Free Republic

The first RICO racketeering charges against members and associates of the migrant terrorist group Tren de Aragua were filed this week in New York. A statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said that the case is part of "Operation Take Back America," which it said is a "nationwide initiative that marshals the full resources of the Justice Department to repel the invasion of illegal immigration, achieve the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and protect our communities from the perpetrators of violent crime." According to the statement, the charges filed...

As the proposed implementation of a pilot cross-border trucking program draws near, another international trade corridor project is drawing heat from local residents in Texas. The March 18 New York Times reported on the reactions of residents of the West Texas towns of Marfa and Alpine to a hearing held by the Texas Department of Transportation on the development of an official trade corridor, La Entrada al Pacifico, or “Gateway to the Pacific.” It would link the port of Topolobampo in Mexico’s Sinaloa state through Chihuahua to the U.S. market, via the border crossing at Presidio, Texas, and the oil...

Thanks to oil, Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in the region — before becoming the continent’s poorest, ravaged by corruption and feckless economic policy. And amid the economic decline, high-ranking government officials became conspicuously wealthy. But how? According to U.S. indictments, former government officials, and regional experts, officials linked to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah and members of Maduro’s government built a massive drug syndicate — while most of the country increasingly struggled to find food to eat, or medicine to care for the sick. “Venezuela was a narco state several years ago, but it has become darker and...

An explosion in southern Lebanon last week destroyed what is believed to have been a Hezbollah weapons depot. This latest in a series of mysterious “accidents” in Hezbollah-controlled precincts proved, as one Israeli official wryly remarked, that those who “sleep with rockets and amass large stockpiles of weapons are in a very unsafe place.” With the Party of God’s overland supply route through Syria choked off by the 22-month-long uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and Israel virtually in total control of the maritime route, Hezbollah’s stockpile is being systematically degraded.Yet the arsenal of Iran’s other regional proxy force, Hamas,...

Ric Grenell, President Trump's former ambassador to Germany, and Director of National Intelligence, knows a thing or two about Jack Smith, having lived in Europe when Smith was active in prosecuting war crimes in The Hague. Now that Smith has been caught tampering with evidence in his case against President Trump, Grenell's put out a devastating series of tweets about Smith's history of dishonest behavior. Let’s be clear: Jack Smith is accused of tampering with evidence, manufacturing witnesses, bribery and corruption… And that’s in the investigation of the President of Kosovo 3 years ago when Jack Smith worked at The...

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) — Russia began deporting Tajik migrants Tuesday, the first in a wave of expulsions in apparent retaliation for the jailing of a Russian pilot in the Central Asian nation, officials in Tajikistan said. The spat threatens to imperil the livelihood of thousands of Tajik laborers and stir discontent in a country struggling to protect its border with Afghanistan. The former Soviet nation's economy relies heavily on the remittances provided by the many hundreds of thousands of Tajiks working in Russia. Over the past year, Moscow has been attempting to strong-arm Tajikistan into permitting Russian border troops to...

An Australian mother of five is facing the death penalty in Taiwan after she was allegedly caught with a stash of cocaine hidden in her suitcase. Debbie Voulgaris, 57, was arrested at Taoyuan International Airport in December after the drugs were allegedly found in black plastic bags inside her luggage. Taiwanese police allege she was carrying 15lbs of the drug, which - they say - she initially 'vehemently denied' having any knowledge of. She later claimed her ex-husband John was behind the scheme, police say. Ms Voulgaris's lawyer Leon Huang said it was 'essential' her ex took the stand as...

Police tracking drugs in our area are sounding the alarm with cocaine and meth making a comeback. Metro Detroit law enforcement is warning of an uptick in meth and cocaine use across the area. "The danger of this is significant to everybody," said Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard. "Basically the cost of cocaine, the cost of meth, all of that has gone down to about a third of what it was two years ago." Bouchard says it is a supply and demand issue, combined with the already troubling amounts of fentanyl coming into the states. He says it is a...

Investigators found odd, little pills buried in the pockets of Hamas terrorists who attacked Israel on Oct. 7. They were later identified as the drug Captagon, a powerful, synthetic stimulant. Captagon gained international notoriety in 2015 when it was discovered to be used by ISIS fighters to suppress fear and fatigue prior to carrying out terrorist operations. Now, because it’s cheap, as well as easy to make and smuggle, Captagon and its counterfeits are likely to remain a favorite tool of extremist militant groups to enhance their soldiers’ violent tendencies. Some reports have even labeled Captagon as “the jihadists’ drug,”...

Italy's financial police Guardia do Finanza, said in a statement Wednesday that authorities seized a 15.4 ton shipment of amphetamines reportedly produced by ISIS in Syria. The police tracked three containers at the port of Salerno in southwest Italy and found around 84 million pills stored inside industrial paper cylinders, CNN reported. The estimated value of the drugs was around $1.12 billion, the largest amphetamine bust in the world by quantity and value, the statement said.

Stop by your local post office and you might just see a poster of Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londono hanging next to the Most Wanted posters of bank robbers and fugitives. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about the Communist terrorist leader. But all the State Department had to do was ask Secretary of State Kerry. Obama did the wave with the Cuban dictator and Kerry met with Timochenko , the leader of FARC, a Marxist terrorist organization that appears on his own department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations a little above Al Qaeda. Timochenko is a...

Congratulations! It’s a … bag of cocaine. Two people were recently accused of trafficking more than 1,500 grams of cocaine through South Carolina after the drugs fell out of a fake pregnancy belly being worn by one of the alleged dealers. The Anderson County Sheriff’s Office said deputies first pulled over Anthony Miller and Cemeka Mitchem during a “proactive patrol” on Interstate 85.

The most circulated newspaper in Europe killed a major corruption story to please Joe Biden. A new report details how editors at Bild, the outlet in question, canned an extensive investigative piece on Albanian PM Edi Rama because he and the US president are friends and political allies.Per The Washington Examiner, Albania has become a narco-state over the last decade under Rama, and Bild was getting ready to expose him further.So, who is Rama? He’s the far-left leader of Albania’s Socialist Party. Accusations against him range from drug trafficking to money laundering, to extortion and vote buying.A few days ago,...

Miami, Florida – Miami federal prosecutors have charged British Virgin Islands (BVI) Premier Andrew Alturo Fahie, Managing Director of the BVI Ports Authority Oleanvine Pickering Maynard (O. Maynard), and the Port Director’s son, Kadeem Stephan Maynard (K. Maynard), with cocaine trafficking and money laundering conspiracies for agreeing to facilitate the safe passage through BVI ports of tons of Colombian cocaine headed to Miami. In exchange, the defendants would make millions, which would be funneled through different businesses and bank accounts to hide the money’s source. According to the allegations of the criminal complaint affidavit, during March and April, Fahie, O....

In a bombshell report by POLITICO‘s Josh Meyer, the Obama administration is accused of protecting Hezbollah drug and human trafficking rings to help ensure a nuclear deal with Iran was achieved. POLITICO reports: Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial...

The killing of two Canadians at a resort on Mexico’s Caribbean coast last week was motivated by debts between international gangs apparently dedicated to drug and weapons trafficking, according to a senior Mexican prosecutor. “The investigations indicate that this attack was motivated by debts that arose from transnational illegal activities that the victims participated in,” said Oscar Montes, the chief prosecutor of the Quintana Roo state, on Tuesday. “The information [is] that they were involved in weapons and drug trafficking, among other crimes.”

Venezuela’s ex-vice president and now the top confidant of Nicolas Maduro is said to have tried sneaking in Hezbollah militants into his country, made a business deal with a drug lord and became extremely wealthy as the once-rich country turned into an economic basket case. Tareck El Aissami has emerged as a hardliner of Maduro’s socialist regime as the country remains on the brink of an all-out civil war due to economic misery. **SNIP** But El Aissami, while not having the same scrutiny as Maduro, has long been the subject of various investigations both at home and in the U.S....

Crew of the US Coast Guard Cutter Munro board a self-propelled semi-submersible that was suspected of being a drug-smuggling vessel worth an estimated $232 million dollars

Mexican Federal police have discovered an enormous marijuana plantation just south of San Diego, 6 miles over the Mexican border in the state and El Centro, and set it on fire. Border Patrol officials out of San Diego, California, estimated the 70,000 pounds had a street value of $277 million and they believe they were produced to flood the U.S. market, Customs and Border Protection said in a statement issued late Friday.

by Brian Hayes New Mexico's new, Trump-hating open-borders governor has taken radical actions just to spite the President -- but the results are proving disastrous for her own state, and likely nation as well. Trump deployed National Guard and U.S. Army troops to the Mexican border to deal with a huge increase in illegal entries in January. In act of what she called "resistance" against the president, New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham withdrew 118 National Guard troops from the state’s southern boundary. She said she did it to counter what she called Trump’s “charade of border fear-mongering,”...