Matthew Cox

Well, this concentrated effort by the authorities to undermine the domestic production resulted in creating a vacuum where the Mexicans were able to step in.

And so you had the Valencia organization, based out in Guadalajara, step in to fill the void.

They entered into a relationship with a guy named Emezcua.

His operation, also based in Guadalajara, they're producing the raw material.

And so Valencia needs to start developing his own independent source for the precursors.

Well, his operatives in L.A., in Orange County, knew a bunch of Chinese guys.

in Orange County.

And it just so happened that the guys in Orange County, that faction of the 14K, was the faction that took guys from the mainland.

And so now they were able to say, hey, do you guys have any connections to obtain precursors?

Well, in the Chinese culture, there's a concept called guanxi that's critical to understand, and it's a system of reciprocal obligations that are created through networking.

And so pretty soon word gets put out throughout the network.

Does anybody got any connections?

Well, maybe somebody's got a brother that works at a company or maybe somebody had a brother-in-law.

Eventually they were able to find enough business relationships where the Mexican faction of Sinaloa operating the millennial group, it was technically called.

The millennial group was able to begin purchasing precursors from China, sending the product materials into Mexico for them to take over the manufacturing.

Well, that's the first iteration of the Chinese because they had to be able to get the money back to China.

See, this wasn't laundering Mexican proceeds to launder Mexican money.

This was surfacing the capital for the purposes of paying for the precursors.

And so that's where you've got a concept that's well over a thousand years in the Chinese community, in the Chinese culture called Shifan.

And so, in English, that translates to flying money.