‘This stuff is being exported out of the country. … It’s an international business for them,’ a drug enforcement expert said.
Chinese organized crime with suspected ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has taken over an estimated 75 percent of the marijuana black market in the United States, a federal narcotics expert said.
Rob Roggeveen, national deputy coordinator of the Marijuana Impact Group within the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, said that the black-market marijuana trade has grown exponentially into an estimated $300 billion-a-year industry.
“This stuff is being exported out of the country, whether it’s to Canada, France, England. It’s an international business for them,” Roggeveen told The Epoch Times.
“They’re not growing in the U.S. just to keep it within the United States—it’s going international.”
A pound of marijuana bought for $450 to $500 or less, in California, for example, will sell in New York for much more, and in some countries where marijuana is illegal with more severe penalties, it sells for “exponentially more,” ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 a pound, Roggeveen said.
In the past, Mexican cartels hid outdoor marijuana grows on U.S. public lands such as national forests, but in recent years, Chinese syndicates have brazenly moved into states that legalized the medicinal and recreational use of marijuana and reduced penalties for illegal cannabis cultivation, he said.
“A decade ago, you rarely saw anything other than the Mexican cartels running marijuana, and generally that was being brought across the border,” Roggeveen said. “Somewhere along the line, it changed, and that trade changed hands from the Mexican cartels to the CCP.”
How and why it happened remains somewhat of a mystery, he said, especially because there is no real evidence of clashes between Chinese and Mexican cartels.
“We don’t see them warring amongst each other over the marijuana trade. Why isn’t there any Hispanic-on-Chinese violence? Usually it’s Hispanic on Hispanic, Chinese on Chinese, or Chinese on some other Asian group,” Roggeveen said. “There’s a lot of theories out there, but the bottom line is they’re operating together.”
Narcotics experts suspect that there must have been some sort of alliance struck between Mexican and Chinese cartels. And, according to witnesses who testified at a Sept. 18 House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, such a deal may have come in the form of cheap Chinese money-laundering services for Mexican cartels.
Christopher Urben, a former agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration who now works for global investigations firm Nardello & Co., told the subcommittee the CCP is now doing most of the laundering for Mexican cartels and is using the Chinese-controlled app WeChat and cryptocurrency to do it.
Chinese money laundering organizations are now “one of the key actors laundering money professionally in the United States and around the globe,” according to the latest National Money Laundering Risk Assessment by the Treasury.
Urben called for increased use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—originally enacted in 1970 to target the Italian Mafia—to prosecute Chinese and Mexican organized crime and advocated the creation of a new, well-funded federal task force with the tactical ability to move from state to state.
Experts at the hearing said Chinese organized crime, allegedly linked to the CCP, poses a national security threat to the United States.
Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Director Donnie Anderson testified that some illegal marijuana grow operations are located near critical infrastructure, including military bases and pipelines.
“It is my belief that the CCP maintains access to these sites, particularly through its known practices of controlling expatriates via so-called ‘police stations,’” Anderson said.
Although Oklahoma law requires marijuana business owners to be state residents with at least two years of residency, Anderson said nearly all Chinese-operated grows “circumvent this requirement through fraud and straw ownership” facilitated by consulting firms, real estate agents, and attorneys who helped establish these shell operations.
Anderson said investigators have documented evidence of financial transfers to the Bank of China and connections to businesses owned by the Chinese regime.
By Brad Jones
