Apple + Gemini

Plus Grok.

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1. From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity. Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in an interview. Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. The mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China, according to state and federal officials. Known as “triads” because of an emblem used long ago by secret societies, these criminal groups wield power at home and throughout the diaspora and allegedly maintain an alliance with the Chinese state. The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global powerhouse, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The huge revenue stream from marijuana fuels that laundering apparatus, which is “the most extensive network of underground banking in the world,” said a former senior DEA official, Donald Im. And the shadow of the Chinese state hovers over it all. (Source: propublica.org, italics mine)