January 16, 2022 Updated: January 16, 2022
Bags of heroin, some laced with fentanyl, are displayed at the office of the New York Attorney General in New York City on Sept. 23, 2016. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Beijing
is fueling the fentanyl crisis in
Canada and the United States through a sophisticated web involving drug
cartels, loan sharks, and foreign casinos, investigative journalist and author
Sam Cooper says.
How
Chinese money was funneled through such a web was described by Cooper as the “Vancouver model” in his
book “Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents
Infiltrated the West,” based on his investigations into crime networks in
cities including Toronto and Vancouver.
Cooper
said in a recent interview with EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program that
Chinese organized crime figures “have become the major movers of financial
crime money around the world,” as the model can be found in major U.S. cities.
“We can
say that in cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York City, San Francisco,
Boston, Seattle, and others, I can see the very same underground banking, Vancouver-model
activity,” Cooper said, where drug money was moved around on secret ledgers
without the need for wire transfers across borders.
That
model has surfaced because of China’s capital control, Cooper said, because
each citizen in communist China has a foreign exchange limit of $50,000 a year.
As a result, in order to move large sums overseas, for activities such as
buying a condo in foreign cities, wealthy Chinese would, for example, need to
seek out underground banking channels.
Cooper
explained how the Vancouver model works: Gang members from Vancouver travel to
casinos in Macau, targeting wealthy Chinese gamblers, including Chinese officials
who wish to get their money out of China. The two sides strike a deal and
Chinese gamblers travel to Vancouver, using cash supplied by local loan sharks
who get the money from drug dealers.
Chinese
gamblers use the money to buy casino chips, play them, cash them, and walk out
with cleaned or laundered money. Then, they transfer money from their bank
accounts in China to the gangsters’ accounts in China to pay back the debt.
“The
proceeds, of course, fund more fentanyl precursor production [in China] … which
sends more drugs into the United States or Canada, [and] produces more drug
cash, and the cycle repeats,” Cooper said, adding that the gangsters would loan
out the cash again to fund the gambling of more wealthy Chinese in
Canada.
Cooper’s
book illustrates cases in
which state actors from the communist regime directed drug trafficking
organizations in Vancouver and intervened in gang conflicts in the city.
Fentanyl
is a synthetic opioid that is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times
more powerful than heroin.
More
than 100,000 people in the United States died of drug overdoses from April 2020
to April 2021, a record amount during a 12-month period, according to the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fentanyl was involved in nearly
two-thirds of those deaths.
U.S.
officials have been trying to stop the influx of fentanyl into the country.
Earlier
this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported
that it seized 87,652 pounds of narcotics in south Texas ports between Oct. 1,
2020, and Sept. 30, 2021. Among the seized drugs, 588 pounds were fentanyl, up
1,066 percent from the year prior.
In
April 2021, a Chinese national was sentenced to 14 years for
laundering tens of millions of dollars of drug money for Latin American
cartels. Less than six months later, another Chinese national was given a seven-year sentence for
running a money-laundering network spanning several countries.
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