THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
The Infiltrator (for those who are not
already familiar with it), is a movie about a very high level, very intense,
very lengthy sting operation carried out by the Drug Enforcement Agency in the
1980s. It stars Bryan Cranston as a real life U.S. Customs agent, Robert
Mazur. Over a five-year period, he plays the role of a mob-connected,
very successful money launderer who, step-by-step, manages to infiltrate the
cocaine distribution network of the then drug king-pin, the Colombian Pablo Escobar.
He has two partners, one a street-wise, punky looking character played by John
Leguizamo, and the other a female rookie agent (Diane Kruger), who plays the
part of Mazur’s fiancée. Her role is critical in creating the final
sting-of-stings at which a whole bunch of high, medium, and low members of the
drug gang are rounded up and eventually sent to prison. Of course, if the
particular drug in which they were dealing was legal like, let’s say, alcohol,
the “drug gang” would be known as the “distributors,” as in, let us say,
Budweiser Beer.
It happens that
Budweiser is a major beer distributor as well as a major brewer.
It
was originally founded, interestingly enough by a Sudeten German family in what
was in the 19th century the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. The
Sudeten Germans were later to provide for the unopposed entry of Nazi Germany
(of course facilitated by the British and the French who were most interested
in keeping the Nazis focused East, towards the Soviet Union) into what had
become Czechoslovakia) into Western Czechoslovakia (and subsequently all of
it). Budweiser
is currently in the process of attempting to use its evermore dominant position
in beer distribution (comparable to that of Escobar for cocaine) to put out of
business the rapidly growing family of “craft-beer” brewers (as Escobar did in
gradually putting out of business the smaller growers and distributors of
cocaine). Such
is the similarity in the power of distribution between the “licit” and
“illicit” drug industries.
The movie itself
is, in my view, brilliantly done.
Bryan Cranston is a long-time character
actor who happened to come to prominence playing the lead in a TV series —Breaking Bad—about the
manufacture of and trade in, coincidentally, another one of what I call the
RMADs (recreational mood-altering drugs): dexamethasone.
He
has now burst into stardom, portraying among others, the black-listed Hollywood
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
But
all of the actors are fine, with Benjamin Bratt playing superbly as one of
Escobar’s top lieutenants, who happened to live in the States.
Click here for
the full article.
Source: The
Greanville Post
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