Terry Gerton: Well, I want to talk about your new book that talks about the U.S. campaign against the Sinaloa cartel and its Chinese chemical suppliers. This tells a story that a lot of people don’t know. So begin by filling us in on the background.
Jake Braun: Sure. So I initially got the idea to write this when I was sitting with some HSI, Homeland Security Investigations folks, at a retreat that we were doing in Crystal City, actually talking about fentanyl. And one of the guys there starts going into the takedown of El Chapo. And it’s just a fascinating story. And I had no idea how much HSI was involved in this. Obviously, the DEA was super involved as well. And he goes into all the wiretapping they were doing and working with the Mexican Marines and all this stuff to get them. And so he mentioned this group called the TCIUs, the Transnational Criminal Units that HSI pays. These are elite in Mexico’s case, Mexican law enforcement officials that are on the U.S. payroll and kick down doors for our brave men and women out there. So went down to meet some of them and we sat at the top of the Sofitel Hotel, which is right next to the U.S.-Mexico embassy. It’s where all the government people sit, and we’re sitting there with these agents and their HSI handlers and it’s like a rooftop thing. We’re drinking beers and by the end of the night, doing shots of tequila and everything. And these guys are showing me pictures in their phones of like them taking down these huge Sinaloa cartel groups, and they’ve got like guys with balaclavas all handcuffed next to these helicopters and so on. And talking about the shootouts they’re in and everything else and I was like, ‘Oh my God, somebody’s got to tell this story.’ And so I just kind of started writing down what we were doing every week and eventually it turned into this book. But really, there’s kind of three main pieces to it. One is really just an assessment of HSI and really just what they’ve become as an organization. And at least at that time, really just fascinating everything that they’ve done in the last 15 years or so since they were stood up. But then also that fentanyl is not a redux of the crack cocaine epidemic. Most people who are taking fentanyl don’t know they’re taking it. So it really is more like a mass poisoning than anything else. And then finally, as I came to find out when I was with HSI and their TCIUs and so on, just the complete transformation from a corporate perspective that the Sinaloa cartel has gone through over the last decade or so and how that is so responsible for what we’re facing with fentanyl today. So it was really a fascinating journey for me and hopefully, I’ve been able to pull back the curtain and for folks and add some interesting color to make it a cool kind of thriller type story while also going into some really kind of heavy topics.
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Terry Gerton: Well, let’s take those three that you mentioned and sort them in order because this operation that you describe is really an unusual collaboration across agencies and across countries. What surprised you most about how that team was formed and how it operated?
Jake Braun: Well, it was really interesting in the sense that for most of history, law enforcement has looked at criminal organizations from kind of a kingpin strategy, right? It’s like in Chicago, where I’m from, they go in and they take down Al Capone and like help decapitates the mob here and everything else. Well, Sinaloa’s been around for over a century. They can outfight the government in parts of Mexico and they’re as big as a Fortune 50 company. We’ve taken out almost every head of the cartel they’ve ever had, and they’re stronger today than they’ve ever been. And so we started putting together a counter network approach, looking at it from a counterterrorism perspective, the way we took out ISIS or al-Qaida as a network, as opposed to trying to just take out bin Laden or one of the terrorist leaders, but trying to go after the network. And that really required a whole-of-government approach. So it wasn’t just HSI or DEA. I mean, they were in many ways the tip of the spear, but we had massive involvement from the intelligence community, the military from an intel perspective, obviously DEA, other parts of DOJ, and nearly every part of DHS, whether it be CBP, Coast Guard, Intel and Analysis, et cetera. And so the meetings we had on this, it was really a cast of everybody and anybody who had worked in the War on Terror because it was really kind of the same approach that we took to stand up this operation against Sinaloa. And by the way, in the first year after we launched the effort, which we launched in ’23, fentanyl fatalities went down by 37% in 2024. So we think it’s working and the current administration, I think, has picked up the many places where we left off and, hopefully, we’ll see the deaths further decline in coming years.
Terry Gerton: I’m speaking with Jake Braun. He’s the executive director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Well, let’s come back to that for a minute, and that’s your second point. You mentioned fentanyl is really not so much a drug as it is a mass poisoning, but also the impact of this operation, reducing fentanyl deaths by about 40%. What are the key takeaways from those points? How should they impact what we’re thinking about in terms of national policy?
Jake Braun: Sure. So first off, people might view saying it’s a mass poisoning as somewhat hyperbolic, but I really don’t believe it is. And this is something else that I really did not know until I started working on this. Almost everybody, even drug users, avoids fentanyl like the plague. But the way they wind up dying from fentanyl almost always is that it is cut into something else that they’re taking. Now sometimes it’s cut into other drugs, which of course folks shouldn’t be doing, but they also don’t deserve to die for it. Oftentimes though, it’s cut into fake prescription pills that folks are given from a friend or there’s these horrible stories about a kid who’s studying for finals in college and they want to take an Adderall or a Xanax or something like that and they take one from a friend thinking it’s real. Oftentimes, the friend thought it was real, too. And it turns out it has fentanyl in it and they die from one dose. That’s where this is this again is not the crack cocaine epidemic. People are dying who don’t even know that they’re taking these drugs. And from a public policy perspective, I think that requires a very different approach for how we inform potential victims to not take the drug. It can’t just be like, ‘Hey, don’t take fentanyl.’ Nobody’s trying to take fentanyl. It’s you can’t really take anything that you don’t know exactly where it came from, even prescription pills. Not prescription pills you get from a pharmacy, but from a friend or a colleague or whatever. So that’s one major difference in how public policy needs to really think through how to address this. When it comes to the kind of counternetwork approach that we took and looking at Sinaloa, what again was so fascinating to me that I did not know going into this was that Sinaloa has completely changed its business model in the last decade. So it was an essentially a Fortune 50 company that had two main commodities that sold marijuana and cocaine. Well, marijuana, we’ve mostly legalized in the country and even in states where it’s not legal, they’re getting it from another state that is, generally not the Sinaloa cartel. And cocaine, which used to be incredibly popular back in the 80s, about 7% of the population reported doing it in any given month, it’s now down to 0.3% of the population is doing cocaine. So it’s like if you went to McDonald’s and said, ‘Oh, guess what? Nobody is going to buy your hamburgers and french fries anymore.’ I mean, what would they do? So what Sinaloa did is they’ve taken over the migration trade. I mean, you cannot cross the border in the United States or into the United States or Mexico unless you pay Sinaloa or their main rival, CJNG. That is a big shift. That is not the way migration worked years ago. And then separately, since cocaine and marijuana aren’t making money for them anymore, they figured out how to both cut fentanyl into the drugs they have to increase their margins. But also they got into this illicit prescription drug market and of course they did that right at the heels of us weaning the population off of oxycotton and other drugs that had plagued society for well over a decade. And they filled that void, which was something that a space they were not in before. And that’s made this so much more tragic is their entrance into the illicit prescription drug market.
Terry Gerton: What is the implication of Sinaloa’s realignment on U.S. operations in the Caribbean right now on our counter drug operations?
Jake Braun: Well, I think that they’ve largely moved, they and the other cartels have largely moved a lot of their operations out of the Caribbean because it’s easier for them to smuggle things across the border via tunnels, drones and so on and so forth. There’s still some, don’t get me wrong, but most of what they’re doing is not in the Caribbean. That being said, they have really dramatically stepped up their efforts to try and get fentanyl into the country from any vantage point, including the Caribbean. I think that what’s critically important with stopping what they’re doing is to really focus specifically on fentanyl, because no administration, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, no administration will ever end criminality. That has been around since humans have existed. It’s not going to stop. But we could end fentanyl and I think if we were able to turn up the heat so high and really just put our boot on the throat of Sinaloa the way we did on al-Qaida and ISIS, they would stop selling fentanyl because they could sell all the other stuff they do, and we’d relegate this back to normal cops and robbers the way we have before with all the other illicit things they do like racketeering and prostitution and other drugs and so on, things far less deadly than fentanyl. But without a real direct focus on fentanyl, I don’t see a world in which kind of a broader approach is really going to end this one issue. And the idea that we’re going to end the Sinaloa cartel in general, them or rivals will come in and take their place later. But again, if we focus narrowly on fentanyl, I think we could end this epidemic in the United States. And there and there’s a moment for this right now. I think the president has shut down the border and or at least shut down illegal crossings. He fulfilled his top campaign promise basically already. And so we’re in a moment now where they really could turn their attention to specifically stopping this horrible epidemic that’s killing so many people.
Terry Gerton: That sounds like a policy recommendation.
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Jake Braun: I guess it is.
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