I read recently of smugglers busted with $18 million worth of meth hidden in a vegetable shipment. It was around 16 tons. For the smugglers, Aside from of going to prison, are the smugglers indebted to the cartel or do the cartels see it as a cost of doing business?
In: Economics
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)
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