Chapter 179 The Soaked Ohio Justice System

Vinny thought for a moment. "From what I know about these people, Richie did at least a few weeks of homework before stocking up."

"He knows exactly how fast Oxford Town has changed over the past few months. He's likely looked into everything: how many people are at the new construction sites, the general wage levels at each site, the distribution of the workers' origins and age demographics, and even whether there are fixed patrol routes in the workers' dormitories."

"But the fact that he still chose to come in means that, in his risk assessment, your existence isn't the type he can't touch."

"He thinks you're just a wealthy Chinese man who invested in a few projects in Oxford Town and hired a bunch of workers. He assumes you won't care, or rather, won't even know, if he comes here to sell some little pills."

"Besides, he's holding onto a rather troublesome status."

"What status?" Mu Xin asked.

"He's a registered informant for the Butler County Sheriff's Office. This means any law enforcement operation targeting him must go through a review of the informant database at the Sheriff's Office before it can even begin. And once that review starts, he'll know immediately that someone is coming for him."

"This is an old trick of the Connolly Family. Almost every one of their secondary distributors has an informant file in the local police system. It's not that they're actually being informants; it's just another form of paying protection money."

"You pay a certain police officer tens of thousands of dollars in cash every year, he registers you as an informant, and your name enters the protected database."

"From then on, any cross-departmental law enforcement operation has to check this database before it can be initiated."

Mu Xin leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Things were getting tricky. This whole registered informant bullshit was simply outrageous...

Derek hadn't succeeded using this method; he had only managed to get the Police Department to shelve investigations. But the Connolly Family had managed to ensure every one of their key nodes possessed a legally backed early warning mechanism.

This was an opponent on a completely different dimension. Derek was fighting from outside the system, while the Connolly Family had set up home inside it.

He could deal with Derek directly using trucks and steel coils, but against this kind of protection mechanism involving an official informant status, even the first step of an investigation would be detected in advance.

No wonder all the investigations by the Hamilton Police Department were halted. It wasn't a lack of evidence; it was that they were always discovered before they could even get close.

"There's another characteristic of the fentanyl distribution network in southwestern Ohio: the Connolly Family are the top-level provincial agents. Every level below them has its own profit margin and protection fee standards, and every level has its own way of hedging risk."

"The biggest advantage of this tiered distribution model is its extreme resilience. If you take out one level, the logistics and information flow between the levels above and below will quickly bypass the eliminated level and reconnect."

"If you take out one retailer, the distributor above them will find two new ones to replace them."

"So the current situation is that no matter how many people I arrest or how many retail points I bust in Oxford Town, as long as Richie and the Connolly Family upstream can still ship goods here, the problem won't be solved."

"If I take action against Richie directly, he has the informant status protection, and the Sheriff's Office will tip him off before I can even make a move."

"If he suddenly goes missing, the Connolly Family won't even need to investigate to guess who did it, because they already assessed all the risk variables in Oxford Town before they started stocking up. The only one they couldn't quantify is me."

"Once they confirm I'm the one causing them losses, the retaliation won't take long."

"But if I do nothing, the contraband problem in Oxford Town will at least triple around the time the theme park opens."

"By then, my construction sites, my hotel, my theme park, my Medical Center—everything I spent hundreds of millions of dollars building—will all become the 'packaging' for the Connolly Family's distribution network."

Mu Xin rubbed his face and let out a long sigh. "Fucking hell." He paused for a moment, then couldn't help but add, "Fucking Ohio."

The silence lasted for about a minute. Vinny picked up his coffee to take a sip, realized the cup was empty, and put it back down.

He watched Mu Xin's expression, knowing his boss was currently undergoing a very heavy cognitive shift.

The Connolly Family had spent thirty years embedding the contraband business into the socioeconomic structure of southwestern Ohio. Water, electricity, gas, and heating were Mu Xin's infrastructure, while informant files and insiders in the Police Department were the Connolly Family's infrastructure.

Two infrastructures had collided in the same area.

This wasn't a collision between justice and evil; it was two completely parallel social control systems overlapping on the ground in Oxford Town.

On one side, he had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build this into an orderly, modern community; on the other side, the people of the Connolly Family had used thirty years and a pen to mark this as their distribution territory.

Mu Xin stood up, walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and drew a circle on the board—"Oxford Town."

Then, he drew a much larger circle outside that one—"Connolly Family's 30-Year Contraband Network."

Then he wrote three terms in the blank space between the two circles: Richie O'Leary, Informant Files, Tiered Distribution.

"John, Vinny, keep digging. Clean it up level by level. You don't need to dig all the way to Washington, but I need you to lock down the state-level connections and the Connolly Family's retaliation paths clearly."

"Every one of their key nodes—who is responsible for delivery, who is responsible for collecting money, who is responsible for liaising with the police—get it all cleared up."

"I don't need to catch the big fish in Washington. I need to know who is on the entire chain—from Richie to the Connolly Family to the possible state-level umbrella—what the processes are, how often they remit payments, and which nodes can be targeted."

"As for that question mark, don't worry about it for now. Our capabilities aren't enough to know that much yet."