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In the dark hours before dawn, there’s no busier place than the Hunts Point produce market in The Bronx, where throngs of chefs, grocers and deli owners jockey each morning to snag the plumpest peaches and leafiest lettuce.
But the bazaar, which handles as many as 30 million pounds of goods per day and is the largest produce outlet in the nation, also provides perfect cover for the importing of fentanyl, America’s deadliest drug, which smugglers sneak into New York amid boxes of fruits and vegetables, according law-enforcement officials.
Once fentanyl reaches the market, traffickers move it to nearby apartments where the drug gets chopped up and packaged into small glassine envelopes. The drugs are then sold on the streets of the city — and up and down the East Coast.
“It comes in with the produce,” said Bridget Brennan, who heads the city’s Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, noting that densely packed fentanyl bricks, hidden in box trucks and 18-wheelers, travel by highways from the border with Mexico to the Great Lakes region before coming east.
“The drugs are offloaded in New Jersey and then into The Bronx, where they are milled into glassines. The mills pump out millions of these glassines and they get distributed all over the country.”
Packaging operations inside apartments close to Hunts Point are staffed mostly by Dominican laborers decked out in full face masks, gloves and protective clothing to prevent them from being poisoned by the powerful narcotic, Brennan said.
“It tends to be an apartment in The Bronx with eight guys sitting around a big table working around the clock.”
They produce powder versions of the drug and press it into pills that look just like oxycodone, she said.
The fake oxy tablets are known as “blues” — 30 milligram pills so potent they are typically cut into halves or quarters, Brennan said. The amount of the drug can range from .02 to 5.1 milligrams, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. While the agency says a dose as small as two milligrams can be enough to induce a fatal overdose, 42 percent of the pills the DEA tested had that much or more.
Oxy users, said Brennan, “think they know what they’re getting because they’re used to purchasing pills online. But sometimes it’s pure fentanyl.”
Fentanyl, which is manufactured by the cartels in Mexico, has become a plague in America amid the current border crisis, sources said.
A group of border guards in Texas blasted President Biden last week for not stopping the rampant flow of the dangerous drug into the Lone Star State, with one lawman saying Biden’s inaction has created a “tsunami of death.”
“It’s quite frankly a tsunami of death that is crashing into the United States over our southern border,” Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner told The Post of the thousands of pounds of the drug smuggled into the US.
Cartels are taking advantage of the wave of migrants surging over the border, experts said.
“Ninety percent of our resources are tied up processing immigrants,” said Brandon Judd, president of the national Border Patrol union. “The cartels exploit that border patrol agents are tied up. That means the border is wide open for them.”
Since 1999, when fentanyl emerged as a popular alternative to heroin, nearly one million Americans have lost their lives to the drug, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
