Eideard

Guns, marijuana and cocaine seized during Operation Pipeline Express
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

At least 70 suspected drug smugglers with alleged ties to the powerful Sinaloa cartel have been arrested in Arizona, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

The massive take-down of the drug trafficking network in Arizona included arrests of Mexican and U.S. suspects who allegedly smuggled more than 330 tons of illegal narcotics a year through Arizona.

More than 20 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were involved in the 17-month multiagency investigation called Operation Pipeline Express. Speaking at a news conference Monday in Phoenix, law enforcement officials said the organization was responsible for smuggling more than $33 million worth of drugs a month…

Officials say the ring, organized around cells based in the Arizona communities of Chandler, Stanfield and Maricopa, used backpackers and vehicles to move loads of marijuana and other drugs from the Arizona-Mexico border to a network of “stash” houses in the Phoenix area. After arriving in Phoenix, the contraband was sold to distributors from multiple states nationwide.

Law enforcement officials seized thousands of pounds of marijuana, cocaine and heroin in a series of raids. They also seized more than 100 weapons, including multiple assault rifles and ammunition.

Authorities say the organization has been around for at least five years. According to a news release, officials say they “conservatively estimate the ring has smuggled more than 3.3 million pounds of marijuana, 20,000 pounds of cocaine and 10,000 pounds of heroin into to the United States, generating almost $2 billion in illicit proceeds.”

Most folks who feel – as I do – that drug use should be decriminalized, managed through price-fixed clinics still have nothing but contempt for the slimy gangsters who run the import business for American habits and addiction.

Throw away the key.

One of the Goddesses

A church called the Phoenix Goddess Temple has been accused of being a house of prostitution, and a six-month undercover investigation has resulted in the arrests of 20 women and men who worked there…

Authorities are still searching for 17 more people — all of whom have been indicted — in connection with the prostitution enterprise, said Sgt. Steve Martos, a Phoenix police spokesman. The 20 people arrested so far have been charged with prostitution or other offenses, police said.

During a Wednesday search of the Phoenix temple and two church-related sites in nearby Sedona, police seized evidence showing that “male and female ‘practitioners’ working at the Temple were performing sexual acts in exchange for monetary ‘donations,’ all on the pretense of providing ‘neo tantric’ healing therapies,” Phoenix police said…

“What’s unusual is that they were trying to hide behind religion or church, and under the guise of religious freedom, they were committing acts of prostitution,” Martos said…

The website says at one point: “Sex is a holy, sacred and divine healing force at the core (of) our beings. Once we embrace this force instead of deny it, we become successful, happy and powerful manifestors.”

The website also features unclothed women, listed as residing in several states, under a “Goddesses” section.

Of course, prostitution should be made legal as should any number of other “morality” crimes. Allow for sensible regulation, health checks and above all else – collect taxes.

I guess that applies to real churches, too.

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry

In late 2009, ATF was alerted to suspicious buys at seven gun shops in the Phoenix area. Suspicious because the buyers paid cash, sometimes brought in paper bags. And they purchased classic “weapons of choice” used by Mexican drug traffickers – semi-automatic versions of military type rifles and pistols…

Jaime Avila was one of the suspicious buyers. ATF put him in its suspect database in January of 2010. For the next year, ATF watched as Avila and other suspects bought huge quantities of weapons supposedly for “personal use.” They included 575 AK-47 type semi-automatic rifles.

ATF managers allegedly made a controversial decision: allow most of the weapons on the streets. The idea, they said, was to gather intelligence and see where the guns ended up. Insiders say it’s a dangerous tactic called letting the guns, “walk…”

CBS News has been told at least 11 ATF agents and senior managers voiced fierce opposition to the strategy. “It got ugly…” said one. There was “screaming and yelling” says another. A third warned: “this is crazy, somebody is gonna to get killed.”

Sure enough, the weapons soon began surfacing at crime scenes in Mexico – dozens of them sources say – including shootouts with government officials…

Then, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. The serial numbers on the two assault rifles found at the scene matched two rifles ATF watched Jaime Avila buy in Phoenix nearly a year before. Officials won’t answer whether the bullet that killed Terry came from one of those rifles. But the nightmare had come true: “walked” guns turned up at a federal agent’s murder…

Hours after Agent Terry was gunned down, ATF finally arrested Avila. They’ve since indicted 34 suspected gunrunners in the same group. But the indictment makes no mention of Terry’s murder, and no one is charged in his death…

RTFA for a more detailed account.

Thanks, Tom

Phoenix Police S.W.A.T. officer stands in front of the drop house
Daylife/Ross D. Franklin /AP Photo used by permission

It could have been mistaken for a day care center, with so many children of all ages inside. But the authorities said that the crowded house in a working-class neighborhood here was really a drop point for a human-smuggling operation and that the 10 children, ages 2 to 17, were illegal immigrants being held for ransom.

The mother of three of the girls — a Salvadoran women who is living legally in Northern California — alerted the authorities to the operation late last week when she told the F.B.I. that smugglers had threatened to rape and kill her daughters if she did not pay $10,000. The girls are ages 12, 14 and 15.

The police in Phoenix found the house, on South Seventh Street, and raided it on Thursday night. They found what has become an all too common sight in Phoenix: a large group of migrants being held against their will.

This time, though, most of those inside were crying babies and scared teenagers from Mexico and Central America, all but one of them unaccompanied by an adult…The smugglers had refused to release them, even though their families had paid thousands of dollars to get them into the United States, until more money was handed over.

“We haven’t seen anything like this before,” said Capt. Fred Zumbo, who leads the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s illegal immigration task force. “Imagine what these children went through.”

The authorities arrested a man and a woman, Jaime Cruz Gutiérrez, 44, and Olga Marino Fuentes, 41, both Mexican citizens, on charges of kidnapping, extortion and smuggling humans for a profit.

The depths plumbed by the cultures of crime around the world have no bottom. Whether Sudanese bandits, Afghan warlords, Salvadoran gangbangers or Mexican human smugglers – there is no shame, no humanity, no respect for life and individual freedom.

They deserve to lose nothing less than what they are willing to take from every other human being.

The light rail here, which opened in December, has been a greater success than its proponents thought it would be, but not quite the way they envisioned. Unlike the rest of the country’s public transportation systems, which are used principally by commuters, the 20 miles of light rail here stretching from central Phoenix to Mesa and Tempe is used largely by people going to restaurants, bars, ball games and cultural events downtown.

The rail was projected to attract 26,000 riders per day, but the number is closer to 33,000, boosted in large part by weekend riders. Only 27 percent use the train for work, according to its operator, compared with 60 percent of other public transit users on average nationwide.

In some part thanks to the new system, downtown Phoenix appears to be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise economically pummeled city, which like the rest of Arizona has suffered under the crushing slide of the state’s economy. The state, for years almost totally dependent on growth, has one of the deepest budget deficits in the country.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jaime Andrade had just gotten out of the shower when the men came to snatch him.

His wife, Araceli Valencia, was mopping the kitchen in their family home on a typical warm spring morning in Phoenix, Arizona, “when she suddenly felt a hard object pointed to the back of her head and a voice in Spanish tell her not to move,” according to a Phoenix, Arizona, police investigative report.

“I told you not to look at me!” Valencia heard one of the kidnappers bark as he struck Andrade across the head…

After beating and binding Andrade, one of the kidnappers put a gun to Valencia’s head. His message: We’re taking your husband and SUV. We’ll be watching your house. If you call the cops, he’s a dead man.

Andrade, his wife would later tell police, was a mechanic and freelance human smuggler, or coyote. Police say his 2006 kidnapping was evidence of a growing trend in Phoenix: drug and human traffickers abducting each other for ransoms or retribution.

The trend continues, as police investigated roughly a kidnapping a day in 2007 and 2008 and are on track to shatter those numbers this year. Police are stingy with details of fresh cases navigating the court system, but recently allowed CNN to review the files from Andrade’s kidnapping…

Phoenix police formed [a special] squad in October after two years of unprecedented kidnapping numbers — 357 in 2007 and 368 in 2008 — gave the city the dubious distinction of being the nation’s kidnapping capital. Home invasions were not far behind: 317 in 2007 and 337 in 2008…

More frustrating is that the numbers represent only a third, maybe less, of the city’s kidnappings, said Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a police spokesman with 16 years of drug enforcement experience. Most kidnappings aren’t reported, he said, because the victims are generally smugglers, drug dealers or illegal immigrants — or some combination of the three.

RTFA. More details than you’ll enjoy. But, it helps to understand what your police department has to deal with.

The culture of silence, of accepting crime as a way of life is never separate from a whole culture. Especially one that starts with illegal entry into the country. Whatever sentiments you may have about charity for poor, illegal migrant laborers, protecting your family and neighborhood from a subculture of gangsters takes precedence.