The day's first priority was clear: isolate and analyze the city's most influential journalists, identify their weaknesses and, with precision, turn those weaknesses into assets. This was not mere rumor-mongering, not brute-force blackmail—at least not at first. The operation required tact, psychological discernment, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the local media ecosystem. I started by logging into the network's secure terminals, scrolling through digital archives, cross-referencing bylines, op-eds, even social media profiles. I compiled a spreadsheet of the men and women whose prose shaped the city's consciousness, and in so doing, shaped the fates of those who lived in its shadow.
There were names I recognized from years ago, when the Cartel preferred to threaten or bribe its way into the news cycle with crude, unsubtle tactics. That age had passed. Now, credibility was the cartel's most valuable currency, and to spend it required the careful cultivation of relationships that appeared, to the public eye, utterly legitimate.
I practiced the ritual of research like a physician learning the subtle signs of disease. I knew, for example, that a reporter whose daughter attended an expensive international school would be receptive to a source who could offer lucrative consulting work on the side. A columnist with a taste for high-stakes gambling might be softened by an invitation to a private casino night, where the house would ensure his fortunes rose or fell as needed. There were those with secrets more illicit, of course, but the real art was in making the transaction seem like an act of mutual benefit, not coercion.
The spreadsheet grew, and with it, my sense of control. If the cartel could harness the credibility of these trusted voices, it could spin narratives in ways that would make direct intimidation obsolete. A sudden uptick in homicide—actually the result of a shipment gone wrong—could be reframed as the work of a rival gang, sowing confusion and buying time. A police raid on one of our safe houses could be downplayed as the desperate act of a corrupt official, undermining public trust in law enforcement. It was a chessboard, and each journalist a piece to be moved with careful, almost loving, manipulation.
There were risks, always. Some reporters were incorruptible, or worse, drawn to danger for its own sake. These were not to be threatened directly—the modern world had too many eyes and too much appetite for scandal. Instead, they would be fed a steady diet of misleading tips, always just plausible enough to keep them chasing the wrong leads. Over months, even the most principled investigator could be made to look incompetent, confused, irrelevant.
I finished my research just as the sun cracked the horizon, feeling a peculiar pride in the day's invisible victories. The work was not glamorous, not the kind that drew headlines or earned respect, but it was the backbone of the empire. With the journalists on our side—or at least kept at bay by the illusion of transparency—we could shape reality itself, and in so doing, become untouchable.
It was, in the end, almost comical how little about our operation actually resembled the narco empires of the past. Our stated goal, which I repeated to myself like a mantra whenever the old instincts threatened to reassert themselves, was to conduct business not like a street gang, not even like the glorified paramilitaries that had ruled the news cycles of the last generation, but like a Fortune 500 company. A real, modernized multinational. Every time I walked the fluorescent-lit corridors of our European headquarters, the floor plan modeled after some Silicon Valley disruptor, I tried to imagine how the legends of the trade—your Escobars and Ochoas—would react to the spare offices, the ergonomic chairs, the polished gender-neutral bathrooms. There were no family portraits, no gold-plated guns mounted on the wall, no brash, testosterone-soaked displays of power. The only evidence of our criminality was the omnipresent, humming diligence of the men and women who worked the terminals, logged the imports and exports, and tracked the shifting allegiances of a world that was, at its core, just a hypercapitalist market with different regulatory challenges.
If I had to name a patron saint for our new mode of operation, it would not be any of the old guard. I read about Tse Chi Lop, the ghostlike architect of the Asian meth trade, and recognized in him a kindred spirit. Tse was already a kind of myth, known for his patience and silence, for the way he built his empire not by gunning down rivals but by making himself indispensable to them. He understood that violence was a cost, not a benefit, that the true lever was information, reputation, and the efficient allocation of risk. The authorities called him the "El Chapo of Asia," but this was a misnomer, a failure of the law to comprehend the difference between the spectacle of crime and its substance. Tse's genius—his real innovation—was to become invisible, to abstract himself from the product, the shipment, even from his own network, until by the time the world realized who he was, his hands were already nowhere near the scene.
From Tse, and from the handful of other criminal polymaths who had flourished in the new century, I stole ideas shamelessly and adapted them to our own context. We rebranded the product, diversified the supply chains, ran every major deal through a shell game of holding companies and charitable foundations. Our HR department was real, staffed by a former labor lawyer from Madrid who'd never seen the inside of a prison, and our quarterly all-hands meetings were indistinguishable from those at the pharmaceutical conglomerates whose stock sometimes backed our laundering operations. The point was not to mimic the trappings of legitimacy but to render ourselves truly mundane, so that when the authorities came looking, they found only a smooth surface, a bureaucracy so dense and lifeless that they lost the will to peel it apart.
It worked. The local police, even the specialists flown in from the capital, were outmatched before they set foot in the city. They had trained for the guns-and-money show, for the clumsy violence of yesterday's cartels, and when faced with an adversary that used market research and focus groups, that anticipated their moves not with paid informants but with predictive analytics, they simply malfunctioned. The old men in the cartel, the ones who still believed in the power of fear, assumed this would make us soft, but they were wrong. We could do violence, when it was necessary, but we treated it as a line item, measured and amortized. More often, we solved problems by buying out the competition, by poaching their best people, or by making their business models obsolete.
I started the day with these thoughts, planning to rewrite another page in the city's annals without ever setting foot on its streets. The world was changing, and we were its most adaptive predators.
So, if I am going to follow the footsteps of the fellow narco trafficker Tse Chi Lop, then I will need to start developing meth, ecstasy, and other synthetic drugs—not as a sideline, but as the central pillar of the operation. Tse had proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the real future of the business lay in chemistry, not in poppies or coca leaves or the endless headaches of smuggling agricultural products across hostile borders. The new empire would be built on molecules, precision, and the uniquely modern promise of product standardization: every pill identical, every shipment free of contaminants or surprises, a guarantee of quality so ironclad that even the most skeptical buyer would come back for more.
I spent days researching the global supply chain for precursors, bouncing from dark web forums to obscure academic papers, then zooming back into local black markets and the gossip-heavy WhatsApp groups where disgraced pharmacists and ex-chemistry grad students hawked their wares. The genius of Tse's model was that he didn't bother with the old romance of cartel mystique; he built his manufacturing base in the wide-open, unregulated zones of the world—university towns in Malaysia, industrial parks outside Bangkok—then ran the logistics like a Fortune 500 logistics consultant, optimizing every link in the chain until the process was so ruthlessly efficient it made the DEA's heads spin. The math was beautiful in its clarity. For every metric ton of meth made, the cost of raw materials and labor hovered around $4,000. Retail value, once it reached the European market, was a minimum of $200,000 per ton, after everyone in the pipeline took their cut. The profit margin was almost illegal in its audacity.
But I knew that copying Tse's playbook wholesale was a fool's errand. The markets were different, the scrutiny more intense now, and the law enforcement adversaries had gotten wise to the old shell games. My solution was to hybridize: take the best of Tse, then graft it onto the information discipline and PR savvy of the modern European corporate world. First, I needed a team of chemists. Not the slapdash meth cooks of Breaking Bad folklore—those amateurs were the first to get caught and the last to innovate. What I needed were scientists: postdocs and adjunct professors, men and women smart enough to know the risks and desperate enough to ignore them. I started with the obvious recruiting grounds: technical universities in the former Soviet bloc, where the funding was always thin and the dreams of glory long since faded. I posed as a venture capitalist, offering research grants for "novel psychoactives," and within weeks my inbox was flooded with CVs from PhDs who had spent a decade in obscurity and were hungry for validation, money, or both.
Second, I had to lock down the supply chain for precursors, a task complicated by the fact that the EU had recently tightened oversight on the most common reagents. The solution was twofold: set up shell companies in the Balkans under the guise of "agricultural chemical distributors," and cultivate a side operation in Turkey run by a cousin of Zopilote's, who had a knack for bribing customs officials and a taste for German techno. By splitting the shipments, using a dizzying array of courier services and intermediaries, we could flood the network with legitimate orders and slip our real product through the cracks.
The most delicate part was the establishment of the actual production labs. Tse Chi Lop had favored nondescript apartment buildings, but I opted for abandoned light-industrial warehouses, the kind that sat rotting on the outskirts of every dying city in the former Yugoslavia. They were cheap, already wired for three-phase power, and, crucially, nobody ever called the police when odd smells drifted across the parking lot. We hired locals to "renovate" the properties, keeping them on short-term contracts so they never learned too much, and paid off the zoning inspectors with a combination of cash and a promise to demolish the building once our lease was up.
By the end of the first quarter, we had three labs running at full capacity, each staffed by a team of five—two chemists, one logistics lead, one local fixer, and a single trusted Zopilote operative whose job was to keep everyone calm and on schedule. The first shipments rolled out in hollowed-out pallets and inside the engines of salvaged cars bound for Rotterdam. The product was immaculate: off-white, odorless, perfectly crystalline. Reviews from the buyers were ecstatic. Within three months, we had cornered a third of the regional market, and the price per kilo began to rise as demand outstripped supply.
But the genius of it—the reason Tse's model was worth emulating—was that the violence, the drama, the spectacle, all disappeared. There were no street shootouts, no beheadings, no breathless news stories about narco terrorism. Just supply, demand, and the quiet satisfaction of seeing spreadsheets fill with numbers so large they barely seemed real.
There were still risks, of course; there always are. But for the first time in my life, I felt like the architect of a new order, not just an inheritor of someone else's bloody legacy. And when I walked the corridors of our European headquarters, past the open-plan offices and the glass-walled conference rooms, I caught myself smiling at the thought: this was what the future looked like, and it belonged to us.