Fentanyl & Dirty Cash: How Chinese Money Launderers Took Over the Narco Underworld

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When gunmen ambushed a Mexican-Chinese businessman outside his Guatemala City casino in 2016, few outside the DEA paid much attention. But the shootout presaged the downfall of a man who, feds would later say, hadn’t just made a tidy living out of money laundering, but pioneered it. But Xizhi Li, who grew up in the border town of Mexicali, was just one of a new army of Chinese money launderers who, tooled with millennia of underground banking skills, and China’s own economic policies, have become the go-to guys for Latin American cartels looking to wash their dirty cash. And with fentanyl flooding America’s streets, their work is becoming deadlier by the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:58.0	It's 2016 at the MGM Golden Casino.
1:05.0	Not the MGM Grand, the MGM Golden.
1:09.0	A shabby spot just outside the Guatemalan capital, Guatemala City.
1:14.0	It's one of two gambling dens in the city owned since recently
1:18.0	by a Chinese-American man who has almost entirely under the radar become one of the biggest players in the global narcotics trade.
1:28.0	Shishi Lee moved from China to Mexico as a boy before diving into the murky world of money laundering.
	...

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