The Underground Empire Quotes

“International crime eventually ascends through politics, diplomacy, and statesmanship to a level of supracrime, where, having triumphed absolutely, it rules even that which had been created to destroy it, and is eventually not recognized as crime at all.”
― James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“While La Tigressa was snarling at the president, other Mexican officials also were talking. Wild, unbelievable stories began to circulate through Latin American intelligence and diplomatic circles. Local journalists, whose ties to high Mexican police officials were in some cases stronger than those of American drug agents, reported that under torture Falcon had admitted working for the CIA to set up a network exchanging Mexican heroin and marijuana for weapons. The weapons, according to these reports, were passed to Central American guerrilla groups fighting to 'destabilize' their governments. Governments harassed by the guerrillas, it was hoped, would align themselves with the United States in exchange for military aid. The plan would cost the CIA nothing since it was financed by unwitting American drug dealers, pot smokers, and junkies.”
― James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“In the weeks immediately following Sicilia-Falcon's arrest, in an uproar of murder and threats, with the intelligence agencies of a half-dozen countries scrambling for position, the political future of Mexico was irrevocably altered, and Pat Gregory, Rich Gorman, and a handful of other American narcotics agents discovered a startling fact. Falcon, with all his wealth and power a king of crime, appeared from another viewpoint to be hardly more than a footman. Far above him, way beyond him, lay a snarled, labyrinthine network of criminals, intelligence agents, diplomats, and politicians reaching into the halls of national power on four continents.”
― James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“He said that men like Sicilia-Falcon were not just committing crimes. They were attacking the sovereignty of the nation. They were making a mockery of the law, the government, and the country itself.”
― James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“You have to understand the history of the people,' he said. 'I do not consider the Latins to be fundamentally a brutal people. The brutality which they exhibit is a brutality they learned from the Europeans, going back to the Inquisition. The Latins didn't know how to torture people. They killed people—the Aztecs and the Incas did—as part of sacrificial religious rites, but they didn't torture them. They learned that from the Inquisitors. Now it's been developed over centuries, and it's become a way of life. As has the corruption, which also was taught to them be Europeans.”
― James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“And particularly Orientals—they weigh everything out carefully and deliberately. And if it looks suspicious and it's gonna take a year to make the decision, they wait for a year and make it.”
― James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“Tuan claimed that the Thair Border Patrol Police were 'totally corrupt and responsible for transportation of narcotics.' This was of some interest, since the BPP, a CIA creation, was known to be controlled by SRF, the Bangkok CIA station.”
― James Edward Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“Life had become a huge, monstrous machine. Grinding to nowhere.”
― James Edward Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace

“Then Estrada introduced Allen to a man who was eventually to become one of the most politically explosive Centac targets in the world, a man whose brutal counterattack to efforts to curb his power would precipitate direct personal talks between the presidents of the United States and Mexico.”
― James Edward Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace