Free Republic

FILO DE CABALLOS, Mexico—The assault force rolls through this small mountain town not long after dark. Traveling in a fleet of pick-ups with about 15 men in each truck, they are dressed in pixelated camouflage uniforms and ballistic vests and at first glance they look like official army units, but their weapons give them away. Many of these commandos carry AK-47 model assault rifles, which aren’t used by the Mexican armed forces. The logo stamped on the doors of the trucks shows a figure from the Mexican Revolution wearing a sombrero and brandishing a rifle astride a charging horse. Below...

Harris County prosecutors are threatening to issue grand jury subpoenas to the Houston Police Department for details about confidential informants used by narcotics officers at the center of the botched Harding Street drug raid in January that ended with two residents dead and five officers injured. After police failed to fulfill a previous request for the information in May, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Natasha Sinclair sent a one-page letter Thursday demanding HPD turn over a trove of information relating to the bust, including the identities of informants used by Squad 15 since 2014, the names of those who signed...

A man traveling from Colombia to Japan died aboard an AeroMexico flight after he swallowed hundreds of cocaine packets, Mexican prosecutors announced in a statement Sunday. An autopsy revealed the 46-year-old Japanese passenger's death was caused by a drug overdose. The prosecutor's office in Sonora said the AeroMexico flight was heading to Tokyo after a Mexico City stopover on Friday when a Japanese man identified as "Udo N." began to suffer convulsions mid-flight, at around 2 a.m. local time. The airliner sought an emergency landing in Hermosillo, Sonora. Less than a half hour later, upon arriving, medics declared the passenger...

HOUSTON, Texas — The Drug Enforcement Administration in Houston is looking for a contractor to burn 1,000 pounds of marijuana per hour through September. The DEA’s posting says the contractor would need to have enough space and resources to burn the marijuana for eight consecutive hours per day. The burns are needed to reduce unneeded evidence from the DEA’s inventory. The incinerator must burn 1,000 pounds of marijuana per hour, which would be delivered in “bales” or “bricks,” each weighing up to 200 pounds. DEA agents would accompany the contractor during the burns, and all employees would receive drug tests...

The Harris County District Attorney's Office announced Wednesday it has launched a review of more than 1,400 criminal cases that narcotics officer Gerald Goines worked on during his 34-year career at the Houston Police Department. The review includes 27 cases that are currently pending in court. The undercover narcotics officer's work has come under intense scrutiny after a drug raid last month in south Houston in which two people were killed and five police officers were injured. After the raid, Houston police announced they were investigating whether Goines had lied on an affidavit used to secure the search warrant used...

You may remember the tag line of a popular ad campaign: “This is NOT your father’s Oldsmobile.” The company was trying to reinvent its image, to shake the automaker’s reputation as a stodgy businessman’s car company, and recast it as a home of sleek design for hip young people. Whether it was successful or not, it was useful as a reminder that nothing is static anymore; some aspects of an issue remain the same, while others are constantly changing. A famous 1970s book and film, Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock,” hammered this home for my generation, stressing not only that some...

Terrorism, illegal drugs, and the flow of illegal immigrants are all weapons in the hybrid war being waged against America by those with common cause to destabilize and collapse America from within. It has been over 17 years since George Bush announced the war on terrorism and 47 years since Richard Nixon announced the war on drugs. Does anyone wonder why the most powerful nation on earth has not won either? I do. The current border war and heated debate over the building of a security wall on our southern border sounds disturbingly familiar.

The Houston Police officers who conducted a deadly raid in an East Houston home on January 28, expecting to find heroin, only seized 18 grams of marijuana and 1.5 grams of an unknown white powder. The Houston Chronicle obtained the results of the search warrant Friday, which also showed officers found two shotguns and two rifles inside the house. The house had been under investigation for about two weeks after HPD received information about a suspect that was allegedly selling narcotics. A confidential informant was sent to purchase heroin from the suspect on January 27. The informant told officers the...

A veteran Houston police narcotics officer has been relieved of duty due to "ongoing questions" that have emerged over his role in a raid last week that ended in a deadly mid-afternoon shootout, police said Thursday. "We have confirmed that at least one narcotics officer has been relieved of duty due to ongoing questions that cannot be answered until the case agent is interviewed," HPOU President Joe Gamaldi said in a written statement. "The department made the decision to relieve the officer of duty while a thorough investigation continues. Nearly all officers relieved of duty return to work quickly after...

California marijuana dispensaries reported record-high holiday sales this Christmas as pot products became popular stocking stuffers this holiday season. Pot sales in the state soared in the first holiday season where recreational marijuana is legal in California, as many stores reported seeing five times the amount of customers they normally see. One Sacramento-area store, All About Wellness, reported seeing more than 150 customers per day during the 2018 holiday shopping season. On average, the store sees 20 to 25 customers per day. The increase in pot-hungry customers has also led to lines going out the door at stores. Kysa Butler,...

An Ecstasy pill found in a child’s hamburger wrapper lead to the arrest of three Sonic Drive-In employees. On Friday, a manager of the SONIC in Taylor is facing charges of Possession of a Controlled Substance, Delivery of a Controlled Substance, and Endangering a Child.According to the Taylor Police Department, the pill was discovered during a family outing to pick up dinner at the SONIC Drive-In located at 1700 N. Main. “The 11-year-old daughter was opening the hamburger for her 4-year-old brother. It was a kid’s meal,” said Henry Fluck, Chief of Police in Taylor. But within seconds, the girl...

The meeting between top Mexican federal police officers and the head of the violent Beltran-Leyva drug cartel took place at a quiet ranch in central Mexico. The officers, including then-Cmdr. Ivan Reyes Arzate, told the cartel leader of an informant in his operation who'd been arrested in Miami and was providing information to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, leading to the seizure of several boatloads of narcotics on the open seas, according to testimony Thursday in a federal courtroom in Chicago. The officers then identified the informant and handed his photo to an irate Arturo Beltran-Leyva. Within days, the informant...

“Government’s first duty,” President Reagan said in 1981 and President Trump recently tweeted, “is to protect the people, not run their lives.” The safety of law-abiding citizens has always been a core principle of conservatism. And it is why we need to take this opportunity to pass real criminal-justice reform now. Although violent crime rose during the final two years of President Obama’s time in office, it decreased during the first year of Trump’s presidency. We need to keep that momentum going. And criminal justice reform can help us do that in two ways. First, commonsense sentencing reform can increase...

DETROIT - "White Boy" Rick Wershe is less than 24 hours away from his best chance at release during a prison sentence of more than 29 years. On Friday, the Michigan parole board will vote on whether or not to release Wershe, who is the longest serving nonviolent juvenile offender in the state's history. On June 8, Wershe went through an intense four-hour parole hearing in Jackson, Michigan, with two members of the parole board and Assistant Attorney General Scott Rothermel. ...The information provided by Wershe led to the arrests of family and friends of Coleman Young, including his favorite...

Call it a buzzkiller from BuzzFeed. On Wednesday, online news site BuzzFeed reported that the Trump Administration is engaged in a "secret war on weed." BuzzFeed stated that the Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee told multiple federal agencies to submit "data demonstrating the most significant negative trends" about marijuana use. The goal appears to be to try to prevent further support for relaxing federal anti-marijuana laws. If the committee is successful in its efforts, companies with U.S. marijuana operations such as Scotts Miracle-Gro (NYSE:SMG), CannaRoyalty (NASDAQOTH:CNNRF), and Kush Bottles (NASDAQOTH:KSHB) could see their hopes of operating in a fully legal environment...

Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his Middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine. The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison. The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Ga., may have been due to a muddled prosecution of a muddy case. Or it may have been...

Like a cocaine-fueled Homeric epic, Colombia’s long tragic battle with the drug cartels has produced countless heroes and villains. But one figure cutting across the country’s current narco battlefield, a name drawing praise and hate alike, is actually a 6-year-old German shepherd you can find trotting through the country’s airports. Sombra — “shadow” in English — is a drug-detection dog with the Colombian National Police. Over the past few years, her radar nose has led to more than 200 arrests and the seizure of at least nine tons of illicit drugs. That success has turned the dog into something of...

Christ came to me emblazoned on the upper arm of my beloved cousin Marc. The blue-black ink danced between the bullet scars and stretch marks that graced my cousin’s upper body. Atop this crown-of-thorns depiction was a tattooed banner with the phrase “Only God Can Judge Me.” Marc—like several men in my family—had been caught in the webbed threads of poverty, geography and lack of opportunity during the fever pitch of 1990s mass incarceration. Baggy-pant boys like him fit the descriptions of “super-predators” and “thugs” that dominated our national discourse at the time. Marc served his time, and has been...

President Trump said he likely will support a congressional effort to end the federal ban on marijuana, a major step that would reshape the pot industry and end the threat of a Justice Department crackdown. Trump’s remarks put him sharply at odds with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions on the issue. The bill in question, pushed by a bipartisan coalition, would allow states to go forward with legalization unencumbered by threats of federal prosecution. Trump made his comments to a gaggle of reporters Friday morning just before he boarded a helicopter on his way to the G-7 summit in Canada. His...

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. (CBS12) — A man and woman from central Florida are facing charges after their 8-month-old baby overdosed on drugs, the Brevard County Sheriff's Office said. Authorities arrested 29-year-old David Williams Chappele Jr. and 27-year-old Jessica Marie Strickland of Cocoa on charges of aggravated manslaughter of a child. The investigation began in September when deputies responded to a call about an unresponsive baby at a home in Cocoa. The baby died later at the hospital. The medical examiner, according to the sheriff's office, said the baby died from an overdose of cocaine and fentanyl.