♪ ♪
JJ: I won't show my face on camera,
because I'm currently working cases all undercover.
We've arranged to purchase 4 kilograms of fentanyl
for the sum of $152,000 from (bleep).
♪ ♪
We'll then effect a buy bust.
We'll arrest and take him into custody
on state charges of trafficking in drugs,
which carries a max for 11 years in prison.
(phone ringing)
DEALER: Hello
JJ: Hey. ¿Qué pasa, amigo?
Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey, dude, it's time to go.
(laughs)
DEALER: er... ok give me... er...
give me one hour
JJ: You say one hour?
DEALER: yeah one hour
JJ: Alright, bro, sounds good.
♪ ♪
JJ (off-screen): So we probably got anywhere from 20 to 25
people on this operation today.
OFFICER: Let me know, and I'll be hanging around. Thanks.
♪ ♪
OFFICER: When we have eyes on both vehicles,
we can do the takedown.
♪ ♪
OFFICER: Alright, what's the move, Jimbo?
Alright, JJ's saying if you've got 'em, stop 'em.
Stop 'em.
♪ ♪
(siren)
SHERIFF: Where's he at? Where's the target at?
You have the right to remain silent.
You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to.
OFFICER: 558, traffic...
♪ ♪
JJ (off-screen): In 2019 we saw in the state of Ohio
more than 4,000 overdose deaths.
A lot of old dope cops will say,
you know, it never used to be that way.
♪ ♪
I would say that's because the addiction
has never been this out of hand.
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.
NIXON: America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.
MAN: Heroin destroys everything.
MAN: Prescribing pain pills created huge numbers of addicts.
CROWD: People die! Sacklers lie!
MAN: Opium is cash.
It's like you're growing bills on the bush.
MAN: Crime and drug abuse go hand in hand.
It's like peanut butter and jelly.
KAMALA: There's now an understanding that
the war on drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here?
(theme music plays).
♪ ♪
RILEY (off-screen): The Dearborn Housing Project is on the
South Side of Chicago,
and it's a traditional low-income housing project.
So, it's really an enclave unto itself.
And in the early 2000s it was being controlled by,
really, elements of organized crime,
primarily street gangs.
♪ ♪
The Mickey Cobras were the organized crime faction
within Dearborn.
They made money by the sale of narcotics, specifically heroin.
(siren)
♪ ♪
I remember distinctly it was on a Saturday,
and I think over the first day or so
there was 26, 27, 28 reported overdoses.
Not all led to death,
but clearly what was going on the street
was not ordinary street heroin.
♪ ♪
SNAKE: It hit the news, that's when we found out that everybody was ODing.
OFFICER: What did he take?
WOMAN: I don't know, I don't know.
OFFICER: Okay, alright, let me get my gloves on,
and he's gonna, I'm gonna get him with Narcan, okay?
What's his name, baby?
Alright.
OFFICER: Have you got anything? OFFICER: Uh, yeah, there's a...
♪ ♪
SNAKE: Yo, my name's Snake
I used to be affiliated with the Mickey Cobras
back in the early 2000s.
RILEY (off-screen): I think the Mickey Cobras really had no idea
just exactly what they were dealing with.
Whatever this was, it wasn't normal,
and they weren't handling it right,
and we knew it was probably cut with something
that we didn't know about.
(siren)
SNAKE: When people started dying, that's when the heat came on
We really didn't want nobody to die, but if it happened, it happened
We really didn't care, all we wanted was the money.
RILEY: Our first question of concern was just
where the hell is this coming from, who was responsible?
(siren)
(radio chatter)
♪ ♪
Eventually our wiretaps and intelligence
led us to several phone calls that were going from the Cobras,
or someone representing the Cobras,
to Toluca, Mexico.
♪ ♪
QUINONES: By chance, they arrive just as one guy is there
feeding the guard dog.
(dog barking)
They don't know who this fella is.
They begin to interrogate him,
and it turns out that he is not some worker,
he's the guy running the whole show.
♪ ♪
This fellow was a guy by the name of Ricardo Valdez Torres,
also known as El Cerebro, the brain.
♪ ♪
It was around his talents that this entire lab had been built.
♪ ♪
Fentanyl is a magnificent drug when used medically in surgery.
It's a revolutionary anesthetic.
Many of us have had it; I have.
And it made certain kinds of surgery possible.
The way it did that was because it was very potent,
but it also brought people into anesthesia,
then out of it very quickly,
and you did not remain doped up for hours,
as morphine used to do.
It's that quick in, quick out of fentanyl
that makes it such a wonderful drug if you're a street dealer,
because now addicts have to use it four, five, six times a day.
Ricardo Valdez Torres, a.k.a. the Brain,
had no background in chemistry.
It's still a mystery to me
how he first learned how to make fentanyl.
During the manufacture of the fentanyl,
he began to test it on mice.
(squeaking)
He finds that this fentanyl has to be diluted 50 to 1,
so 1 kilo makes 50 kilos of sellable product.
Otherwise it'll kill people.
(sirens)
He gives these instructions to the people who take it north.
But in Chicago, nobody believes that anything on the street
will take a 50-to-1 cut.
They believe that that's kind of salesmanship.
Just sounds like a con job.
SNAKE: Back then, you know, we didn't even know that fentanyl was in the heroin
All we did was get it. Put it together and sold it
RILEY: In the lab at the time we raided it,
they had enough chemicals to produce
60 kilos of pure fentanyl.
Now that's enough fentanyl to kill 30 million people.
(horns honking)
♪ ♪
QUINONES: When he's arrested, The Brain tells investigators,
you know what, just a couple days ago,
I sent out a 10-kilo batch of fentanyl.
♪ ♪
Where that ended up, he doesn't know,
but he assumes probably Chicago.
RILEY: Knowing 10 kilos was inbound to Chicago,
and knowing the way the Cobras handled it and cut it,
even against the instructions of the lab,
yeah, that was terrifying.
We knew we had to act and hit the Cobras
so that we really destroyed their organization,
so they couldn't be the conduit of this anymore.
REPORTER (over TV): At least 30 alleged street gang members
are in federal custody tonight.
They are charged with running a 24/7 drug operation.
SNAKE: I remember it like it was yesterday
It was at least 100 police, 200 police, Feds, DEA, Chicago PD
U.S. Marshals, some of everybody
They got to locking everybody up, they ask questions later
RILEY: We went and we conquered them, no question about it.
♪ ♪
It disappeared, it's almost like it never existed.
No fentanyl on the street, no overdoses due to fentanyl.
It went away, and that really gave us confidence
that we had eliminated the problem, start to finish.
I don't think anybody ever in their wildest dreams
thought it would be the way it is today.
I know I didn't.
♪ ♪
75,000 Americans lost their life last year due to opioids.
♪ ♪
Imagine that.
Two football stadiums full of people that are no longer there.
Just think of what that does.
They all have families, they're all mothers, fathers, brothers,
sisters, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife.
Their families are destroyed...
because of opioids, because of fentanyl.
Yeah, that's, that's, that'll keep you up at night.
♪ ♪
O'DONNELL (over TV): Tonight the DEA is offering $10 million
for information leading to the arrest
of the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Mencho.
♪ ♪
VIGIL: El Mencho is the leader
of one of the most powerful drug cartels in the world,
known as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
♪ ♪
He is a synthetic drug lord,
because most of the profits that he makes
from the illegal drug trade
come from methamphetamine and then also fentanyl.
♪ ♪
GRILLO: The Sinaloa Cartel in the 2000s
that El Mencho joins
is really a federation of drug traffickers.
So you have these different factions, these different heads,
spread around different parts of Mexico,
with really their own networks that are interlinked.
So El Mencho joins the faction in Jalisco
of this broader Sinaloan empire,
and he begins as muscle and a head of hitmen.
♪ ♪
So Rosalinda González Valencia is the heiress
in a powerful drug trafficking family.
When El Mencho marries her, that's a step up for him,
and that gives him more access
to the powerful levels in the drug trafficking business.
VIGIL: He knew that without Rosalinda,
he would be an assassin for the rest of his career,
and he was very ambitious and wanted to become a cartel leader
as quickly as he could.
♪ ♪
Ignacio Coronel was a top leader within the Sinaloa Cartel.
He was also known as the Crystal Meth King,
because he managed the methamphetamine operations
for the Sinaloa Cartel,
and Nacho Coronel acted as a mentor to El Mencho,
especially when it came to the trafficking of synthetic drugs.
♪ ♪
GRILLO: Synthetic drugs are really a game changer
in the drug trafficking business.
You no longer need to have these fields
where you're harvesting coca leaves
or opium poppies or marijuana.
You could just have these precursor ingredients,
which are the base chemicals you need
to make these synthetic drugs,
and then you can cook them anywhere.
He's seeing this business, he's seeing the precursors
being imported in the ports on the Pacific coast of Mexico.
He's seeing the labs, he's seeing the massive profits,
and this is a lot more profitable
than the old plant-based drugs.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Ignacio Nacho Coronel,
one of the top leaders
of Mexico's most powerful drug cartel,
has been killed in a gun battle.
The Mexican army calls his death
the biggest strike against the cartel in years.
(screeching)
GRILLO: When Nacho Coronel is shot dead,
then El Mencho is free to make his own play,
and after a violent struggle,
he becomes the head of the mob in Jalisco.
♪ ♪
VIGIL: The Zeta drug trafficking organization
was making encroachments into the Sinaloa Cartel's territory.
They were a brutal, brutal cartel,
and El Mencho went to war with them.
(gunshots)
GRILLO (off-screen): The Zetas had really brought in
the paramilitary tactics into the Mexican drug war.
When El Mencho fights them, he takes these paramilitary tactics
and puts them at a whole new level.
REPORTER (over TV): Dozens of bodies dumped in the street
near a busy shopping center in Veracruz.
Now a new paramilitary group appears to be claiming
responsibility for the massacre.
♪ ♪
GRILLO (off-screen): So the port of Veracruz is one of the biggest ports
in Mexico, and it became a big stronghold for the Zetas.
♪ ♪
VIGIL: He went in there with tremendous violence.
These people were tortured, killed...
and they were just dropping them off
like they were so much trash.
GRILLO: They not only pushed out the Zetas from the port,
they then took control of it.
It was a strategically very cunning move,
and really all along
he was taking their territory for his own uses.
♪ ♪
And then it emerged, this new name,
the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
♪ ♪
VIGIL (off-screen): So within three months,
he went from the Veracruz seaport,
Manzanillo in the state of Colima,
and then also Lázaro Cárdenas in the state of Michoacán.
So it was a strategic move on the part of El Mencho
to control the seaports.
♪ ♪
(horn blows)
♪ ♪
WESTHOFF: Hip-hop was always the music I loved,
and when I became the music editor at LA Weekly,
I started interviewing all these rappers
that I loved from my childhood,
like Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre,
and so that's how I developed my credentials.
♪ ♪
I first heard about fentanyl back in 2010
when my good friend died from it.
♪ ♪
The worst part was that
I just didn't know anything about fentanyl,
so I started talking to experts,
and I kept hearing that it was being made in China,
and so I wondered if any journalists
had really investigated this, and it turned out they hadn't,
and no journalist had ever been inside a Chinese fentanyl lab,
and so I decided that's where I needed to go.
♪ ♪
I started by just Googling "buy fentanyl in China,"
and all these search results popped up,
and so I made a fake email, a fake persona,
and I started contacting some of the salespeople
at these fentanyl companies,
and they had no sort of shame or hesitation to talk to me at all,
and so that's how I ended up on a plane to Wuhan.
(jet engine roaring)
♪ ♪
All of a sudden I was doing this deep investigative journalism
in a country where I didn't speak the language,
and it was pretty harrowing.
♪ ♪
When I got to the address for this company,
I thought I was in the wrong place,
because it was this giant hotel.
I went into the lobby, and I was met by this pair of sales reps,
and these were women who both called themselves Amy.
♪ ♪
They showed me the sales floor,
you know, with these hundreds of salespeople.
I asked about the fentanyl precursors,
and the two Amys chatted among themselves in Mandarin,
and one of them left the room.
♪ ♪
I was kind of nervous wondering what was happening,
or if they suspected me,
but then she came back and basically said, "No problem."
Some of the salespeople showed me the fake packaging
that they send the fentanyl ingredients in.
One of them looked like dog food,
another looked like banana snacks,
and I was surprised how cheap these drugs were.
You can turn $3,000 worth of product
into hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.
And a million doses of fentanyl
might just fit in a very small box.
♪ ♪
Ye Chuan Fa is the CEO of the Yuancheng Chemical Company.
I was very surprised when the sales reps just brought me
right up to his desk, and I got to meet him.
♪ ♪
When I think of an international drug kingpin,
I definitely did not think of this guy.
He did not have sort of an intimidating look
about him at all.
He looked like a typical nerdy manager of a chemical company.
I basically said I wanted to think about it a little more,
and I would get back to them.
I was very nervous when I got to the airport.
I was afraid they were gonna stop me
or I was gonna be apprehended,
but I was able to get on the plane
and got the heck out of there.
(jet engine roaring)
I found out that one of the clients
buying the fentanyl precursors
from this Chinese chemical company was CJNG.
♪ ♪
ROSE (over TV): Tonight we continue our investigation
of the opioid epidemic,
which is taking more than 80 lives a day.
REPORTER (over TV): Each year nearly 7 million Americans
abuse prescription drugs.
That's more than cocaine,
heroin, hallucinogens,
ecstasy, and inhalants combined.
DURR (over TV): When the cocaine dealers
are turning into pharmaceutical dealers,
that's, you know, that tells you how lucrative it is.
QUINONES: The entire opioid crisis really has its root
in the massive promotion of narcotic painkillers
by drug companies to doctors,
and doctors then prescribing those to their patients.
At a certain point, doctors began cutting back
on the amount of prescribing they were doing,
more regulation by law enforcement,
those addicts began to look for new places
to procure their pills.
VIGIL: El Mencho was already manufacturing methamphetamine.
He knew that the opioid crises was ongoing
in the United States.
And as a result of that relationship
between his cartel
and Chinese traffickers of precursor chemicals,
he made a strategic decision to start getting into fentanyl
to basically feed the appetite of U.S. consumers for opioids.
QUINONES: Eventually, as they learned to make fentanyl,
the traffickers in Mexico begin to make quantities
that are just staggering.
So, how to market it, how to, how to sell it.
So they begin to make all these different counterfeit pills
that contain only fentanyl.
And counterfeit pills
are a perfect way for sending fentanyl north.
(horns honking)
♪ ♪
VIGIL: El Mencho looked at the United States,
and he knew that he was in competition with other cartels
for major metropolitan areas.
So he decided, I'm going to go
into the rural areas of America.
♪ ♪
Because it's an untapped market.
QUINONES: Fentanyl shows up in the states
where the opioid epidemic really begins,
primarily Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky.
And making these pills are people
who really don't have any background in chemistry.
(siren)
♪ ♪
This was a pivotal moment.
It was the moment when the Mexican trafficking world
discovered fentanyl,
and that this was the most profitable drug
that they had ever encountered.
♪ ♪
(men shouting)
GRILLO: El Mencho builds his own private army,
a huge paramilitary organization.
He can use this to fight rivals for territory,
but also to defend himself against the government.
(gunfire)
IVAN: If something happens to your face, so that it will never be the same
it does affect you.
♪ ♪
(helicopter)
IVAN: We weren't told what we were doing on that operation
My name is
Deputy Officer Ivan Morales Corrales from the Federal Police
Intelligence Division.
We were told we were behind a convoy of pickup trucks
I told my partner
to watch out as anything could happen
because we knew it was dangerous
♪ ♪
(helicopter)
(gunfire)
IVAN: The shooting began with bursts of machine-gun fire
(gunfire)
and that's when everything hits
You could hear it hitting the (armored) plate
When they hit the rotor, the roof of the helicopter caught fire
That's when we started falling
(explosion)
When the aircraft crashed on the ground, I was in shock
I knew I was going to get burned
because the flames were all around
My wife was pregnant
I didn't want to die and not meet my son
That's what helped me push through
I got out and I tried to put out
the fire as fast as I could
but the helicopter's fuel, the kerosene
meant that my jumpsuit burnt quickly
El Mencho escaped from that operation
I don't remember more
I think being in the hospital and having my wife visit me every day
was what helped me pull through
When I left the hospital, I left wearing my uniform
because that's what I wanted
ANCHOR: It's believed that the current attacks
are related to the operation to arrest
the leader of the
Jalisco New Generation Cartel
El Mencho
♪ ♪
(siren)
GRILLO: When El Mencho sends his operatives to spread terror
to defend himself from being arrested,
he's really upping the stakes
and putting huge amounts of pressure on the government
and saying, if you want to take me down,
it's gonna be very costly to you.
VIGIL: When the CJNG knocked down the military helicopter,
the entire world knew about their ultra-violent tactics,
so it put them in the crosshairs of Mexico
and then also the United States.
♪ ♪
(horn squawks)
(radio chatter)
♪ ♪
MINERD: Well, anytime law enforcement's conducting
an investigation that they know that has a connection
to a very dangerous organization,
like New Generation, you have no idea what to expect.
Keep in mind, we just did a sting operation
where we just took off nearly a million dollars' worth of drugs.
Quite frankly, someone's gonna be (bleep) about that.
OFFICER: Do you have anything else on you?
No? Nothing illegal they're gonna find?
Okay, if you do, it's gonna be additional charges,
you know that, right?
Okay.
♪ ♪
JJ: These are the 4 kilograms of fentanyl that we recovered
from the stop of the vehicle on the roadside today.
Roughly 40,000 unit doses in its entirety
taken off the streets of Columbus.
♪ ♪
TEAM LEADER: We're gonna call for knockers
on the second level, and then head up the stairs.
♪ ♪
MAN (over loudspeaker): This is the Franklin County Sheriff's Office.
We have a search warrant for (bleep).
(thud)
♪ ♪
MINERD: DEA here in the United States
oftentimes say as little as 2 milligrams can be fatal.
(siren)
And so if 2 milligrams is enough to kill somebody,
how many lives did we save
by taking 4 kilograms off the street?
I mean, well over a million people
that we potentially saved,
and so that's the money shot.
That's why we do what we do.
♪ ♪
Growing up 20, 30 years ago,
when I first got into the business,
the Columbus, Ohio, area was kind of known as a cow town.
Lots of cornfields, rural area,
not really on the map, so to speak.
But over the last 20-plus years,
Columbus area has grown pretty fast.
♪ ♪
And many people don't know this,
but Central Ohio, if you go out 500 miles in any direction,
you touch somewhere in the neighborhood
of about 70% of the population of the United States,
and so location, population, proximity,
all make it a very ripe area for drug trafficking.
♪ ♪
(horn blows)
♪ ♪
(beeping)
♪ ♪
AUTOMATED VOICE: It is now safe to touch the patient
to start CPR.
♪ ♪
PARAMEDIC: Help me pull him out, get him on the ground.
PARAMEDIC: He's not breathing
♪ ♪
VIGIL (off-screen): Family means everything to El Mencho,
and the United States and Mexico have gone after family members.
They arrested his wife for money laundering.
She was the primary money launderer for the CJNG.
(officer speaking Spanish)
GRILLO (off-screen): Now, the man overseeing that arrest,
heading the investive criminal agency,
is Garcia Harfuch,
who will go on to head the Mexico City police force.
So you have this crazy attempt to assassinate him.
♪ ♪
OMAR: My name is Omar Hamid Garcia Harfuch
I am the Chief of Police for Mexico City
All ranks within the Mexico City Police start work really early
not just me
♪ ♪
OMAR: Edgar was driving
In the back was Rafael, who was the head of my security detail
and had been with me for 12-13 years
Our SUV stopped at a speed bump
and I saw a 3.5-ton truck cut us off
and I looked up and I only saw... like
individual faces that were popping up out of the back of the 3.5-ton truck
♪ ♪
OMAR: It was totally silent in the city
and the first (shot) made a tremendous sound
especially on the windscreen
(gunfire)
Afterwards, the only things you could hear were
a rainfall of gunshots hitting the SUV
There was a lot of smoke, a lot of powder
Every hit would splinter bits of everything
I told Edgar, who was driving, to reverse
He reversed and he said the SUV wasn't working anymore
♪ ♪
(gunfire)
I couldn't see Edgar because he was in the seat in front of me
Rafa was literally next to me
He didn't suffer, it was very quick
(gunfire)
I was just waiting for the one gunshot that would inevitably end it
That's what I was waiting for
(siren)
When I heard the first siren, it was truly a relief
(siren)
I had 15 wounds, four of which were serious
After the attack, my life changed
Obviously, I don't have the freedom to go out as I'd like to
♪ ♪
OMAR: I don't regret chasing after any criminal group
or any leader, including El Mencho, or whoever
♪ ♪
QUINONES: This drug is now a little bit like
the way we use salt on food, kind of just thrown on there,
just mixing it with anything.
A lot of people have been dying
because they think they've been using cocaine
or methamphetamine,
and it's got fentanyl in it.
You see this all across this country.
♪ ♪
So why would you want to risk killing people?
♪ ♪
The reason is you replace a cocaine customer
who may buy from you weekly, maybe biweekly,
with an opioid addict who has to buy from you every single day,
and that makes total business sense.
So now anybody who's using drugs on the street
is going to assume that anything they use
is gonna contain fentanyl.
♪ ♪
The truth is, the days of recreational drug use
are over in America, and fentanyl is the reason why.
All those myths that we once laughed at
about what drugs were and how deadly they were,
all of those myths have become reality.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group