Interesting article. This may have been around the time that the Sicilians started to falter a little so I can see the chinese jumping at the chance of distributing some of their product directly to the customer instead of through a middleman(the Sicilians). At one point the Sicilians did dominate heroin. It was really the ndrangheta as well as the casalesi clan who saw the future in cocaine and invested in it early on from what I read.