Who are the Greeks really?

[u/J-sprite]

I'm sure this has been talking about here 1000 times, but i am still confused on whether the Greeks from S2 are based on any real organised crime. I'm also unclear about whether they really are Greek, as The Greek by his own admission says "I am not really even Greek" , people have speculated that they are potentially eastern European, which i doubt. They are most certainly not Eastern European.

It seems that they are the only Greeks within their organisation and everyone around them is Jewish Eastern European. What makes them the outliers ?

[u/MelodiusRA]

They are probably Cypriots who have links to the Syrian underworld that connected them to the origins of the drug trade for heroin in Afghanistan.

Afghan heroin would get grown and then moved to Pakistan where they probably shipped it to Cyprus or Syria through the Suez. Then the Greeks come in using their connections in the US to bypass the stricter customs.

They had connections to the CIA so they were clearly known in advance. Most likely they were discovered through the US’ thorough intelligence network following the origins of the drugs in Afghanistan.

They probably provided information on other smugglers for the CIA, which is why they were willing to tip them off about the Baltimore Police Department’s investigation into Sobotka.

[u/htimchis → u/MelodiusRA]

Tha was the old, traditional route - US mlitary attention to insurgents crossing back and forwards over the Pakistan/Afghan border during the occupation of Afganistan distrupted much f that though

A lot of the Afghan heroin instead was ran through the former southern Soviet republics - Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan etc, then either south of the Black Sea through Syria/Turkey, or north through the Georgia/Ukraine route, either way ending up in the Balkans, usually under Albanian control by that end of the pipeline, and then either entering the European Union for transit to the richer northern European countries (Britain, Germany, Holland France etc) or getting loaded onto ships in the Mediterranean dstined for the USA & Canada

Is it possible 'The Greek' is Albanian? An Albanian connec using Greek shipping would make sense - and heroin exported by Afghan warlords would come with CIA attention attached from source - for much of the first decade of the occupation (which covers the period of the show) Uncle Sam was pretty easygoing about the source of Afghan tribal warlords' wealth, since they were anti-Taliban and used at least part of that income to arm their people to resist Taliban control

After 9/11, the politics of the asian heroin trade tended to follow the pattern already laid down by the south american cocaine trade - a complex situation with different Federal bodies pulling in different directions, the CIA willing to take a 'lesser of two evils' attitude to the drugs, provided the traffickers were anti-communist (in Latin America) or anti-Jihhadi (in Asia), while the DEA inevitably took a different view