Tag Archives: organized crime

Texas Is The Example

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On Saturday, Just the News posted an article highlighting the actions of Texas in dealing with the gang violence in Uvalde County.

The article reports:

Thirty-three members of violent gangs were arrested as part of a multi-agency operation targeting transnational and organized crime in the border town of Uvalde, Texas, and surrounding area in Uvalde County.

“Gang violence has no place here in Texas, we will bring the full force of justice down on these famous criminals,” Gov. Greg Abbott said when directing Texas Department of Public Safety to surge resources there to root out organized crime in September 2022.

Nearly two years ago, a multi-agency operation began, made possible through additional state funding and criminal investigative oversight from DPS targeting an extensive organized crime network operating at the Texas-Mexico border. The investigation focused on the selling and distribution of narcotics, weapons, extortion, aggravated assaults and organized criminal activity of multiple gangs associated with transnational criminal organizations, including Mexican cartels.

The article notes:

After an extensive investigation, 33 gang members were arrested, including from the Latin Kings, West Texas Tango, Tango Blast, Tango Orejon, Tango Aguilon, Texas Syndicate, Paisa, Texas Mexican Mafia, Maniac Latin Disciples, and San Antonio Walked Down Gang, according to a statement from the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office.

The 38th Judicial District handed down 68 state indictments related to narcotics trafficking and engaging in organized criminal activity. The U.S. Western District, Del Rio Division, handed 17 federal indictments related to racketeering and conspiracy.

Texas DPS criminal investigators have identified gang activity “as a growing and serious problem in Uvalde and the surrounding area.”

Joining them in the investigation were investigators with the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office, Uvalde Police Department, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations. The 38th District Attorney’s Border Prosecution Unit and the U.S. Attorney’s office are prosecuting the case.

The investigation targeted the Uvalde area nearly 10 years after a joint operation in 2015 vanquished major gang operations there resulting in the Latin Kings being disbanded, the sheriff’s office said. Since that time, gang activity increased with the “most recent gang activity involve[ing] some of the children of those former incarcerated gang members.”

The only way to deal with the problem of the open southern border is to arrest the people who are involved in the criminal activity related to the open border. We need to arrest them, deport them, and seal the border. None of that will happen under a Biden-Harris administration or under a Harris-Walz administration.

This Did Not Go As Planned

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On Friday, The Gatestone Institute posted an article about the impact of legalization of marijuana has had on California.

The article reports:

Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.

Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.

California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.

Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.

While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.

The article concludes:

Legalization advocates still argue that if the government lowered the high taxes on legal pot, the business model could turn around again, but even without a single penny in taxes, no amount of legal labor is going to be able to compete with illegal aliens smuggled across the border and forced to work for free by gunmen. Legal businesses can’t compete with organized crime.

Drug legalization increased homelessness and drug abuse. It boosted illegal migration and organized crime. It made life worse in every state and city where it’s been tried without delivering tangible benefits to anyone (including weed users who still get theirs the old-fashioned way) except for a few politicians who temporarily have a few million more to pass around to special interests, donors and lobbyists.

And all they had to do was hand over half the country to organized crime.

America does not need another legal, mind-altering drug. There is no evidence that legal marijuana improves the quality of life for anyone. For regular users, it simply numbs them to their responsibilities and makes them less likely to pursue worthwhile goals. That is not good for society as a whole or the people involved.

Score One For The Good Guys

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NewsMax posted an article today about a global sting operation to catch members of organized crime in action.

The article reports:

The operation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Australian and European police ensnared suspects in Australia, Asia, Europe, South America and the Middle East involved in the narcotics trade, the officials said.

Millions of dollars in cash were seized in raids around the world, along with 30 tonnes of drugs including more than eight tonnes of cocaine.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the operation had “struck a heavy blow against organized crime – not just in this country, but … around the world.”

Operation Greenlight/Trojan Shield, conceived by Australian police and the FBI in 2018, was one of the biggest infiltrations and takeovers of a specialized encrypted network.

It began when U.S. officials paid a convicted drug trafficker to give them access to a smartphone that he had customized, on which he was installing ANOM, also styled An0m, a secure encrypted messaging app. The phones were then sold to organized crime networks through underworld distributors.

The FBI helped to infiltrate 12,000 devices into 300 criminal groups in more than 100 countries, Calvin Shivers of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division told reporters in The Hague.

The article concludes with some of the numbers involved:

Australian police said they had arrested 224 people, including members of outlawed motorcycle gangs, and disrupted 21 murder plots.

On Monday alone, they seized 104 firearms, including a military-grade sniper rifle, as well as almost A$45 million ($35 million) in cash, including A$7 million from a safe buried under a garden shed in a suburb of Sydney.

In Europe, there were 49 arrests in the Netherlands, 75 in Sweden and over 60 in Germany, where authorities seized hundreds of kilograms of drugs, more than 20 weapons and over 30 luxury cars and cash.

Finnish police not only detained almost 100 suspects and seized 500 kg of narcotics but also found a warehouse with 3-D printers used to manufacture gun parts.

The operation also revealed that gangs were being tipped off about police actions, which prompted “numerous high-level public corruption cases in several countries,” according to an affidavit from an FBI agent.

Kershaw said the Australian underworld figure, who had absconded, had “essentially set up his own colleagues” by distributing the phones, and was now a marked man.

“The sooner he hands himself in, the better for him and his family.”

Please follow the link above and read the entire article. It is amazing.