Indian mafia expands business with Mexican cartels

[Omar Al-Deek]

Indian mafia expands business with Mexican cartels​

The arrest of Mohammad Sadiq, who allied with a Sinaloa drug lord to send lethal doses of fentanyl to Mexico, put a new route leading to the US on the DEA's radar.​

https://www.milenio.com/policia/mafia-india-expande-negocios-cartel-sinaloa

(principle Fentanyl routes)

As if it were an episode of the Breaking Bad series , the character in this story is a skilled chemist who works for the drug trafficking networks ; except that, in real life, the origins of the protagonists change: the scientist has Indian nationality , the buyer is a Mexican who works for the Sinaloa Cartel and the devastating effects of fentanyl are not fiction.

In 2018, Dr. Mohammad Sadiq leads a double life: he is a respected academic, graduated from Devi Ahilya University in central India , who works from 9 am to 7 pm on the ground floor of a small pharmacist , but when his shift ends, he steals chemical precursors and moves with his team to the first floor of the building to make fentanyl until dawn.

He is an expert in synthetic materials, so the enormous and lethal doses of fentanyl that he puts into the pills are not a coincidence: he knows that his buyer, Jorge Solís, a 43-year-old from Sinaloa, will take that drug to the United States. So Dr. Sadiq, who carries a deep-seated hatred of Americans, spikes each pill with deadly doses to overdose on anyone who takes it.

No one knows exactly how many deaths Dr. Sadiq and his team caused before October 5, five years ago. What is known is that its facade fell that day, after a week of surveillance by undercover agents of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) , the most important criminal intelligence agency in India , who had received an anonymous tip from Mexico: a drug laboratory of the Sinaloa Cartel had been installed in the Pologround neighborhood in Indore, the most populous city in Madhya Pradesh.

The operation led to the arrest of Dr. Sadiq , his partner Manu Gupta and the Mexican Jorge Solís, who for at least six months used the postal service between India and Mexico to obtain the narcotics, but in the fall of 2018 he decided to travel to Indore to supervise personally the drug laboratory . On the first floor, the agents found 10.9 kilos of fentanyl, which with the academic's "recipe" would have killed 5 million people, according to the local newspaper The Times of India.

India springs into action

“Following the seizure of 11 kg of fentanyl in an illicit laboratory, India came to be considered as a possible source of the substance. The consignment was headed for Mexico, and thanks to the seizure, several citizens of India and Mexico were discovered and detained ,” the International Narcotics Control Board reported in its annual report. The seizure meant a drastic change in the global map of drug trafficking.
In addition, it triggered the alerts in India , but above all it unleashed a series of questions among the DRI agents: how long ago did the Mexican cartels enter the country?

The answer would come three years later, in 2021, in a national risk report prepared by the United States anti-drug agency, the DEA: "the involvement of Mexican criminal groups in the production of methamphetamine is through industrial-scale laboratories, Mainly in China and India.
The Indian mafia was beginning to compete head-to-head with Chinese criminal families, which controlled the multimillion-dollar monopoly of fentanyl distributed by Mexicans.

Mobsters like Chuen Fat Yip slipped onto the DEA's list of the most wanted people in the world —at the same level as El Mayo Zambad— thanks to their business dealings with the Sinaloa Cartel.

The exchange was based on a simple idea, but one that was complex to execute: criminal clans in China provided Mexican cartels with chemical precursors to create methamphetamine and fentanyl, which they shipped from ports like Shanghai to Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in exchange for millions of dollars being laundered in huge pharmaceutical companies in Asia.

The most notorious case in Mexico was that of businessman Zhenli Ye Gon, arrested in 2007 after an operation in a mansion in Lomas de Chapultepec, in Mexico City, where 207 million dollars were seized. He was the most visible link in the alliance between Chinese and Mexican criminals residing in Sinaloa.

But five years ago India appeared as an emerging player in the drug business with the cartels : the lax regulation to boost its pharmaceutical industry made the Asian country an attraction for Mexican drug traffickers, especially for the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel ( CJNG) , which found a territory not conquered by its enemies. And when they arrived, so did other criminal groups.

The covid displaced China

India is a kingpin's paradise : it has little government surveillance, corruptible authorities, weak institutions, and ports connected to the entire world with proven routes. The intense daily rhythm allows the most important shipments to be confused among the less important ones.

One factor that could make India more attractive compared to China was that, for some reason, the Chinese would be excluded from the drug route to Mexico . And that happened in 2020: the coronavirus pandemic isolated the country from the Red Dragon and froze shipments of precursor chemicals to the Pacific. The Indian mafia stepped in to fill a void that the cartels desperately needed.

In addition, they offered Mexican criminals low prices in times of scarcity and purity levels similar to those found in China. The cartels' envoys did not even have to know Bengali or Hindi—the most popular languages in India—as all the price and quantity fixing would be done through a calculator, as Chinese gangsters and gangsters have done for years. Mexicans when negotiating cargo prices.

Now, criminal groups in India such as the Mumbai mafia or the D-Company are the suppliers of chemical precursors for the Mexican cartels that set up laboratories to create fentanyl pills that end up in the United States, according to the UN itself: India is the new global fentanyl threat in alliance with the most important cartels in Mexico.

"Multiple shipments of precursor materials from India are sent to Africa and Mexico ," alerts the United States Department of Justice in the 2022 International Narcotics Strategic Control Report. The alert is accompanied by a hint: "This trend is going to continue and expand.
The Mexican cartels say goodbye to their dealings with China and hello to the Indian mafias. The business changes, but one thing remains the same: whoever the supplier is, the cartels will find a way to supply the world with drugs.