Eideard

Preet Bharara and Ray Kelly
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Five active and three retired officers of the New York Police Department are among 12 people charged Tuesday with conspiring to transport and distribute firearms and stolen goods…

“A group of crime fighters took to moonlighting as criminals,” Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference.

The defendants are charged in an alleged conspiracy to transport and distribute untraceable firearms across state lines. and conspiracy to transport supposedly stolen and counterfeit goods including cigarettes from Virginia and slot machines from Atlantic City, New Jersey…

The current or former NYPD officers charged are William Masso, Eddie Goris, Ali Oklu, Gary Oritz, and John Mahony, all active-duty officers in Brooklyn; Joseph Trischitta and Marco Venezia, who were active-duty NYPD officers at the time of the alleged crimes but are now retired; and Richard Melnik, a retired NYPD officer. Also charged, federal authorities said, are Anthony Santiago, a New York City Department of Sanitation police officer; David Kanwisher, a New Jersey corrections officer; and Michael Gee and Eric Gomer, who court documents list as “associates” of Santiago…

Prosecutors said that while the defendants all believed the items they transported were stolen; they had in fact been provided by the FBI. The firearms were never a danger to the public, authorities said, as they had been rendered inoperable.

“These crimes are without question, reprehensible — particularly conspiring to import untraceable guns and assault rifles into New York,” said Janice K. Fedarcyk, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York division. “The public trusts the police not only to enforce the law, but to obey it. These crimes, as alleged in the complaint, do nothing but undermine public trust and confidence in law enforcement.”

You got that right.

We’re fortunate to have someone like Preet Bharara operating in New York, nowadays. Seems like I get to note his name in a crime-busting case every couple of months.

U.S. police arrested 17 people and broke up a gun running network that sought to funnel more than 700 firearms including high-powered Kalashnikov rifles to Mexico drug cartels.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, said police arrested 17 suspects in a multi-agency operation across the Phoenix valley on Tuesday. Three other suspects remained at large.

The operation…dismantled a network buying weapons for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel, investigators said. “We strongly believe we took down the entire organization from top to bottom that operated out of the Phoenix area,” said William Newell, special agent in charge of the ATF’s Phoenix field division…

Arizona straddles a lucrative and heavily trafficked smuggling corridor. Organized criminal networks haul drugs and illegal immigrants north, and spirit guns and cash profits south to Mexico.

The 53-count indictment alleged that from September 2009 to December last year the defendants conspired to purchase hundreds of guns, including Kalashnikov rifles, a weapon of choice for cartel enforcers in Mexico.

It’s the weapon of choice for military-style operations worldwide.

Criminal indictments handed down in the case charged defendants with crimes including conspiracy to obtain a firearm for drug trafficking offense, and making false statements in connection with the acquisition of firearms.

A conviction for conspiracy carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison, while making a false statement, five years…

The gun bust comes a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa in Mexico, and restated the United States’ support for Calderon’s drive to crush the cartels.

Clinton acknowledged the role the vast U.S. demand for illegal drugs and the flow of U.S. weapons south across the border to drug smugglers were major contributors to the violence.

Acknowledged, eh? Well, that accomplishes a lot doesn’t it.

Paranoid nutballs and their NRA allies may whine all the way to the next Tuscon-style crime scene; but, the traffic in weapons needs to be as thoroughly regulated as public safety demands. It doesn’t matter if the motivation is sport or safety – though the number of murdered spouses is daunting – fear of what follows is why we get to vote. Someone writes a lousy regulation, throw the bum out.

In a sweeping operation aimed at uncovering “straw buyers” blamed for funneling high-powered guns to Mexican drug cartels, federal agents have arrested dozens of Arizonans and seized a large amount of weapons.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says its successful investigation is just the beginning of ramped-up efforts to stop the illegal export of American weapons and is aimed at nailing the middle men who buy weapons on behalf of others for use in major crimes.

Arizona’s status as a guns-and-drug hub for the rest of the country has created an industry that brings tons of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine into the United States and sends cash and guns back to Mexico, according to federal agents…

“We have a huge problem here,” said Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, “We have now become the gun locker of the Mexican drug cartels…”

Agents worked the newest operation in Arizona and New Mexico from May until early August as part of the ATF’s Gun Runner Impact Team. It seized about 1,300 weapons and more than 71,000 rounds of ammunition.

Although the effort was deemed a success, agents admit there is no reliable way to track the number of weapons from the U.S. being used in Mexico’s ongoing drug war…

The dozens of arrests that agents made in the course of the operation will likely not do much to cut off those supply routes…

The operation required the cooperation of Mexican authorities, who supplied ATF agents with information on firearms seized at crime scenes there.

Court records indicate the guns purchased in Arizona came from federally licensed firearms dealers throughout the state, including some who sell them at the Arizona State Fair.

RTFA.

When you know you’re fronting for murderers, you are no different. Ignorance is a pretty flimsy alibi in this day and age.

Police in Britain, Spain and the Republic of Ireland have arrested 32 people in raids against an alleged major international criminal group.

Among those detained is Christy Kinahan, dubbed the “Irish godfather”, who is accused of leading the group. The Irish-born Briton, 53, was arrested with his sons in Malaga, Spain.

The network is suspected of trafficking large quantities of drugs and firearms, and of laundering hundreds of millions of pounds, UK officials said.

Twenty people were arrested in Spain, 11 in the UK, and one in Ireland…

Some 750 police officers were involved in the raids, which were co-ordinated from London, Dublin and Malaga.

Officers also searched property in Belgium, Cyprus and Brazil.

Spanish police arrested Mr Kinahan together with his family, other British and Irish suspects and four Spanish lawyers.

OK. I’ll leave off a lawyers joke.

While lower intelligence scores — as reflected by low results on written or oral tests of IQ — have been associated with a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, no study has so far compared the relative strength of this association with other established risk factors such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure.

Now, a large study funded by Britain’s Medical Research Council, which set out to gauge the relative importance of IQ alongside other risk factors, has found that lower intelligence scores were associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease and total mortality at a greater level of magnitude than found with any other risk factor except smoking…

When the data were applied to a statistical model to quantify the associations of nine risk factors with cardiovascular mortality, results showed that the most important was cigarette smoking, followed by low IQ. Similar results were apparent when the health outcome was total mortality.

I wonder if inclusion of firearms worship could determine the eventual date of the Darwinian disappearance of the Republican Party?

Want to buy an M-16? In Pakistan on the Afghanistan border.
Daylife/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. military failed to “maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons — or about 36 percent — of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and shipped to Afghanistan from December 2004 through June 2008,” a U.S. Government Accountability Office report states.

“Accountability lapses occurred throughout the supply chain,” it says.

The Defense Department spent roughly $120 million during that period to acquire a range of small arms and light weapons for the Afghan National Security Forces, including rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

The military also failed to properly account for an additional 135,000 weapons it obtained for the Afghan forces from 21 other countries.

“What if we had to tell families [of U.S. soldiers] not only why we are in Afghanistan but why their son or daughter died at the hands of an insurgent using a weapon purchased by the United States taxpayers? But that’s what we risk if we were to have tens of thousands of weapons we provided washing around Afghanistan, off the books,” Rep. John Tierney, D-Massachusetts, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.

The military is unable to provide serial numbers for 46,000 of the missing 87,000 weapons, the report concludes. No records have been maintained for the location or disposition for the other 41,000 weapons.

So, the “fiscal conservatives” who left us with trillions of dollars of debt, the “faith-based” moralists who think it’s unethical for the Federal Government to include money for school buildings in the Stimulus Bill, the nit-picking nutballs who whine about closing Gitmo and ending torture – turn out not to be competent or capable of keeping a record of hardware freely distributed in a part of the world half of them can’t spell or find on a map – when they were in charge of the ship of state.

And no one is really surprised. Are you?