Lead:
As we all know, Mexico's drug trade is the most rampant, and it is known as the paradise of drug lords around the world. As a result, Mexican politicians have been unable to combat this illegal activity, and although many laws and policies have been promulgated, they have had little effect, and the drug P trade has become the biggest headache in the region.
In the past, the Golden Triangle region was synonymous with the drug trade, and its scale was the most concentrated and prominent in the world. Today, however, Mexico is home to the world's largest concentration of drug lords, even to the horror of its local population.
In this place full of drug lords, a Chinese legend has emerged. He never dabbled in the drug deal, but became one of Mexico's biggest drug lords, easily earning up to $14 million a day. The police even found two tons of cash in his home, and the Chinese drug king was Ye Zhenzhen.
Unwilling to be ordinary Ye Truth
Born in Shanghai in 1963, Ye lives in the city center, but in a dilapidated house with no toilet and waiting every day for a manure truck to empty the toilet.
The Xijiao Hotel in Shanghai, next to his home, is the preferred place to receive important foreign guests, and both the American General T and the Queen of England have lived there, which is very luxurious. In stark contrast to his impoverished life, he aspired from an early age to become a successful man and live a luxurious life like an aristocrat.
Ye Zhenzhen was lucky to catch the opportunity to resume the college entrance examination, so he studied hard and was admitted to the famous school of East China University of Political Science and Law. At school, he not only studied the curriculum attentively, but also became very interested in English.
At that time, it had just been changed to G opening, and people who could speak English were very popular, and even had the opportunity to go abroad for development. In order to learn English, he made three foreign pen pals from Turkey, Korea and Mexico. But because his family was not able to pay the high international postage rates, he wrote long letters each time, equivalent to several letters each.
After graduating from East China Political Science and Law, Ye Zhenzhen made a bold decision, he gave up the job assigned by the state and chose to go to an emerging pharmaceutical company to do drug sales. Many people think his choice is silly, but his goal is very clear: to realize his American dream through the pharmaceutical company's foreign trade opportunities.
Life after arriving in Mexico
After years of hard work, Ye finally got the opportunity to go to Mexico in 1990 at the age of 27. However, he was a bit conceited at the time, thinking that he could make a lot of money if he went abroad, no matter where he was.
So he traveled alone to Mexico to try to market their company's cold medicine. But at that time, the Mexican market was dominated by European and American pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and Bayer, and how could a brand from China, relying on a novice who did not understand Spanish, be competitive?
Therefore, Ye Zhenzhen began to knock on doors door to door, almost breaking the doors of the local pharmacy. Despite his efforts, sales of cold medicine were still poor, and his life became very hard.
However, in the career failure, he unexpectedly harvested love. A Mexican pen pal he had made became his wife, and the two met and developed a good impression and eventually entered the palace of marriage.
With family responsibilities, Ye Zhenzhen realized that he needed to earn money to support his family. So, he quit his job at a pharmaceutical company and started a business instead.
However, before Chinese manufacturing had established a reputation at the time, Mexicans did not recognize Chinese brands, and his business quickly collapsed. Coincidentally, his wife was pregnant again at this time, and they needed a steady income to support the child. So, Ye Zhenzhen began to think about how to make more money.
Ye Zhenzhen only has some legal foundations, experience in selling cold medicine, and some knowledge of import and export. These three skills have been inaccessible before, so how can they be combined?
There is no doubt that poverty is the primary productive force. Stimulated by financial difficulties, Ye Zhenzhen really succeeded in organically combining these skills.
The cold medicine he sold earlier contained ephedrine, which can be used to treat nasal congestion and relax the airways. However, it also has the side effect of stimulating the central nervous system to get excited.
With only a little refining, it can be made into W ephedrine, both of which are important raw materials for the manufacture of ice D.
Embark on the road to drug production
While working for a pharmaceutical company, Ye used the legal knowledge he learned in college to study Mexico's import and export regulations. He discovered that it was legal to import ephedrine from Mexico. Therefore, Ye Zhenzhen can easily make poison P.
In order not to become a small black workshop for drug production that the police come to the door to investigate at any time. In 1997, Ye Zhenzhen founded a "Mexican United Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.", which imports a large number of cold medicine raw materials from Asia, and after a little processing, can be sold to drug dealers.
At the same time, the Mexican ephedrine market was not yet set foot in the market, so Ye Zhenzhen became the exclusive supplier of Mexican drug traffickers. Coupled with his previous sales experience and very good at dealing with Mexicans, his ephedrine is selling better and better.
However, even so, he is just a petty drug dealer. Until Mexico's third largest drug lord, Shorty Guzman, discovered him and bought him drug P, Shorty Guzman's order made Ye Zhenzhen's business prosper.
The rise of Ye Zhenzhen
Guzman is very ambitious, and before that, Mexican drug lords were only second-tier traffickers and did not develop their own products. Guzman decided to vigorously develop ice D to complete the industrial chain integrating production and marketing.
After the two cooperated, Guzman became Mexico's largest drug lord with Ice D, and Ye Zhenzhen as a supplier, the business became bigger and bigger, and the two can be said to have achieved each other.
Ye Zhenzhen knew that ephedrine was still at risk of being banned, so he began to seek an umbrella. Unlike other drug lords who directly stuff money into high-ranking officials, Ye Zhenzhen's method is much smarter. He used the name of a pharmaceutical company to invest heavily in Mexico, pull a lot of achievements for the governor and minister, and then send the money to the officials in the form of kickbacks, so that the officials have face.
In 2002, Ye became a Mexican citizen, and from that year until 2004, his company obtained the right to import ephedrine products legally authorized by the government.
With his strong political connections, he even won the title of honorary senator of Mexico, and became good friends with Calderón, then minister of state-owned enterprises, which was simply drug trafficking.
According to Mexican statistics, in just over 2005-2006, Ye Zhenzhen imported 96 tons of ephedrine, and each kilogram of ephedrine was only about 290 US dollars, but Ye Zhenzhen sold at a price of 2380 US dollars a kilogram, calculating that Ye Zhenzhen can earn 14 million US dollars a day.
A dashing life of profligacy
Ye Zhenzhen began to show off his wealth wildly after having a large amount of money, and it is said that he often went to Las Vegas to spend, and at most lost tens of millions of dollars a night.
But Ye Zhenzhen is definitely not a big wrong, the money he lost to the casino is actually his money laundering fee, he took the cash given by the drug lord to the casino to play, and then the cycle became D Bo won money, and then through HSBC to his own account, so that it was completely laundered.
Such an arrogant person will definitely go back to his hometown to show off, Ye Zhenzhen bought a single-family villa in the "first mansion in Shanghai" in the Tan Palace when he returned to China to visit relatives, which was next to his former home, which was said to be worth hundreds of millions at that time.
However, prosperity is bound to decline, and Ye Zhenzhen's money was originally earned against his conscience, so his wealth is difficult to last.
The kingdom of ephedrine
In July 2005, Ye Zhenzhen's ephedrine import license was revoked by Mexican politicians, after which it was illegal for him to import ephedrine. But Ye Zhenzhen didn't pay attention to it at all, because his good friend Calderon was about to become the chief T, but what he didn't expect was that it was Calderon who caused the fall of his kingdom.
In mid-2006, Calderón was elected General of Mexico, and one of the first things he did when he came to power was to launch the war against drugs. Subsequently, a batch of 19 tons of ephedrine was intercepted by Mexican politicians at customs.
In early 2007, Mexican politicians raided Ye's United Chemical Factory and seized 9.8 tons of purified W ephedrine. At the same time, the Mexican police are also paying close attention to Ye Zhenzhen's movements. After 4 months of tracking, they finally found Ye Zhenzhen's residence.
On March 15, 2007, Mexican police broke into Ye's mansion and prepared to arrest him in the name of drug production and trafficking. In the mansion, police seized $207 million in cash, 18 million Mexican pesos, 200,000 euros, 113,000 Hong Kong dollars, 11 Mexican gold bricks, and countless jewels, which together weighed two tons.
When Ye Zhenzhen, who was in the United States, learned the news, he felt deeply betrayed, and his friend Calderon just used himself as a money bag and destroyed his ephedrine empire as soon as he came to power.
It is difficult to escape the end of arrest
After Ye Zhenzhen knew that Calderon had destroyed his empire, he simply contacted the media in the United States to break the news.
He revealed that $150 million of the two tons of cash was a bribe from drug lords to Calderon and did not belong to him.
This huge amount of money was forcibly placed by the Mexican Minister of Labor Alarcón, who did not want to receive it, but Alarcón threatened him to cooperate or die, so he was forced to help keep the money.
This revelation made Calderon very distressed, afraid that Ye Zhenzhen would say more things, he quickly contacted the United States, hoping that the United States could arrest Ye Zhenzhen and save him from talking nonsense outside.
So in July 2007, Ye Zhenzhen was arrested by the US police at a Chinese restaurant on charges of smuggling the drug P to the United States.
Epilogue:
Although Ye Zhenzhen is the world's biggest drug lord, Chinese does not hate him, he once said after his arrest: "I have not sold drugs to China, that is my motherland, I sell drugs in Europe and the United States and other places, I am to avenge the Opium War."
It is precisely because of his example that when the mainland established the anti-drug law in 2007, it listed raw materials such as ephedrine as the first category of anti-toxic chemicals and carried out the strictest control.
Ye Zhenzhen's experience is exactly in response to that sentence, justice may be late, but it will never be absent.