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May 22 - Deadly Chinese Fentanyl Is Creating a New Era of Drug Kingpins



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May 22 - Deadly Chinese Fentanyl Is Creating a New Era of Drug Kingpins
 

 
Outside the gates of a residential complex called Oak Bay, a construction frenzy tears up the central Chinese city of Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million racing to catch up with Beijing and Shanghai. The aural assault of jackhammers and cement trucks fades at the walls of the complex. Inside, a leafy oasis of manicured grounds and winding red-brick walkways draws out residents for early morning tai chi sessions near the banks of the Yangtze River.

Among the 5,000 apartments, on a high-rise’s 20th floor, lives Yan Xiaobing, a chemicals distributor with short, spiky hair. His wife, Hu Qi, operates an English tutoring business. Their social-media feed shows the couple and their two young children under blue skies at the beach and posing at landmarks in Europe and Japan. One photo shows Yan reading to pupils in a classroom.

In half-frame glasses, blue plastic house slippers and button-down shirt, Yan could have passed as an ordinary office worker when Bloomberg News reporters found him late last year. Filling the apartment doorway with his 6-foot frame, he expressed soft-spoken bafflement at the portrait the U.S. Justice Department paints of him: not a modest businessman, but a new type of international drug dealer. “This is horrifying,” he said. “Their investigation must have gone wrong.”

Federal prosecutors in Mississippi charged Yan, 41, in September with leading an empire built on the manufacture and sale of drugs related to fentanyl, one of the world’s deadliest and most profitable narcotics. So strong that it’s been studied as a chemical weapon, the drug has saturated American streets with breathtaking speed: It ki1ls more people than any other opioid, including prescription pills and heroin, because it’s so easy to overdose. Authorities say they have linked Yan and his 9W Technology Co. to more than 100 distributors across the U.S. and at least 20 other countries. Investigators expect scores of arrests as they dismantle his alleged network.

A month after the indictment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein held a Washington news conference to shine a spotlight on Yan and another man, Zhang Jian, 39, who’s accused of a similar scheme. Their indictments, Rosenstein told reporters, marked “a major milestone in our battle to stop deadly fentanyl from reaching the United States.”

Yan is the first Chinese national the U.S. has ever added to its “consolidated priority organization target” list of individuals thought to command the world's most prolific drug-trafficking and money-laundering networks. Investigators say his strategy was to offer fentanyl-like compounds called analogues — which differ slightly on a molecular level but produce similar effects — in order to exploit discrepancies between the laws in the U.S. and China. Rosenstein expressed optimism that his Chinese counterparts would hold Yan accountable.

But if Yan doesn’t resemble a stereotypical drug lord, neither is fentanyl your average drug. It has upended how traffickers conduct business and how such activity gets policed. Bloomberg News examined hundreds of pages of court documents and government reports and interviewed drug dealers and law officers, retracing a byzantine path that took investigators from a Mississippi parking lot all the way to Wuhan.
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What emerged looked less like the movie fantasy of guns and fancy cars and more like an operation that brokers souvenir keychains or counterfeit cosmetics. It is barely more trouble to dispatch deadly drugs than any of the other goods Americans import from the country of 1.4 billion every day.

The Drug Enforcement Administration might have never found Yan if not for a traffic stop in Ocean Springs, Mississippi on March 20, 2013. On an overcast Gulf Coast morning, Roslyn Demetrius Chapman, then 26, turned into the parking lot of the AT&T call center where she worked. A police officer suspected the windows of her silver Mitsubishi Galant were tinted too darkly, then found her license was suspended. He arrested her, and a search of her car turned up bags of synthetic marijuana and white powder.

Gulfport police Sergeant Adam Gibbons, a native New Yorker with a hockey player’s build and buzz cut, was two towns over when he got the call. As a then-13-year veteran who split time between street patrols and investigations with a DEA task force, he had insight into the trade from top to bottom and an expertise in synthetic narcotics. He took the lead. His team searched Chapman's home and a storage unit, finding more synthetic marijuana, chemicals used to make it, U.S. Postal Service boxes, shipping labels, ledgers and receipts.

He and DEA intelligence analyst John Metcalf scoured Chapman’s phone records, Facebook account and laptop. It looked like she was in love with someone named Rasheed Ali Muhammad in Bridgeport, Connecticut, whom she’d met on the phone through a mutual friend. They’d rendezvoused in Washington and New York and he’d gifted her sh0es and Godiva chocolate. She'd gotten his name tattooed on her chest.

“Im all in with u baby,” she wrote in one email, pledging to help him in “building an empire.”

Their so-called empire was an online operation that sold synthetic drugs known as spice, bath salts and flakka that mimic marijuana and stimulants. It wasn’t some haphazard thing: They treated first-time customers to free samples and free shipping, took credit cards and PayPal, and provided next-day delivery, tracking numbers and 100-percent money-back guarantees.

But where were the fake weed and bath salts coming from? Gibbons obtained a search warrant for a Yahoo email account created by Muhammad and spotted the drugs' source: Yan Xiaobing in Wuhan.

A Sept. 14, 2011, message to Yan read: “Can I pay to have this stuff shipped faster? I need this stuff like yesterday,” referring to JWH 210, a synthetic cannabinoid.

Using the alias William Zhou, Yan confirmed the shipment with a tracking number. “UPS is the fastest way to USA, we have tried our best to send it quickly and charge no extra fee,” he wrote. A similar compound, he wrote, “is just out of stock, the new batch will be ready tonight, so we will send it tomorrow. Since September, the purchase amount are soaring, so we will increase human power and equipment to expand the production capacity.”

He signed it, “Best regards.”

On Aug. 10, 2012, Yan sent Muhammad’s account a price list for 26 mind- and body-altering chemicals ranging from $1,400 to $3,600 per kilo.

(Chapman and Muhammad would later get prison sentences of nearly 17 and 120 years, respectively. In interviews, Muhammad, now 45, admitted to selling chemicals but said he did extensive research to remain within the law.)

Fentanyl wasn’t on offer, but agents kept following the digital trails that have made it easier for people like Muhammad and Yan to enter the global drug trade and for investigators to hunt them down. Because Yan used Gmail, operated by U.S.-based Google, Gibbons and his team could persuade a judge to let them monitor his communications in real time. What they found broke the dam: Yan wasn’t just selling fake weed and bath salts to Muhammad in Connecticut. Gibbons said he was peddling fentanyl analogues around the globe.

“This guy has hooks all over the place,” Gibbons recalled thinking as he traveled to New Orleans; Baltimore; Portsmouth, New Hampshire and dozens of other cities to track down buyers. Metcalf, the intelligence analyst, worked the international angle, alerting his counterparts about customers in Russia, Kuwait, Sweden, Brazil and 16 other countries. They went undercover as distributors, prompting Yan to send them seven shipments containing kilograms of fentanyl analogues and other synthetics. Yan labeled the packages as clothing, buttons, radios and cleaning supplies, and when Gibbons claimed that one had been confiscated by customs, Yan sent another for free.

By the time of the indictment, investigators had tied Yan to at least two Chinese factories equipped to produce deadly chemical compounds by the ton. The indictment charges Yan with conspiring to manufacture and import 22 substances banned in the U.S. over six years beginning in 2010. Included on the list are four fentanyl analogues — none of which were illegal in China at the times he’s accused of sending them to Mississippi.

That wasn’t by accident, Gibbons said. “He stayed abreast of the law to stay ahead of it.”
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