Many Chinese people have given up restaurant jobs in recent years and associated themselves with illegal marijuana ventures such as black-market trading, illicit cultivation, cross-state trafficking, and money laundering. They get pulled in with the lure of “making a fortune in the cannabis industry” and are unable to get themselves out. On July 1, 2010, Fayin Deng submitted a plea letter to the judge before the court’s verdict. He wrote, “once I started making that money it never felt like I had enough and could stop. I lost my self-control and fell to the temptation that the easy money offered.” Deng and his six cousins were operating Chinese restaurants in Colorado. Meanwhile, they purchased at least nine independent houses to grow marijuana in various middle-class communities. They used the profit from drug trafficking to launder money in restaurants and then transfer large amounts of cash from the United States to …