U.S. charges 4 Chinese firms with selling chemicals to make fentanyl
Four chemical companies based in China and eight Chinese nationals have been charged with trafficking chemicals used by Mexican drug cartels to manufacture vast quantities of fentanyl later sold in the United States, federal officials said Friday.
The officials said that two of the defendants, the principal executive of one Chinese firm and its marketing manager, had been arrested overseas and taken to Hawaii for a court appearance, and that they would be brought to Manhattan to face prosecution.
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The indictments announced Friday in New York are part of a strategy by the Drug Enforcement Administration to attack the scourge of fentanyl at every stage of the supply chain. The buyers of the chemicals were largely organizations like the Sinaloa cartel, formerly run by the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, which the Justice Department says is largely responsible for the influx of fentanyl into the United States.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news conference that the firms advertised the so-called precursor chemicals online, and an indictment said they were packaged to resemble dog food, nuts or motor oil. Wuhan-based Hubei Amarvel Biotech Co., Garland added, “went as far as to guarantee ‘100% stealth shipping,’ and they provided proof of their success on their websites, including a screenshot of a shipping confirmation to Culiacán, Mexico, the Sinaloa cartel’s base of operations.”
Anne Milgram, the administrator of the DEA, said the companies also chemically camouflaged their goods in the lab.
“They even disguised the chemicals at a molecular level, adding a molecule to mask the precursors so they would not be detected as banned substances during transport,” Milgram said. “They taught their customers how to remove that molecule after they received the chemicals.”
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at the news conference that over the course of the investigation, Amarvel Biotech shipped more than 200 kilograms of precursor chemicals to the United States, which for that company “was apparently only a drop in the bucket,” Williams added.
The two Chinese executives taken into custody, Qingzhou Wang and Yiyi Chen, worked for Amarvel Biotech, Williams’ office said. A lawyer for Qingzhou Wang did not immediately respond to a request for comment; one for Chen declined. A third employee was also charged and is at large.
Three other Chinese companies along with five employees were named in indictments unsealed on Friday in Brooklyn federal court.
Breon S. Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, noted at the news conference that although most of the chemicals the companies sold were legal, the defendants knew they would be used to make fentanyl. “This is akin to a company selling the components for a bomb, knowing they would be used to make an explosive,” Peace said.
Milgram called fentanyl “the greatest threat to Americans today,” adding that fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death for people between 18 and 45. The drug can be 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, and is sometimes added to cocaine or heroin without the buyer’s knowledge.
In New York City, overdoses have skyrocketed thanks to fentanyl, with 2,668 deaths in 2021, a 78% jump from 2019, according to city data.
Milgram said the Chinese firms gave their customers the raw materials and the scientific know-how to make the drug — “and they knew exactly who they were working with.”
“They provided the chemicals,” she said. “They gave advice on how to mix them. They made changes to the recipe when an ingredient wasn’t available. They told a customer to substitute one ingredient for another to make twice as much fentanyl. They employed chemists to troubleshoot when customers had questions.”
The charges revealed Friday came two months after Garland announced sweeping indictments in Manhattan, Chicago and Washington, D.C., against more than two dozen people in what he described as a global fentanyl manufacturing and distribution operation run by the Sinaloa cartel.
Those defendants included the four sons of El Chapo, whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera and who is serving life in prison in the United States after his 2019 conviction in Brooklyn.
