10-2-19 Over the last four years the Orange County Sheriff's Department has sponsored legislation with California Sen. Pat Bates, proposing the penalties for trafficking fentanyl be like those for trafficking cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. Those bills have all been defeated. https://abc7.com/18-pounds-of-fentanyl-seized-in-santa-ana/5635222/
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Clarkstown police said this truck was stopped in West Nyack on Sept. 25, 2019, and found with heroin, fentanyl and cocaine. (Photo: Clarkstown Police Department) 11-13-19 WESTCHESTER, N.Y. – Eleven people have been accused of taking part in a major drug ring that sent truckloads of carfentanil – a drug 100 times more potent than fentanyl – across the country, including $2.4 million worth of drugs that were seized in West Nyack, New York.
The operation used long-haul truckers to move carfentanil, heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, ketamine and tramadol throughout the United States, authorities.
The accusations were revealed in a press release this month from the Queens District Attorney's Office, which is leading the investigation. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/13/carfentanil-new-york-giovanny-arias-victor-salazar-hector-maren/4181254002/
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When he began working the Molly case the ambition of D.E.A. agent Michael Buemi was to identify the ultimate source of the drugs. He launched a virtual reconnaissance mission, sleuthing through online ads and forum postings, many of which linked back to a saleswoman in China who went by the name Li Li. Posing as a prospective buyer Buemi reached out to Li Li and, after a few weeks, had learned enough to begin mapping out the network of American distributors….
Some of these facilities manufacture tons of chemicals every week, or more than a million pills per day. In 2016 the industry made up 3 percent of China’s national economy, with over $100 billion in profits annually. Most of these companies are members of the vast pharmaceutical underclass, pumping out huge quantities of inexpensive generic drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients. It’s a low-cost, low-profit business, but the barriers to entry are minimal and the market is immense: the basic pharmaceutical ingredients that China produces are needed everywhere in the world — including the United States — for synthesis into more complex and profitable medicines are needed by more advanced drug companies everywhere in the world for synthesis into more complex and profitable medicines….
Li Li shared with him the name and telephone number of a man in the northeastern United States who distributed the company’s drugs across the country. “Reach out to him,” Buemi recalls Li Li saying. “He’ll tell you everything about us.”
On their first call almost before Buemi could introduce himself the distributor leapt into a long, feverish recap of a lifetime of illicit activities. All he wanted to do was talk about drugs. The distributor said that he had been caught once by the D.E.A., but that he had learned his lesson. Now he was more careful.
Buemi had by then received the acetyl fentanyl pills from Li Li: 50 of them, five strips of 10 wrapped neatly in paper tucked inside a letter-size Canada Post envelope. He was doing his own research on fentanyl but still didn’t really understand what it was or why it was being shipped to the United States as a street drug. On the call the distributor brought it up unprompted. “Have you ever heard of fentanyl?” the distributor asked. He walked Buemi through the basics: just sprinkle fentanyl into heroin or a batch of counterfeit prescription pills, and the potency — and the street value — increases enormously. …
In 1984 researchers at the University of Utah created a “child friendly” sweetened, red lollipop-like product called Oralet; soon thereafter came sprays, tablets, films and more. The most successful of these was a transdermal patch called Duragesic, which allowed for the slow, controlled release of fentanyl in patients with chronic pain. Here fentanyl was truly revolutionary: unlike many other drugs, which needed to be injected directly into a patient’s bloodstream, fentanyl was so potent that merely placing it on the skin was enough to relieve pain. By 2004 Duragesic sales were more than $2 billion worldwide….Dr. Robert Dripps, the chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1973 and a towering figure in American medicine, initially argued strongly against the drug’s certification by the F.D.A. There was no need for most doctors to be using such a powerful drug, Dripps said. He worried that fentanyl’s potency and the near-instant high the drug produced would lend itself to abuse….
The development of ever-simpler synthesis methods helped catalyze a devastating fentanyl outbreak in the mid-2000s when illicit fentanyl flooded drug markets in the Midwest, claiming more than 1,000 lives. The D.E.A. traced production to a single lab in Toluca, Mexico where one of the lab’s operators told authorities that he’d bought the necessary chemicals from a Chinese company….And because the internet offered a bevy of manufacturers to choose from, buyers in the United States could change sources constantly, making it difficult to detect patterns in their purchases. “If Mexican cartels were the big-box stores of the drug market,” says Dr. Bryce Pardo, a drug-policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, “the Chinese are Amazon” — cheap, convenient and ubiquitous.
The US Postal Service suddenly became perhaps the largest drug-transportation network in the world, delivering fentanyl from China straight to American homes….The United States Postal Service’s international parcel volume increased to nearly 500 million packages in 2017 — far more than FedEx, U.P.S. and DHL combined — from about 150 million in 2013. More than half of those arrived at just one facility in New York….
At the head of one operation appeared to be Jason Berry of Montreal, coordinating the importation of huge quantities of drugs into the United States, via Canada, from Chinese chemical companies. “It was an astronomical amount of drugs coming in from China,” Buemi says — fentanyl chief among them….
Zaron Bio-tech, a company based in Shanghai and registered in Hong Kong—Zaron billed itself as a food-additive manufacturer, but it was in fact responsible for a majority of the fentanyl that Berry and Vivas Ceron were moving (in 2014) into the United States. The two inmates were merely deputies of a global operation — whoever was behind Zaron was the real mastermind….
Brandon Hubbard in Portland, OR (username pdxblack on dark web) was working out of his home while directing drug shipments to a seemingly innocuous second address: Northwest Oil Solutions in Woodland, Wash., where a co-conspirator worked….
Even while countless Chinese companies were producing illicit powdered fentanyl for sale to American customers, the Chinese maintained their stance, and the companies continued to operate unimpeded. “It was like talking to a stone wall,” one former United States diplomat told me. The Chinese were unequivocal: “We don’t know what you’re talking about,” the United States diplomat recalls being told. “We have no fentanyl problem.”…Oct. 2015, the Chinese government said that it was adding 116 synthetic chemicals to its list of controlled substances. A huge majority of these were new psychoactive substances, but the list also included six fentanyl analogues….
The shipment on its way to Mexico had been sent through five separate freight forwarders, the nameless middlemen of international shipping who handle all the paperwork and logistics of export. Fentanyl manufacturers used these companies to ship their product anonymously and disguise its point of origin with layers of anonymity and dead-end addresses. For freight forwarders any shipment to the United States was good business. They earned a healthy profit even while accepting no risk — they had no responsibility for checking the contents of the shipments they were givenb or ensuring that the information provided by the sender was accurate or complete….
Coordinating through the D.E.A. Special Operations Division he learned that the California distributor, a man named Gary Resnik of L.A., was also communicating with Zaron via Wickr….(Resnik pleaded guilty and was sentenced with a co-conspirator to nearly 27 years.) At the storage unit agents found bulk imports of acetyl fentanyl from China — imported as “toys” or “children’s clothes” — and a makeshift lab equipped with five pill presses capable of making 40,000 pills, enough product for the operation to net more than $3.6 million a year in street sales alone….
With the placebos (from pharmaceutical companies) ready Buemi began his work as Zaron’s chief distributor. Small shipments arrived in a baggie inside a magazine tucked in an envelope; larger shipments came ensconced in mylar packaging inside a square box. In both cases the return address was a Chinese freight-forwarding company that had handled the shipment. Buemi took the real drugs into evidence, packaged the harmless pills for shipment and then sent them wherever Zaron asked….There were organizations in Nebraska, Maryland, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, California and Ohio, and more still. They received fentanyl shipments at hundreds of addresses: car garages and P.O. boxes, derelict apartments and expensive homes in gated suburban communities….
Though he used the moniker Hong Kong Zaron, the man behind Zaron was actually from Qingdao, a city in eastern China. His real name was Zhang Jian. Buemi learned he was not a fentanyl manufacturer; he did not personally operate any factories. Instead Zhang was a logistician and a trader. He took orders from customers, coordinated with manufacturers and sent off the product — a glorified salesman. “His job was: sell stuff, get money,” Buemi says. Zhang’s family was involved, too….In August as Buemi was about to finalize the shipment, Zhang suddenly went silent. Buemi soon discovered why — Zhang had been arrested in China by Ministry of Public Security….But then, just a few weeks later, Buemi learned that Zhang had been released. He was not being charged. Buemi was told that there was an issue with the evidence but nothing more. The joint investigation was over….
A few weeks before Zhang’s kingpin designation, corporate ownership of Zaron Bio-tech was transferred to a man named He Wenxiang at an address in Guangzhou, China. Searching through Hong Kong corporate registration documents, I saw that He was the longtime owner of a freight-forwarding company. I also noticed that, in the five months around Zhang’s indictment in North Dakota, He Wenxiang had suddenly become director of three other seemingly random and unrelated companies, including one, Qingdao Gold Crown Fashion Jewelry Co., Limited, based in Zhang Jian’s hometown….
Zaron Bio-tech’s officially registered address is on the 20th floor of a run-down business tower in Wan Chai, a congested commercial area on Hong Kong Island’s north shore. When Zaron filed its last annual return, in April 2016, the office belonged to Hongkong Keyray Accountants. Visiting the office earlier this year I saw a new sign, for Rich Moral CPA Limited. A young woman in faded jeans and a red varsity jacket answered the door. I asked if she knew about a company called Zaron Bio-tech that was registered at this address. She told me that dozens of companies were registered there; in fact, a list of all the companies used to be posted on the wall just inside the door so that employees could keep them straight. The list was gone, she said, but people still come looking for a different company every month or so. It was easy cash for Rich Moral CPA, charging other companies to use their address. Whatever those businesses were actually up to, the woman told me, “we don’t want to know.” Her boss promptly came to the door and told me to leave. Until March 2018 secretarial firms were totally unregulated. They didn’t have to comply with laws combating money laundering or the financing of terrorism. Creating a corporate entity in Hong Kong could be done in a day from anywhere in the world, and hiring a “corporate secretary” was as simple as searching online and sending in a few anonymous forms. …
He Wenxiang ran into another room and returned with a thick folder of papers and documents relating to his real company. He said that he had registered a shell company in Hong Kong in 2012, solely for the purpose of moving money more easily into and out of the mainland. In 2017, he had seen an advertisement in a QQ group — a Chinese messaging and social media service — asking if anyone had a company in Hong Kong that they were willing to sell. He Wenxiang’s shell company was no longer of use to him, so he sold it for 10,000 RMB. He never asked why the person wanted a company, or couldn’t just open one themselves. Maybe, he suggested, someone had used his information and signature from that transaction to steal his identity and make him as a scapegoat for Zaron and the three other firms he now controlled. He took out his phone, called his accounting firm and asked if they knew that he was director of so many companies. “I cannot help you,” the woman on the phone said. “You don’t even know how many companies you own? Take care of it yourself.”
No one else had asked him about this, He Wenxiang said — not the police, not the M.P.S. Now that he knew all these companies were registered to his home address he was thinking of moving. …
Anyone can call themselves an accountant or secretarial firm — there are no professional regulations. Hiding behind layers and layers of these firms, Kenneth Leung of HK said, “is quite standard practice.”…
And India, the world’s other pharmaceutical and chemical giant, is a looming threat to step in and fill any gaps created by China’s new regulations. Last September, intelligence officers in Indore, in west-central India, seized nearly 11 kilograms of fentanyl. A local businessman had been asked by contacts in Mexico to make fentanyl; they gave him the formula and told him how to make it. Yet China remains the center of the global fentanyl economy. On Alibaba, Facebook and other sites Chinese companies openly advertise the drug and its precursors and analogues, as well as their ability to deliver orders while eluding United States customs. Some of these companies, unconcerned with scrutiny or confident of official indifference, operate from the same addresses and use the same phone numbers that Zaron Bio-tech once used. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/magazine/china-fentanyl-drug-ring.html
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