Every time Mauricio Ramos passed by the Los Primos restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, he thought with pride about the prosperity that work brings. It never crossed his mind that it was just a front for drug distribution as the prosecutor’s office of the state where he lives recently said 20 years.
“Their food was very good and it was a pleasure to eat with the family”, he says in an interview with this newspaper. “Little by little we saw that he was having trailers to sell tacos informally.”
This migrant regrets that they are being targeted by the local prosecutor’s office, that they are being investigated and that they have seized several kilos of methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin; that there are accusations against 34 people, 124 charges and until the investigation to catch them has a name that stigmatizes the Mexican community: “Los Banditos”.
“They always put us as a mafia and it remains to be seen to what extent the cartels in Mexico pressure businesses to collaborate”.
The Attorney General of South Carolina, Alan Wilson, announced in mid-May that drug trafficking had the approval, favor and direction of the owners of the Los Primos restaurant, but no further details were given.
Through a press release The press only said that “allegedly many of the drugs were trafficked directly from the restaurant, while others would have been trafficked from taco trucks.
“The conspiracy has represented more than 1,000 kilograms (more than one ton) of methamphetamine, 100 kilograms of cocaine and 2 kilograms of heroin trafficked throughout the state of South Carolina”.
In this way, the main restaurant in Greenville would serve as a regional drug storage and distribution center for the Mexican cartels have not specified which ones in the state.
Other cases
Other types of cartel strategies are added to the use of Mexican restaurants as warehouses. Kieran Beer, chief analyst at the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists explains that “restaurants are a classic way of moving money” through the use of cash.
“Almost any business that requires a lot of cash can be used to launder money (laundromats, used car dealers, taxi services), but restaurants tend to appear more and more frequently as money launderers”.
Two years ago, a federal complaint publicized the case of a Colorado Springs food distribution company and six local Mexican restaurants linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, at that time still directed by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán-Lorea and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada-Garcia.
The investigation agents documented that José Aguilar-Martínez, owner of the El Potosino Foods restaurant, without official registration, had “significant contact” with alleged distributors of cocaine in the city.
On the front, restaurants would buy food from El Potosino and accept bills for items they did not order or receive but were paid for with checks.
Aguilar-Martínez, aged 51, was in the United States illegally, according to the complaint.
The authorities also reported that El Potosino was not a registered business, its website was inactive and that they had no ties to any other wholesale food distributor in Colorado Springs. “Nothing was known about the business among industry insiders.”
More than 1.5 million dollars were seized from the owner of El Potosino 15 bank accounts and two safe deposit boxes from Taco Star and Los Albertacos restaurants as well as Rodolfo’s Mexican Grill in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the investigation began with the suspicious purchase of a vehicle.
Long story
Mexican food businesses have been targeted by the authorities for more than a decade. In 2007, DEA drug enforcement agents focused on Montana and took the owners of four restaurants in different cities of the state to court: Belgrade, Butte, Helena and Great falls.
They were charged along with 16 other people of smuggling methamphetamine and selling cocaine, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in District Court in Great Falls.
Federal agents began investigating the Melaque restaurant chain in January 2005 after receiving reports that the restaurants employed Mexican nationals who were in the United States illegally.
Seven Months into the investigation, agents learned that a Melaque worker was driving to Mexico twice a month, picking up drugs and taking them back to Montana, according to court records, and that the manager of Melaque, one of the restaurants, had been going to Las Vegas and acting as a smuggler or “coyote” for undocumented immigrants.
Analyst Beer points out that the more popular a restaurant is, it can serve as an ideal smokescreen for money laundering. “If I’m going to launder money, I’d like a business where, if the FBI or IRS comes through, there are a lot of customers coming and going. In this way, the income is justified by the clientele”.
The drug cartels have specialists in finding those ideal businesses. Last November, a US federal court indicted 29 suspected members of an international money laundering organization that is linked to the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in Mexico.
Of them, 21 were in San Diego, Calexico and Bakersfield, California and would have laundered
more than 32 millions of dollars in drug proceeds from the United States to Mexico.
The money laundering organization obtained contracts with drug trafficking organizations in Mexico to collect drug profits in cities in the United States, including Baltimore; Detroit; The Angels; Philadelphia; Boston; Denver; Chicago; New York City and many others.
For Mauricio Ramos, in South Carolina, the information provided by the authorities in the US it is still incomplete, he insists: “it is not known if those who participate in the chain of trafficking or money laundering do so voluntarily and even more so if they are undocumented.”
You can interest:
– How cartels in Mexico are using unconventional weapons as if they were armies at war
– Video: Narcos burn a Mexican policeman and his girlfriend
– “My husband was burned to death by cartels”: Mexican mother, after receiving asylum in Chicago