Mexican Cartels Moving Deeper Into the US

According to an investigation by the Associated Press

(NEWSER) – Mexican drug cartels have long dispatched agents to border states, but a new AP investigation finds that operatives are now infiltrating much deeper into the US, with problems arising in areas from the Chicago suburbs to rural North Carolina. Typically, middlemen have been used to smuggle drugs over the border and distribute them, but cartels are increasingly cutting those traffickers out in order to grab a bigger chunk of the money; now, cartel agents are suspected of running drug networks in nine or more non-border states, often in middle-class suburbs in the Midwest, South, and Northeast. "It's probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime," says the head of the DEA's Chicago office.