Jonquilyn Hill

So they'll take it out of Colombia and move it through countries like Ecuador.

And so we just have these sort of much more creative and strategic ways of moving these drugs.

We're talking about how the trade has expanded via, you know, cultivation methods and diversified markets and logistics, right?

It feels like we're talking about any other kind of business.

Absolutely.

And actually, much of this is happening on legal container ships.

So we're not necessarily talking about, you know, sometimes you do see these crazy stories about these submarines ending up in Australia and these go fast boats in the Caribbean.

But a lot of times it's container ships, legal container ships, banana ships that are leaving through legal ports.

And so a lot of what has also allowed this explosion in the cocaine trade is corruption.

It's buying off people in the ports, in the police, in the courts.

So it's going to be a lot harder to get rid of this when it has infiltrated every level of the state.

So you profiled this guy who's sort of emblematic of the way the cocaine trade has changed, an Albanian guy who created an empire from an Ecuadorian jail.

Who is he?

Yeah, so this is a fascinating character named Dritin Rejepi, who is an Albanian criminal who essentially started off as this gunman, hitman, who was sort of one of the most wanted criminals in Europe.

But he actually, after fleeing prison,

Multiple times, he managed to sort of find a home in Ecuador and actually built his cocaine business out of a prison cell because he once again was caught and he was put in prison in Ecuador.

But actually, that was the perfect location for him to develop alliances, to learn how the criminal world worked in Ecuador, at times working with rivals in Mexican cartels, and

using these connections to find new ways to move large quantities of drugs through Ecuador and primarily to Europe.

You know, when we think about cocaine, we think about cartels, right?

We think about these organizations that demand loyalty.