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An Anaheim man imprisoned after two police officers and a civilian were killed in a 1987 helicopter crash while pursuing him has been charged with selling methamphetamine. Vincent William Acosta, 38, who authorities say is a north Orange County leader of the Mexican Mafia, is also charged with possessing a gun and drugs. He appeared in court Wednesday where a $1-million bond was set. He could receive a 136-year prison sentence if convicted on all counts. Acosta was arrested in 1987 after police helicopters from Newport Beach and Costa Mesa collided while chasing him. He was driving a stolen car....

WASHINGTON — Paramilitary enforcers for Mexican drug cartels are responsible for a wave of violence in Nuevo Laredo that poses a serious threat for residents on both sides of the Southwest border, U.S. law enforcement officials told a House committee Thursday. Assassinations, kidnappings and daylight shootouts between military-trained gangs place citizens at risk along the border where violence has soared past historical norms, officials said. "These paramilitary groups work for the cartels as enforcers and are a serious threat to public safety on both sides of the border," said Chris Swecker, the FBI assistant director for the criminal investigative division....

<p>WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities arrested 582 alleged gang members, including 22 in South Jersey, over a two-week period, targeting an estimated 80 violent groups they say have spawned street crimes across the country, officials said yesterday.</p> <p>Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called the gangs "a threat to our homeland security and ... a very urgent law enforcement priority."</p>

In another punch aimed at the Texas Mexican Mafia, the government has frozen the prison trust fund accounts of the gang's founder and his right-hand man. In a seizure warrant filed under seal this week in San Antonio, investigators contend the $13,000 in the account of purported gang president Heriberto "Herb" Huerta, 52, and the $10,000 balance of alleged gang vice president Benito "Viejito" Alonzo, 70, are the fruits of illegal activity. Specifically, the federal government alleges the accounts were fueled by the collection of "the dime" — a 10 percent street tax that the San Antonio-based gang levied on...

An anti-gang task force arrested 15 defendants charged in a federal racketeering indictment with exercising control over Hispanic street gangs across Orange County, CA. The indictment alleges that members of the Ojeda Organization - named after leader and Mexican Mafia member Peter Ojeda - extorted "taxes" from street gangs and punished non-payers with assaults. In addition to the arrests made by well over 100 agents and officers associated with the Santa Ana Gang Task Force, ten defendants are already in state custody. The three-count indictment, which was returned by a federal grand jury in Santa Ana, asserts that the Ojeda...

WND Exclusive CONTROLLING THE SUBSTANCES Big money in Mexican meth New laws cut down on U.S. labs, but drugs still flow Posted: August 19, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com While new state and federal laws are cutting down the number of U.S. meth labs, the deadly drugs continue to flow into the U.S. across the porous border with Mexico, say law enforcement authorities. The federal anti-meth law was recently amended to permit states to impose their own stiffer restrictions and penalties. In Oregon, for instance, legislators now require cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a principal ingredient in methamphetamine, to...

A renegade band of Mexican military deserters, offering $50,000 bounties for the assassination of U.S. law-enforcement officers, has expanded its base of operations into the United States to protect loads of cocaine and marijuana being brought into America by Mexican smugglers, authorities said.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal authorities arrested 582 alleged gang members over a two-week period, officials said Monday, targeting an estimated 80 violent groups they say have spawned street crimes across the country. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called the gangs "a threat to our homeland security and ... a very urgent law enforcement priority." Investigators picked up most of the offenders between July 16 and July 28 on immigration violations for being in the United States illegally. Seventy-six face criminal charges, ranging from illegal possession of a firearm to holding fraudulent documents. "For too long, these gangs have gone unchecked...

Mexican Mafia grows in Staten Island BY CARRIE MELAGO AND JOSE MARTINEZ New York Daily News NEW YORK - (KRT) - At the foot of the Bayonne Bridge, in the Staten Island neighborhood known as Little Mexico, crime is down - falling by more than 6 percent this year. But troubling signs remain.Fights regularly break out in the Port Richmond neighborhood's Latino nightclubs, and even more unnerving are the graffiti scrawlings for M13, a street gang with ties to the notorious Mexican Mafia."We've got a lot of problems right now with the gangs," said a 28-year-old Mexican man who ran...

Feds and local cops in New York nabbed almost a hundred illegal aliens who are suspected of participating in gang activities that include violent offenses, drug trafficking, prostitution and sex crimes. A joint criminal investigation in the New York City metropolitan area has resulted in the arrest of 95 criminal alien gang members, all of whom now face removal from the United States. The arrests are the culmination of a joint four-month investigation conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the New York City Department of Probation, Yonkers, NY Police Department officers and other local law enforcement agencies that...

The Mexican Connection Sunday, June 05, 2005STEVE SUO MEXICO CITY -- America's methamphetamine crisis is now rooted in Mexico, where drug cartels are illicitly obtaining tons of pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient needed to make the potent stimulant. Mexico's imports of the cold medicine have vaulted from 66 tons to 224 tons in the past five years, customs records show. That's roughly double what the country needs to meet the legitimate demands of cold and allergy sufferers, an analysis by The Oregonian found. U.S. officials say meth production in Mexico is rising because Mexican traffickers can no longer easily obtain pseudoephedrine...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico- Grappling with a wave of kidnappings and murders, including the brutal slayings of two small children, authorities in the border city of Juarez are recruiting people over 60 to patrol outside elementary schools. They hope this unarmed "policia adulto mayor," or elder police force, will gain the trust in a city whose police force is widely seen as corrupt. The elders are armed only with a cell phone and a uniform of black pants and a yellow shirt with a state police logo. They work in pairs outside their neighborhood elementary schools, watching for suspicious activities and...

300 have been killed as drug crime thrives in Mexico U.S.-MEXICO BORDER – The dead include university students, assembly-plant workers, farm hands, businessmen, journalists, money couriers, drug gang henchmen and dozens of police officers. At least 550 people have lost their lives in drug-related executions in Mexico so far this year – with 300 of those killings in the six Mexican states bordering the U.S. All are thought to be linked to organized crime, according to a review of press accounts by The Dallas Morning News. Among the latest: A police commander assassinated in Nuevo Laredo early Thursday. Enrique Cardenas...

MEXICO CITY - Reputed drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman has launched a bloody offensive to control drug smuggling along the entire Mexico-U.S. border, Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said. Mexico's top law enforcement official said Guzman was behind a wave of violence that has killed hundreds of suspected smugglers, hit men, police, soldiers and civilians along the 2,000-mile border. "Definitely, he is the most active man in his group. He is trying to fight for the border corridors, trying to control places like Culiacan just like the rest of the communities of Sinaloa (state), and the border cities,"...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Gunmen shot dead a Mexican police commander in front of his young daughter on Thursday, the second attack on a senior officer in this violent city on the U.S. border in two days.Municipal police commander Enrique Cardenas was murdered outside his house as he left to drive his daughter to a primary school in the city, which lies south of Laredo, Texas, a police spokeswoman told Reuters. The attack came a day after gunmen in a moving car ambushed and wounded another local police commander, Samuel Alvarado, as he drove through the city center. Nuevo Laredo...

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Thursday added nine new targets to the nation's congressionally mandated list of individuals and organizations the administration deems to be major foreign narcotics traffickers. Those on the list are subject to a variety of economic and other U.S. sanctions. Added this year was one organization, the Mexico-based Arriola Marquez Organization, and eight individuals, four of them Mexicans: Oscar Arturo Arriola Marquez; Miguel Angel Arriola Marquez; Ignacio Coronel Villareal; and Rigoberto Gaxiola Medina. Also added to the "foreign narcotics kingpin" list were Marco Marino Diodato del Gallo of Bolivia, Otto Roberto Herrera Garcia of Guatemala, Haji...

NUEVO LAREDO - A high-ranking city police official was in critical condition Wednesday after he was shot several times as he was on his way home in the pre-dawn hours. Commandant Samuel Alvarado Torres, 43, was alone in his 1996 Grand Marquis when he was attacked at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday near the intersection of Venustiano Carranza and Guerrero Streets. He was hit several times on the left side, but he managed to drive to the police station near city hall, where officers picked him up and took him to a hospital. Officials said Alvarado Torres was off duty at the...

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's chief drug prosecutor Monday described the country's top fugitive drug lord as a kind of Pablo Escobar figure who - like the deceased Colombian trafficker - is viewed as a hero by many people who protect his mountain hideouts and tip him off when police come looking. In the most detailed description yet of how Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman has managed to avoid capture, Assistant Attorney General Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos called the drug lord "the smartest leader we've come up against." He said authorities are campaigning to convince people in northern Mexico that the funds...

MCALLEN - The Border Patrol checkpoint on a remote stretch of South Texas ranchland was the ideal route for a drug trafficking ring to move tons of marijuana. To make sure their product got through, traffickers paid $1.5 million to U.S. Border Patrol agent Juan Alfredo Alvarez, 35, to wave trucks loaded with a ton or more of marijuana through checkpoints outside Hebbronville, according to a plea bargain Alvarez agreed to earlier this month. As Mexican drug cartels have transformed the Texas-Mexico border into one of the major transport corridors for marijuana, cocaine and heroin, traffickers have stepped up their...

MEXICO CITY — Reputed drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman has launched a bloody offensive to control drug smuggling along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said today. Mexico's top law enforcement official said Guzman was behind a wave of violence that has killed hundreds of suspected smugglers, hit men, police, soldiers and civilians along the 2,000-mile border. "Definitely, he is the most active man in his group. He is trying to fight for the border corridors, trying to control places like Culiacan just like the rest of the communities of Sinaloa (state), and the border...