Narco Dollars for Beginners (Part 6)

Thursday, 21 February 2002, 9:34 am
Column: Catherine Austin Fitts

Narco Dollars for Beginners (Part 6)
How The Money Works In The Illicit Drug Trade

Part 6 in a 13 Part Series
By Catherine Austin Fitts
First published in the Narco News Bulletin
Originally Published Oct 2001

Part 1 – Narco Dollars For Dummies
Part 2 – Sam & Dave Do White Substances
Part 3 – The Ultimate New Business Cold Call
Part 4 – On Your Map
Part 5 – Getting Out of Narco Dollars
Part 7 – Dow Jones Up, Solari Index Down
Part 8 – Fast Food Franchise Pop
Part 9 – At the Heart of the Double Bind
Part 10 – Drugs as Currency
Part 11 – In Defense of American Drug Lords
Part 12 – We Have Met the Enemy and It is Us
Part 13 – The Real Deal: Americans Love A Winner

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Georgie, West Philadelphia and the Stock Market

One of my new homes is in the city in Philadelphia, near where I grew up in West Philadelphia. Another is in a very beautiful and close knit farming community in Hickory Valley, Tennessee where my father’s family has lived since the 1850’s.

Once a month I drive to Philadelphia from my home in Hickory Valley to attend a board meeting. I stay in a lovely little apartment in the first floor of a row house owned by my friend Georgie.

Georgie is one of my favorite people in the world. She lives in the apartment on the second floor. Just about my favorite thing in the world is hanging out with Georgie. We watch Oprah, we talk, we go to movies, and we giggle over ice cream with long names and cookies. Georgie is an awesome cook and my little apartment fills up daily with the smells of something delicious that Georgie is making.

One day, Forest, my dog, and I were up in Georgie’s apartment to enjoy a fresh plate of scrapple that Georgie had fried up that morning. The conversation turned to narco dollars. Georgie said that looking at the big picture was simply too overwhelming. Couldn’t I explain this without using the words millions or billions – just dollars and cents in terms of our neighborhood in West Philadelphia?

I always have this problem explaining international money flows to moms and grandmoms. Most really great women want to know about the real world. The world of real people – her world full of her kids and grandkids and other kids she loves.

So we got out a blank piece of paper and started to estimate.

Every day there are two or three teenagers on the corner dealing drugs across from our home in Philadelphia. We figured that if they had a 50% deal with a supplier, did $300 a day of sales each, and worked 250 days a year that their supplier could run his net profits of approximately $100,000 through a local fast food restaurant that was owned by a publicly traded company.

Assuming that company has a stock market value that is a multiple of 20-30 times its profits, a handful of illiterate teenagers could generate approximately $2-3 million in stock market value for a major corporation, not to mention a nice flow of deposits and business for the Philadelphia banks and insurance companies.

(continues…)

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…come back tomorrow for Part 7 – Dow Jones Up, Solari Index Down

– AUTHOR NOTE: Catherine Austin Fitts, author of Scoop’s “The Real Deal” column, is a former managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read & Co, Inc, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, and the former President of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc. She is the President of Solari, Inc, an investment advisory firm. Solari provides risk management services to investors through Sanders Research Associates in London.