"I never considered anything I did as money laundering."
Emily Spell heard the screams from outside her parents’ red brick home.
She found her brother, Joseph Williams, 31, splayed on a mattress in the basement. His eyes, half open, were yellow. His lips were blue.
“Joe, wake up! Joe, wake up!” his wife, Kristina, hollered, while pounding on his chest.
Spell, a nursing student, started CPR. Joe’s mother, who’d raced home from work at the Piggly Wiggly grocery in Garland, North Carolina, tore into the room.
“It’s OK, baby, you can go ahead and sleep,” Susan Williams said. “Do you want a cigarette? Are you cold?”
“I thought my mama had lost her mind,” Emily remembers. “Of course he was cold. Because he was dead.”
Joe’s family had no idea that he was one of the first of thousands of Americans who would die from fentanyl, the most dangerous narcotic in the world. And even after they saw the autopsy report, it wasn’t until much later that they learned of the global forces responsible for Joe’s death, including a Fort Lauderdale man who would ultimately be sent to prison.
It took a network of traffickers stretching back to China, relying on the easy movement of dirty money through brand-name financial institutions, to deliver lab-designed opioids to rural North Carolina and across the United States.
New details about how money that powered the fentanyl drug ring and more than $2 trillion in other suspect funds flowing around the globe are contained in a cache of secret financial records obtained by BuzzFeed News and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ assembled a global team of news organizations to analyze the documents, including, in the United States, the Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and their parent, McClatchy.
The records, known as Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, provide a worldwide tour of crime, corruption and inequality, with crucial roles played by politicians, oligarchs and swindlers, as well as the bankers who serve them all. The SARs, which are collected and analyzed by an agency called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, show how the failure of banks and other financial institutions to thwart the flow of illicit money promotes criminality and suffering on a grand scale.
Read more at the Miami Herald