Cartel Corner #78: The Rise of Mexican Black Tar Heroin

As the rate of opioid addiction has surged in the United States, Mexico has become the world’s third-largest producer of opium used to process heroin. Mexican cartels are now the primary suppliers of the drug to the US, producing a crude and unrefined form known as black tar.

VICE News travels to the fertile mountains of western Mexico, where we see the beginning of the path black tar heroin takes to the US on plantations growing poppies used to make opium. We then head across the US border to witness the human cost there of the lucrative but destructive heroin trade.

Read the Original Article at Vice News

Cartel Corner #76: Drug Mules Beware! This is What Happens When a Bag of Cocaine Burst In Your Stomach…

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

On March 22, a Lithuanian man landed in Barcelona and boarded metro line 9 with his luggage, but without a ticket. Witnesses describe how he started behaving weirdly, and when security guards came up to him and asked for a ticket, he fell on the ground and started shaking and foaming at the mouth. The guards couldn’t have known, but that guy was a mule, a body packer: He had been carrying cocaine in his stomach in an attempt to smuggle it into Spain.

Transporting illegal drugs across borders is a business that can be as profitable as it can be lethal, and it has gained popularity in Spain since the economic crisis began. The man in question broke down because one of the bags of cocaine he carried in his stomach had ruptured. There wasn’t anything the emergency services could do—15 grams of coke ended his life. When forensic doctors investigated the body, they found 34 capsules of cocaine inside him.

Such cases are pretty rare—several doctors working in emergency units in Spanish hospitals told us that a patient who’s had a packet of drugs rupture inside him or her comes in about once a year. If everything goes according to plan, the bags leave the mule’s body in his or her stool. They’re in an ideal shape to be excavated and can stand the gastric acid that helps dissolve foods in your stomach.

Read the Remainder at Vice

Financial News and Modern Crime: Why You Should Care About the “Panama Papers” Leak

The Panama Papers—11.5 million leaked documents that detail the inner workings of Mossack Fonseca, a law firm accused of helping drug lords, sports stars, Ponzi schemers, kings, presidents, prime ministers, FIFA officials, mafia members, high-profile thieves, high-ranking politicians, and at least one convicted sex offender launder money, evade taxes, and escape criminal prosecution—are a big deal.

Mossack Fonseca has ties to the $37 million Brink’s-MAT robbery of 1983, which British media called “the crime of the century.” Thirty-three of its clients have been blacklisted by the US government for allegedly doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations, and “rogue nations” like North Korea and Iran. Its files have unearthed a secret, shady $2 billion trail of money that leads to Vladimir Putin. One of its clients played a crucial role in the Watergate scandal. Another was convicted for the torture and murder of a US drug enforcement agent.

With a story this big—dubbed by Edward Snowden as “the biggest leak in the history of data journalism”—it can be difficult to understand exactly what’s at stake. The Panama Papers are, unquestionably, insane. But what do they have to do with you?

If you live in one of the 200 countries and territories that Mossack Fonseca’s clients call home—and, given the fact you’re reading this article, you probably do—the story of the Panama Papers is your story. The money the law firm helps to hide should be used to pay for your schools, your highways, your hospitals. The criminals it works with run the most violent illegal organizations your country has ever seen. The politicians who have taken and made bribes, dodged taxes, and amassed fortunes of unimaginable scale are your politicians.

Not long after the story broke, people started posting tweets along the lines of: “Shock, horror: wealthy, powerful people are corrupt—why should I give a shit?” Well, because of course you should give a shit. To know this story—of hidden millions, of corruption, of murder and bribery and power and betrayal—is to know your own. Here’s how the revelations came to be, and why you should care.

THE LEAK

A little over a year ago, an anonymous source reached out to the German newspaperSüeddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and offered it heaps of internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in selling offshore companies based in tax havens across the globe. The source didn’t ask for compensation. Instead, he wrote in an email to the paper that he wanted one thing: “To make these crimes public.”

Over the next several months, SZ found themselves with about 2.6 terrabytes of data. The paper shared it with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists(ICIJ), allowing hundreds of reporters from more than 100 media organizations in 80 countries to sift through the documents. After a year of research, those journalists finally began to figure out how Mossack Fonseca works—and to uncover how a business that’s never faced criminal prosecution could have a bigger hand in corruption, bribery, and crime than anyone ever imagined.

THE SCHEME

Offshore companies aren’t illegal—not inherently, anyway. But using them to hide assets from tax authorities, thwart investigations, and protect criminals is.

Here’s how this whole mess of a situation works:

An individual, often through a middle-man he or she is close to, pays Mossack Fonseca to create a “shell company”—a business on paper, but in reality, a storehouse for a shit-ton of money, whether in cold hard cash or tied up in shares. Mossack Fonseca sets up the shell company offshore in a place like Panama (where the firm is based), the British Virgin Islands, or any other “tax haven”—a place where the true owners of a company can be anonymous and their home country (which, typically, doesn’t know about the company in the first place) can’t tax it.

Say a politician makes $100,000 per year as his or her salary, and for some reason—bribes, business deals, all manner of shady shit—also makes upward of $1 million in some other way. If he or she puts that money in an offshore shell company, he or she can access it without being taxed for it. Even if the shell company is discovered, it can’t be tied directly to the politician because the company is technically owned by someone else—a stand-in owner who’s appointed by Mossack Fonseca to run the company on paper, but, in reality, doesn’t own anything. To move the money, the company pretends to make business deals: The Panama Papers reveal thousands of fake share trades, million-dollar payments for “consultancy,” and huge payouts in “compensation” for canceled transactions.

“This is not business,” money-laundering expert Andrew Mitchell QC told BBC Panorama. “This is creating the appearance of business in order to continually move and hide assets.”

Read the Remainder at Vice

Holocaust History: Newly Released Documents Reveal Rampant Cannibalism at Nazi Concentration Camps

Cannibalism, drowning, and crucifixion: just some of the horrors described in first-hand accounts of British people’s experiences at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two which were released on Thursday in the UK.

The long-sealed testimonies — contained in applications that UK nationals made to a Anglo-German Nazi Persecution Compensation scheme between 1964 and 1965 — also reveal the struggle of many of those who suffered to meet the strict criteria necessary to get remuneration.

Out of 4,206 people who applied for compensation, only 1,015 were successful. Many were subjected to months or even years of questioning about their experiences or backgrounds before being refused.

The accounts given included one from Harold Le Druillenec, who was the only British survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he was imprisoned for 10 months. Le Druillenec went on to give evidence at the Belsen Trials.

He wrote: “All my time here was spent in heaving dead bodies into the mass graves kindly dug for us by ‘outside workers’ for we no longer had the strength for that type of work which, fortunately, must have been observed by the camp authorities.

“Jungle law reigned among the prisoners; at night you killed or were killed; by day cannibalism was rampant.

“The bulk of Auschwitz had been transferred to Belsen when I arrived and it was here that I heard the expression: ‘There is only one way out of here — through the chimney,'” he said, referring to the crematorium and gas chambers.

He recalled different “means of putting inmates to death includ[ing] beating, drowning, crucifixion, hanging in various stances etc,” and said attempted suicide “was a major crime for the choice of means of death was not ours, and as there was no privacy at all I cannot recall a single successful suicide.” More than 70,000 people died at the Bergen-Belsen camp between 1941 and 1945.

Le Druillenec lost half his body weight during his imprisonment and suffered the aftereffects of dysentery, scabies, malnutrition, and septicaemia for almost a year after his release. He eventually was awarded compensation to the value of £1,835 (around £30,000 or $43,000 today) by the Foreign Office.

One applicant, Albert Slack, was a private in the 4th Royal Berkshire regiment when he was taken prisoner in May 1940 and imprisoned in various camps, including the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp, where he was forced to dig graves. After being freed and returning home he was “hard to get on with” and his family did not want anything to do with him, according to his file. He was awarded £340 (worth around £6,000 or $8,625 today) in compensation for the loss of a finger.

Those who were refused compensation included Lieutenant Bertram James, a British officer who was involved in the celebrated “great escape” from the Luftwaffe-run prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III. James was told by UK officials that he did not suffer “the inhuman and degrading treatment of a concentration camp proper.” His case was later picked up by the British parliament and press, and eventually he received £1,192 (worth around £21,600 / $31,000 today).

Another person refused compensation was naturalized Briton Elizabeth Spira, who was imprisoned at a Czech camp at Theresienstadt. She described horrible scenes at that camp, where she said children “could not eat for fear [of] what we will do with them, as they had seen their parents never came out any more.”

She said: “We tried to clean [the children] in the bathhouse. They refused to go in and they held on to the door handle, when we tried to carry them in. In the end, I took the smallest child, we went into the bathhouse, gave [the child] a good hot bath… soon [the children] recovered completely only to be sent back… to be gassed.”

The money was awarded from a pot of £1 million ($1.44 million) given to the UK by the German government for victims of Nazi persecution — which was defined by the UK Foreign Office as “illegal detention in a concentration camp or comparable place for the purpose of the infliction of deliberate and organised suffering, torture, or extermination in furtherance of Nazi ideology.”

Criteria used included physical disability resulting from the detention and how long the person had been held.

Many applicants were refused because they were either not British citizens at the time of the persecution or held dual nationality. Others were refused because they were soldiers and thus legally interned as prisoners of war, or because the Foreign Office deemed them to have experienced a case of suffering, but not persecution.

Read the Original Article at Vice News

Cartel Corner #66: Drug Cartels Are Taking over the Mexican Tortilla Biz

Samuel ran down the steep dirt track lined with blue and pink houses desperate to escape. The 20-year-old took long strides and ran from one side to the other in a zigzag. He begged for someone to open the door of a house so he could hide, but nobody did. That mid-morning, the poor and violent neighborhood of La Laja in the Mexican resort city of Acapulco seemed suddenly deserted.

A few moments before, three gunmen had burst into a tortilla shop called Los Mangos, where Samuel worked, and started shooting. His only co-worker, Rodolfo, had also escaped those first bullets. But, as Rodolfo fled to the roof he was shot in the back. He fell from the first floor to the ground, dead. His corpse lay at the entrance to the business.

Samuel knew he was the next target as he hurtled down the track. One of the gunmen who looked about the same age as him, took aim and fired his 9mm pistol, but he missed.

This allowed Samuel to reach the tarmac and the possibility of reaching the corner and into an alley that would have taken him out of sight of the hitman. He was within 10 yards of the turn when the bullet pierced his skull and he collapsed to the ground.

The gunmen, thinking their job was done, left.

But Samuel was still alive. When police arrived half an hour later, he was lying on his back spitting blood and begging not to be left to die. “Hold on, chavo! The Red Cross is on its way,” one of the officers told him. “Do not fall asleep.”

Samuel Sotelo Jurado died in the hospital a few hours later. It was January 7, 2016.

This reconstruction of Samuel’s murder draws from witness accounts told to VICE News a month after the event. The Los Mangos tortilla shop, and its red door, have been closed since the shooting. Some old wooden boards are stained with what looks like blood. A small burnt wallet lies on the counter. There is nothing else to indicate that two young men were killed there a month ago, other than the fear that hangs in the air.

The deaths at Los Mangos are just two of many associated with a drug cartel war on the tortilla industry in the southern state of Guerrero — where dozens of criminal groups fight for control of opium poppy plantations in the mountains, and drug shipment and distribution spots in the cities. Three days before, two other tortilla workers were killed in Cañada de los Amates, another Acapulco neighborhood. Two more were murdered on the same day in the Loma Bonita area.

Read the Remainder at Vice