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Mexico’s underworld has become the Everything Store for the Dark Side. Its cartels make or broker all the stuff Amazon doesn’t sell—cocaine, heroin, uppers, downers, mind-benders, sex, death, and much more. 

For Mexican traffickers, the urgent priority is to get their bloody billions spot-clean and into the international banking system. There are only so many dusty rancheros, fly-specked beach bars and brothels to acquire in their homeland. Like other moguls, they want prime real estate and front businesses in the American Sunbelt and other legal, peaceful, posh spots in  the industrialized world.

Enter China, again. Chinese organized crime figures have made themselves indispensable to Mexico’s Evil Inc, as demonstrated by a steady stream of narcotics intelligence and a criminal prosecution quietly playing out in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. The Alexandria case—U.S. vs Xizhi Li et al., filed Sept. 24 and unsealed only last Thursday—lays bare a bit of the China-Mexico connectio…