Let's go further back to 1898 when the drug company Bayer was promoting heroin as the new miracle cure for all kinds of ailments for adults and children! Even Sears Roebuck sold the Bayer's "miracle drug". By 1924 there were over 200,000 heroin addicts in the United States alone. Maybe you can call the pharmaceutical industry the first real drug cartel and still continuing that fine tradition today.
Hey there Tom, Yes great point. The legal heroin and opium market is one to look at. Some people would look even further back still to the East India Company as maybe the world's first drug cartel - with the Royal Navy as its enforcers. I guess the Mob made the blueprint for an illegal drug distribution network in the U.S. but like you say you have these legal companies and the pharmaceutical industry which really laid the groundwork for the Mob to be able to do that. More on this to come - and the interaction between the U.S. legal drug market and the illegal one is one worthy of more investigation. All best there friend.
Remember cocaine was presented as the more beneficial drug and least addictive to heroin by doctors and hospitals in the early 1900's. Who can forget the original formula to Coca Cola? Cocaine was an additive.
The East India Company is the prefect example of the merging of corporate and state interests into an organization as ruthless and brutal as any criminal organization now and then. Another example would be the conversion of diet pills in the late 1950's into speed with formulas and distribution linked to the drug companies and distribution initially by Hells Angels. The companies listed the 5-6 percent loss of diet pills as shrinkage when trucks were crossing the border into Mexico to lose portions of the shipments.
Fentanyl is a legal drug used in anesthesia and tested by pharmaceutical companies also as a pain killer. You are right. Legal companies have done the chemical research and development suitable for adaptation to criminal street drugs. Cloaking these despicable companies and owners in a veneer of legality makes them even more dangerous.
Yes, the East India Company can certainly be seen now as a morality tale of allowing private monopolies huge power and mercenary armies. I fear we could be going back there with the new emerging power of monopolies today. Going forward, the power of U.S. pharmaceutical companies has been something difficult to see paralleled in the rest of the world. The United States is great in many ways but on the question of drugs it has certainly struggled. The tough question is where to go from here. Cheers.
I always heard, from reliable sources who were around in the 1970s (+ even 1960s) that the reason the Italian/Sicilian outfit lost its hold on crime was not because the Feds broke it up, but because the bosses stopped "making" new soldati; preferring instead to send their sons to college and into legitimate, less brutal businesses. The sons with no other options were a pretty poor lot, for many reasons; and had less of an exclusively "ethnic" community to extort and live off. They got into drug trade heavy, but were bad at it; and wound up busted, addicted, or dead in disputes with outside competitors and their own suppliers. The other, newer, hungrier ethnic outfits supplanted them easily. It's my belief that "Mafias" in America are a stage in the development of immigrant cultures; formed first for community self-defense, then expanding into lucrative "rackets" where their tools of force are useful. The prosperity they generate springboards their second or third generation into American upper-middle-class identity, and they leave the rackets behind where the next group takes up. It worked for the Irish, Jewish, and Italians; and the Russians, Albanians, and various Latinx ethnicities have it now.
Hey Shaggy - I hadn't heard this but this is a great insight and makes a lot of sense. The Italians built their American mafia in the 1920s but by the 1970s there was less need for it as a vehicle out of poverty - and that chimes about these "juniors" being bad in the trade. It also makes sense about mafias in the U.S. reflecting a stage of immigration. However, inside Mexico and Colombia etc, I guess the dynamic is quite different and less linked to immigration. Anyway, best there friend and great to hear your observations.
Well, yes, Mexico and Colombia are gonna be different; bc they don't have polyglot societies like America does. I can't speak to it, but I wonder if there are parallels between the cartels' place in society in those countries and LCN, 'ndrangheta, and Camorra's place in Italian society 40 years ago.
Yes, there is certainly a point of comparison with Italy - but in Mexico and Colombia the power and violence of narcos has been so much more extreme. So Mexico has now become its own reference point for ultra violent organized crime. The fear is more places will follow what is happening here.
Sep 11, 2023·edited Sep 11, 2023Liked by Ioan Grillo
Another great, informative one. Very interested in the time bracket 50s to 70s (also Acapulco's "Golden Age") Thanks for the pause for thought ... and "stratospheric infamy" makes my day!
Thanks there Barbara. Yes, that overlap with Acapulco has some interesting angles. I know a woman who was the daughter of a Jewish mobster involved in the creation of Las Vegas, and when the heat was on, he sent her to Acapulco as a safe haven, I think in the late 50s. It would be interesting to look up mafia money there along with Elvis and Sinatra. Ha ha, yes, I was trying for a suitable word for how famous Capone is, and it's interesting how infamous certain gangsters - Capone, Chapo, Escobar - became and why. Cheers.
Yes, the "why" is complicated, haven't yet checked etymologies of "infamy" but populist villains is a route like Robin Hood stuff, also thinking to a social form of Stockholm Syndrome, and then mad deflections / guilt like how great Hitler was because he built roads (heard local bloke in pub defend Thatcher, despite essentially screwing beyond repair his working class family, because she achieved this on only 4 hours of sleep every night. Then there's Manson, the True Crime Genre ... I'll comb back into the Acapulco leads for what you mention. There are still folk there alive and lucid who know these stories from personal involvement at tail end, and now they are "old", more likely to talk (off record)
The why on certain mobsters is interesting and I think it might be partly even that certain names are catchy. The fact that people are fascinated by gangsters is not that mysterious I believe although fascinating - a mix of working class anti heroes, and rebels but capitalists, and stories of violence and power that have always gripped people. Ha ha, Thatcher was interesting comparison.
I know it's dead common and normal, but I am still mystified about why we like things that harm others and ourselves (schadenfreude, and how we blur lines between pleasure and pain), why we fixate on the hero and rebel side and can't be rational about or name the damage or terror. btw Sent you one of the trafficking prevention videos to your WhatsApp x
Good point. Another interesting angle perhaps is that men seem to be obsessed by gangsters and women with serial killers. (Or is that a stretch). I received the video, thanks and I can send to the human rights center perhaps. Cheers.
That's very interesting, and I hadn't thought of it before (despite writing the last part of my PhD thesis on popular / post feminism and the true crime genre (early 90s, mind). So many of the big serial killers killed women, could that be a reason? (Also we don't call reall mass killers, Hitler, Stalin etc serial killers, nor even the cult ones that get people to take suicide pills ... the intimacy of the types of murders, and the sexualising and mutilation of the bodies could be something to do with it. I bet there are cool experts to ask -- a new thing to ponder, will take it to the pub for some Kentish street wisdom!)
Thanks on the video -- I want to send you the Jamaica one, which is perhaps more pertinent to Mexico, and am still waiting on Olga there. Abrazos from the September sun x
My extensive studies have shown a common link beyond the ethnicities of criminal cartels (the ones that are truly "organized" and not just local crews), that factor being a deeply held Catholicism whether rooted in Sicily, Ireland, Italy, or elsewhere. Always included are enough shylocks of Jewish ancestry to prop up Rome's favorite diversion of blaming Jewry for all ills, and Europe has always had a deep pool of Jews from which to recruit, most with a lineage on that heavily catholicised continent going back generations if not centuries. Ex-Jesuit priest Alberto Rivera wrote in 1985 that he personally organized and handled both criminal groups and shamanic cults, selling them holy water for occult rituals. He also noted that then-Pope John Paul II condoned those very cults (predecessors to the Santa Muerte-worshipping Mexican drug cartels of today).
Romanism had overt power in Latin America since the conquest, replete with a title-holding, noble ruling elite that did not have to conceal itself. Independence movements damaged that from 1806, but it wasn't until the Spanish-American war 100 years later that this power structure was truly shattered in the Americas. In the USA, prohibition arrived just in time, providing a product and market for a new generation of secret and subversive mobs to pander to. As you have demonstrated, the sophistication and financial clout wielded by these syndicates has increased exponentially through various iterations. I would add that, in the USA, Indian gaming has been a major outgrowth of organized crime with proven affiliations to both Mafia and Latino cartels. This is logical, since heavily "evangelized" (that is, catholicised) native tribes were the foot soldiers against protestant Americans through a century of French & Indian wars prior to the 1776 revolution. Every believer of Apocalipsis knows there is a criminal underground that spans the whole world, has been active for twenty or more centuries, and ruled openly for many of them. Today her tentacles include the vast network of financially inexhaustible NGOs trafficking migrants up through the Americas, many governments wholesale (Red China especially), and huge sectors of the US government. That is why so many US agencies have been kicked out of Mexico!
That is a very interesting idea of Catholic as a common link of cartels that I hadn't considered. I guess there are also "mafias" and very organized gangs from other cultures including the Russians, Chinese and indeed the White Aryan Brotherhood. But there might be something in a link between Catholic culture and a certain type of organized crime. Best there Pastor Sam.
There is a persistent "legend" that Lucky Luciano personally visited Culiacán to arrange "alternate" sources of opium after Turkish opium was no longer available in WWII. Supposedly, he did so with knowledge of US government officials. Many are convinced Luciano hoped that if he could find a replacement source of opium (heroin) the FBI and the US would grant a blanket pardon for other crimes. I this actually happened as told in the legend, it would have been a futile since he was ultimately deported and reputedly furious about the government "betrayal".
Rumour and legends about his Culiacan visit to "little Chicago- Culiacan" has been repeated many times in several books and in local legends circulating in Sinaloa. Luis Astorga could find absolutely no evidence of any "agreement to provide heroin" between Luciano and the US government in his extensive analysis of US archives. Astorga remains skeptical that Luciano was ever in Culiacán and is convinced that he never the 1940's generation of drug capos in Sinaloa. Nevertheless, the legends persist.
I briefly mentioned this period and these events in my own book Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds and provide the references to Astorga's research.
Hey there Jim. Good to hear from you and thanks for recounting this story, which is a fascinating one. Ben Smith had an interesting piece and concluded it was largely a myth but there mafia buyers posing as government agents. I am still 50/50 on whether there was a U.S. government deal to buy Sinaloan heroin. If only we could find that smoking gun. All best there and keep in touch friend.
Let's go further back to 1898 when the drug company Bayer was promoting heroin as the new miracle cure for all kinds of ailments for adults and children! Even Sears Roebuck sold the Bayer's "miracle drug". By 1924 there were over 200,000 heroin addicts in the United States alone. Maybe you can call the pharmaceutical industry the first real drug cartel and still continuing that fine tradition today.
Hey there Tom, Yes great point. The legal heroin and opium market is one to look at. Some people would look even further back still to the East India Company as maybe the world's first drug cartel - with the Royal Navy as its enforcers. I guess the Mob made the blueprint for an illegal drug distribution network in the U.S. but like you say you have these legal companies and the pharmaceutical industry which really laid the groundwork for the Mob to be able to do that. More on this to come - and the interaction between the U.S. legal drug market and the illegal one is one worthy of more investigation. All best there friend.
Remember cocaine was presented as the more beneficial drug and least addictive to heroin by doctors and hospitals in the early 1900's. Who can forget the original formula to Coca Cola? Cocaine was an additive.
The East India Company is the prefect example of the merging of corporate and state interests into an organization as ruthless and brutal as any criminal organization now and then. Another example would be the conversion of diet pills in the late 1950's into speed with formulas and distribution linked to the drug companies and distribution initially by Hells Angels. The companies listed the 5-6 percent loss of diet pills as shrinkage when trucks were crossing the border into Mexico to lose portions of the shipments.
Fentanyl is a legal drug used in anesthesia and tested by pharmaceutical companies also as a pain killer. You are right. Legal companies have done the chemical research and development suitable for adaptation to criminal street drugs. Cloaking these despicable companies and owners in a veneer of legality makes them even more dangerous.
Yes, the East India Company can certainly be seen now as a morality tale of allowing private monopolies huge power and mercenary armies. I fear we could be going back there with the new emerging power of monopolies today. Going forward, the power of U.S. pharmaceutical companies has been something difficult to see paralleled in the rest of the world. The United States is great in many ways but on the question of drugs it has certainly struggled. The tough question is where to go from here. Cheers.
I always heard, from reliable sources who were around in the 1970s (+ even 1960s) that the reason the Italian/Sicilian outfit lost its hold on crime was not because the Feds broke it up, but because the bosses stopped "making" new soldati; preferring instead to send their sons to college and into legitimate, less brutal businesses. The sons with no other options were a pretty poor lot, for many reasons; and had less of an exclusively "ethnic" community to extort and live off. They got into drug trade heavy, but were bad at it; and wound up busted, addicted, or dead in disputes with outside competitors and their own suppliers. The other, newer, hungrier ethnic outfits supplanted them easily. It's my belief that "Mafias" in America are a stage in the development of immigrant cultures; formed first for community self-defense, then expanding into lucrative "rackets" where their tools of force are useful. The prosperity they generate springboards their second or third generation into American upper-middle-class identity, and they leave the rackets behind where the next group takes up. It worked for the Irish, Jewish, and Italians; and the Russians, Albanians, and various Latinx ethnicities have it now.
Hey Shaggy - I hadn't heard this but this is a great insight and makes a lot of sense. The Italians built their American mafia in the 1920s but by the 1970s there was less need for it as a vehicle out of poverty - and that chimes about these "juniors" being bad in the trade. It also makes sense about mafias in the U.S. reflecting a stage of immigration. However, inside Mexico and Colombia etc, I guess the dynamic is quite different and less linked to immigration. Anyway, best there friend and great to hear your observations.
Well, yes, Mexico and Colombia are gonna be different; bc they don't have polyglot societies like America does. I can't speak to it, but I wonder if there are parallels between the cartels' place in society in those countries and LCN, 'ndrangheta, and Camorra's place in Italian society 40 years ago.
Yes, there is certainly a point of comparison with Italy - but in Mexico and Colombia the power and violence of narcos has been so much more extreme. So Mexico has now become its own reference point for ultra violent organized crime. The fear is more places will follow what is happening here.
Another great, informative one. Very interested in the time bracket 50s to 70s (also Acapulco's "Golden Age") Thanks for the pause for thought ... and "stratospheric infamy" makes my day!
Thanks there Barbara. Yes, that overlap with Acapulco has some interesting angles. I know a woman who was the daughter of a Jewish mobster involved in the creation of Las Vegas, and when the heat was on, he sent her to Acapulco as a safe haven, I think in the late 50s. It would be interesting to look up mafia money there along with Elvis and Sinatra. Ha ha, yes, I was trying for a suitable word for how famous Capone is, and it's interesting how infamous certain gangsters - Capone, Chapo, Escobar - became and why. Cheers.
Yes, the "why" is complicated, haven't yet checked etymologies of "infamy" but populist villains is a route like Robin Hood stuff, also thinking to a social form of Stockholm Syndrome, and then mad deflections / guilt like how great Hitler was because he built roads (heard local bloke in pub defend Thatcher, despite essentially screwing beyond repair his working class family, because she achieved this on only 4 hours of sleep every night. Then there's Manson, the True Crime Genre ... I'll comb back into the Acapulco leads for what you mention. There are still folk there alive and lucid who know these stories from personal involvement at tail end, and now they are "old", more likely to talk (off record)
The why on certain mobsters is interesting and I think it might be partly even that certain names are catchy. The fact that people are fascinated by gangsters is not that mysterious I believe although fascinating - a mix of working class anti heroes, and rebels but capitalists, and stories of violence and power that have always gripped people. Ha ha, Thatcher was interesting comparison.
I know it's dead common and normal, but I am still mystified about why we like things that harm others and ourselves (schadenfreude, and how we blur lines between pleasure and pain), why we fixate on the hero and rebel side and can't be rational about or name the damage or terror. btw Sent you one of the trafficking prevention videos to your WhatsApp x
Good point. Another interesting angle perhaps is that men seem to be obsessed by gangsters and women with serial killers. (Or is that a stretch). I received the video, thanks and I can send to the human rights center perhaps. Cheers.
That's very interesting, and I hadn't thought of it before (despite writing the last part of my PhD thesis on popular / post feminism and the true crime genre (early 90s, mind). So many of the big serial killers killed women, could that be a reason? (Also we don't call reall mass killers, Hitler, Stalin etc serial killers, nor even the cult ones that get people to take suicide pills ... the intimacy of the types of murders, and the sexualising and mutilation of the bodies could be something to do with it. I bet there are cool experts to ask -- a new thing to ponder, will take it to the pub for some Kentish street wisdom!)
Thanks on the video -- I want to send you the Jamaica one, which is perhaps more pertinent to Mexico, and am still waiting on Olga there. Abrazos from the September sun x
Uncomfortable Truths....
Indeed. And many more to come. Good to see you here DuVay Knox and keep in touch there.
My extensive studies have shown a common link beyond the ethnicities of criminal cartels (the ones that are truly "organized" and not just local crews), that factor being a deeply held Catholicism whether rooted in Sicily, Ireland, Italy, or elsewhere. Always included are enough shylocks of Jewish ancestry to prop up Rome's favorite diversion of blaming Jewry for all ills, and Europe has always had a deep pool of Jews from which to recruit, most with a lineage on that heavily catholicised continent going back generations if not centuries. Ex-Jesuit priest Alberto Rivera wrote in 1985 that he personally organized and handled both criminal groups and shamanic cults, selling them holy water for occult rituals. He also noted that then-Pope John Paul II condoned those very cults (predecessors to the Santa Muerte-worshipping Mexican drug cartels of today).
Romanism had overt power in Latin America since the conquest, replete with a title-holding, noble ruling elite that did not have to conceal itself. Independence movements damaged that from 1806, but it wasn't until the Spanish-American war 100 years later that this power structure was truly shattered in the Americas. In the USA, prohibition arrived just in time, providing a product and market for a new generation of secret and subversive mobs to pander to. As you have demonstrated, the sophistication and financial clout wielded by these syndicates has increased exponentially through various iterations. I would add that, in the USA, Indian gaming has been a major outgrowth of organized crime with proven affiliations to both Mafia and Latino cartels. This is logical, since heavily "evangelized" (that is, catholicised) native tribes were the foot soldiers against protestant Americans through a century of French & Indian wars prior to the 1776 revolution. Every believer of Apocalipsis knows there is a criminal underground that spans the whole world, has been active for twenty or more centuries, and ruled openly for many of them. Today her tentacles include the vast network of financially inexhaustible NGOs trafficking migrants up through the Americas, many governments wholesale (Red China especially), and huge sectors of the US government. That is why so many US agencies have been kicked out of Mexico!
That is a very interesting idea of Catholic as a common link of cartels that I hadn't considered. I guess there are also "mafias" and very organized gangs from other cultures including the Russians, Chinese and indeed the White Aryan Brotherhood. But there might be something in a link between Catholic culture and a certain type of organized crime. Best there Pastor Sam.
There is a persistent "legend" that Lucky Luciano personally visited Culiacán to arrange "alternate" sources of opium after Turkish opium was no longer available in WWII. Supposedly, he did so with knowledge of US government officials. Many are convinced Luciano hoped that if he could find a replacement source of opium (heroin) the FBI and the US would grant a blanket pardon for other crimes. I this actually happened as told in the legend, it would have been a futile since he was ultimately deported and reputedly furious about the government "betrayal".
Rumour and legends about his Culiacan visit to "little Chicago- Culiacan" has been repeated many times in several books and in local legends circulating in Sinaloa. Luis Astorga could find absolutely no evidence of any "agreement to provide heroin" between Luciano and the US government in his extensive analysis of US archives. Astorga remains skeptical that Luciano was ever in Culiacán and is convinced that he never the 1940's generation of drug capos in Sinaloa. Nevertheless, the legends persist.
I briefly mentioned this period and these events in my own book Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds and provide the references to Astorga's research.
Hey there Jim. Good to hear from you and thanks for recounting this story, which is a fascinating one. Ben Smith had an interesting piece and concluded it was largely a myth but there mafia buyers posing as government agents. I am still 50/50 on whether there was a U.S. government deal to buy Sinaloan heroin. If only we could find that smoking gun. All best there and keep in touch friend.