More than 1,400 suspects have been arrested in a crackdown on organized crime, police in northwestern Shaanxi province said, according to reports from Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the People's Republic of China.
Shaanxi Public Security Department launched a campaign against gang crime in November 2017. Police in the province have busted 202 gangs involved in 532 cases, seizing more than 9.21 million yuan.
In Jiangxi province, police said they had busted 173 gangs, arresting 1,111 suspects.
Wednesday, February 07, 2018
Tuesday, February 06, 2018
Judge Rules Jurors' Names will be Kept Secret in #ElChapo Trial
A federal judge in Brooklyn has ruled that the identities of jurors expected to decide the fate of accused Mexican drug lord at a trial later this year will be kept secret.
US district Judge Brian Cogan said jurors’ names, addresses and places of employment will be shielded from Guzmán, his lawyers, prosecutors and the press. He also ordered that jurors be transported to and from the courthouse by federal marshals, and sequestered from the public while there.
Prosecutors offered “strong and credible reasons” why the jury needs protections, including Guzmán’s use hitmen to carry out thousands of acts of violence over more than two decades, Cogan wrote in the order, released by the prosecutor’s office.
That history “would be sufficient to warrant an anonymous and partially sequestered jury, but that many of the allegations involve murder, assault, kidnapping or torture of potential witnesses or of those suspected of assisting law enforcement makes the government’s concerns particularly salient”, he said.
Guzmán’s attorney, Eduardo Balarezo, said that his client was disappointed by the ruling. The defense had argued that an anonymous jury would give the false impression that Guzmán is dangerous. “All he is asking for is a fair trial in front of an impartial jury,” Balazero said in a statement.
Guzmán has pleaded not guilty to charges of running a massive international drug trafficking operation.
Since his extradition in January 2017, he has been held in solitary confinement at a high-security federal jail in Manhattan, with US officials mindful of how he twice escaped from prison in Mexico, the second time via a mile-long tunnel dug to the shower in his cell.
In the past, Guzmán used his connections to continue to run his drug empire from behind bars, prosecutors said. They also claim that in the United States, Guzmán had the support of criminals who are not under his direct control.
In court papers, prosecutors cited media reports about a YouTube video made last year – and since removed from the internet – by a group of federal prisoners in California in which they boasted in Spanish that they were “hitmen” at his service.
Guzmán is due back in court on 15 February for a pre-trial hearing. The judge has indicated he expects the trial to begin in the fall.
US district Judge Brian Cogan said jurors’ names, addresses and places of employment will be shielded from Guzmán, his lawyers, prosecutors and the press. He also ordered that jurors be transported to and from the courthouse by federal marshals, and sequestered from the public while there.
Prosecutors offered “strong and credible reasons” why the jury needs protections, including Guzmán’s use hitmen to carry out thousands of acts of violence over more than two decades, Cogan wrote in the order, released by the prosecutor’s office.
That history “would be sufficient to warrant an anonymous and partially sequestered jury, but that many of the allegations involve murder, assault, kidnapping or torture of potential witnesses or of those suspected of assisting law enforcement makes the government’s concerns particularly salient”, he said.
Guzmán’s attorney, Eduardo Balarezo, said that his client was disappointed by the ruling. The defense had argued that an anonymous jury would give the false impression that Guzmán is dangerous. “All he is asking for is a fair trial in front of an impartial jury,” Balazero said in a statement.
Guzmán has pleaded not guilty to charges of running a massive international drug trafficking operation.
Since his extradition in January 2017, he has been held in solitary confinement at a high-security federal jail in Manhattan, with US officials mindful of how he twice escaped from prison in Mexico, the second time via a mile-long tunnel dug to the shower in his cell.
In the past, Guzmán used his connections to continue to run his drug empire from behind bars, prosecutors said. They also claim that in the United States, Guzmán had the support of criminals who are not under his direct control.
In court papers, prosecutors cited media reports about a YouTube video made last year – and since removed from the internet – by a group of federal prisoners in California in which they boasted in Spanish that they were “hitmen” at his service.
Guzmán is due back in court on 15 February for a pre-trial hearing. The judge has indicated he expects the trial to begin in the fall.
Thursday, February 01, 2018
Roadmap to Hell: Sex, Drugs, and Guns on the Mafia Coast
From sex slaves to drug mules
, The Daily Beast's Rome Bureau Chief uncovers a terrifying and intricate web of criminal activity right on Europe's doorstep. Caught between Camorra gunrunners selling to ISIS and Nigerian drug gangs along Italy's picturesque coast, each year thousands of refugees and migrants are lured into their underworld, forced to become sex slaves, drug mules, or weapon smugglers.
In this powerful expose, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau follows the weapons trail, meets the trafficked women trapped by black magic, the brave nuns who try to save them, and the Italian police who turn a blind eye as the most urgent issues facing Europe play out in broad daylight.
Roadmap to Hell: Sex, Drugs, and Guns on the Mafia Coast.
, The Daily Beast's Rome Bureau Chief uncovers a terrifying and intricate web of criminal activity right on Europe's doorstep. Caught between Camorra gunrunners selling to ISIS and Nigerian drug gangs along Italy's picturesque coast, each year thousands of refugees and migrants are lured into their underworld, forced to become sex slaves, drug mules, or weapon smugglers.In this powerful expose, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau follows the weapons trail, meets the trafficked women trapped by black magic, the brave nuns who try to save them, and the Italian police who turn a blind eye as the most urgent issues facing Europe play out in broad daylight.
Roadmap to Hell: Sex, Drugs, and Guns on the Mafia Coast.
Monday, January 29, 2018
An Underboss is Whacked, Because Even Mobsters Don’t Like Heroin
John Turano was working a shift at his father’s Italian-American restaurant, Joe and Mary’s, on July 12, 1979, when Carmine “Lilo” Galante walked through the door. A mob strongman and regular patron, Galante was escorted — along with two Sicilian bodyguards — to his usual table in the back courtyard. Temperatures soared that summer day in New York City, but the guards still wore full leather jackets to hide their heavy artillery. Galante, after all, had plenty of enemies.
Having served a stint in prison for attempted robbery in the late 1930s, Galante transitioned from strong-arm work for Vito Genovese to establishing his power base in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — Bonanno family territory. He shared a couple common enemies with Joe Bonanno, the most prolific being Carlo Gambino, and eventually rose to rank of underboss in the Bonanno family. While known as a cold-blooded killer — the NYPD suspected him of numerous mob-related murders — authorities could never find anyone to testify against the feared mobster.
“[Galante’s] foray into the drug world really got kicked into high gear in the ’50s,” says Christian Cipollini, author of Murder Inc.: Mysteries of the Mob’s Most Deadly Hit Squad. Galante traveled to Canada and Sicily to oversee narcotics trafficking, “and it wasn’t long before he gained recognition by law enforcement as a major player in drug trafficking.” The feds busted Galante, sending him to prison in 1962 for 20 years. Finally paroled in the early 1970s, Galante set out to regain his control of the dope business. The problem? His fellow mobsters didn’t like it.
That fateful afternoon, Galante, 69, was having lunch with a friend and bodyguard Leonard Coppola, 40, and Turano’s father, Giuseppe, 48 — also a Bonanno associate. Smoking a cigar and enjoying the conversation, Galante certainly didn’t expect what happened next. John remembers three masked men walking into the restaurant. One pointed a gun at him, telling him not to move. But before the shooters reached the courtyard, the son shouted a warning to his father. The gunman turned and fired, wounding the young Turano before joining his cohorts in the courtyard, where they unleashed a barrage of bullets.
“They blew Lilo away while he was eating lunch, in broad daylight,” says Mafia historian Ed Scarpo, author of Cosa Nostra News: The Cicale Files, Volume 1: Inside the Last Great Mafia Empire. John hid throughout the onslaught, and after the gunmen and bodyguards fled, he found the bodies. Galante had been blown off his chair and flung into the tomato patch behind him — a cigar in his mouth and a Zippo lighter in his hand. Coppola also was killed, and Turano was mortally wounded, dying later in the hospital.
Galante had reckoned he was untouchable as a former underboss to Joe Bonanno, and as a man who’d held to the code of omertà doing his jail time, he felt he deserved to get back what he lost. Assuming a leadership role without permission was one thing, but Galante had also started killing off his rivals in the Gambino family to take over the drug trade — and that was a step too far.
“His apparent desire to basically reap all the rewards of the New York Mafia’s lucrative drug trade — by cutting out most of the other mafiosi from the profits — became Galante’s ultimate downfall,” says Cipollini. Someone at Galante’s level in the mob hierarchy doesn’t usually get assassinated without a lot of other important peers giving the OK. But Bonanno family crime boss “Joseph Massino wanted him out of the way,” Scarpo explains.
Galante paid the ultimate price for “hubris and greed,” says Scott Burnstein, author of Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit. “He came out of prison and went against typical mob protocol by declaring himself boss without the universal approval of [the Bonanno] crime family.” To further complicate things, Galante isolated himself from his troops by creating his own handpicked inner circle of young native Sicilians to do his drug trafficking and strong-arm work. The irony? It was those very Sicilians — his bodyguards — who sold him out. Those armed bodyguards at his side weren’t killed that day because they had, in fact, betrayed Galante.
Galante’s rackets and drug dealings were taken over by Massino and the others who had plotted to take him down. Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato, a Bonanno soldier, was convicted of the murder in 1986 at the famous Mafia Commission trial and sentenced to 40 years.
Since then, the picture of Galante’s last meal has become an iconic image, representing what can happen when an ambitious mobster makes a power grab. While certainly not the first mobster to dabble with drugs, says Burnstein, “he was one of the first to do it so brazenly and unapologetically.” Rather than let him consolidate as a drug kingpin, the Bonnanos decided Galante had overstepped and that he had to pay the ultimate price.
Thanks to Seth Ferranti.
Having served a stint in prison for attempted robbery in the late 1930s, Galante transitioned from strong-arm work for Vito Genovese to establishing his power base in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — Bonanno family territory. He shared a couple common enemies with Joe Bonanno, the most prolific being Carlo Gambino, and eventually rose to rank of underboss in the Bonanno family. While known as a cold-blooded killer — the NYPD suspected him of numerous mob-related murders — authorities could never find anyone to testify against the feared mobster.
“[Galante’s] foray into the drug world really got kicked into high gear in the ’50s,” says Christian Cipollini, author of Murder Inc.: Mysteries of the Mob’s Most Deadly Hit Squad. Galante traveled to Canada and Sicily to oversee narcotics trafficking, “and it wasn’t long before he gained recognition by law enforcement as a major player in drug trafficking.” The feds busted Galante, sending him to prison in 1962 for 20 years. Finally paroled in the early 1970s, Galante set out to regain his control of the dope business. The problem? His fellow mobsters didn’t like it.
That fateful afternoon, Galante, 69, was having lunch with a friend and bodyguard Leonard Coppola, 40, and Turano’s father, Giuseppe, 48 — also a Bonanno associate. Smoking a cigar and enjoying the conversation, Galante certainly didn’t expect what happened next. John remembers three masked men walking into the restaurant. One pointed a gun at him, telling him not to move. But before the shooters reached the courtyard, the son shouted a warning to his father. The gunman turned and fired, wounding the young Turano before joining his cohorts in the courtyard, where they unleashed a barrage of bullets.
“They blew Lilo away while he was eating lunch, in broad daylight,” says Mafia historian Ed Scarpo, author of Cosa Nostra News: The Cicale Files, Volume 1: Inside the Last Great Mafia Empire. John hid throughout the onslaught, and after the gunmen and bodyguards fled, he found the bodies. Galante had been blown off his chair and flung into the tomato patch behind him — a cigar in his mouth and a Zippo lighter in his hand. Coppola also was killed, and Turano was mortally wounded, dying later in the hospital.
Galante had reckoned he was untouchable as a former underboss to Joe Bonanno, and as a man who’d held to the code of omertà doing his jail time, he felt he deserved to get back what he lost. Assuming a leadership role without permission was one thing, but Galante had also started killing off his rivals in the Gambino family to take over the drug trade — and that was a step too far.
“His apparent desire to basically reap all the rewards of the New York Mafia’s lucrative drug trade — by cutting out most of the other mafiosi from the profits — became Galante’s ultimate downfall,” says Cipollini. Someone at Galante’s level in the mob hierarchy doesn’t usually get assassinated without a lot of other important peers giving the OK. But Bonanno family crime boss “Joseph Massino wanted him out of the way,” Scarpo explains.
Galante paid the ultimate price for “hubris and greed,” says Scott Burnstein, author of Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit. “He came out of prison and went against typical mob protocol by declaring himself boss without the universal approval of [the Bonanno] crime family.” To further complicate things, Galante isolated himself from his troops by creating his own handpicked inner circle of young native Sicilians to do his drug trafficking and strong-arm work. The irony? It was those very Sicilians — his bodyguards — who sold him out. Those armed bodyguards at his side weren’t killed that day because they had, in fact, betrayed Galante.
Galante’s rackets and drug dealings were taken over by Massino and the others who had plotted to take him down. Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato, a Bonanno soldier, was convicted of the murder in 1986 at the famous Mafia Commission trial and sentenced to 40 years.
Since then, the picture of Galante’s last meal has become an iconic image, representing what can happen when an ambitious mobster makes a power grab. While certainly not the first mobster to dabble with drugs, says Burnstein, “he was one of the first to do it so brazenly and unapologetically.” Rather than let him consolidate as a drug kingpin, the Bonnanos decided Galante had overstepped and that he had to pay the ultimate price.
Thanks to Seth Ferranti.
Friday, January 26, 2018
Young and Scantless #YNS Street Gang Members Charged with Racketeering, Kidnapping, and Trafficking Crack Cocaine #DetroitOne
New charges were filed in the prosecution of the northwest Detroit street gang Young and Scantless (YNS).
Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney Matthew J. Schneider of the Eastern District of Michigan; Special Agent in Charge James Dier of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Detroit Field Division; and Police Chief James E. Craig of Detroit made the announcement.
The second superseding indictment charges George Eubanks, 30, of Detroit, and James Bowens, 37, of Detroit with taking part in the YNS racketeering enterprise. The charges describe YNS as one of the most dangerous in the city of Detroit, known for its ruthless reputation and violent acts including seeking to intimidate, injure and kill rival drug dealers to eliminate competition; attempting to instill fear in the community in order to discourage cooperation with police and witnesses from reporting YNS-related crime; and posting numerous intimidating photographs and videos to social media.
Five YNS members, including alleged leader Edward Tavorn, 31, of Detroit, were previously charged with a variety of crimes including a murder, robberies that turned into murders, shootings, a home invasion, arson, and narcotics distribution.
The latest indictment also charges Tavorn, Eubanks and Bowens with a narcotics conspiracy in which Eubanks and Bowens agreed to sell drugs in West Virginia on Tavorn’s behalf while Tavorn was incarcerated on pending charges. The indictment alleges that in furtherance of the plot, Eubanks and Bowens possessed firearms; Bowens kidnapped and fired gunshots at a victim to force the victim to rent a vehicle for gang members to use to transport narcotics to West Virginia; and Eubanks and Bowens possessed with intent to distribute approximately 550 grams of cocaine base.
The charges are the result of the Detroit One initiative, a collaborative effort between law enforcement and the community to reduce violent crime in Detroit.
Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney Matthew J. Schneider of the Eastern District of Michigan; Special Agent in Charge James Dier of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Detroit Field Division; and Police Chief James E. Craig of Detroit made the announcement.
The second superseding indictment charges George Eubanks, 30, of Detroit, and James Bowens, 37, of Detroit with taking part in the YNS racketeering enterprise. The charges describe YNS as one of the most dangerous in the city of Detroit, known for its ruthless reputation and violent acts including seeking to intimidate, injure and kill rival drug dealers to eliminate competition; attempting to instill fear in the community in order to discourage cooperation with police and witnesses from reporting YNS-related crime; and posting numerous intimidating photographs and videos to social media.
Five YNS members, including alleged leader Edward Tavorn, 31, of Detroit, were previously charged with a variety of crimes including a murder, robberies that turned into murders, shootings, a home invasion, arson, and narcotics distribution.
The latest indictment also charges Tavorn, Eubanks and Bowens with a narcotics conspiracy in which Eubanks and Bowens agreed to sell drugs in West Virginia on Tavorn’s behalf while Tavorn was incarcerated on pending charges. The indictment alleges that in furtherance of the plot, Eubanks and Bowens possessed firearms; Bowens kidnapped and fired gunshots at a victim to force the victim to rent a vehicle for gang members to use to transport narcotics to West Virginia; and Eubanks and Bowens possessed with intent to distribute approximately 550 grams of cocaine base.
The charges are the result of the Detroit One initiative, a collaborative effort between law enforcement and the community to reduce violent crime in Detroit.
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