After the death of a baby from poisoning, America discovers that the scourge of Fentanyl can strike anywhere. Felix Herrera, the husband of the owner of the New York daycare center which housed a drug manufacturing factory, was arrested this Tuesday, September 26
For a long time, Grei Mendez De Ventura, 36, was seen as a mother above all suspicion. She lived with her husband, their two sons, aged 2 and 19, and their two daughters, aged 15 and 17, in a three-room apartment on the second floor of a walk-up building from the 1920s. The neighborhood, Morris Avenue, in the Bronx, mainly populated by Latinos, is one of the most dangerous in New York. But it is well served, thanks to line 4, which allows you to quickly reach Manhattan. Six months ago, Grei opened, on the ground floor of a neighboring building, in a large apartment rented for more than $3,000 a month, a daycare center that she named “Divino Niño”: the divine child.
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“Adorable,” said Maria, who lives nearby and still remembers the time when the kids from the nursery played ball on the sidewalk, under the tender eye of the director, who “loved them.” such “. On Friday, September 15, around 2:30 p.m., Maria heard Grei screaming in the stairwell. “I went down to see, the ambulance was already there. » Grei had in fact just called 911, the emergency number. Three children, aged 18 months to 2 years, lay lifeless on stretchers, ready to be transported to hospital. At the same time, a fourth child, aged 1, was taken to the hospital by his parents. For everyone, the diagnosis will be the same: Fentanyl intoxication, this drug which has become the number one cause of death among Americans under the age of fifty. But not yet in babies. Doctors managed to resuscitate three of the four children, but they were unable to save 22-month-old Nicholas Feliz-Dominici. Maria remembers this little boy well, “always the last one to leave nursery”. The next day, the New York police arrived to arrest Grei and Carlisto Acevedo Brito, a cousin of her husband who, for $200 a month, sublet a room in the nursery. Both are charged with drug trafficking resulting in death. Grei’s husband, on the run, is wanted by the police.
Fentanyl is a poor man’s drug
A daycare as a cover for drug trafficking? Still presumed innocent, Grei and Acevedo deny everything, but the police quickly had their suspicions confirmed by searching their cell phones. According to the indictment report, the young woman’s panic was not explained only by the children’s state of health. A minute before calling for help, she actually called her husband (referred to as “CC-1” in the report) to tell him to come to her urgently: he then appeared on the building’s surveillance cameras, filmed arriving empty-handed then coming out a few minutes later loaded with large plastic bags… For the police, the attempt to make the evidence disappear is obvious but futile, because Grei may well have deleted 21,000 messages on the encrypted application used for his business, investigators managed to recover some of them. Like that of September 12 when everyone seemed to rejoice at the arrival of the “torta” (“cake” in Spanish), a code name used by the cartels to designate the cargo… In the nursery, searched from top to bottom , the police will discover Fentanyl everywhere: in cupboards near which the children spent their days, and even in a trapdoor located under the linoleum of the playroom…
Nicholas and his parents. He was the youngest of their five children and had just finished his week of acclimatization. ©DR
Maria, the neighbor, is convinced that Grei didn’t know what she was doing. “He was a good person,” she assures us. We talked a lot together, always in Spanish because she didn’t speak English. She loved rap, especially Tivi Gunz, a star in the Dominican Republic, where she is from. She made a mistake, that’s all. » Another neighbor, less charitable, remembers that, on weekends, Grei and her husband would sit with “shady” friends on the sidewalk to drink and smoke, in full view of everyone, “some substances with very long pipes”. In this neighborhood where drugs abound, this ritual surprised no one. And then Grei and his accomplices could rest easy: on September 6, the city’s health services carried out a surprise inspection. They had only seen fire there.
A pill costs 1 cent to make and sells for 10 euros
The first big seizure of Fentanyl, this drug that is ravaging all of America, dates back to October 2014: customs officers in San Ysidro, a border town in southern California, stopped a white Chevrolet Blazer whose driver caught their attention. Under the back seat, 10.7 kilos of a powder that they have difficulty identifying, because Fentanyl trafficking from Mexico is only just emerging. It actually started in the early 1990s, quite officially, under the name OxyContin, a painkiller prescribed by doctors. “Between 1997 and 2012, certain American pharmaceutical laboratories, such as Purdue Pharma, literally campaigned to convince doctors and regulatory authorities to be less timid towards this category of painkillers. They push consumption,” laments Dr. Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University. Problem: this “miracle” remedy is ultra-addictive. Health authorities reacted, but too late: millions of Americans already addicted then turned to the black market to fill the gap.
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The Mexican cartels, always on the lookout for new opportunities, quickly see the opportunity. In the early 2010s, they suffered from the emerging legalization of marijuana in many American states, which would translate into billions of dollars in losses for the drug lords. Fentanyl could fill them. For several reasons. First, demand is high: there is a “captive” clientele, ready to adopt it. But also because the drug is very cheap to produce. Compared to opium, which must be grown and harvested before turning into heroin, the ratio is 1 to 100. “Making Fentanyl is child’s play,” notes Dr. Kolodny. It only takes a small laboratory and two people, hardly more, to transform the raw material imported from China, sometimes the most legally in the world. The recipe can be found on the Internet. The “package”? A pill similar to an aspirin tablet, which allows customs officers to be fooled at the border between Mexico and the United States. The profit prospects are colossal: a pill that would cost 1 euro cent to produce in a Mexican laboratory is sold for 10 euros (a thousand times more!) in major American cities. It is for this reason that the two main Mexican cartels – the Sinaloa, founded by El Chapo, and the Jalisco Nueva Generacion – have embarked on intensive production. They are now world leaders, but they face competition from a host of small, independent traffickers capable of producing the substance at home. Perhaps Grei Mendez and his accomplices were among them. Fentanyl is the poor man’s drug 2.0: anyone can produce or sell it. It is everywhere, even slips into the composition of other drugs, and dominates the American market while the prices of plant substances, such as opium, collapse. The public wants more because it is as easy to administer (no need for a syringe) as it is to find. And its addictive potential is fifty times that of heroin.
Carlisto Acevedo Brito, 41, was arrested on September 17 and charged, like the director of the daycare, Grei Mendez, with drug trafficking. Getty Images / © NY Daily News
In these times of the presidential pre-campaign in the United States, this uncontrollable phenomenon has taken on a political dimension. Last week, Joe Biden and his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, took advantage of the United Nations General Assembly to sound the alarm and demand a coordinated fight at the global level. The scourge indeed involves several nations: China (which exports 90 to 95% of the original substance), Mexico, the world’s largest producer, and the United States, the largest consumer market. For the moment, France remains relatively spared, “but that could change, because the level of prescription is increasing”, worries Dr Kolodny, who believes that “several European pharmaceutical laboratories are pushing for the consumption of these ultra-addictive painkillers , exactly as it happened in America.” Everything suggests that European mafias are ready to intervene: “We are already seeing transnational organizations operating from Russia or war zones like Ukraine,” explains Ambassador Todd Robinson, who heads the international narcotics bureau. He sounds the alarm: “It is not only in America that synthetic drugs are a problem. This scourge will eventually strike the entire world. »
2023-10-01 09:08:02
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