The Border (Power of the Dog, #3)

by Don Winslow

There are too many people dying. And we’re a few brooms trying to sweep back an ocean of H. “The paradigm has shifted,” Mullen says, “and we have to shift with it. ‘Buy and bust’ works up to a point, but that point is far short of what we need. We’ve had some success busting the heroin mills—we’ve seized a lot of horse and a lot of cash—but the Mexicans can always make more heroin and therefore more cash. They figure these losses into their business plans. We’re in a numbers game we can never win.” Cirello’s done some of the mill busts. The Mexicans bring the heroin up through Texas to New York and store it in apartments and houses, mostly in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. At these “mills” they cut the H up into dime bags and sell it to the retailers, mostly gangbangers, who put it out in the boroughs or take it to smaller towns upstate and in New England. NYPD has made some big hits on the mills—twenty-million-, fifty-million-dollar pops—but it’s a revolving door. Mullen’s right, the Mexican cartels can replace any dope and any money they lose. They can also replace the people, because most of the personnel at the mills are local women who cut the heroin and low-level managers who work for cash. The cartel wholesalers themselves are rarely, if ever, present at the mills except for the few minutes it takes to bring the drugs in. And the drugs are coming in.