Free Republic

SNIPPET: "BRUSSELS, March 24 (Reuters) - SNIPPET: "There is a Venn diagram that you could draw with overlap between al Qaeda and organised crime," said Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and a former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence at the U.S. Treasury. "But in the real world, as opposed to the Jack Bauer world, you don't have the Sicilian mafia and Osama bin Laden's guys meeting at the hip," he told Reuters in an interview, referring to the fictional counter-terrorism agent in the TV series 24. Levitt, a former terrorism analyst with the FBI and a...

Busy At The Northern Border Investigators say that Albanian citizen Ermira Hatija was a leader in an Ecstasy trafficking ring based out of Detroit, Mich. Authorities also believe that Hatija has been involved in human trafficking along the Canadian-US border. This serious crime lets criminals like Hatija profit off the misfortune of others. But when human beings are treated like objects, the price in life can be high. Tragic Traffic Hatija first came onto the police radar in 2003, when police say that she arranged for a 13-year-old-boy and his mother to cross the Canadian-US border on a Wave Runner....

Poland seeks US extradition Poland’s Minister of Justice has flown to the US in the hope of the extraditing a Polish businessman believed to have masterminded the assassination of national police chief General Marek Papala in 1998. Report by Bogdan Zaryn 05.10.06 Police chief General Marek Papala was murdered while parking his car meters away from his Warsaw apartment in 1998. It took Polish authorities several years to apprehend Papala’s killer, an unknown assassination. The lengthy investigation has led public prosecutors to Polish businessman Edward Mazur, who’s now living in the U.S. Mazur is believed to have ordered the assassination....

The Rise of Middle Eastern Crime in Australia by Tim Priest I BELIEVE that the rise of Middle Eastern organised crime in Sydney will have an impact on society unlike anything we have ever seen. In the early 1980s, as a young detective I was attached to the Drug Squad at the old CIB. I remember executing a search warrant at Croydon, where we found nearly a pound of heroin. I know that now sounds very familiar; however, what set this heroin apart was that it was Beaker Valley Heroin, markedly different from any heroin I had seen. Number Four...

Two members of Sinn Fein were being questioned tonight as part of a police investigation into possible IRA links to a major money laundering operation. They were among six men and a woman detained in Dublin and Co Cork. More than £2 million was seized but late tonight police in Belfast could not confirm that any of the money was part of the £26.5 million stolen from the Northern Bank just before Christmas. The Sinn Fein leadership said they were not prepared to make any comment on the cross-border inquiry but politicians from all the main parties in Belfast and...

Mr. John Avery Moore previously from Florida, pleaded guilty to possession of unlicensed and illegal weapons. He was in possession of 17 assorted riffles and Shotguns, 14 assorted hand guns, one silencer, 70 live rounds of ammunition, including several "Cop Killer" bullets, several holsters and telescopic lens, and was given a $143,000 fine or 3 year sentence in Freeport Grand Bahama on September 23rd 2002. Now a Bahamian would normally get 2-3 years sentence for one gun, but this person was shown preferential treatment, why? Because he was a US citizen and had opened a small Glazing business in the...