Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Accused Chinatown gangster Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow has refused to sign on to a protective order that will allow defense attorneys to receive evidence from federal prosecutors, including audio recordings and video surveillance, from a five-year undercover investigation that led to his arrest, and the arrest of 26 others in March. Attorneys for the federal government on Thursday filed a motion to compel Chow to cooperate, noting that nearly all the other defendants have signed on, and only one other defendant has not signed because of a likely substitution of counsel in the near future. According...

Shocking enough are the allegations that a long-perceived unassuming state senator tried brokering an international arms deal with military-style rifles and rocket launchers, but Leland Yee may have narrowly escaped an even more ominous label: supporter of terrorism. Yee, whose arrest after an FBI undercover sting shook the California political world last week, would likely have been charged with aiding terrorists if not for a bureaucratic label missing from the militant Filipino group that he is accused of sourcing for an international arms deal, counterterrorism experts told this newspaper. His ties to the group, whose leader has said he personally...

Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed at a federal court hearing Thursday that the unwieldy criminal case against suspended state Sen. Leland Yee, Chinatown association leader Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow and 27 others should be split up before trial. **SNIP** The hearing before U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer came two weeks after the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California filed a new indictment in the case, adding violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act against Yee and his former fundraiser, Keith Jackson. Yee is accused of conducting a criminal enterprise with Jackson, who allegedly solicited bribes and...

**SNIP** Yee, D-San Francisco, and Jackson, his former consultant and a former San Francisco school board president, are among 29 defendants charged with racketeering and other crimes after an undercover FBI investigation. Prosecutors have accused Yee, now suspended from his Senate seat, of soliciting tens of thousands of dollars from agents posing as campaign contributors in exchange for political favors. In a filing Aug. 14, Jackson's lawyer asserted that an FBI agent had been removed from the investigation and reprimanded because of financial misconduct. The agent, identified in court records only as UCE 4773, posed as a Georgia businessman and...

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Suspended California state Sen. Leland Yee could face a jury as early as June for charges of political corruption and conspiracy to import guns. At a scheduling conference on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said Yee will be tried along with his political consultant Keith Jackson, who also faces drug and murder-for-hire charges. Breyer said those charges will be tried separately, but lawyers for the defendants, including Yee's lawyer James Lassart, were not satisfied. "The firearms charges are going to be extremely prejudicial. The government has acquired 50 to 70 different firearms that, undoubtedly to...

**SNIP** The San Francisco Democrat was a fairly high-profile member of the California Legislature, but not a flamboyant one or one who was the subject of gossip and rumor. And that’s probably why the news in March landed with such a bombshell, when the 66-year old former psychologist was arrested and charged with not only corruption, but also with allegedly participating in a scheme to smuggle illegal weapons into the United States. The irony was impossible to miss: gun trafficking charges against a Democrat who made a name for himself as a fierce advocate of gun control, a politician who...

'This was an egregious breach of our nation's air traffic security': Brooklyn district attorney slams gun smuggling ring that allowed 18 pistols and ammunition to get past TSA in Atlanta **SNIP** Thompson commented as he described a case brought against five people, including an airline baggage handler who was charged a day earlier by federal authorities in Atlanta. Thompson said he was not trying to scare anyone. But he said it's 'truly frightening' what investigators learned after a probe that started as a way to reduce gun violence in Brooklyn. He said former Delta Air Lines employee Mark Quentin Henry...

Despite growing public support for legalizing marijuana, a lawsuit filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma shows that at least two segments of American society are prepared to fight the idea before the nation’s highest court—social conservatives and law enforcement. The lawsuit seeks to overturn Colorado’s experiment in legalized recreational pot, alleging that the two conservative states are being overrun with Colorado marijuana that is making it harder for them to enforce their own drug laws. …

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...

She also alleges that some immigrants who have entered the country illegally pose a threat to national security and safety. In her court filings, Taitz referred to an order Hanen entered in December 2013 in an unrelated case, United States of America vs. Mirtha Veronica Nava-Martinez, who was convicted of attempting to smuggle a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador. Court records show that the girl’s mother Salmeron Santos, an immigrant illegally in the country, admitted that she had hired smugglers to transfer her child from El Salvador to Virginia and paid a $6,000 advance for the service. DHS delivered the...

MCALLEN, Texas — Border Patrol agents seized more than $650,000 in cash that had been left behind near the Rio Grande River that separates Texas from Mexico. The seizure was made Thursday night when U.S. Border Patrol Agents following a set of footprints near Sullivan City ended up coming across four backpacks filled with bulk cash and a little more than a kilo of cocaine, an agency news release shows. Inside the four backpacks the agents ended up finding a mixture of dollars and pesos that added up to $650,000 as well as the cocaine which had a value of...

The federal government says 173 unaccompanied immigrant children have been placed in Minnesota since the start of the year. The Office of Refugee Resettlement on Thursday issued a state-by-state breakdown of unaccompanied child placement. The figures show more than 30,000 children have been released to sponsors this year through July 7. The specific locations of the placements were not specified. Fifty have been placed in Wisconsin. Texas, New York, Florida and California are receiving the most unaccompanied children caught at the U.S. border, according to the information. Federal and state governments are scrambling to find shelter for the children fleeing...

A federal jury has convicted a Minnesota man of smuggling arms to Nigeria and lying on firearms purchase records. Fifty-one-year-old Sheriff Olaleran Mohammed was convicted of one count of smuggling goods from the U.S. and 17 counts of providing false statements while purchasing a firearm.

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...

Government IT projects have a tendency to fall on their rear ends more often than not. After the miserable debacle that was Healthcare.gov last October, I made the case for why the larger than life public face of Obamacare had zero chance of succeeding in original form. Fast forward six months, and after some contractor firings and a public about face consisting of a "tech surge", the website is finally working at nominal levels. That's not to say no one didn't take the fall for the mess of this bungled IT project gone haywire. The former head honcho of the...

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...

A house overflowing with more than 100 people presumed to be in the U.S. illegally was uncovered just outside Houston on Wednesday, a police spokesman said. The suspected stash house was found during a search for a 24-year-old woman and her two children, a 7-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, that were reported missing by relatives late Tuesday after a man failed to meet them as planned at an undisclosed location on the city's north side, said John Cannon, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department. Many of the people in home that authorities said appeared to be part of...

More than 100 suspected illegal immigrants were found in an apparent stash house in south Houston on Wednesday, police say. Officers say the immigrants were held against their will in deplorable conditions. snip...one toilet, no ho hot water and human waste everywhere.

Smugglers stuffed 13 ‘incredibly rare’ iguanas into socks and tried to take them through Heathrow Airport. The endangered lizards were found by customs officers in a suitcase at Terminal Five when they stopped two Romanian women who arrived from the Bahamas. They were trying to take the San Salvador rock iguanas, which are native to the Bahamas and under threat of extinction, on to Dusseldorf in Germany. Each was wrapped in a sock and 12 survived the journey, while one died. Rare iguanas stuffed in socks seized at Heathrow Airport The iguanas were smuggled inside one suitcase (Picture: PA) Grant...