I Research Economic Crime and Hang Out With Mexican Cartels

Bertrand Monnet is a professor of economic crime at EDHEC Business School in Lille, France. But he’s not like the professors you had at university, quietly sinking five pints of ale in the local each night before plodding off home to watch Blackadder repeats.

Monnet has spent the last decade gaining the trust of Mexico’s infamous and bloodthirsty Sinaloa cartel. Using his status as an academic – rather than a journalist – he persuaded the narco gang’s leadership to let him embed with the cartel, and for seven years has been filming every stage of their latest boom industry: the illegal M30 fentanyl trade that has ravaged the US.

This is not his first rodeo. He’s been taken hostage in Brazil, tangled with Yakuza in Japan, and met with mafiosi in Italy. His videos, made primarily as case studies for his students, have also been drip fed on to the internet as short documentaries. Again, what the footage captures is not what you’d expect a university professor to be doing in his spare time – whether he’s repeatedly asking sicario hitmen if they believe in God, spending evenings with zombified fentanyl users beside a highway in New York, or going undercover with cartel bosses as they seek to launder narco blood money through shadowy property investment schemes in Dubai.

Monnet’s aim is to teach his students – many of whom expect to graduate into high-flying corporate careers – how to recognise dirty money when it comes their way, and to exercise their professional power to stop it flowing into the legal financial system. According to his research, this sector of the criminal economy alone accounts for 3 percent of global GDP. 

The most startling thing about his work is the degree of trust that exists between Monnet and the criminals he meets, something he attributes to his status as an academic – rather than a journalist duty-bound to liaise with the police and authorities. I spoke to the professor about the strange professional grey area he dwells in and the globalisation of the drugs trade. 

VICE: You’ve been in touch with the Sinaloa cartel for 10 years. How did this all begin?
Bertrand Monnet: I’m a professor at EDHEC Business School and my only topic for 18 years has been economic crime. That’s not teaching people how to become criminals; it’s teaching the dangers of economic crime to my students. Just like other professors teaching marketing or whatever, we rely on case studies – and in economic crime, that means going into the field to meet economic criminals. Whether it’s Cosa Nostra guys, Yakuzas in Japan, or whatever.

I began working with the cartel ten years ago and first got access seven years ago. Two years later, I made the first documentary, filming their cocaine labs. I wanted to track the origin of the criminal money from street level right up to the bank accounts of legal companies – companies that maybe, once they graduate, my students are going to do business with. I teach them how to avoid working with those companies. But you also have to convince them by showing them the truth… Where does that money come from?

When I first worked on those documentaries, I saw fentanyl in the labs. I immediately understood that for the gangs, it’s a cash printing machine. I asked if it would be alright to cover the fentanyl production. And they said, “Absolutely not, this is impossible.” Of course, this raised my curiosity and for two years, I insisted and insisted. Eventually, it worked. 

The level of trust in the documentaries is kind of astonishing.
This is key. For journalists, it’s very risky. Many are killed in Mexico, as they don’t have time to build this level of trust with cartels. They’re under pressure to inform, and this topic in Mexico is an emergency. I have the luxury of time. For me, Culiacán is the most secure place in the world, because I’m welcomed by the cartels. After the first docs, they saw I kept my word. Their faces were hidden, their voices were changed. They thought, ‘OK, maybe you’re a trustable man.’

In one of the docs, you arrive at a cartel safe house seconds after the drug squad and the army. How much contact have you had with law enforcement in Mexico?
None. If you talk to the police, you cannot talk to the cartels, unless you assume the risk of taking a bullet to the head.

The narco trade has been going so long now it’s basically a heritage industry. Where does the current incarnation of the Sinaloa cartel exist in this wider context?
They aren’t the only cartel selling fentanyl in the US, but they are the most important. The opiate crisis means it’s big business.

What were the narcos like to be around as people? What kind of future do they imagine for themselves? A peaceful retirement?
No. These people are what I call “business extremists”. Even a middle manager earns millions of dollars a year. And my question is always, “Hey guy, why not stop? You’re rich, your money is safe somewhere, you could have a good life with your family.”. But no. They cannot stop. They take cocaine but the real drug is not cocaine, it’s the dollar. They are absolutely enthralled by greed and they cannot control this passion they have to make money, no matter what. This is the only reason why, to me, as someone who’s been working in this field for years, they are willing to kill so many people – even their own family. The money exerts the same grip as fentanyl on its users. They do anything to get their dose.

But they are not crazy, at all. They are well organised at the smaller clan level – the cartel is a federation of clans, like a cooperative business. The clans are fully independent. Apart from three things they all chip in to fund: access to fentanyl – which they all pay to import from China in bulk – high level corruption, and access to the machines that produce fentanyl pills. It’s very risky to import them from China, so these three things are organised by leadership at cartel HQ.

Inside each clan, you have the people in charge of money laundering. They are experienced people with real financial know-how and connections. And for the clan that I follow in the documentaries, they especially have these connections in Dubai. 

The opacity in terms of Dubai’s rules and regulations… Surely the authorities there understand they are going to attract investment from illegal businesses, like the narcos?
Exactly. This is why Dubai is so attractive to criminals. The opacity of Dubai is not something rare in the world – there are many other banking havens, granting the same opacity to criminals. But the Dubai authorities don’t collaborate at all. It’s very rare that they answer to the demands issued by judges in the US or Europe or wherever. If you want to be absolutely safe when you’re hiding your money, it’s very simple – once your money is in Dubai, don’t put it in a bank account, invest in a building. Whether it’s a flat, a building site, a hotel, a mall… even if the Dubai authorities decided to share the information they have on you, once your money has left the bank account and been invested in 100 flats, it’s impossible to know who owns these assets.

Is the narco trade now too global to stop?
The narcos have to launder billions of illicit money to attain wealth – and that absolutely takes the use of banking havens. It is possible to tackle the globalised narco economy by pressuring these little holes in the globalised financial climate. But this is the only way. 

Using economic sanctions more than guns, helicopters and drones – or using both! But not forgetting to use economic pressure. And this is only in the hands of major states: the US, the UK, the EU and Canada. And so far, they don’t move. 

In the documentaries, you ask everyone you meet who’s involved in the trade the same question – whether or not they believe in God. Why?
After some years teaching my students, it’s amazing that people consider the narcos to be so different from themselves. Of course, they are very different, because they are killers. But the reason why I ask them that question is to show that they’re human beings who are fully paradoxical. How can you believe in God while you order the killings of thousands of people a year? The only explanation is that they’re human beings like you and me.