Mountains Of Vile Vials

The U.S. tries to crush the lucrative trade in drug paraphernalia

Shortly before dusk on April 23, three young agents from the U.S. Customs Service were about to hit the jackpot of their careers. Sitting in a car outside a warehouse in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, the men were looking for Huan ("Danny") Teng, 38, a Taiwanese believed to be one of America's kingpins of drug paraphernalia. They never found Teng, but what they discovered inside the building left them breathless. It was a vast, dungeon- like factory filled with machines for injecting, cooling and grinding plastic. Three Chinese workers in ragged garb glanced at their visitors just once before getting...

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