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California to tax pot as much as 45% by Aaron Smith @AaronSmithCNN October 31, 2017: 2:24 PM ET Buying legal marijuana in California could be pricey enough to keep the black market healthy. Between customers, retailers and growers, taxes on cannabis may reach as high as 45% in parts of the state, according to a Fitch Ratings report. Those high taxes may keep consumers away from legal marijuana stores once the recreational retail market goes live on January 1. "High effective tax rates on California cannabis may complicate the state's efforts to establish legal markets" said analysts Stephen Walsh and...

During AlphaBay's two-year reign as the world's largest online black market, many observers believed the eBay-style site owed its success to being headquartered out of reach of U.S. authorities behind a re-emerging Iron Curtain. The Russia explanation seemed obvious until the site was busted this month. Court documents and official statements released this week say the site actually was run by Canadian citizen Alexandre Cazes, who lived in Thailand, had bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein and owned properties in Cyprus and the Caribbean. The FBI said in a statement its work "to seize AlphaBay’s servers and shut down the...

Street Meat Sold in San Francisco Ends up in Restaurants, Frustrated Police Caught on Camera Confronting Black Market RegularsThe City by the Bay has a reputation for shopping and dining, but what the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit found for sale at the corner of Seventh Street and Market in San Francisco gives new meaning to “steal of a deal.” Store owners and retail crime investigators say shoplifters are growing more aggressive and brazen, putting public health and safety at risk. Despite a daily police presence, our hidden cameras captured buyers and sellers doing brisk business. Within moments of arriving...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it possesses a “limited amount” of 9mm bullets for agents in the field as well as for training purposes, and it is rationing its ammunition based on internal requests until it can award a new contract. [ ] The apparent role poor planning, or another agenda, played in the issue came to light when ICE said it would have run out of 9mm ammo by June 2017 in the absence of a modified contract with its supplier, Vista Outdoor Inc. So, the agency last month approved a $363,307 ceiling increase to contract No. HSCEMS-11-D-00002....

Poachers have broken into a French zoo, killing a four-year-old white rhinoceros and sawing off its horn. Keepers found the dead animal, named Vince, in the African enclosure of the zoo at Thoiry, west of Paris, on Tuesday morning. It had been shot in the head and its large horn removed with a chainsaw. The poachers fled before they could remove the animal’s second horn, either because they were disturbed or because their equipment failed, police said. Authorities described the incident as the first of its kind in Europe. The poachers forced a grill at the rear entrance to the...

Under World Ghost 1911 We’ve all heard of the quasi-mystical ‘Gun runners’ and ‘illegal gun trade’, but if you’ve ever wondered where those illegal guns could come from, wonder no more. The Philippine city of Danao has a few manufacturers, making copycat Colts and other 1911s with templates and hand tools. Unfinished though they are, they get handed off to finishers that make these guns look like the real deal. They fire, they're dangerous, and they're being imported. At $230 a sale, these illegal guns aren’t all that expensive, but they are massively illegal. They're even given fake serial numbers...

I have been interested in clandestine manufacture of firearms on the Indian subcontinent since my close friend and associate, Norman Whisler, brought them to my attention in the early 1980's.  Finding articles is much easier now, with the Internets.  Illicit, black market pistols are commonly available in India for about $10-$15.  These pistols show a level of sophistication a bit higher than most, but hand craftsmen have been making semi-autos for as long as they existed.  Many Belgian and Spanish semi-autos were hand crafted.  Semi-autos are routinely handcrafted in small Philippine shops.  From newindianexpress.com: TALCHER: An illegal small arms...

From Reuters: “Turkish fighter jets shot down a Russian-made warplane near the Syrian border on Tuesday after repeatedly warning it over air space violations, Turkish officials said, but Moscow said it could prove the jet had not left Syrian air space.” Just the other day, “American warplanes destroyed around 280 of ISIS' oil tanker trucks along the Syria-Iraq border on Monday, U.S. officials told NBC News.”[SNIP] “U.S. air strikes targeting ISIS oil assets are so rare that PBS was caught using footage of Russian fighter jets bombing an oil storage facility in Syria and passing it off as evidence...

Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing Human Brains from Medical Museum A 23-year-old Indiana man pleaded guilty on Wednesday to breaking into a medical museum and stealing preserved human brains and other tissue that he then sold online, authorities said. David Charles, of Indianapolis, pleaded guilty to six charges including receiving stolen property, and burglary in a Marion County court where Magistrate Amy Barbar sentenced him to one year of home detention and two years of probation, county prosecutor spokesman Anthony Deer said. Charles on multiple occasions broke into the Indiana Medical History Museum to steal jars of brains and other...

A US-led raid on the compound housing the Islamic State's "chief financial officer" produced evidence that Turkish officials directly dealt with ranking ISIS members, Martin Chulov of the Guardian reported recently. The officer killed in the raid, Islamic State official Abu Sayyaf, was responsible for directing the terror army's oil and gas operations in Syria. The Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) earns up to $10 million a month selling oil on black markets.

In French, a man (or woman) who is particularly resourceful is called a débrouillard (débrouillarde). In the former French colonies of West Africa, people have used this word to form a phrase, “l’economie de la débrouillardise,” which refers to the vast network of “inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes.” Systeme D for short. The concept and the quote are from a nifty and fairly new book I’m reading just now, Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth. He claims that...

Strict laws must be put in place to combat New York City’s massive tobacco smuggling problem, former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives Assistant Director Rich Marianos told The Daily Caller News Foundation.“Street gangs, narcotics crews, Russian and Asian organized crime networks, and terrorists are trading cigs for guns, narcotics — even humans,” Marianos, who was with the ATF for 27 years, said.NYC’s disproportionately high cigarette tax is allowing hardened criminals and even terrorists to fund illicit activity and make huge profits, with almost no risk, thanks to lax tobacco smuggling laws.Since 2006, the tax rate on NYC...

A Grade 12 student in Lethbridge, Alta., was suspended last week for dealing Pepsi to fellow students out of his locker. Keenan Shaw was suspended for two days by Winston Churchill high school for selling the soft drink to students, violating a school policy that only permits diet pop on the premises. Shaw says he was told the sales violated the nutrition and marketing policies, and that he was operating a business without a licence. But compared with what some other students sell at the southern Alberta school, Shaw says, his transgressions were minor. "I'm not going to name any...

Nascent cannabis industry splits between wealthy with clean criminal records and those who turn to less than legal methods

Mexican drug cartels, such as the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, are supplementing their incomes by selling stolen gasoline. At $0.40 a liter, gasoline is cheaper for residents of Tamaulipas than a can of Coca-Cola if they buy from the cartels, helping increase cartel violence while also seriously damaging oil companies in the nation. According to the Mexican publication Milenio, 15% of gasoline sold in the northeast state of Tamaulipas, which borders central Texas, is controlled and distributed by the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. The low prices of stolen gas in the region cannot be understated: the paper notes...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- Cigarette smuggling costs states an estimated $5.5 billion annually. Much of that traffic takes place on the East Coast along Interstate 95, as cigarettes from lower-tax states are being smuggled to states with higher taxes in the Northeast. A new website, sponsored by RAI Services Co., a subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc., calls the I-95 corridor "The New Tobacco Road."The website draws attention to the problem to encourage states to pass stiffer penalties for smuggling and devote more resources to enforcement.The website, www.thenewtobaccoroad.com, shows how I-95 has become a key transit route for cigarette smuggling from southern...

Dale doesn't exactly look like an international crypto-criminal. He's soft-spoken, baby-faced, and a senior at an Ivy League college. But every couple of weeks the political science major logs onto the Silk Road, an online black market that has been described as an "amazon.com of drugs" to buy wholesale quantities of "molly" (also known as MDMA, a particularly "pure" form of ecstasy), LSD and magic mushrooms. Some of these will be for his personal use, and the rest he'll flog to less tech-savvy classmates at a mark-up of up to 300%. On a good weekend, he can net a profit...

Jessie Grinnan, a stay-at-home mom from Palm Beach County, Fla., pays $13 a gallon for milk—and she couldn’t be happier about it. Grinnan drinks raw, unpasteurized cow's milk that she buys at a local farm. “It’s a full milk,” she says, “so it’s not watery and it’s not bland. It’s delicious, actually, and I’m not a huge milk drinker.” Grinnan believes raw milk has health benefits. She says her husband couldn’t tolerate pasteurized milk and has found relief from his allergies since they switched to raw milk. She says she also doesn’t want her 23-month-old son drinking anything whose origins...

A majority of the cigarettes for sale in New York are illegally smuggled into the state, according to a report out Wednesday from the conservative research group the Tax Foundation. According to the report, 56.9% of the cigarettes sold in New York—the highest importer of smuggled cigarettes—originated from out of state. Since 2006, cigarette smuggling in the state has risen sharply, by 59%, in tandem with a massive hike in cigarette taxes of 190%. New York state now has the highest cigarette taxes in the country, at $4.35 a pack. Residents of NYC must also pay an extra $1.50 per...

From the mid-1800s on, hundreds of thousands of African elephants were slaughtered for their ivory. Their valuable ivory tusks, some weighing as much as 200 pounds each, were collected and the rest of the elephant was left to rot in the sun or for scavengers to feast on. The ivory was used for many things such as piano keys, to ladies combs to various ornate pieces of carved artwork. In some areas of Africa, elephants were hunted to extinction prompting many countries to pass laws on the import and sale of ivory from elephants. In 1975, the Convention on the...