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THE MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE….
FROM VILLARAIGOSA’S MEXICAN GANGLAND OF LOS ANGELES, TO ALL OVER CALIFORNIA, AND NOW ALL 50 STATES! ACCORDING THE F.B.I., THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS OPERATE IN 233 AMERICAN CITIES!
YOU REALLY WANT OBAMA’S AMNESTY AND OPEN, UNDEFENDED BORDERS???
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May 13, 2010
Agents Swarm Newburgh in Raid Against Gangs
By RAY RIVERA
NEWBURGH, N.Y. — The authorities raided dozens of homes here early on Thursday in a major show of force against the Bloods and the Latin Kings street gangs, whose members have wreaked havoc in this small, troubled city along the Hudson River.
More than 300 officers and agents with the F.B.I.; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the local and state police began gathering before dawn in a former National Guard armory here. By 6 a.m., heavily armed F.B.I. SWAT teams were breaking through doors across this city about an hour north of Manhattan.
“Nothing this size has been tried with this many agents in the region,” James Gagliano, the supervisory agent in charge of the region, who has headed the investigation, told the small army of agents as they prepared to roll out.
“Be careful out there,” he added. “No blue on blue.”
Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which has been working closely with the F.B.I. on the investigation, unveiled a pair of federal indictments later Thursday, naming 60 suspected Bloods members and associates and 18 members and associates of the Latin Kings on a range of drug charges. Of those named in the indictment, 34 were already in federal custody, five were picked up Wednesday night and 18 were arrested in the early morning raids, the authorities said.
The operation was the culmination of 16 months of investigation. Though the charges revolved around narcotics trafficking, the clear intent was aimed at stamping out the violence that has taken a deadly toll in the city. Newburgh, which has a population of about 29,000, led the state in violent crimes per capita in 2008 and is on course to do so again this year. Gang violence has been responsible for all but two or three of the 16 homicides in the city in the last two and a half years, including five since January that have drawn the attention of Washington.
“I think it’s going to have a big effect,” George Venizelos, acting assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York field office. “It’s going to take a dent out of two gangs.”
The Bloods and the Latin Kings are considered by law enforcement to be the most organized and dominant gangs in the city, with the Bloods being the biggest with an estimated 160 members.
“Potentially we can take out a third of their membership,” Mr. Venizelos said of the Bloods.
At a news conferences in White Plains, Mr. Bharara said the drug and gang problem in Newburgh had reached “crisis proportions.”
“The situation in Newburgh has quite simply become intolerable,” he said. He called Thursday’s raid “the most sweeping crackdown on gangs in the Hudson Valley that anyone can remember.”
He said, “these gang members are not wannabes, but die hard, lifelong gang members.”
“Today we tried to bring new hope to Newburgh,” he said.
The indictments — one focusing on the Bloods and the other on the Latin Kings — paint a detailed and disturbing picture of Newburgh’s deeply entrenched gang culture. The Bloods were broken into a number of sub-groups with names like “Bounty Hunter Bloods,” “G-Shine,” and “9 Trey.” Ranking members could and did call meetings of all the Newburgh Bloods. Attendance was mandatory.
It was at these meetings that ranking members organized their drug operations and used code words to order the assaults or murders of rival gang members who invaded into their territory, according to the indictments. Members “referred to a person who had been targeted for an assault or murder as ‘food,’ or a ‘plate.’” People were inducted into the gang in a process known as “bringing them home.”
They brought in crack cocaine from Manhattan and the Bronx, and often used minors to distribute the drugs, act as lookouts and carry weapons, the first indictment states.
While the Bloods controlled the largely black northeast end of town, the Latin Kings’ territory included Benkard Avenue and William Street in the largely Hispanic southeast end, according to the second indictment.
Smaller in number, the Latin Kings held regular meetings and required their members to pay dues. Like the Bloods, they closely guarded their drug territory from outside dealers, except those willing to pay extortionate fees known as “rent,” the indictment states.Throughout the morning, bleary eyed suspects in handcuffs and hair still mussed from being rousted out of bed were fingerprinted and processed in a small gymnasium inside the armory. Caravans of police vehicles, ambulances and unmarked black Chevrolet Suburbans loaded with F.B.I. agents in Kevlar vests and armed with M-4 rifle jolted wary residents awake. Some stood on their doorsteps to take in the show as agents stormed buildings with battering rams and concussion grenades.
No one was injured in the raids and Newburgh police chief Eric Paolilli called them remarkably uneventful for the number of people involved. He welcomed the federal assistance in leading the investigation.
At one apartment building in the southeast end, families looked out the upper floor windows as agents arrested a suspected Latin King member from a lower floor.
“I knew it, I said it,” said one woman as she gave a play-by-play to an acquaintance on her cell phone. “They’re dealing drugs.”
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon started his crackdown on drug cartels and corrupt law enforcement two years ago, more than 4,000 people have been killed. The death toll among law
enforcement has topped 500. Kidnappings and violence are spreading across the border, and now the AP reports Mexican cartels have green-lighted hits against targets in the U.S. We’ll talk to Phoenix police about becoming the kidnapping capital of the nation and the rapid increase in other crimes linked to Mexico the city is coping with.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tonight, we’ll have all the latest on the devastating floods in the Midwest and all the day’s news from the campaign trail. The massive corporate mouthpiece the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is holding a “North American Forum” to lay out its “shared vision” for the United States, Canada and Mexico – which is to say a borderless, pro-business super-state in which U.S. sovereignty will be dissolved. Undercover investigators have found incredibly lax security and enforcement at U.S. border crossings, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office. This report comes on the heels of a separate report by U.C. San Diego that shows tougher border security efforts aren’t deterring illegal entries to the United States.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
And there are some 800,000 gang members in this country: That’s more than the combined number of troops in our Army and Marine Corps. These gangs have become one of the principle ways to import and distribute drugs in the United States. Congressman David Reichert joins Lou to tell us why those gangs are growing larger and stronger, and why he’s introduced legislation to eliminate the top three international drug gangs.
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EVEN AS THE MEX DRUG CARTELS POUR OVER OUR BORDERS, OBAMA HAS TAKEN HUNDREDS MORE GUARD OFF SINCE SEPT 2009! AND THE OBAMA DECLARES “BORDER SECURITY” IS THE HALLMARK OF HIS PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP!
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, September 28, 2009
And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is headed.
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ACCORDING TO SENATOR LAMAR SMITH OF TEXAS, WHEN CHALLENGING SO- CALLED “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIPS” LA RAZA JANET NAPOLITANO, AS TO WHY OUR BORDERS ARE WIDE OPEN TO NARCOMEX, OBAMA HAS CUT ENFORCEMENT BY MORE THAN 60% IN ALL AREAS.
Obama soft on illegals enforcement
Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday. Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.
The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Mr. Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said a period of economic turmoil is the wrong time to be cutting enforcement and letting illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans otherwise would hold.
NEW YORK TIMES
In Newburgh, Gangs and Violence Reign
By RAY RIVERA
NEWBURGH, N.Y. — It started with adolescent taunting near a frozen pond on a January afternoon and soon escalated into a brawl.
By the time it was over, Levi King Flores, a 17-year-old suspected gang member, was dead from a stab wound between his shoulder blades. A 13-year-old was in jail for his murder. And the year was off to a bloody start.
Gang violence is nothing new in this dilapidated city an hour north of Manhattan. Built along a scenic bluff on the west bank of the Hudson River, Newburgh has long been known for problems far out of proportion to its population of 29,000. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was racial strife and disastrous urban renewal efforts. In the 1980s, when the city was known as “crack alley,” it was drug-fueled violence, which has ebbed and flowed here ever since.
But this latest round of violence is shining a harsh new glare on the city, both for the intensity of the attacks and the young ages of many of those involved. The community led the state in violent crimes per capita in 2008 and is on course to do so again this year.
Gang violence has been responsible for all but 2 or 3 of the city’s 16 homicides in the last two and a half years. By law enforcement estimates, gang members with national affiliations outnumber the city’s police by a ratio of three to one, not counting the hundreds of young people in homegrown groups.
At a Senate hearing with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in Washington last month, Senator Charles E. Schumer called the situation in Newburgh “shocking.”
“There are reports of shootouts in the town streets, strings of robberies and gang assaults with machetes,” Mr. Schumer said.
At the senator’s urging, Mr. Holder promised to send a top-level official to Newburgh to examine the problem. Even before that assurance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York had already made Newburgh one of its top priorities in the region after a spate of killings in 2008.
“I think that we will see shortly some of the results of that work,” Mr. Holder said at the hearing.
Newburgh’s persistent violence is remarkable considering what the community is not: a big city. Though people on the streets here like to call it the sixth borough of New York, it is no such thing, either in density or geography.
Adorned with brick row houses and 19th-century Gothic Revival mansions, relics of its industrial past, the city has a certain nostalgic charm. Pleasure boats and upscale restaurants with colorful awnings line the riverfront esplanade. From there, a grassy slope leads to Grand Street, a tree-lined avenue where the expansive homes of the city’s Gilded Age stand in varying states of renovation and neglect.
But just a few blocks away is Lander Street, a menacing little stretch of boarded-up row houses and graffiti-tagged walls that has become one of the state’s most implacable centers of poverty and violence. Young men with pit bulls occupy porch stoops at all hours, guarding barely concealed drug markets inside. It is one of several such streets within a few blocks in the city’s northeast end that law enforcement officials say are mainly controlled by the Bloods street gang, the city’s largest with an estimated 160 members.
A number of homegrown groups — not formal gangs necessarily, but with the same territorial and violent tendencies — occupy various blocks and bear names like Ashey Bandits, Ave World and D-Block.
The narrow avenues and one-way streets make it hard for police — even in unmarked cars that are by now well known by the residents, including a green Chevrolet Suburban they call the “Green Goblin” — to sneak up on anybody.
“As soon as we turn the corner, they call out ‘One time!’ ” said Officer Joseph Palermo, on a recent night patrol.
The city’s southeast side, a largely Hispanic area known as the Heights, is controlled by Hispanic gangs like the Latin Kings, la Eme and a local group known as the Benkard Barrio Kings.
A sense of how embedded the gang culture has become can be gleaned at the local high school, the Newburgh Free Academy.
Two years ago, Torrance Harvey, a social studies teacher, and Mark Wallace, the school’s violence prevention coordinator, created a class where students could come and talk about issues important to them. During a recent session, Mr. Harvey drew a diagram on the board with the word “community” in the center and asked the class to define it. The students rattled off the usual institutions: churches, schools, law enforcement. But high on the list they also called out “gang-bangers,” “drug dealers” and “crackheads.”
Central to the problem, Mr. Harvey and Mr. Wallace said, is the lack of jobs and activities available to young people. The city has no supermarkets, one Boys and Girls Club that is closed on weekends and a virtually nonexistent bus system, leaving young people without cars too far from the only steady source of employment, at regional malls well outside of town.
“Kids are energy,” Mr. Wallace said, “and if they don’t have some place to go, where are they going to go? The corner.”
Many of those involved are not yet teenagers. Among those stabbed in the January fight was a 12-year-old who, while later testifying against Mr. Flores’s killer, lifted his shirt in court to show his knife wounds. Three months later, that same boy would find himself in jail along with seven others, accused of beating and stabbing a man nearly to death with baseball bats and knives.
“That’s the thing: Today’s victim is tomorrow’s suspect,” said Joseph Cortez, a Newburgh gang detective.
To complicate matters, the acting city manager, Richard F. Herbek, soberly announced earlier this year that Newburgh was broke. It needs $10 million to make it through the rest of this year and is facing a $6 million shortfall in the coming year, leading to fears of further cuts to community services, including the Police Department, which is already down to about 85 officers from a high of more than 100 a few years ago. Officials, though, say police cuts would be a last resort.
“It’s a tough, urban city,” said Nicholas Valentine, a tailor who doubles as the mayor of Newburgh. “We have pockets in this city that will rival any other area in the northeast, from Cleveland to Detroit, and we don’t have the resources to deal with it.”
Sitting on a stoop on Chambers Street recently, a 19-year-old woman who asked that her name not be used for safety concerns said she began “gang-banging” in seventh grade and stayed with it until a few months ago. She belonged to D-Back, an informal group named for nearby Dubois Street.
“I had the flag going on, the clothes going on, all that,” she said.
She had followed the example of her older brother, she said. “I’d see him getting so much respect outside in the ’hood, and I’m like, ‘That’s my bro, I want that respect,’ ” she said.
By 10th grade, she was selling marijuana, making as much as $2,500 a week. She had clothes, jewelry, everything she says a young girl could want. “You hear kids with jobs and as much money as they get paid in a week,” she said. “I was making that in a day or two, you know.”
But for her, things began to change the night of May 6, 2008. That night, Jeffrey Zachary, a baby-faced 15-year-old, was killed in a drive-by shooting across from his house on Dubois Street. Police officials said he was not a gang member and had been hit mistakenly.
The woman, who had been with Jeffrey earlier that day, wanted revenge. Everyone in D-Block did. But his mother, who had lost another son in nearly identical fashion three years earlier, pleaded with them not to retaliate.
“She said ‘Listen, that’s not what I want,’ ” the 19-year-old recalled. “ ‘This is going to go on and on, it’s never going to stop.’ And she was right.”
For Jeffrey’s family, his death was overwhelming. His sister, Tova Zachary, 23, had been in the house when she heard the shots. She ran out to find her brother on the ground. She clutched him, pleading with him: “Please don’t go. Hold on. Hold on.”
That night, she sneaked into the emergency ward at nearby St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital a few blocks away where doctors were trying to save her brother. She had done the same thing three years earlier as doctors tried in vain to save her other brother, Trent, 19.
“Everyone always mentions that they died in the exact same way,” Ms. Zachary said. “But not everyone knows they died in the exact same emergency room.”
Jeffrey Zachary’s death resonated beyond the neighborhood. In his office in Goshen, about 30 miles away, James Gagliano, an F.B.I. special agent who is head of the Hudson Valley gang task force, keeps a yellowed newspaper clipping of the teenager’s death under his desktop glass.
Mr. Gagliano had coached youth basketball in Newburgh for years. Though he never coached Mr. Zachary, he remembered him from the courts playing for a youth team at St. Mary’s Church.
“I can’t tell you how many times I saw him there,” Mr. Gagliano recalled. “When he caught a bullet and he was the second kid in that family to die as a result of gang of violence — you talk about a mother’s grief.”
Jeffrey Zachary’s death came about the same time that Mr. Gagliano took over as agent in charge in the Hudson Valley region, armed with orders to build federal gang cases, starting in Newburgh. Over the next several months, the number of agents whose primary focus was gangs increased from 1 to 10. He also enlisted the aid of the local police, the State Police and other federal agencies to build a 30-member gang task force to go after the city’s most hardened gangsters. But building federal cases takes time, and jail is only part of the solution, said Mr. Gagliano, a kinetic West Point graduate whose arms are covered with tattoos from years of undercover work.
For that reason, he has also taken an unusually active role in the community, lobbying city officials and business leaders to build an activity center where young people can learn job skills, play basketball or indoor soccer and find a safe place away from the street corners.
“Newburgh is hemorrhaging and we have to make a change,” he said. “And it can’t just be on the law enforcement side.”
Others are also taking up that charge. A group of mothers who have lost children to violence recently formed an organization called Mothers for Upward Movement. They hope to raise money to pay for recreational activities for young people like bus trips to the Bronx Zoo.
“So many of these kids have never even been out of the community,” said Jennifer Murchison, 39, whose 16-year-old son James Murchison was stabbed to death in May 2008.
Reflecting recently on her lost son, who was the second oldest of her five children, Ms. Murchison started doing a silent roll call in her head.
“I’m almost 40, and all my friends are still alive,” she said finally. “My kids are young, and they’ve lost at least eight friends, and a brother.”
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