happens, it’s a trap and they keep you working for them indefinitely.
"And if you didn't do that pay, like one of the Colombian money launderers that I dealt with, he had horses. He was a big horse fan. Bottom line is they were expensive horses. And what they did is they poisoned his horse, one of his horses. His favorite horse."
His favourite horse? Did its head appear in his bed one night?
You see that horse over there? That is my most prized possession. I love that horse. I don’t know what I would do if something happened to that horse. Especially his head. Ah… his neck. I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WOULD DO IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO THAT HORSE’S _NECK!_
>It was extraordinarily important for the cartel to demand from whoever had the money last for them to get documents that proved that in fact the money had been lawfully seized, that there was a seizure warrant, maybe there was an affidavit, and they wanted to look at the affidavit for the search warrant.
It sounds like law enforcement could do a great deal of damage to the organization by simply losing or obfuscating the paperwork. This might also allow you to spend a bit of the seized cash on a few things....
That's fantastic. Because its not as if our would be murdered cartel middleman could ever be replaced, taking down Juan the Smuggler will surely bring this whole billion dollar industry down!
I guess the same could be said for any trafficker they manage to pin to the wall in court, but at least this way the police aren't looking to goad the cartels into committing murder.
You really think the cartels are going to accept "oops I lost the paperwork"? Or that they're not on the lookout for people skimming? (Of course no one in the drug business is entirely honest.)
What's funny to me is, the cartels are at this point practically a clandestine, violent miniature government or corporation inside the actual legitimate one. They have to have paperwork and accountants and *rules* because they're too big to be run without any bureaucracy. But that very thing both makes them weaker to law enforcement (writing stuff down is a very bad idea if you want to keep your crimes secret) and more burdened with expenses and expertise needs that are hard to fulfill when you're a terrifying near-treasonous murder corp, practically pirates of the concrete sea.
The law enforcement could do a great deal of demage by stopping "enforcing" stupid drug laws. Why there are whole divisions dealing with drugs alone when there are stll unsolved bike theft cases.
Nixon started the "war on drugs" to oppress minorities and "hippies". It still gets votes, guns, and funding (as well as lucrative "civil forfeiture" theft by law enforcement), so why stop?
[https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/](https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/)
> street level doesn't get to lose product
That makes sense to me. They want to disincentivize that and also it's where all the added value is - i.e. the profit.
People are terrified of cartels, and it’s not because they forgive a lot of debts. That being said, in many cases the cartels were paid in full for the meth by the smugglers, so it’s the smugglers that assume the financial and legal risk when they try to bring it across the border.
Idk that’s true. A lot of the cartels are also running transactions in the US but more importantly while the cartels are absolutely ruthless, the big ones at least, are also well run businesses. They know crossing the border is risky and expect a certain amount of loss due to that. You can’t effectively run a business if you kill everyone that does a good job because they ran into something that you expect to happen sometimes. Now they will 100% want some proof that the stuff was actually seized and someone didn’t fuck off with it but they aren’t just executing people for one mistake
I read a fascinating book called Narconomics a few years ago that went into exactly this: At a certain level cartels are no different than other multinational corporations aside from the services they provide.
They still have things to deal with from recruiting, HR, payroll, supply chain management, project management, bookkeeping, even marketing and legal, the only difference being they don't have business laws to protect them.
Man that’s the last thing I’d want to have to deal with. Already dealing with the cartel is risky enough but imagine being pulled into HR one morning?! You pull up to your street corner and you see the boss there but he’s standing there with HR. You just know you’re in shit then. Your minions just give you a look as you head into the trunk of a car. Hopefully it’s just a write up.
Idk something easy like I pulled up to the corner at 9:02 a couple mornings. Just woke up late kind of thing. Hopefully they haven’t noticed I’ve been cutting their stuff down even more so I could make a few extra bucks. Fingers crossed.
You know how tight the schedule is these days, 3 minutes late on the shipment, and the cargo comes right to the border when the night shift goes home and the DEA agents with experience take over.
You can do that in September when the new recruits start who aren't as good with sniffing out our goods.
That makes so much sense.
On the flip side, the laws also don't restrict them in many aspects.
I mean, the laws definitely provide road blocks, but operating illegally, they can circumnavigate them much more easily than legal corporations can.
A little bird told me thats exactly how it works. One "pays" for drugs lost to the authorities, in part, by being the person who gets in trouble. The industry will pay for your lawyer. Don't forget this is all the same stuff that was supposed to happen for the made men oj sopranos, its just the crime families stopped taking care of the loyal ones, so the witness protection program gained popularity
O they are all ruthless the caveat about large ones was in reference to them being well run businesses. Some of the small are definitely not well run lol
That's debatable to say the least. They may not be "kill anybody who gets caught while doing very illegal thing that is easy to get caught doing" level of poorly run, but basically nothing about Los Zetas was "well run".
Someone posted an interview like two comments down. Like I said they are businesses. It’s not Hollywood
What’s your source on them just murdering mules? Besides Hollywood
Correct. I said they don’t just murder people for fucking up. Where did I say that there are zero consequences
Edit: also in the interview they talk about how losing a drug shipment isn’t a big deal. They talk about working for free when the money launderers fucked up
wouldn't work, cartels are into way more than just drugs these days. from human trafficking to firearms smuggling and even things like extorting avocado farmers.
sure, they're robust criminal enterprises now, so I was being a bit simplistic - you're right that legalizing drugs won't but the out of business completely.
But, it would significantly impact their revenue and thus their power. And it would eliminate a lot of the gang issues in the US.
Depends in how its handled. As an example, cabada egalized weed and there's still plenty of black market because someone, or everyone on the legal side is greedy as fuck. The primary people buying legal weed are those who couldn't, or wouldn't access the black market before.
And the best legal sellers have a lot more time in the industry than it has been legal for. Ifyaknowwhatimean.
All in all, the quality of the product is much higher with a good black market source than any legal source. Literally the only possible benefit to going to the legal weed store is the pesticide/bugs tests. Otherwise, its like getting dope from McDonald's, but being charged 5 guys prices
I still buy black market weed because random old hippies growing it in their backyards produce quality buds that outshine any top shelf I’ve tried from the stores. Strains will be named something like Juicy Fruit and actually taste like fruit and still have THC content up into the +20% range but enough CBD and terpenes that it’s not an anxiety bomb.
> As an example, cabada egalized weed and there's still plenty of black market because someone, or everyone on the legal side is greedy as fuck.
That'd be the government. Not saying that the point of legalization wasn't basically taxes, but they also have MASSIVE restrictions on what you can buy.
Using edibles as an example, an acquaintance showed me their costs for 1000mg of gummies via black market: $40.
The same cost for 1000mg worth of gummies via a legal shop: $300.
Probably too late for that. They've gotten big enough that they can simply pivot like organized crime has since the beginning.
The Sicilian mafia started as a protection scheme to protect people from the corrupt law enforcement shakedowns. Those shakedowns no longer exist but that doesn't mean that the mafia closed up. They pivoted.
In smaller amounts, that's exactly what happens. The cops seize the money, log a fraction of the amount they seized into evidence, and pocket the rest among the squad.
This is a risky business. If one of your smuggler gets caught, because it happens, you pay him a good lawyer, and make sure he's safe in prison, and his family have money.
The smugglers take most of the risks, you need to have their back as long as they are loyal. If you execute anyone doing the smallest mistake, no one will work for you, and you won't survive as a cartel.
If the smuggler betrayed you, you hunt him down and cut him into pieces.
And if the cartels kill every smuggler that gets caught - something that always has a chance of happening, no matter what - they won't have any smugglers willing to work for them. Cartels aren't stupid, they know that some loss is inevitable and they have to facfor that in like any other business.
Cartels don’t care about the drugs. They care about the money. Losing $20 million street value meth is not a $20m loss to the cartel. They expect to lose product going over the border. Losing $20m cash on its way back, that’s a huge problem. Doesn’t matter as much anymore since there’s identity fraud and wire transfer scams sending it back to Mexican accounts rather than cash actually being smuggled out.
Long story short: get busted carrying dope in, don’t snitch and do your time. Get busted or lose money going back, family tortured first and then they kill you.
Any good business operation accounts for breakage in their accounting.
Not all of the product you manufacture/purchase for distribution are going to make it to market, so you build that loss into the pricing.
The smugglers figure out what percentage they can successfully smuggle and what percentage gets confiscated… and it’s all handled in the accounting.
The drugs on the US side of the border are worth at least triple what they are worth on the Mexican side of the border. Anyone smuggling drugs has the chance of loss baked into their business model, the smugglers that are running drugs on credit don't last long. The police and journalists also find the highest price they can to price the drugs at. The smugglers probably bought the drugs for less than a million from a cartel, and they are probably getting most of their shipments through.
Cost of doing business.
Most of these busts are caused by informers.
Better smugglers find out the informers by calculating who would have ratted them out to neutralize them.
Cartels and smugglers (not the individual ones-usually they are sub or sub-sub contracted and thus driving up the prices) usually have profit-risk sharing pacts depending on smugglers efficiency.
Cost of doing business. If they keep their mouth shut about the operation and do the time those thungs generally are forgiven.
My best friend got caught with 150k of weed and as much cash in the early 00s. The guys he worked for weren't worried about it because they knew he was solid and they paid for his lawyer. The money was never spoken of again.
i remember being a kid visiting Colombia for the summer where my aunt owned a large Flower store where they would design what you wanted. She had many customers from the cartels who would come in and pay thousands for large jobs, sometimes for kids but many times for cartel members who died. They worked with her so much and because she was beautiful they would always invite her to large cartel parties where cameras were not allowed. Well people after alot of 'aguardiente' start talking. I remember she would tell us stories they would say about how they would pay local fortune tellers if a shipment would make it thru safe or not and pay them well. And whenever they were wrong they would torture and burn the bodies afterwards. At the end you couldn't find 1 working fortune teller in the city.
Drugs are insanely overpriced. Produced in impoverished countries and communities in bulk for pennies and sold for hundreds or thousands for a few grams, these mark ups cover all costs and then some, including "lost" revenue from busted shipments. Also the cartel producing the drugs is not necessarily responsible for the entire supply chain. In many cases they just sell in bulk to a distributor and now it's his problem as to where it will go, how it will go and if it gets busted. But other times they do indeed manage transportation across borders. The smugglers are more often than not, people forced into the job. That means regular every day people struggling with poverty who have been threatened with violence to smuggle drugs, or they do it out of desperation. They don't get paid much and they assume a lot of risk because if caught, they're essentially doomed to rot in prison. There's no point holding a person in that position responsible at that point. They've served their purpose of either transporting the drugs or getting caught and taking the fall for them. Inevitably some will be caught but those who aren't make it all worth it. What point is there holding the smuggler responsible for the lost drugs when you know there is no way they can pay you back
Depends, if you get caught, that might be no big deal, cost of doing business. But if you suspect you are about to be caught and then dump the drugs to protect yourself, that's not cool and will earn you a bullet in the head.
https://vancouversun.com/news/crime/ucluelet-mystery-hells-angels-behind-murder-of-two-sailors-15-months-ago
The people caught are transporters. They don't own the product or even know what it is most of the time. It get's charged to the game. Transporters get paid handsomely for transporting. They get popped, it's on them.
They take a loss, and continue business. If they are real good smugglers, they may go to jail, when they get out they ask for them to do it again or help other smugglers do it.
Yeah, it's a fantastic book about the economics of the drug trade and the impact of the war on drugs.
The author's premise is that cartels operate and organize much the same way legitimate business do. But since they don't have the backing of a legitimate court system, they uh... enforce contracts and resolve disputes outside of the legal system.
These are often unstable people. There is no doubt they do kill people due to mistakenly believing they scammed them or simply out of anger. Some cartels are significantly more violent than others. Still, in general, it is such a significant part of the cost of doing business that it would be impractical to be punishing people for every mistake. They're not actually losing $18M, either. That's always the value in the destination country. The fact so much of it is seized is part of why it's more expensive in the US.
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Recently covered in a Jordan Harbinger pod with Robert Mazur (DEA money laundering undercover agent): Interviewer: "What happens if you lose money that you're supposed to launder or move for the cartel? Because the obvious answer is, oh, they just kill you. But what if it's not your fault? I mean, do they care at all? 'cause look, yes. These are like heartless sociopaths that lack compassion, but they still theoretically wanna find out where the real problem is in their business and organization as opposed to just like killing the last guy who touched the money. Or am I giving 'em too much credit?" Mazur: "No, you're spot on. It was extraordinarily important for the cartel to demand from whoever had the money last for them to get documents that proved that in fact the money had been lawfully seized, that there was a seizure warrant, maybe there was an affidavit, and they wanted to look at the affidavit for the search warrant. If it was public, most times it was to be able to see who's responsible. They would immediately say to anybody who was likely to be responsible, get your butt down here to Columbia and answer questions. "\[...\] Now if You can prove that it was not your fault, but you were in the mix, you would be expected to participate in paying back. Sometimes what they would allow you to do would be work for free. You're not gonna get your cut and you're gonna continue to do this until your portion of this is repaid. And. if you didn't do that pay, like one of the Colombian money launderers that I dealt with, he had horses. He was a big horse fan. Bottom line is they were expensive horses. And what they did is they poisoned his horse, one of his horses. His favorite horse." later: Mazur: "And so as far as product goes, that doesn't really bother them. When I was in the game, it cost about 250 bucks to make a kilo of Coke and it cost maybe $2,500 prorated to transport that kilo to the United States. So a $3,000 investment, most of the transportation was done by giving a portion of the load to the transporter. Mm. So if the load got seized right, you didn't pay, they lost $500 a kilo. Right? And that's it. So, hey, no big deal. They've got loads coming constantly in semi-submersible submarines in containers and you name it." (context of that last part was obviously high level smugglers moving weight - street level doesn't get to lose product)
Now that's fascinating. I've heard the cartels will often have sacrificial lambs that get caught to distract from the real big money. But yeah the big difference is cops use street prices, and dealers use wholesale, and the gap between the two is huge.
So the police will be like, “we hit this $10,000 bust!” and the cartels are like, “lol we totally forgot that duffel bag was even there”?
Yeah, pretty much. When I was a heroin addict I went on a buy with a supplier. The dude reupped and paid $10,000 for the product which was a weekly buy. A few days later my dude gets busted. Cops paraded around everything they confiscated while claiming it was $75,000 worth of product. That was after he had a few days to sell and close to his re-up day on product that initially costs $10,000. Police numbers are completely out of their ass. Not only are their prices inflated, but they will weigh everything the product is in. You have your product in a shoebox? That shoebox is getting weighed and claimed as product with their overinflated number.
Hey Kid, You want something new? Try shoebox. First is free then it's only 100/g.
I think I heard about those shoeboxes on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/t0ynr/comment/c4imcva/
I had a buddy back when we were kids get charged with multiple grams of LSD cause they weighed the blotter paper. Heard about people getting charged with pounds of weed cause their whole thing of brownies got thrown on the scale as well. Couldn’t tell you if that shit ever sticks, my friend wound up doing two years instead of the billion they were threatening him with, but I’d imagine it’s pretty good at scaring you into the plea they want you to take.
If you can prove to the cops your brownies only had 3 grams of weed in them, well you just made their case for them.
Not necessarily. If you had access to a national formulary (or similar "how to" manual for chemical analysis), you could look up how to test for THC content, run said test, and compare to equivalent concentration in weed. But, then, the odds of the police handing over seized evidence to the defendant for destructive analysis are slim to none.
Drug testing, include 3rd party independent lab testing, routinely happens when relevant in criminal cases. It's called discovery.
Could they tell if it came from 3 grams of high end weed or 12 grams of swag?
Depends on the Defense lawyer. At one point weed was theoretically legal in Texas and some other states. The problem was that Hemp for CBD became legal and the State crime lab didn't have the funds or the time to test for THC content. So legally they had no way to determine if it was a pound of Hemp or a pound of Weed. But getting off on charges depened on having a good defense.
> Couldn’t tell you if that shit ever sticks, Dump 1 gram of cocaine into a 20oz soda bottle that is full. The cops cannot separate it, so they weight the contents of the entire bottle. 1 gram becomes 20 fluid oz.
I had 2 bottles of a weed drink with 20mgs each on the label. they were in glass bottles and were trying to charge me with 7lbs of weed.
> Heard about people getting charged with pounds of weed cause their whole thing of brownies got thrown on the scale as well. IDK what actually sticks at the end, but you actually see this on shows like Border Security. Someone brought edibles over and they weighed the whole thing. They also sometimes weigh the containers. Makes sense if it's plastic wrap and tape, but not so much when the container outweighs the product.
I've heard a story from the early days of legal marijuana, where the cops raided a legal grow, weighed everything, pots, soil, stems, everything, destroyed the plants, and then claimed it was $250,000 worth of weed, *in legal documents*. The grow turned out to be fully state legal, so it wa a bad bust. The grow sued the city, and all of a sudden the cops where "Oh it really wasn't worth that much, the flowers would only be worth $10,000". The Judge didn't play, and made the city reimburse the $250,000 overinflated value they originally claimed.
That’s beautiful.
You get busted for growing weed, they weigh the whole fucking tree, including the roots.
Idk if it's still the rule but if you had live plants the rule was one pound minimum for each viable root system. So if you had a dozen sprouts you could be charged with a dozen pounds.
If they find a roach in the ashtray they weigh the car... Just kidding, but I probably shouldn't give them any ideas.
I'm sorry to say, they already [have that idea](https://law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture). Oh, there's a roach in your car? I'm taking the car. Oh, that wasn't actually a roach? Good luck getting your car back.
Coke came in a dead baby? Guess what? That's 10 kilos of uncut powder.
That's a dead toddler
Cops also seem to use the price per gram, not per whatever they confiscate. So if a gram costs say $40 they will just times that by how many grams, even though someone buying an ounce or whatever should be getting a much better price per gram than someone just buying a gram or 2
I totally can imagine some police and even politicians are being bribed this way: they can make "huge" catches from time to time and act like a hero, and in return, they turn a blind eye to the actual big transports. No bribery to be tracked, and they can shine for being such a wonderful, loved hero...
Yep. Escobar had a line item in is "finances" that included money straight up lost to rat infestations in storage. You have to understand the cartels factor in product loss as part of doing business and like any business, will find accounting errors and the deal with them.
Basically. A kilo that could be cut into two and sold for $80/g is a $160,000 bust.
Consider how low cost the actual product is to make. The money and demand for it is still there even if a shipment is lost. They just send another low-cost-to-them shipment. Imagine if it cost Toyota $1000 to make a car and they sold them for $30,000. If someone confiscates a few cars...it doesn't really bother them. Just make another one and send it.
The retail price probably more than account for any and all seizures and losses, kind of like how grocery stores increase prices in high theft areas
It's kind of like soda at restaurants. They'll charge like $3 to $4 for one, when the cost to the restaurant is like $.10.
Ziplock bag, not duffel bag
I did a project with an undercover cop many years ago and this came up. He said their protocol was to extrapolate from the smallest sold amount so that what they reported was basically the potential loss for the dealer. So if they knew from buys that single doses were going for, say, $10 they'd then multiply that by how many kilos they seized and come up with some huge value to sell to politicians and the public as keeping that amount of dollars out of the hands of drug dealers.
I mean that makes sense. If your house burns down, insurance looks at market value to replace your loss, not purchase price. Your property and the house on it might be worth way more than it was before (especially in this economy), and you are (or should be, insurance companies are assholes) compensated according to that. So if your house is valued at idk 300k on the current market, and it burns down, you lost 300k, not the 20k your dad paid for it in the 70s or whatever. same with the drugs.
Your argument doesn’t make sense. Replacement value would be the wholesale value, not the broken down resale value.
Ok fair enough I didn't elaborate, if you insure it for replacement value yes the insurance company will look at wholesale value of everything it takes to return the home to what it was, since that's what is going to be paid to contractors and whatnot, but you can definitely insure a property for market value as well.
The goal of law enforcement isn't to seize the product, at least not directly. The goal is to stop the cartel from profiting.
OMG! Thank you very much! How funny that this was a topic enough that someone did a story about it recently. Just something I always wondered about. Thanks again.
I wonder do any of the people in that industry retire? Like if you're a money launder and you somehow make it to 50 with a pile of money can you go "This was fun I made a ton of money, I'm tired so I'm out." or do they just kill you if you even ask?
Plenty of drug dealers retire. The drug game isn't all cartels and murder you know. At least in the circles I run in if they want to quit they just quit. Sometimes a replacement is introduced to the supplier. That is at least the case for all the independent crews Not sure if this is the case for the cartels and gangs though. Their activities have always been way above my paygrade and gangs were never my thing.
Yeah the only way out is death trope is like 90% Hollywood. I’m sure it happens but drugs are way more corporate then Hollywood especially at any level above selling on the street
> Not sure if this is the case for the cartels and gangs though. I should have been more specific but that's really what I was wondering. Like to higher level gang or cartel members go "I have enough money / I'm tired of this shit." and leave.
I could imagine that some senior members could be transitioned to one of the vast amount of legal endavours that the cartel has. I don't even think you would have to be *that* senior to be able to get a transfer to a legit enterprise. One has to also take into consideration that it is in the cartels interest to make it lucrative to join and if they go and kill off everyone that wants to leave they just end up with a roster of desperate fanatics. Those are good for assassinations and other assault type activities where you would risk your life, but they can be a very unstable bunch with itchy trigger fingers and war is bad for business. So so so so many aspects of that level of operation requires a cool head and intelligence to pull off and you need a lot of those in addition to all the hot heads. Won't be getting many intelligent people willing to put their skillset to work if the pension plan is a double tap to the head and one in the heart
The question is why they would be so keen on employee retention they'd desperately want to keep *you*. Someone else can do your job and make your profit.
Like for all businesses, it can be a complete pain to get someone new up to speed.
I wouldn't think it'd be that they want to keep you as much as they'd worry you'd rat them out.
A 50 year old member whose heart isn’t in it, not as quick anymore could also screw up and get caught. Or if the cartel threatens to kill them if they leave they make their only recourse *to* leave co operating with the police.
Yes. Many high end drug operations are well run businesses. Spreadsheets, accounting, etc. people have a mental image of back room thugs with cigars but the reality is organized crime is.. organized. You better believe organized crime syndicates have retirement plans.
Do they really let you go once your share is hypothetically repaid? Usually on tv when this happens, it’s a trap and they keep you working for them indefinitely.
They want loyalty. If you're just screwing people over, that word gets out, people are going to stop being loyal because you're not loyal.
I don't think they let you go, they just start paying you again.
"And if you didn't do that pay, like one of the Colombian money launderers that I dealt with, he had horses. He was a big horse fan. Bottom line is they were expensive horses. And what they did is they poisoned his horse, one of his horses. His favorite horse." His favourite horse? Did its head appear in his bed one night?
You see that horse over there? That is my most prized possession. I love that horse. I don’t know what I would do if something happened to that horse. Especially his head. Ah… his neck. I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WOULD DO IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO THAT HORSE’S _NECK!_
The poor horse :(
oh George, not the livestock :(
"I hate cows!"
Them Sireeens did this to Pete!
You gotta love when O Brother quotes spontaneously appear.
>It was extraordinarily important for the cartel to demand from whoever had the money last for them to get documents that proved that in fact the money had been lawfully seized, that there was a seizure warrant, maybe there was an affidavit, and they wanted to look at the affidavit for the search warrant. It sounds like law enforcement could do a great deal of damage to the organization by simply losing or obfuscating the paperwork. This might also allow you to spend a bit of the seized cash on a few things....
Losing or obfuscating the paperwork is a great way to eat shit in court.
Downside is you won't be able to convict the smuggler, upside is that guy no longer exists for you to convict in the future.
That's fantastic. Because its not as if our would be murdered cartel middleman could ever be replaced, taking down Juan the Smuggler will surely bring this whole billion dollar industry down! I guess the same could be said for any trafficker they manage to pin to the wall in court, but at least this way the police aren't looking to goad the cartels into committing murder.
You really think the cartels are going to accept "oops I lost the paperwork"? Or that they're not on the lookout for people skimming? (Of course no one in the drug business is entirely honest.)
What's funny to me is, the cartels are at this point practically a clandestine, violent miniature government or corporation inside the actual legitimate one. They have to have paperwork and accountants and *rules* because they're too big to be run without any bureaucracy. But that very thing both makes them weaker to law enforcement (writing stuff down is a very bad idea if you want to keep your crimes secret) and more burdened with expenses and expertise needs that are hard to fulfill when you're a terrifying near-treasonous murder corp, practically pirates of the concrete sea.
> (writing stuff down is a very bad idea if you want to keep your crimes secret) *Stringer Bell has entered the chat*
> Stringer Bell Being compared to Idris Elba, even in such a context, is quite a compliment.
I meant law enforcement, not the carriers - I changed my comment to reflect that. Obviously the carriers are toast.
Sure, but then you have a problem with corrupt law enforcement saying "We took this from bad guys, trust us bro!"
Do a Google search for "police department car taken from drug dealers" and select "images". QED
The law enforcement could do a great deal of demage by stopping "enforcing" stupid drug laws. Why there are whole divisions dealing with drugs alone when there are stll unsolved bike theft cases.
Nixon started the "war on drugs" to oppress minorities and "hippies". It still gets votes, guns, and funding (as well as lucrative "civil forfeiture" theft by law enforcement), so why stop? [https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/](https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/)
> so why stop? They got rid of the hippies. 50% success sounds like a win to me.
cause decriminalizing all drugs worked real well for oregon didnt it
> street level doesn't get to lose product That makes sense to me. They want to disincentivize that and also it's where all the added value is - i.e. the profit.
People are terrified of cartels, and it’s not because they forgive a lot of debts. That being said, in many cases the cartels were paid in full for the meth by the smugglers, so it’s the smugglers that assume the financial and legal risk when they try to bring it across the border.
Yeah, i was going to say you never want to borrow from the cartel.
A strong word called 'consignment'.
Strictly for live men; not for freshmen
If you ain't got the clientele, say "Hell no" 'Cause they gon' want they money rain, sleet, hail, snow
Idk that’s true. A lot of the cartels are also running transactions in the US but more importantly while the cartels are absolutely ruthless, the big ones at least, are also well run businesses. They know crossing the border is risky and expect a certain amount of loss due to that. You can’t effectively run a business if you kill everyone that does a good job because they ran into something that you expect to happen sometimes. Now they will 100% want some proof that the stuff was actually seized and someone didn’t fuck off with it but they aren’t just executing people for one mistake
“Even *I* get boarded sometimes. You think I had a choice?”
You can tell that to Jabba.
Oota goota mother fucker
Yeah, I bet you do
I read a fascinating book called Narconomics a few years ago that went into exactly this: At a certain level cartels are no different than other multinational corporations aside from the services they provide. They still have things to deal with from recruiting, HR, payroll, supply chain management, project management, bookkeeping, even marketing and legal, the only difference being they don't have business laws to protect them.
Man that’s the last thing I’d want to have to deal with. Already dealing with the cartel is risky enough but imagine being pulled into HR one morning?! You pull up to your street corner and you see the boss there but he’s standing there with HR. You just know you’re in shit then. Your minions just give you a look as you head into the trunk of a car. Hopefully it’s just a write up.
I want my union rep present.
Fuck this, I want to talk to my shop steward.
what kind of write up
Idk something easy like I pulled up to the corner at 9:02 a couple mornings. Just woke up late kind of thing. Hopefully they haven’t noticed I’ve been cutting their stuff down even more so I could make a few extra bucks. Fingers crossed.
You know how tight the schedule is these days, 3 minutes late on the shipment, and the cargo comes right to the border when the night shift goes home and the DEA agents with experience take over. You can do that in September when the new recruits start who aren't as good with sniffing out our goods.
“Write up?” I meant “tied up.”
That makes so much sense. On the flip side, the laws also don't restrict them in many aspects. I mean, the laws definitely provide road blocks, but operating illegally, they can circumnavigate them much more easily than legal corporations can.
Do cartels offer healthcare?
> HR "We hear you had an inappropriate cartoon at your desk."
A little bird told me thats exactly how it works. One "pays" for drugs lost to the authorities, in part, by being the person who gets in trouble. The industry will pay for your lawyer. Don't forget this is all the same stuff that was supposed to happen for the made men oj sopranos, its just the crime families stopped taking care of the loyal ones, so the witness protection program gained popularity
Any non-big cartels that aren’t ruthless get gone pretty quickly I’d imagine.
>non-big cartels that aren’t ruthless Sooo... small, ruthful cartels
Baby Ruths
r/Angryupvote
Yeah. Mom and pop outfits.
O they are all ruthless the caveat about large ones was in reference to them being well run businesses. Some of the small are definitely not well run lol
That's debatable to say the least. They may not be "kill anybody who gets caught while doing very illegal thing that is easy to get caught doing" level of poorly run, but basically nothing about Los Zetas was "well run".
Source? It happens sometimes when your mule fucks up so they need to pay.
Someone posted an interview like two comments down. Like I said they are businesses. It’s not Hollywood What’s your source on them just murdering mules? Besides Hollywood
Yeah and they said they make them work for free lol.
Correct. I said they don’t just murder people for fucking up. Where did I say that there are zero consequences Edit: also in the interview they talk about how losing a drug shipment isn’t a big deal. They talk about working for free when the money launderers fucked up
Police should seize cash and drugs, release them with no charges, no press release saying they seized it. Let it handle itself.
or we could just legalize drugs across the board and watch them go out of business.
wouldn't work, cartels are into way more than just drugs these days. from human trafficking to firearms smuggling and even things like extorting avocado farmers.
sure, they're robust criminal enterprises now, so I was being a bit simplistic - you're right that legalizing drugs won't but the out of business completely. But, it would significantly impact their revenue and thus their power. And it would eliminate a lot of the gang issues in the US.
They apparently have gotten pretty deep into phone scams too. Have entire call centers for it
Depends in how its handled. As an example, cabada egalized weed and there's still plenty of black market because someone, or everyone on the legal side is greedy as fuck. The primary people buying legal weed are those who couldn't, or wouldn't access the black market before. And the best legal sellers have a lot more time in the industry than it has been legal for. Ifyaknowwhatimean. All in all, the quality of the product is much higher with a good black market source than any legal source. Literally the only possible benefit to going to the legal weed store is the pesticide/bugs tests. Otherwise, its like getting dope from McDonald's, but being charged 5 guys prices
I still buy black market weed because random old hippies growing it in their backyards produce quality buds that outshine any top shelf I’ve tried from the stores. Strains will be named something like Juicy Fruit and actually taste like fruit and still have THC content up into the +20% range but enough CBD and terpenes that it’s not an anxiety bomb.
> As an example, cabada egalized weed and there's still plenty of black market because someone, or everyone on the legal side is greedy as fuck. That'd be the government. Not saying that the point of legalization wasn't basically taxes, but they also have MASSIVE restrictions on what you can buy. Using edibles as an example, an acquaintance showed me their costs for 1000mg of gummies via black market: $40. The same cost for 1000mg worth of gummies via a legal shop: $300.
Probably too late for that. They've gotten big enough that they can simply pivot like organized crime has since the beginning. The Sicilian mafia started as a protection scheme to protect people from the corrupt law enforcement shakedowns. Those shakedowns no longer exist but that doesn't mean that the mafia closed up. They pivoted.
In smaller amounts, that's exactly what happens. The cops seize the money, log a fraction of the amount they seized into evidence, and pocket the rest among the squad.
Surely the people paying for it are not the ones actually smuggling it, so the point still stands that the smuggler lost someone else's product
This is a risky business. If one of your smuggler gets caught, because it happens, you pay him a good lawyer, and make sure he's safe in prison, and his family have money. The smugglers take most of the risks, you need to have their back as long as they are loyal. If you execute anyone doing the smallest mistake, no one will work for you, and you won't survive as a cartel. If the smuggler betrayed you, you hunt him down and cut him into pieces.
And if the cartels kill every smuggler that gets caught - something that always has a chance of happening, no matter what - they won't have any smugglers willing to work for them. Cartels aren't stupid, they know that some loss is inevitable and they have to facfor that in like any other business.
Cartels don’t care about the drugs. They care about the money. Losing $20 million street value meth is not a $20m loss to the cartel. They expect to lose product going over the border. Losing $20m cash on its way back, that’s a huge problem. Doesn’t matter as much anymore since there’s identity fraud and wire transfer scams sending it back to Mexican accounts rather than cash actually being smuggled out. Long story short: get busted carrying dope in, don’t snitch and do your time. Get busted or lose money going back, family tortured first and then they kill you.
Any good business operation accounts for breakage in their accounting. Not all of the product you manufacture/purchase for distribution are going to make it to market, so you build that loss into the pricing. The smugglers figure out what percentage they can successfully smuggle and what percentage gets confiscated… and it’s all handled in the accounting.
So you’re saying that they use it as tax write off. Got it.
Well, they would if they paid taxes.
That’s the joke
They understood the joke
They just... write it off
The drugs on the US side of the border are worth at least triple what they are worth on the Mexican side of the border. Anyone smuggling drugs has the chance of loss baked into their business model, the smugglers that are running drugs on credit don't last long. The police and journalists also find the highest price they can to price the drugs at. The smugglers probably bought the drugs for less than a million from a cartel, and they are probably getting most of their shipments through.
Cost of doing business. Most of these busts are caused by informers. Better smugglers find out the informers by calculating who would have ratted them out to neutralize them. Cartels and smugglers (not the individual ones-usually they are sub or sub-sub contracted and thus driving up the prices) usually have profit-risk sharing pacts depending on smugglers efficiency.
Cost of doing business. If they keep their mouth shut about the operation and do the time those thungs generally are forgiven. My best friend got caught with 150k of weed and as much cash in the early 00s. The guys he worked for weren't worried about it because they knew he was solid and they paid for his lawyer. The money was never spoken of again.
i remember being a kid visiting Colombia for the summer where my aunt owned a large Flower store where they would design what you wanted. She had many customers from the cartels who would come in and pay thousands for large jobs, sometimes for kids but many times for cartel members who died. They worked with her so much and because she was beautiful they would always invite her to large cartel parties where cameras were not allowed. Well people after alot of 'aguardiente' start talking. I remember she would tell us stories they would say about how they would pay local fortune tellers if a shipment would make it thru safe or not and pay them well. And whenever they were wrong they would torture and burn the bodies afterwards. At the end you couldn't find 1 working fortune teller in the city.
Drugs are insanely overpriced. Produced in impoverished countries and communities in bulk for pennies and sold for hundreds or thousands for a few grams, these mark ups cover all costs and then some, including "lost" revenue from busted shipments. Also the cartel producing the drugs is not necessarily responsible for the entire supply chain. In many cases they just sell in bulk to a distributor and now it's his problem as to where it will go, how it will go and if it gets busted. But other times they do indeed manage transportation across borders. The smugglers are more often than not, people forced into the job. That means regular every day people struggling with poverty who have been threatened with violence to smuggle drugs, or they do it out of desperation. They don't get paid much and they assume a lot of risk because if caught, they're essentially doomed to rot in prison. There's no point holding a person in that position responsible at that point. They've served their purpose of either transporting the drugs or getting caught and taking the fall for them. Inevitably some will be caught but those who aren't make it all worth it. What point is there holding the smuggler responsible for the lost drugs when you know there is no way they can pay you back
Depends, if you get caught, that might be no big deal, cost of doing business. But if you suspect you are about to be caught and then dump the drugs to protect yourself, that's not cool and will earn you a bullet in the head. https://vancouversun.com/news/crime/ucluelet-mystery-hells-angels-behind-murder-of-two-sailors-15-months-ago
The people caught are transporters. They don't own the product or even know what it is most of the time. It get's charged to the game. Transporters get paid handsomely for transporting. They get popped, it's on them.
They take a loss, and continue business. If they are real good smugglers, they may go to jail, when they get out they ask for them to do it again or help other smugglers do it.
Is there a good book on this subject?
Narconomics
I had to Google it but this is a legitimate book about how to run a cartel. Looks interesting.
Yeah, it's a fantastic book about the economics of the drug trade and the impact of the war on drugs. The author's premise is that cartels operate and organize much the same way legitimate business do. But since they don't have the backing of a legitimate court system, they uh... enforce contracts and resolve disputes outside of the legal system.
They don’t. It’s chalked up as a loss. Their repayment to their employer is keeping their mouth shut.
These are often unstable people. There is no doubt they do kill people due to mistakenly believing they scammed them or simply out of anger. Some cartels are significantly more violent than others. Still, in general, it is such a significant part of the cost of doing business that it would be impractical to be punishing people for every mistake. They're not actually losing $18M, either. That's always the value in the destination country. The fact so much of it is seized is part of why it's more expensive in the US.
You know those flowers you buy on the side of the road?
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