As the violence in Chicago's gang plagued neighborhoods rages on, the underlying cause of the Windy City's murder rampages can be found thousands of miles away along a porous border. According to a report from Breitbart's Jeremy Segal, Mexican drug cartels are "allowed" to run Chicago's streets and young African-American men are killing each other as a result.
Harold “Noonie” Ward, a former high-ranking member of the Gangster Disciples, one of America’s largest street gangs, claims the deadly violence that is plaguing Rahm Emanuel’s “world class city” of Chicago is because Mexican drug cartels are being allowed by “the powers that be” to operate freely and “run” Chicago’s streets.
In an interview with Breitbart News outside of his childhood home, a now-condemned apartment in Altgeld Gardens, one of Chicago’s most well known housing projects, Ward explained that there are a number of issues leading to the bloodshed in the city. The greatest reason, Ward says, is drugs and how they are being brought into the city.
“Where the drugs are coming from is Mexican cartels,” Ward said. “From Mexico to Chicago, they make $3.5 billion dollars a year. And the majority of violence in Chicago, comes from the Mexican cartels.”
This isn't the first time we've heard of cartels plaguing Chicago. Last month Bloomberg issued an extensive report detailing how drug operations are conducted and the violence that is used to do so.
The two Mexican couriers were hauling a tractor-trailer full of cash: $3 million collected for drugs sold on the streets of Chicago. Juan Gonzalez and David Zuniga were driving their rig through Indiana in October 2011, transporting the money to Mexico. As they stopped to fix a flat tire, three members of the Gangster Disciples, Chicago’s biggest street gang, held them up at gunpoint.
The gang had bought the drugs -- and now these members wanted the money back. They pistol-whipped and handcuffed Zuniga. As the gangsters were hooking their own purple Kenworth cab to the money-laden trailer, Gonzalez fled through a cornfield and called the police.
Gonzalez, who worked for Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman, made a surprising request that fall day: He wanted proof for cartel leaders that police had confiscated the $3 million.
“He knew, without a receipt, they’d kill him or his family in Mexico,” says Jack Riley, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for a five-state region that includes Illinois and Indiana.
Such is the fear that Guzman inspires on both sides of the border. Operating from heavily guarded compounds in the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico, Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel supplies 80 percent of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine -- with a street value of $3 billion -- that floods the Chicago region each year, the DEA says. Job seekers in Guzman’s 150,000-strong enterprise must list where their relatives live.
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cartels work with gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood to map out routes for drugs like methamphetamine. New York City, Atlanta and parts of Virginia serve as hubs for the violent MS-13 gang, whose members are deeply embedded in the violent drug trade. Back in April, the Associated Press produced an alarming report about the extent of cartel operations from coast to coast and in U.S. prisons.
Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.
If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels' move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets and money laundering.
But a wide-ranging Associated Press review of federal court cases and government drug-enforcement data, plus interviews with many top law enforcement officials, indicate the groups have begun deploying agents from their inner circles to the U.S. Cartel operatives are suspected of running drug-distribution networks in at least nine non-border states, often in middle-class suburbs in the Midwest, South and Northeast.
"It's probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime," said Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office.
As Congress finally comes to some kind of agreement about the budget and the nation's debt, the debate about illegal immigration is sure to return. Up to this point, brutal drug cartels operating in the United States have been ignored
by those is Washington. On a local level, Chicago, officially dubbed the murder capitol of the country by the FBI, will need more than the police force to get things under control and a phone call to the National Guard to patrol the streets is long overdue.
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