Latest / The Underworld Podcast
How Chinese Money Launderers Took Over the Narco Underworld
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…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.