Mariana van Zeller

And I remember it was in Oregon.

We did a few stories there where a lot of people were complaining about this, small business owners.

I think they go to the bank and try to— Oh, the bank knows.

I think the bank is able to find out just by looking at it.

Because I think it, you know, would fool us, but it doesn't fool somebody who's trained to look at these bills.

I know that that's how they figured out that they had— You've got to go to a lazy bank.

Oh, I cannot remember all the statistics, but it was a lot.

It was like in the millions of dollars that people were making down there.

Wow.

It was crazy, yeah.

But this all back to the story of why I talked about this guy, about why people talk to us.

Oh, and back to the cartel USA story, which started in Sinaloa.

There was a point to this.

You were asking me about how it ended up in the U.S.

Oh, what I discovered with cartels operations in the United States is

So one of the people we interviewed, which was really fascinating, and it was somebody who carried this load on his back and why he decided to talk to us, was this guy called El Gringo, or we called him El Gringo.

And El Gringo is an American citizen who doesn't speak a word of Spanish and who's sort of a wholesale buyer of drugs from the cartel and then is in charge of distributing the drugs here in the U.S.,

He distributes most of his drugs through commercial airlines, usually Delta, because they have really good baggage fees.

They have 70 pounds, two bags, 70 pounds if you fly business.

And so a lot of times it was strippers who would carry the drugs from the West Coast to the East Coast.