Free Republic

Roberto "Kiko'' Pulido, the rogue Boston police officer who enlisted two fellow patrolman in a brazen scheme to escort trucks bringing cocaine into the city, was sentenced today to 26 years in federal prison by a judge who said the defendant had disgraced his badge. "The people who wear that badge have a sense of honor,'' US District Judge William G. Young said, staring at Pulido, the ringleader of one of the most notorious police corruption scandals in recent Boston history. "You are ... dead to that sense of honor.''

SMITHFIELD (MCT) — Ruth Davis banked on looking like just another granny in the slow lane. But the 65-year-old Floridian was on business. A high-dollar delivery — 33 pounds of premium pot — was locked up in the trunk of her rented Chevy Impala. She set her cruise on 74 as she headed north on Interstate 95 through Johnston County, bound for New York. A North Carolina trooper got in her way that morning last December and, by chance, stumbled across a new type of drug mule. “I'm not someone you'd think would be doing this,� Davis said this week...

WASHINGTON — As many as 200 U.S.-trained Mexican security personnel have defected to drug cartels to carry out killings on both sides of the border and as far north as Dallas, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, told Congress on Wednesday. The renegade members of Mexico's elite counter-narcotics teams trained at Fort Benning, Ga., have switched sides, contributing to a wave of violence that has claimed some 6,000 victims over the past 30 months, including prominent law enforcement leaders, the Houston-area Republican told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The slaughter has gained urgency amid high-profile assassinations of law officers in Mexico since...

CULIACAN, Mexico, - Suspected drug hitmen threw grenades and opened fire on a police station in Mexico's Sinaloa state on Wednesday, just hours after the government sent thousands of troops to fight a powerful drug cartel there. A group of 10 to 12 heavily armed men shot at the station with machine guns and attacked three other houses, killing one person, in the town of Guamuchil, about an hour away from Sinaloa's capital of Culiacan. "They fired shots and threw (two) grenades and both of them exploded," a local policeman at the Guamuchil station told Reuters by telephone, asking not...

MEXICO CITY — A federal police commander escaped killers near Monterrey on Tuesday as authorities in Mexico City pursued leads in a plot to assassinate more top police officials. For the first time, Mexico's warring drug gangs are training their guns on the heads of the nation's security forces. Under siege from an unprecedented federal anti-narcotics campaign, the gangs are switching from bribes to bullets in defending their lucrative smuggling routes to the United States. The result is three police commanders killed in the capital since May 1, including Edgar Millan, who as commissioner of the 30,000-member federal police led...

WASHINGTON — Three Mexican police chiefs have requested political asylum in the U.S. as violence escalates in the Mexican drug wars and spills across the U.S. border, a top Homeland Security official told The Associated Press. In the past few months, the police officials have shown up at the U.S. border, fearing for their lives, according to Jayson Ahern, the deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. "They're basically abandoned by their police officers or police departments in many cases," Ahern told AP. Ahern said the Mexican officials — whom he didn't name — are being interviewed and their cases...

"A sad commentary is that when one of these individuals was arrested, he inquired as to whether or not his arrest and incarceration would have an effect on his becoming a federal law enforcement officer," reported the DEA's Ralph Partridge, describing one of the 96 arrestees in the recent San Diego State University drug sweep. It is a sad commentary on many aspects of higher ed, and it gets sadder. Two students have died of drug overdoses on SDSU's campus in the past year. The DEA was surprised by the extent of the campus drug ring, which is believed to...

May 9 The local governments of Tijuana and Mexicali, Baja California state, asked the federal police to send a special anti-kidnapping task force to the cities in order to combat the increasing incidence of extortion-related abductions there. A former political leader in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state, was abducted by a group of armed men. Some reports indicate that a current government official who was with him at the time was wounded during the kidnapping. Police in Navolato, Sinaloa state, reported the discovery of seven bodies with signs of torture. At least one of the victims was a police officer. A...

DEMING, N.M. (AP) - Governor Richardson says he's concerned about violence along New Mexico's border with Mexico. Authorities say seven men have been killed in the Mexican border town of Palomas in a turf war among drug cartels. The Luna County Sheriff's Department says 162 gun shells were found where five men were killed Sunday in Palomas, across the border from Columbus, New Mexico. Another 67 casings were found where a man and his son were fatally shot Friday. A spokesman for Richardson says the governor has directed New Mexico public safety officials to be vigilant to ensure the problems...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States said Monday it was shocked at escalating attacks on police officers in Mexico, adding organized crime posed a "serious threat" to democratic institutions there. "We're shocked by the escalating violence against Mexican law enforcement officials," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement read out at the daily press briefing. "The recent murders of three high-level police officials by criminal syndicates and drug trafficking cartels are a brutal reaction to President (Felipe) Calderon's determination to fight organized crime," he said. "They illustrate the serious threat these organizations pose to democratic institutions in Mexico,"...

After listening carefully to the two policemen, the judge had a problem: He did not believe them. The officers, who had stopped a man in the Bronx and found a .22-caliber pistol in his fanny pack, testified that they had several reasons to search him: He was loitering, sweating nervously and had a bulge under his jacket. But the judge, John E. Sprizzo of United States District Court in Manhattan, concluded that the police had simply reached into the pack without cause, found the gun, then “tailored” testimony to justify the illegal search. “You can’t have open season on searches,”...

ANTA, Ecuador — The scene at the Manta Ray Cafe, a mess hall here at the most prominent American military outpost in South America, suggests all is normal.

MEXICO CITY (AFP) — Gunmen assassinated a commander of Mexico City's anti-kidnapping police Friday, the fourth top police authority slain in 10 days here as the toll from a rising organized crime wave hits top brass. One day after acting federal police chief Edgar Millan was brutally murdered, four gunmen in a truck shot and killed anti-kidnapping commander Esteban Robles, authorities said. Robles was rushed to hospital after the attack Friday but did not survive. The violence, believed to be mostly related to the government's stepped up fight against drug trafficking, saw a new grim chapter Thursday in Mexico City...

<p>MEXICO CITY — An official says the acting chief of Mexico's federal police has been shot dead.</p> <p>The Public Safety Department says Edgar Millan Gomez was shot 10 times and died hours later in a Mexico City hospital. Two of his bodyguards were wounded.</p>

HOUSTON -- Police have charged three suspects accused of using the skull of a corpse buried in a Kingwood cemetery to make a bong. Kevin Wade Jones, 17, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, 17, and a 16-year-old boy were all charged with one count of desecrating a corpse. The suspects are accused of digging up the skull of an 11-year-old boy buried in a cemetery for African American war veterans and using it to smoke marijuana.

SAMHSA announced in March 2008 that Oklahoma topped the nation in prescription painkiller addiction. Effective law enforcement strategies by the DEA and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs have abruptly shut down many of the online pharmacies, loose physician prescription practices, and multiple doctor sourcing. The result is a dramatic reduction in supply. The huge growth in painkiller addiction fueled by cheap and easy supply is being faced with a shutdown in supply. The result will be a sudden overwhelming number of sick and desperate people. Before we become too judgmental of such people, let us not forget...

Dozens of San Diego State University students were arrested after a sweeping drug investigation found that some fraternity members openly dealt drugs and one even sent a mass text message advertising cocaine, authorities said Tuesday. Two kilograms of cocaine were seized, along with 350 Ecstasy pills, marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, hash oil, methamphetamine, illicit prescription drugs, several guns and at least $60,000 in cash, authorities said. Of the 96 people arrested, 75 were students. Eighteen of the students were arrested Tuesday when nine search warrants were executed at various locations including fraternities, said Jesse Rodriguez, San Diego County assistant district attorney....

About a month ago I got a call from a reporter for the Arkansas Times inquiring about my research into paramilitary drug raids. He'd been reporting on a raid in North Little Rock involving a 40-year-old man named Tracy Ingle. When he told me the story over the phone, I was floored, even given all the abuses and mistakes I've reported and read about over the last few years. What makes the case especially egregious is not that the police may have gotten the wrong home, that they shot a man, or that they were covering it up or going...

Police have arrested 96 people – 75 of them students – in a drug bust at San Diego State University, law enforcement sources say. Police picked up the individuals for charges stemming from possession and sales of cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and other drugs. Authorities say among those arrested was a student who worked as an employee of the campus police and was one month away from graduating with a masters degree in Homeland Security. Another suspect found with 500 grams of cocaine and two guns is a criminal justice major. As part of the investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency and...

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors are investigating Wachovia Corp. as part of a broad probe of alleged laundering of drug proceeds by Mexican and Colombian money-transfer companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Wachovia is one of several large U.S. banks that have come under scrutiny for their relationships with such companies. It is in discussions with the Justice Department about reforms in its compliance system and faces a possible deferred-prosecution agreement that would require extensive federal oversight. An official of Wachovia said it is cooperating in the probe. Wachovia, based in Charlotte, N.C., and some other U.S. banks severed...

OPA-LOCKA, Fla. -- Federal agents on the hunt for criminals on Thursday raided the wrong house while searching for drugs. Police and federal agents raided 50 marijuana grow houses around Florida on Thursday, calling it "Operation D-Day." They seized $7 million worth of pot plants, but they also kicked in the door of Noel Llorente's Opa-locka home and found nothing but bewildered homeowners. "I was frightened for my husband because they threw him on the ground," Llorente's wife said. "I was scared. Llorente said he was just leaving for work when unmarked cars pulled up, Drug Enforcement Administration agents jumped...

HOUSTON — Juan Martinez has seen drivers doze off from fatigue while he's taking a bus from Houston to his hometown in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. "This is very dangerous," Martinez said, waiting with suitcase in hand in front of Autobuses Lucano, one of the many smaller bus companies that offer service from the United States to Mexico. But Martinez and the thousands of riders, mostly Mexican immigrants, looking for a cheap way to get home aren't deterred by recent crashes and the recent drug smuggling indictments involving several of these bus companies. "There is just no other way for...

ALTOONA, Pa. -- Police say a straight-A business student at Penn State-Altoona told them he has been selling cocaine to finance his college education. Twenty-year-old Michael Conforti, of Hackettstown, N.J., was charged in the aftermath of a sweep last month by the Blair County Drug Task Force and Logan Township police. He was originally charged with three drug deals involving a confidential informant but yesterday authorities added charges of possession with intent to deliver cocaine and possession of drug paraphernalia. Police based those charges on drugs, nearly $3,500 in cash and other items they say they found at Mr. Conforti's...

NUEVO LAREDO - A gunfight between military forces and alleged drug traffickers that lasted more than an hour in the predawn hours Wednesday left one soldier dead and at least three others injured, authorities confirmed Thursday. An unknown number of traffickers also were killed and injured, authorities said. The assault occurred in Ciudad Mier, about 60 miles east of Nuevo Laredo, at about 1 a.m. Wednesday, said Gen. Rigoberto García Cortés, head of the border military forces headquartered in Nuevo Laredo, at a news conference Thursday. The national Defense Department reported that after the gunfight, soldiers searched two sport utility...

The duly elected sheriff of a county is the highest law enforcement official within a county. He has law enforcement powers that exceed that of any other state or federal official. This is settled law that most people are not aware of. County sheriffs in Wyoming have scored a big one for the 10th Amendment and states rights. The sheriffs slapped a federal intrusion upside the head and are insisting that all federal law enforcement officers and personnel from federal regulatory agencies must clear all their activity in a Wyoming County with the Sheriff’s Office. Deja vu for those who...

Brooklyn Park police were looking for a meth lab, but they found a fish tank and the chemicals needed to maintain it. And a few hours later, when the city sent a contractor to fix the door the police had smashed open Monday afternoon, it was obvious the city was trying to fix a mistake. It happened while Kathy Adams was sleeping. "And the next thing I know, a police officer is trying to get me out bed," she said. Adams, a 54-year-old former nurse who said she suffers from a bad back caused by a patient who attacked her...

MEXICO CITY - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday urged Congress to approve a $500 million anti-drug program for Mexico, saying not to do so would be "a slap" against a crucial neighbor beset by drug violence. Gates, only the second U.S. defense chief ever to visit Mexico, told reporters that U.S. congressional inaction on the program known as the Merida initiative would undermine Washington's ability to aid Mexico's counternarcotics fight. President George W. Bush proposed the three-year, $1.4 billion initiative last October and put an initial $500 million segment for Mexico in the administration's fiscal 2008 supplemental request...

JERUSALEM (AFP) - An Israeli medical team has started tests using the drug Ecstasy as a treatment for conflict-linked post-traumatic disorders, the Maariv daily reported on Friday. Doctors at the Beer-Yakov psychiatric hospital south of Tel Aviv are testing the response of Israeli post-traumatic disorder patients to MDMA, the active ingredient in the drug. Rakefet Rodriguez, Sergio Marchiveski and Marina Kaufchicz, who are leading the experimental programme, are convinced that psychotheraphy is crucial in curing patients and that Ecstasy can help them to recover. The doctors believe the drug has both calming and stimulating effects that can help patients not...

Faltering British efforts to tackle Afghanistan's poppy crop have found an unlikely ally – in the weather. is expected to reduce parts of the country's opium harvest drastically. Scientists believe freezing winter temperatures followed by late rains and a possible drought may cut this year's yields, with some farmers losing half of their crop. The fierce winter cold – which claimed hundreds of lives across Afghanistan – is thought to have stopped millions of poppy seeds from germinating. Late rains have then stunted many of the plants that survived.

TIJUANA, Mexico - Massive gunbattles broke out between suspected drug traffickers who fired at each other while speeding down heavily populated streets of this violent border city early Saturday, killing 13 people and wounding nine. All of the dead were believed to be drug traffickers, possibly rival members of the same cartel who were trying to settle scores, said Rommel Moreno, the attorney general of Baja California state, where Tijuana is located. "Evidently this is a confrontation between gangs," Moreno told reporters. Eight suspects and one federal police officer were injured in the pre-dawn shootings, none gravely, said Agustin Perez...

By Lizbeth Diaz TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Seventeen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the U.S. border on Saturday, their bodies scattered along a road after one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico's three-year narco-war. Rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said. Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road near assembly-for-export maquiladora plants on the city's eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings and many of their...

Authorities have arrested a father and son believed to be top leaders in the Tamaulipas-based Gulf Cartel, Mexican officials announced Thursday. Federal prosecutors allege Rogelio "El Rojo" Díaz Cuellar led the drug trafficking organization's operations in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas State and coordinated the movements of several loads of drugs into the United States. His son - Rogelio "El Roger" Díaz Contreras - was also arrested for allegedly playing an active role in his father's cell, Mexico's attorney general's office said in a statement. "The cell led by this drug trafficker was an important support for the (cartel),"...

Security was heavy Thursday as the nine defendants named so far in an indictment targeting the Gulf Cartel's enforcers, the Zetas, appeared in federal court for pre-trial proceedings.At least half a dozen stone-faced U.S. Marshals kept watch over the defendants in U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez's court, along with members of the Correction Corp. of America's special operations response team, who wore body armor. Prosecutors allege that the nine defendants named in the 47-count indictment are members or associates of the Zetas, a violent wing of the Gulf Cartel believed to control most of the narcotics trafficking in Nuevo Laredo....

WEED, Calif. — Vaune Dillmann thought the wording on his bottle caps was just a clever play on the name of the Northern California town where he brews his beer — Weed. Federal alcohol regulators thought differently. They have ordered Dillmann to stop selling beer bottles with caps that say "Try Legal Weed." While reviewing the proposed label for Dillmann's latest beer, Lemurian Lager, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau said the message on the caps he has been using for his five current beers amounts to a drug reference.

What appeared to be charter bus services whisking people between the U.S. and Mexico turned out to be front companies for an elaborate cross-border drug smuggling operation, federal authorities said Wednesday. Eighteen people have been charged in the alleged Mexican drug importation ring that used modified commercial buses to smuggle cocaine and marijuana to Houston, Dallas and other U.S. cities. A 16-count federal indictment unsealed Wednesday charges the defendants with drug trafficking and money laundering among other felonies that carry penalties up to life in prison. At least 10 defendants, including several from the Houston area, were arrested Wednesday. The...

Ryan and Matthew Epperley awoke at 4 a.m. in Redding, loaded their Dodge Durango with clothes for the weekend and arrived in Oakland on a Saturday morning just in time to attend their first class at Oaksterdam University. The brothers were among 20 people enrolled in the two-day course that, by Sunday evening, would teach them how to own and operate a pot club in California. They'd learn how to grow their product indoors, harvest it and cook with it, and hear from several lecturers on the legality of such a practice.

"Nine, eight, seven ..." A crowd of about 10,000 people collectively began counting down on the University of Colorado's Norlin Quadrangle just before 4:20 p.m. Sunday. Yet the massive puff of pot smoke that hovers over CU's Boulder campus every April 20 -- the date of an annual, internationally recognized celebration of marijuana -- began rising over the sea of heads earlier than normal this year. "Oh forget it," one student said, aborting the countdown to 4:20 p.m. and lighting his pipe early. He closed his eyes, taking a deep, long drag. "Sweet." Although it's become an annual and renowned...

The state’s top drug prosecutor was fired on Friday, hours after reports were published that he was under investigation for possessing child pornography. Assistant Attorney General James Cameron of Hallowell, who worked as the drug prosecution coordinator for the Attorney General’s Office, had been on paid administrative leave for several months, according to one law enforcement source.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A military helicopter crashed in western Mexico on Friday, killing 11 soldiers and seriously injuring another, the Defense Department said. The soldiers, including an army major, were on their way to raid a marijuana field when their helicopter lost strength and crashed outside the city of Uruapan in the western state of Michoacan, the department said in a news release. It said only one soldier survived, and he was flown to a military hospital in Mexico City where he is in serious condition. The department said it is investigating what caused the crash. President Felipe Calderon...

Last month, police in Kentucky went on a 24-hour drug raid blitz. According to local media accounts, the raids uncovered 23 methamphetamine labs, seized more than 2,400 pounds of marijuana, identified 16 drug-endangered children and arrested 565 people for illegal drug use. That's quite a day's work.What inspired the blitz? Complaints from the citizenry? A vicious string of drug-related murders? An outbreak of overdoses?No, none of that.It seems that they were concerned that the federal government is about to turn off the funding spigot."During 'Operation Byrne Blitz,'" a local television station reported, "state police and highway patrol agencies, local police...

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Gunmen held up a family of U.S. tourists in Mexico on Tuesday and made off with their small plane, police said. The robbers attacked the plane as the American couple and their two daughters, ages 6 and 8, were about to take off from a hotel airstrip in the Baja California beach town of Mulege. Detective Juan Carlos de Jesus Jimenez said the thieves pulled a car in front of the six-seat Cessna Stationair, knocked out one of its windows and forced the tourists out at gunpoint. They then set fire to the car and flew...

snip... James Colomb spent the bulk of his career working in an oil field, then was injured. The family’s sole source of income now is his disability check. Ann Colomb—“Miss Ann” to those who know her—is a homemaker. It was from this unlikely setting, the United States alleged, that Ann Colomb and three of her four sons ran one of the largest crack cocaine operations in Louisiana. Over the course of a decade, prosecutors said, the Colombs bought $15 million in illicit drugs with a street value of more than $70 million... ...But in the ensuing months, the government’s case...

MISSION -- A suspected drug smugglers crashed into the Rio Grande this morning after being chased by Border Patrol agents before the driver escaped into Mexico with three suspected bundles of drugs. Federal agents spotted the truck in Abram near the river's levy around dawn. The van's driver drove the vehicle into the river just west of Bentsen Rio Grande Valley State Park. Agents then spotted the man on the Mexican side of the river carrying large bundles, supposedly drugs, said Border Patrol Spokesman Daniel A. Doty. Mission Fire and Border Patrol are working to pull a truck out of...

EL PASO, Texas - Mexican Consulate officials in El Paso, Texas, said Mexican drug cartels have been posting help-wanted ads in Juarez, Mexico, newspapers. The officials said publications including P.M., El Diario de Juarez and El Norte have been printing vague help-wanted ads that are designed to trick young people into smuggling drugs over the border into the United States, the Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News reported Friday. Mexican Consulate spokeswoman Socorro Cordova said the issue came to the attention of officials nine months ago when the family of a driver stopped at the U.S. border showed the ad to Mexican...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Lawmakers from California to Kentucky are trying to save money with a drastic and potentially dangerous budget-cutting proposal: releasing tens of thousands of convicts from prison, including drug addicts, thieves and even violent criminals. Officials acknowledge that the idea carries risks, but they say they have no choice because of huge budget gaps brought on by the slumping economy. <[>"If we don't find a way to better manage the population at the state prison, we will be forced to spend money to expand the state's prison system — money we don't have," said Jeff Neal, a...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican soldiers looking for drug traffickers found $6 million in cash inside a truck near the U.S. border and arrested five men at the scene, the army said on Friday. Army drug squads in the northern state of Tamaulipas, a smuggling hot spot over the border from Texas, found the U.S. currency stuffed into eight suitcases as they inspected a tractor trailer and smaller truck parked along a highway. They also found four pistols, the army said in a statement. Army and federal police units deployed in President Felipe Calderon's 15-month-old crackdown on drug cartels are...

El Paso (AP) - U.S. authorities unsealed an indictment against a suspected Mexican drug trafficker identified as one of several men wearing military uniforms in a high-profile border standoff two years ago. Jose Rodolfo Escajeda, 31, was charged with conspiracy to import and distribute controlled substances, according to the two-page indictment unsealed March 26. He was indicted in 2006. Matthew Taylor, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Friday investigators don't know where Escajeda is but consider him armed and dangerous. Mexican authorities identified Escajeda as one of several men appearing to be Mexican soldiers who had crossed...

Tom Cruise isn't impressed with the new strain of medical marijuana named "Tom Cruise Purple," according to a report in the New York Daily News. The actor's lawyers are assessing the branded marijuana that is available at licensed cannabis clubs in Northern California. The vials of marijuana are branded with a photo of Cruise laughing hysterically. Employees at California marijuana clinics refuse to discuss their inventory. As a follower of Scientology, Cruise opposes psychotropic drugs.

During a traffic stop, sheriff's deputies discovered a woman who had 400 pills of ecstasy hidden inside one of her body cavities. Tanganika Miller, 18, was taken to a local hospital where doctors removed the bag of pills, which had a street value of $20,000. Miller was then arrested and charged with drug trafficking. A spokesman for the sheriff's department said the body cavity in question was not the woman's mouth. During the stop, deputies also discovered that all four occupants of the car had been smoking marijuana while traveling on Interstate 77. Christopher James, 22, was arrested for drug...

MEXICO CITY — Mexican federal police in the border city of Nuevo Laredo seized $6 million in cash Thursday after arresting five alleged paramilitary members at a Pan-American Highway checkpoint. The seizure, officials said, marked the latest blow against the Gulf Cartel, the drug smuggling organization based in the Mexican cities bordering South Texas. Authorities said the arrested men are members of the Zetas, a paramilitary group of gunmen led by deserters from elite Mexican army units. The five men were arrested at a checkpoint about 15 miles south of Nuevo Laredo. After their arrest, they led police to a...