In the report in post #328, 'Sin City Mafia' is misleading, because readers may think it means Columbus,Georgia, rather than Phenix City, across the Chattahoochee River. This is where, curiously enough, Trafficante did not use a patsy (Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice)
Thus the Thai-Cargill poultry link will go into the file for Mena, Arkansas.
'When Santo Trafficante, Jr., boarded a commercial jet for the flight to Southeast Asia, he was probably unaware that Western adventurers had been coming to Asia for hundreds of years to make their fortunes in the narcotics trade. Earlier adventurers had flown the flags of the Portuguese Empire, the British East India Company, and the French Republic; Trafficante was a representative of of the American Mafia.
He was traveling on a jet aircraft, but they had come in tiny wooden-hulled Portuguese caravels, British men-of-war, and steel-ribbed steamships. With their superior military technology, these agents of empire used their warships to open up China and Southeast Asia for their opium merchants and conquered Asian landmass, dividing it into spheres and colonies.
Empire builders subjected millions of natives to opium addiction, generating revenues for colonial development and providing profits for European stockholders. Thus, the Mafia following a long tradition of Western drug trafficking in Asia -- but with one important difference. It was not interested in selling Asian opium to the Asians, it was trying to buy Asian heroin for Americans.'
(McCaoy, op cit)
