New report claims Sinaloa Cartel has infiltrated Arizona politics
A massive, years-long investigation has implicated Governor Katie Hobbs and other officials in cartel bribery
On Thursday, something remarkable occurred. In Arizona, during a joint meeting of the state government’s Senate Committee on Elections and House Committee on Municipal Oversight & Elections, Jacqueline Breger presented evidence that the Sinaloa Cartel has infiltrated Arizona politics.
Breger was the last of several people to testify for the joint session that day. Her testimony stunned the room. She works for the Harris/Thaler Law Corporation, a firm run by John Thaler, an investigative forensic attorney with a long career in Arizona and California. Through her work with Thaler’s firm, Breger became involved with a massive investigation into money laundering activities.
As Breger explained to the two committees on Thursday, “in 2006, the US Attorney’s office in Illinois, Idaho, and Indiana investigated the laundering of drug cartels’ monies through a complex series of single-family home purchases.” The case led to numerous convictions. In its aftermath, Thaler’s firm was asked to assist with some follow-up investigation. Breger said the firm was “asked to determine whether money from the sale of the properties had filtered to properties purchased in Arizona.” As they soon found out, it had.
This finding became the basis of a new investigation by Thaler’s firm into money laundering “and related racketeering activities” in Arizona. Thaler, Breger, and their colleagues spent years combing through well over 100,000 documents, including real estate deeds, home titles, and more. Their investigation yielded an astonishing amount of incriminating evidence. And if the investigation’s conclusions are accurate, it means that the Sinaloa Cartel has already thoroughly infiltrated Arizona politics (and quite possibly national politics).
So what did Thaler, Breger, et al find? Buckle up.
Their findings show that the money laundering uncovered in the midwest by the 2006 case dates back to the 1980s and that the laundered money was drug proceeds for the Sinaloa Cartel. They found that the laundering activity had spread to Arizona by roughly 1994. As Breger told the committees, the cash “mostly came from illicit narcotics sales” including “crystal meth, cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl.” Some of the money also came from human trafficking, she said.
The money was laundered through “inflated and falsified construction invoices, falsified charitable donations…false bankruptcies,” etc. Breger also explained in detail various methods by which the falsification of real estate deeds and home titles have been used to launder proceeds from drug sales and human trafficking.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the investigation found that Wells Fargo employees were complicit in the fraud. Breger reported that “Wells Fargo bankers in Arizona and in multiple additional states had engaged in opening checking and direct deposit accounts for phantom [i.e. nonexistent] people.” Of course Wells Fargo has a long history of working with drug trafficking organizations like the Sinaloa Cartel. (We’ll get back to that in the next newsletter.)
But probably their most important finding was that “in Arizona, laundered cash is used in part to bribe elected and appointed public officials and their support staff.” Notably, the report alleges that cartel cash has been used to bribe none other than the governor of Arizona Katie Hobbs. It also alleges that her Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and a large number of other officials throughout the state have received bribe money from the cartel.
But the investigation went a step further. Its findings suggest that this systemic bribery is facilitated in part by Emerge Arizona, a political organization that recruits and trains women candidates for public office in Arizona. Emerge Arizona is itself part of Emerge America, an umbrella organization founded in 2002 by Andrea Dew Steele that is active across the US. Breger told the committee that “Emerge Arizona seems to have been formed as a medium to attract women interested in politics and bribe them [in order] to further the goals and objectives of the cartel.”
An allegation like that will undoubtedly draw heavy criticism. But due to the sheer gravity of the allegation--if for no other reason--it deserves to be considered, critiqued, and thoroughly examined. Partisan politics will almost certainly cloud our collective judgment as we wrestle with the information uncovered by the Thaler investigation. And while such information on its own may seem ridiculous or outright impossible, when contextualized within a careful study of cartel politics, it starts to seem less and less absurd. (We will examine, in detail, this historical context in the next newsletter.)
Breger said that the cartel corruption is particularly entrenched in Mesa, Arizona. “The city of Mesa is a racketeering organization,” she asserted boldly to committee officials. Breger insisted that there is “a private police department” within the Mesa City Police Department “that is used to support and protect racketeering enterprises.” The officers who participate are paid with drug money laundered through real estate fraud and other methods.
“Officers operating within this private force,” Breger contended, “violate our fourth amendment rights by breaking and entering into private properties, wiretapping, computer hacking, cell phone hacking, and by using related surveillance techniques without warrant. Officers also plant evidence and hide exculpatory evidence,” she continued. She claimed that these officers target individuals who threaten the racketeering activities with false charges in order to protect the enterprise.
The Thaler investigation’s findings are indeed shocking—but to those who follow narcopolitics and corruption, it is probably no surprise. The methods outlined by Breger are standard procedure for drug trafficking organizations across the world. It is therefore entirely plausible that the investigation’s findings do in fact reflect the laundering activities of transnational drug trafficking. Additionally, certain details from the investigation match up eerily well with details from other, similar cases. In whole, such information suggests that the narco-corruption described by Breger may in fact already be widespread.
Or, as Breger told the committees on Thursday, the Thaler investigation’s findings are “just the tip of the iceberg.”
However, there is yet another dimension to the investigation’s findings. This final aspect is one which was not originally included in the purview of the investigation but which arose from an array of circumstantial evidence surrounding the money laundering and bribery activities.
In her testimony, Breger alleged that the very electoral infrastructure of Arizona has itself been infiltrated by cartel-affiliated actors. She claimed that the computer systems which facilitate voting in Arizona were designed with backdoors in their code which allow the outside manipulation of results. Perhaps most stunningly, she claims that this activity is done not for the benefit of the Democratic Party, the Biden Administration, or the FBI—all the typical villains in standard MAGA discourse—but for the specific, strategic benefit of the Sinaloa Cartel.
But Breger’s message may not be reaching the right ears. Because the investigation purportedly casts doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 elections in Arizona, it has been misguidedly framed as Trump-aligned fear-mongering. According to journalist Rachel Alexander, “Democrats on those committees refused to attend the hearing.”
But, as Breger made explicitly clear in her testimony, the investigation was not politically motivated.
Breger testified before the committee that Thaler’s firm—which did the investigation—”do[es] not represent any political candidate, political party or political action commmitte or any similar organization or individual.” She reiterated that election fraud was not something they intended to find when they began the investigation. It only arose after years of forensic research into systematic, multi-state money laundering activities.
Unfortunately, due to the current political climate, the investigation’s findings are not likely to be taken seriously by many, particularly Democrats who will (mistakenly) see it as an attempt to delegitimize the Biden administration and other top Democratic officials.
The information that Thaler’s firm found which they insist shows election tampering was initially tangential to the money laundering activities. But upon closer inspection, they found that the supposed election interference was itself—allegedly—a key component of cartel activities.
To reiterate: Breger alleged that Emerge Arizona is used as a political front for the Sinaloa Cartel to bribe and control public officials. She seems to think that this was in fact a primary purpose behind the organization’s formation. Such allegations are absolutely stunning and will undoubtedly be the topic of contentious debate for years to come.
In the next newsletter I will dive in to several other cases and investigations which align curiously with the allegations revealed by Thaler, Breger, et al. If their investigation’s findings are true, they point to a vast and disturbingly well-entrenched system of cartel bribery and government corruption across the United States.