Free Republic

The drug trade is expanding throughout the world as reported by Holly Ellyatt for CNBC: "according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and European crime-fighting agency Europol, the annual global drugs trade is worth around $435 billion a year, with the annual cocaine trade worth $84 billion." The United States has the most junkies per capita but drug consumption in Brazil, Argentina and other emerging markets is approaching America's degenerate levels. Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder and his Justice Department have decided to release more drug dealers from U.S. prisons many of whom no...

For most of the first half of my life, I lived in or near Boston. Usually, I am proud of my hometown, its history, its universities and its spirit. After the Boston Marathon bombings, Beantown united under the phrase "Boston Strong." I left in 1985. When I go back, I see how much the city has changed. The Boston I left had a wrong side, too -- a culture that looked away when organized crime terrorized young and old. Boston Wrong has been on parade this month during the long-awaited trial of James "Whitey" Bulger, 83, on 32 federal counts...

SNIPPET: "The prosecution also told the court that most wanted Dawood has also been declared "international terrorist" and is facing stringent United Nations Security Council sanctions. In the running of organised criminal activities against strategic and economic security of India and its citizens, he plays a pivotal role."

The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life," Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday. "That's going to be very, very powerful," Waters said. "That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before

...The pontiff exhorted Mafiosi to change their ways, issuing the call Sunday, a day after the beatification of an Italian priest in Palermo who was slain in 1993 by mobsters after he defiantly preached against the Mafia...

The Mr. Ding-A-Ling truck hadn't been rolling through the streets here for more than a week before Joshua Malatino made his message clear: There ain't enough Fudgsicles in this city for the both of us. Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Cops-Snow-Cone-Joe-stalked-Mr-Ding-A-Ling-in-4479911.php#ixzz2SMcToNAd

Nearly two dozen defendants were arraigned last Friday in a Manhattan federal court for their alleged roles in a gambling ring for the fabulous people but missing from the crowd was reputed Russian mobster Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov who remains a fugitive as reported by Richard Behar for Forbes: "The feds call him a 'major figure in international Eurasian Organized Crime' who has been involved in 'drug distribution, illegal arms sales and trafficking in stolen vehicles.' In the current gambling case, he's accused of using his status as a thief-in-law (or vory v zakone) -- a select group of the highest-level criminals...

<p>The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has posted mug shots of 35 educators booked for allegedly colluding to raise standardized test scores.</p> <p>A 73-year-old principal, a middle school secretary, elementary school teachers, and other school workers are accused of being behind the nation's biggest cheating scandal.</p>

Suspicion in the slayings of a Texas district attorney and his wife shifted Monday to a violent white supremacist prison gang that was the focus of a December law enforcement bulletin warning that its members might try to attack police or prosecutors. The weekend deaths of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, who were found fatally shot in their home, were especially jarring because they happened just a couple of months after one of the county's assistant district attorneys, Mark Hasse, was killed near his courthouse office. And less than two weeks ago, Colorado's prison chief was...

Kathleen O’Leary, Presiding Judge of the 4th District Court of Appeal reinstated the Appeal Taitz v Obama et al filed by the candidate for the U.S. Senate Attorney Orly Taitz. Appeal at hand involves Senator Diane Feinstein and Barack Obama as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency.

No halftime show at Super Bowl 2014? That’s the word, according to planners who say the weather may prevent appearances at matchup XLVIII, set for New Jersey. “It’s because of the cold weather,” said one involved with next year’s Super Bowl planning, in a New York Post report. “It’s not only the acts and the singers, but also the crews that have to put the stage together. … You just can’t assemble the stage and break it down fast enough in the cold.”

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; George C. Venizelos, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); and George N. Longworth, the Commissioner of the Westchester County Police Department, today announced the unsealing of charges against 32 individuals as part of a multi-year investigation into organized crime’s alleged continuing control of large aspects of the commercial waste-hauling industry in the greater New York City metropolitan area and in parts of New Jersey. The main indictment charges 12 defendants under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt...

Former FBI agent missing in Iran photographed in Guantánamo jumpsuit By Barney Henderson 8:44PM GMT 08 Jan 2013 The family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007, have released pictures of him dressed in an orange jumpsuit like a Guantánamo Bay prisoner, as they continue to hold hope that he is still alive.

The media immediately accused the accuser, defaming me and supported the union thugs in intimidating/stifling free speech. This unedited footage REMOVES ALL DOUBT as to what happened that day. Please share to shine a light!

Game Changer? The federal government paid nearly $40 million dollars to Claire McCaskill’s husband’s businesses her first five years in office as Missouri Senator. During that time McCaskill has had influence over federal policy that has directly affected her family’s income. Missouri royalty - The rest of the country has suffered but Claire McCaskill and her husband Joseph Shepard have done very well these past five years. There are renewed calls for Democrat McCaskill to release her tax returns. ABC3040 reported: Businesses affiliated with the husband of Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill have received almost $40 million in federal subsidies for...

As I noted in the introduction to my book, The Obama Timeline, a jury at a murder trial will often find the accumulated circumstantial evidence so overwhelming that a guilty verdict is obvious—even though there may be no witness to the crime. “The jurors in the Scott Peterson trial believed the collection of evidence more than they believed Scott Peterson. Among other things, the jury thought that being arrested with $15,000 in cash, recently-dyed hair, a newly-grown goatee, four cell phones, camping equipment, a map to a new girlfriend’s house, a gun, and his brother’s driver’s license certainly did not...

The four areas where organized crime reigns in America -- New York City, Dirty Jersey, Chicagoland and South Florida -- also account for the lion's share of corruption convictions by federal prosecutors against local officials as reported by Joe Palazzolo for The Wall Street Journal Law Blog. The U.S. Department of Justice has released the number of corruption convictions its prosecutors have won against public servants over the last ten years across the 93 federal judicial districts into which the country is divided, and at the top of the list is New Jersey with 429 convictions. Third on the list...

Meyer Harris Cohen was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia, immigrated with his family to the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn and reached Los Angeles’ Jewish point of entry in Boyle Heights in 1915. Up to this point, the spare details of his biography are unremarkable. But Meyer was later nicknamed “Mickey,” and his name still echoes with the larger-than-life reputation he acquired on the mean streets of Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. “By the end of the 1930s, the view from the top of Hollywood Hills seemed unlimited,” Tere Tereba writes in her rich,...

The Yassine family of Austin, Texas is apparently quite the enterprising group. Led by Hussein “Mike” Yassine, the Yassines were quite diversified. They own 8 bars. According to law enforcement authorities they are also a one-family crime wave. They are involved in murder, money laundering, drug dealing–and they have a brother back in Lebanon who is part of Hezbollah.

ROME -- A British lawyer says he invented accusations that Silvio Berlusconi paid him $600,000 to lie on the stand to protect the former Italian premier's business interests. David Mills' testimony Thursday at Berlusconi's corruption trial in Milan undercuts prosecutors' case against the politician.