[Bertrand Monnet est professeur à l’Edhec (école de commerce), titulaire de la chaire Management des risques criminels. C’est à ce titre qu’il s’intéresse au cartel de Sinaloa depuis 2014. Il lui a fallu des années pour identifier des intermédiaires capables de garantir à la fois la fiabilité de ses interlocuteurs et sa sécurité. Cette enquête sur le fentanyl, qui a donné lieu à une série vidéo en trois volets diffusée sur Lemonde.fr, a nécessité de nombreux séjours au Mexique et un long travail de mise en confiance. « Les “narcos” ont accepté de témoigner par volonté d’afficher leur puissance sur la scène internationale », estime le chercheur.]

“Dubai is a paradise for us! » In the heart of Business Bay, the emirate’s commercial district, Eduardo, a Mexican “narco,” interrupts his selfie session in front of the Burj Khalifa Tower, the world’s tallest skyscraper, to explain to me how the Sinaloa Cartel clans come about Tens of millions of dollars are laundered here. He himself works for one of them, with a dual function: on the one hand, exporting tons of drugs, be it cocaine or fentanyl, an opioid thirty times more powerful than heroin; the other is laundering the profits from this particular type of trading.

Several months of investigations in Culiacán, the cartel’s stronghold in Mexico, and then in New York, one of its main markets, allowed me to get a clear idea of ​​the value chain of trafficking in fentanyl, the flagship product of the moment, the cause of 130,000 deaths by overdose in 2022 in the United States. The kilo of fentanyl powder purchased in China for $17,000 (15,700 euros) is converted into blue pellets called “M30” in secret laboratories in Culiacán. The clans that make up the organization – several dozen in all – benefit from a kind of autonomy to produce this drug and then sell it ($ 400,000 per kilo) to American drug traffickers, who in turn sell it in millions of doses of a few milligrams resell, sometimes mixed with other narcotics (heroin, cocaine). For a clan like Eduardo’s, which is particularly active in the field of fentanyl, the trade generates enormous income. In relation to the cartel and its 19,000 members, the profits amount to billions of dollars, which obviously have to be “laundered”.

A few weeks earlier in Culiacan, the same Eduardo gave me a sort of decoding of his organization’s money laundering methods. In fact, it’s nothing very complicated and nothing completely mysterious. The first phase of the operation, placement, involves distributing the cash – specifically stacks of banknotes – across thousands of bank accounts. To this end, the clans funnel this money into the state coffers of hundreds of companies and businesses controlled by them or deposit it directly in bank branches whose employees they bribe so that they do not declare these suspicious deposits.

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