Eideard

A suspected cannibal was arrested in Slovakia after his ‘dinner guest’ changed his mind and alerted police.

The would-be victim from Switzerland answered an internet advert from the 43-year-old man seeking a person who would agree to be killed, cooked and eaten.

He claims he thought the offer was nothing more than a ‘macabre fantasy game’.

But after telephone conversations with the unnamed man, he realised he was “deadly serious”, he said.

He alerted Swiss police who informed their Slovakian counterparts…They sent in an undercover officer posing as the victim in a sting operation to catch the suspected cannibal.

During the arrest, a gunfight ensued in which the cannibal and a police officer were both injured…

A Kysak police spokesman said: “One of our officers and the suspect both suffered gunshot wounds during the arrest and are both being treated in hospital.”

I presume they’re both being treated tenderly.

Dalia Dippolito never planned to have her husband killed, her attorney told a jury on Tuesday. Rather, she thought she was acting in a reality show orchestrated by her husband to achieve fame and publicity.

In his opening statement in her murder-for-hire trial, defense attorney Michael Salnick said Michael Dippolito was a controlling husband who duped his wife into taking part in his hoax.

“Michael Dippolito’s hoax to orchestrate his own murder to achieve fame and fortune was a bad prank,” Salnick said. “It was never anyone’s intention to harm anyone…”

Video from an undercover sting by Boynton Beach police showed Dalia Dippolito in August 2009 trying to hire an undercover officer to kill her husband. Video of her wailing at news of his murder went viral and will be featured on the television show “COPS.”

Salnick told jurors that Dalia Dippolito knew the entire time that she was being recorded, because her husband persuaded her to take part in his reality-show idea. Michael Dippolito won’t admit it, Salnick said…

Dippolito faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. Her alleged plan to have a hit man kill her husband backfired when the man she hired to do the job was the undercover Boynton Beach police officer.

Boynton Beach police were fooled by Michael Dippolito’s staged murder-for-hire scenario, Salnick said, and were more focused on pleasing COPS producers…

On Aug. 5, 2009, police staged the elaborate crime scene, and recorded video of her shrieks and tears when they told her that her husband had been killed.

Later they confronted her, brought her face-to-face with her husband and arrested her. Her reaction and arrest also were caught on video, which will be evidence in the trial.

Michael Dippolito was the victim in the case, Parker said, and was blinded by his love for his wife of six months.

Do you think this is going to work better than the twinkie defense used in San Francisco to justify the murder of Harvey Milk? You have to admit it’s creative and including in a reasonably sleazy reality TV show like COPS is brilliant.

A Southern Utah University vice president was among eight people arrested in a prostitution sting in Cedar City.

Wesley R. Curtis, 57, the SUU vice president for government relations and regional service, was booked Friday into the Iron County jail on suspicion of a misdemeanor count of sexual solicitation. An online jail log indicates he was released the same day after posting a $623 bond.

Curtis did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

SUU President Michael Benson on Saturday issued a prepared statement.

“Given the charges filed against Wes Curtis, the University is placing him on paid administrative leave, per university policy,” Benson’s statement said. “This leave is effective immediately and pending the outcome of an investigation into the alleged misconduct.

“We are concerned for Wes and his family and extend our love and support as the investigation continues…”

Isn’t that thoughtful?

“This is not like a girl in scanty clothes walking down the street making a proposition,” task force commander Dave McIntyre said. “You have to take some pretty substantial steps to set this up.”

At the motel, an undercover woman officer negotiated with the men to trade money for sex before other officers arrived to arrest them, McIntyre said.

Just like they teach you in a proper business school.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Somali-born teenager attempting to detonate what he believed was a car bomb in a packed downtown Portland Christmas tree lighting ceremony on Friday night was arrested by authorities, who had spent nearly six months tracking him and setting up a sting operation, officials in Oregon said.

The bomb in a van parked off the Pioneer Courthouse Square was a fake — planted by F.B.I. agents at the culmination of the elaborate sting — but “the threat was very real,” said Arthur Balizan, Special Agent in Charge of the F.B.I. in Oregon, who identified the suspect as Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old naturalized citizen.

“Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,” Mr. Balizan said in a statement released by the Department of Justice.

He added: “At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack.”

The foiled plot was just the latest jarring terrorist attempt aimed at mass gatherings in the United States, including an attempted car bombing in Times Square this past May. In that case, a Pakistani-born American citizen was arrested and pleaded guilty…

Mr. Mohamud, a sophomore at Oregon State in Corvallis, Ore., had been planning for more than a year to cause mass harm to a large and unsuspecting gathering of people — including children — in their own element, according to the affidavit…

“I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured,” Mr. Mohamud said to undercover agents, according to the affidavit.

RTFA. Archetypical example of a fanatic willing to murder indiscriminately in the name of his ideology.

He deserves a fair trial – and no mercy if found guilty as charged.

UPDATE: Here’s a lengthier, more detailed follow-on article.

They flocked by the dozens to the War Memorial Auditorium, lured by promises of fat stimulus checks. What they got was something else entirely.

In total, more than 100 qualified recipients scheduled appointments last week to see officials with the South Florida Stimulus Coalition in the hopes of a quick buck from a company with the slogan, “Helping jump start our economy.”

But instead, they found Fort Lauderdale police officers. And instead of a stimulus check, they were handcuffed and led off to jail.

Police announced the results Thursday of the two-day sting targeting Fort Lauderdale residents with outstanding warrants: 76 arrests of fugitives wanted for offenses ranging from grand theft to fraud to attempted murder…

Sousa said “Operation Show Me The Money” worked like this: Police searched through a Broward Sheriff’s Office list of wanted Fort Lauderdale residents and sent out letters offering a sum of money from the fake organization to those who called a phone line and set up an appointment.

Those who arrived Wednesday and Thursday to collect checked in, took a seat and later were led to a second room after their identities were confirmed. Sousa would not describe exactly what happened from there on, but the appointments ended in police custody for those who had outstanding warrants.

What a delightful idea. Can we try it on Congress?

Police stay on guard at Riverdale Jewish Center

Four men have been arrested in a suspected plot to bomb a synagogue and Jewish community center in New York City and to shoot at military planes with stinger missiles.

A joint release from the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the FBI and the New York Police Department said the suspects were charged with plotting to detonate explosives near a synagogue in the Riverdale section of New York’s Bronx borough.

The men were also charged with plotting to shoot military planes located at New York’s Air National Guard base at Stewart airport in Newburgh, New York, with stinger surface-to-air guided missiles, the statement said. Newburgh is about 60 miles north of New York City.

“The defendants wanted to engage in terrorist attacks. They selected targets and sought the weapons necessary to carry out their plans,” Lev Dassin, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in the statement.

The four men, identified as James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen, were arrested after buying an inactive missile and inert explosives in a sting operation run by the FBI and other agencies…

The complaint said they bought an arsenal in May that included improvised explosive devices containing inert C-4 plastic explosives and a surface-to-air guided missile provided by the FBI that was not capable of being fired…

Each man is charged with one count of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, and one count of conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, which also carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

All the men live in Newburgh, NY, authorities said.

Three of the four born and brought up in the GOUSA.

There are about 100 of us packed into a restaurant in Upper Holmesburg, Philadelphia – art experts and curators, museum security chiefs, and a phalanx of FBI agents with 9mm Glocks concealed under their G-man suits.

We have gathered to say farewell to a man few people have heard of and even fewer could recognise or describe.

That is the way Special Agent Robert “Bob” Wittman prefers it.

For nearly two decades, usually masquerading as a crooked art dealer with links to the Mafia or the Colombian drug cartels, he has run undercover sting operations, luring criminals into selling him stolen works of art.

Art crime is big business. Estimated to be worth between $1.5 – $6 billion annually, it is now the fourth largest international crime, after drug dealing, gun running and money laundering.

Bob Wittman has been on the frontlines of the war against art crime since 1989.

In a distinguished career he has recovered stolen art worth millions, in more than a dozen countries.

Now, at the age of 53, the king of heists is hanging up his silver badge and gun to write a book and spend more time with his wife and three children.

Always a delight to hear about a copper who honors the profession. For too many – including a small percentage of those I’ve known personally – it’s a sinecure, a civil service gig like working for the state highway department, even an easy source of drugs.

I’ll be waiting in line to buy and read Bob Wittman’s book.

A two-year undercover FBI sting operation targeting online fraudsters has netted 56 arrests and prevented millions of dollars in economic losses.

The FBI said it had infiltrated online “carder” forums hosted on the DarkMarket.ws Web site, which was widely used by online scammers to buy and sell stolen credit card numbers, other financial information, and even the devices used to make fake banking cards. Before it was shut down earlier this month, the Web site had registered more than 2,500 members.

The FBI ran its sting in cooperation with the U.K.’s Serious Organized Crime Agency and authorities in Turkey and Germany. “The arrests this week in the U.K. are a good demonstration of the coordination taking place today between the FBI, the Serious Organized Crime Agency… and other law enforcement agencies around the globe.”

In addition to the 56 arrests, the sting helped the FBI seize compromised accounts and prevent the loss of about $70 million in fraud, the FBI said. It has also generated new leads that are being tracked down by international law enforcement…

Although Dark Market was thought to have been administered by a criminal going by the name Master Splyntr, German Public Radio reported on Monday that the FBI had been running a sting operation on the site since late 2006, and that Master Splyntr was actually an FBI agent named J. Keith Mularski.

Hah!

NBC…has settled a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who killed himself when confronted with cameras for the documentary series “To Catch a Predator.”

The family of Louis Conradt Jr. filed a $105 million lawsuit last year against NBC, which ran the “Predator” episode as part of its “Dateline NBC” news magazine series. The network agreed to pay the family an undisclosed amount…

Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Rockwall County, Texas, had reportedly sent sexually explicit messages to a person he believed was underage. It turned out that the other person was a volunteer for Perverted Justice, an activist group that helps set up stings to catch child sexual predators. The group was a paid consultant for NBC in the “Predator” series.

The volunteer posing as a child arranged to meet with Conradt in November 2006, as part of a four-day sting in Texas facilitated by a local police department. The sting led to 25 arrests, but Conradt did not show up at the bait house, so the local police, encouraged by NBC (according to the lawsuit), decided to arrest him at his home. As police officers and camera crews entered the home, Conradt shot himself in the head.

Last winter, when the ABC news magazine “20/20″ investigated the “Predator” sting, Walter Weiss, a former detective with the police department that partnered with “Dateline,” said: “I understand he took his own life, but I have a feeling that he took his own life when he looked out the door and saw there was a bunch of television cameras outside.”

There has always been an element of entrapment about these stings. Often the case. When the sting expands to include “public interest” groups and TV crews – questioning of such tactics should be heightened, not ignored.