Virginia Police Bust Migrant Gang Smuggling Cigarettes for $30 Million

Virginia police have busted a massive cigarette trafficking ring allegedly operated by primarily African and Middle Eastern migrants.

Police have filed 743 charges against 43 defendants, of whom 19 are in custody. The alleged criminals included a diverse set of migrants from Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, and Mauritania. It is “one of the largest organized crime groups we’ve had,” Virginia police said Friday.

The defendants allegedly purchased more than 600,000 cartons of cigarettes and resold them for $30 million on the black market in other high-tax states, according to the Richmond-Times Dispatch.

The investigation took two years and involved more than 20 different federal agencies, at an enormous cost to law-abiding tax-paying Americans.

The Richmond-Times Dispatch notes that traffickers try to resell cigarettes where prices are higher:

The network used falsified documents to create 29 fictitious businesses in the Richmond area, which allowed them to make large bulk purchases of tax-exempt cigarettes so they could be resold out of state for a “substantial profit,” police said.

Investigators said traffickers in the network would go to big-box stores to buy cigarettes before sending them up to northern localities such as New York City, where high taxes make illicit smokes a relative bargain.

The cigarette smuggling was also tied to many other crimes. For example, the accused traffickers also allegedly stole rental cars to smuggle the cigarettes out of Virginia and defrauded nine banks of $620,000.

Police are also working to determine if the alleged traffickers funneled money to terrorist groups abroad, according to the Washington Post.

Establishment media outlets have downplayed police statements that the suspects are foreign nationals.

However, the Times-Dispatch also described a similar case in which two Chinese foreign nationals who trafficked $23.3 million in cigarettes were convicted and are facing their sentences later in May. “The county is no stranger to cigarette trafficking cases,” the newspaper report states, as if rampant, imported criminality is something Americans must tolerate.

Third World immigration inflicts shocking levels of crime and corruption on American society, conservative author Ann Coulter writes in Adios, America. Coulter states:

I have my doubts that we have the manpower to catch them all. How much are foreigners’ elaborate frauds going to cost the taxpayer? How much are we paying to incarcerate people who have no right to be here? How much of the American economy will be devoted to the police officers, lawyers, and judges necessary to keep foreign criminals behind bars? What is the cost in murder victims, rape survivors, facial reconstruction surgeries, drug overdoses, ruined lives, stolen property, and destroyed neighborhoods?

“America is helpless against the criminal cultures being foisted on us by immigration from the Third World. Identity theft, credit card scams, Medicare and food stamp fraud, tax rebate theft, and staged-crash insurance scams—these are not native American habits,” Coulter writes, adding that in the Third World, “criminality transcends social class.”