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 Editorials | August 2007 
Drug Arrest in U.S. has Global Implications
 Caller Times
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| | Chinese-Mexican businessman Zhenli Ye Gon is interviewed in his lawyer's office in Queens, N.Y., in this Thursday, May 17, 2007 file photo. (AP/Richard Drew) |
The arrest of a 44-year-old Chinese-born Mexican citizen in a Washington, D.C., suburb has become big news in Mexico. And so has the discovery of $207 million in cash hidden in the walls of the man's lavish Mexico City home.
While the detention of Zhenli Ye Gon hasn't drawn as much attention in the United States as it has in Mexico, the case may illustrate how the illegal drug trade is as good as Wal-Mart or McDonalds or any major corporation in responding to the needs of its customers.
The difference of course is that the desperately addicted customers of the illicit narcotics trade are risking their health, their lives and their fortunes, but their downward spiraling lives are of little consequence to the deeply cynical drug barons. The drug involved in the case of Gon are methamphetamines, an illicit product which has been produced mostly on a mom-and-pop scale in small hidden makeshift labs in the United States. But the Mexican case has underscored how the production of methamphetamines has now become as much a part of global trade as autos or toys.
Ye Gon, who was born in China and became a Mexican citizen in 2003, was importing Chinese toys and trinkets into Mexico from China.
Then he began importing large quantities of the major ingredient in methamphetamines, pseudoephedrine, supposedly for Mexican drug companies for cold medicines. Ye Gon adopted a lifestyle worthy of, well, a drug kingpin. He gambled away millions of dollars in Las Vegas.
He was so good a customer that the casinos gave him a Rolls-Royce in gratitude. He acquired a series of mistresses and the luxury home in Mexico City. Few legitimate businesses could support this lavishness and he showed up on the radar screen of Mexican law enforcement.
Ye Gon had fled the country when police raided his home and found what is believed to largest seizure of drug-related cash anywhere. He is facing charges in both the United States and Mexico.
What had prompted the raid was the seizure of a shipload of chemicals that American and Mexican agents believed belonged to Ye Gon. The chemicals were the ingredients for methamphetamines. U.S. prosecutors say Ye Gon was the head of an operation that had imported more than $700 million worth of drugs bound for the American market.
Global crime rings
Meth is now possibly the most available and the most destructive illicit drug on the American market. The seizures of meth at the U.S. border have grown exponentially just as the discovery of domestic labs have dropped. Meth has become the stuff of global trade, no longer predominantly run by small mostly rural operations in labs that were just as likely to blow up as turn out a consistent product.
As the International Tribune noted recently, large quantities of meth ingredients from Germany as well as China have been funneled through Mexico.
And that may foretell organized crime morphing from Columbian to Mexican to possibly Asian and Eastern Europe gangs in the near future.
Ye Gon may have done even more damage, shaking a still-fragile Mexican presidency by charging that he had been keeping part of the seized money for the administration of Felipe Calderon which was using it as a slush fund. Calderon dismissed the story as a fabrication, but Mexicans, who are deeply cynical of all politicians, weren't so sure. Just how past shipments made it through American and Mexican ports without detection hasn't yet been explained.
Calderon has been building credibility with Mexicans after a whisker-thin election victory with a massive assault on the drug cartels operating within his country.
But the case of Ye Gon indicates that Mexican authorities are battling criminal gangs with ties that go abroad, even across oceans.
And American law enforcement understands even more clearly that they are battling crime syndicates that have the sophistication and reach equal to the largest multinational companies. |
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