Category Archives: Drug Cartels

32 Arrested Major Drug Bust San Francisco

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Attention to AOC, Booker, Castro, Biden, O’Rourke and the rest…remember when President Trump said they dont send us their best? Check it, mostly Hondurans.
Hey Pelosi, hey Feinstein, what say you? Maybe someone can alert Shepard Smith too.

Fentanyl…..

U.S. Attorney David Anderson announces a new federal crime-fighting initiative in San Francisco on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019. Seventeen federal law enforcement agencies will team up for a yearlong crackdown on a notorious area of San Francisco where open drug use has been tolerated for years. (AP Photo/Samantha Maldonado) photo

The alleged leaders of the two organizations were Andy Reanos-Moreno and Eduardo Alfonso Viera-Chirinos, according to federal criminal complaints filed on Aug. 1 and July 29 and made public Wednesday.

Nielsen said the two cases were the first time in his law enforcement experience that he had seen the model of the leaders of a drug ring renting housing to the drug sellers.

The residences included apartments and houses in Oakland, Hayward and elsewhere and as many as five dealers, sometimes with partners and children, lived in each unit, according to the complaints.

In part: (AP) — The first step in a sweeping crackdown on crime ranging from drugs to sex trafficking in a notorious San Francisco neighborhood yielded 32 arrests of mostly Honduran nationals tied to two international operations that poured heroin and cocaine into the community, U.S. prosecutors announced Wednesday.

In his first news conference since being appointed by President Donald Trump in January, U.S. Attorney David Anderson said he could no longer stand by as tourists, government workers and residents wade through a daily slog of crime. He said an enforcement initiative by more than 15 federal agencies would not affect “innocent” homeless people or drug users but would tackle high-level drug dealing, fraud, identity theft and firearms.

“My belief is that the Tenderloin, in fairness, deserves the rule of law every bit as much as other fine neighborhoods in San Francisco,” he said. “This is not an immigration initiative. This is not a deportation initiative. This is a public safety initiative.”

Still, San Francisco is a city that strongly opposes federal immigration sweeps, and immigration agents are among those joining the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals Service and others in the effort. San Francisco was a sanctuary city before the rest of California largely pledged not to work with federal authorities on deporting people in the country illegally.

Chris Nielsen, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Francisco, said an investigation launched in late 2017 uncovered two independent operations stretching from Mexico to Seattle in which mostly Honduran nationals living on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay Area commuted daily to the Tenderloin to sell drugs.

He said the “commuter drug dealers” acted like “independent contractors,” selling drugs in exchange for housing.

“Each morning, drugs were dropped off with dealers in the East Bay and then commuted into the city to sell to people from all over the area,” he said.

The federal crackdown, however, was criticized by San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness, whose officials say the Trump administration is targeting immigrants and the poor. “We are deeply concerned that low level offenders, drug users and individuals who do not have homes and are therefore more likely to come in contact with law enforcement will be disparately impacted,” said Sam Lew, the coalition’s policy director.

Others say the neighborhood desperately needs help. Andrea Fogelbach opened her “Slingshot Cafe” coffee shop two months ago in the neighborhood, where discarded needles litter the streets and people sleep in tents or out in the open.

“It’s pretty bad. They’re just shooting up right in front of you,” she said. “I’m afraid for my dog stepping on needles most of the time. If I had children, I don’t think I could live here.”

The organized nature of drug peddling in the Tenderloin was cited in an April city report, which stated that more than half of nearly 900 people booked into jail or cited for incidents tied to drug sales in 2017-18 were cited or arrested by police in the Tenderloin. It said a high percentage of drug sales involve organized crime and “sellers often give drugs to homeless people who are addicted in exchange” for holding the drugs.

The U.S. attorney’s office said it is devoting 15 prosecutors to the crackdown for at least a year.

Gangs Use of Emojis in Text Messages

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How gang members could be using emojis photo

In part: “I’ll see a string of pictures, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that means,'” she said.

Donna Price said that’s exactly what gang members want to hear.

Price was part of the Street Safe Task Force established by former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue and worked closely with gang prevention coordinators. Price said gangs are using what look like innocent emojis in social media posts as hidden messages to recruit, communicate with one another and threaten rivals.

“There are about 1,200 emojis out there, and those emojis can each mean four different meanings,” Price said.

Maxwell asked Foston what she thinks the gas pump emoji means.

“They need gas,” Foston answered. “They’re at an old-school gas station and they’re in the middle of nowhere.”

Not always. Some use that emoji as a symbol for gang. They may add the emoji “A” and emoji “NG” to erase any doubt.

Or they’ll use a cluster of emojis, like the one below. It means “Do you have any weed?”

The emoji combo of a man running and scissors is a threat to cut or stab someone.

“This is like taking it to the next level,” Foston said. “That’s scary.”

Detective Al Smith of the Violent Crimes and Gang Unit in Burlington said that the emoji communication code started with gangs in the western and northern parts of the country.

“They like to share everything. It’s a common trend with gangs,” Smith said.

Maxwell looked at the Twitter feed of a well-known Chicago gang member and found the gas pump emojis and others with multiple meanings, along with plenty of threats.

That gang member was killed three years ago.

“The trend is, by the time we find out about it, they have either used it or have moved on to something else,” said Smith.

That’s where things can get complicated. The alternative meanings of the emojis change often, because gangs know that investigators are on to them. Different gangs use the emojis in different ways, so it can be tough for police, and parents, to break the code, which is why Price said parents have to make the effort to know what the pictures mean.

“It’s like music and technology,” said Price. “You have to stay up on it all the time.”

“I have to tell them (my children) all the time, ‘It’s not necessarily you,’” Foston said. “’It’s the people around you. And I don’t know everybody that you communicate with or talk to.’”

*** BTW, as a warning: Parents beware: Kids are using this secret emoji language

How gang members could be using emojis | FOX13

In the secret code of New York gangs, texting two thumbs up doesn’t mean everything is OK.

It means you’re a member of the Harlem Crips, a ruthless band of hoodlums who have terrorized upper Manhattan for decades, according to police.

They say violent city street toughs have turned to cutesy emoji and other digital imagery to communicate with each other, using seemingly innocuous symbols as tools of murder, assault, rape and robbery.

“Social media is something the juveniles and youth are constantly using,” said NYPD Sgt. Leo Nugent of the Bronx Gang Squad, noting that the gas pump has become a universal symbol for “gang.”

“If I’m in a gang mode, I’ll put that up,” he said.

The Crips opt for the two thumbs-up emoji, with the knuckles facing each other, because they resemble the letter “H.”

Their longstanding rivals, the Bloods, signal their affiliation with an image of a magician’s top hat.

They even go after each other with emoji, posting other gangs’ symbols upside down as a sign of disrespect.

And they livestream video from their opponents’ turf on Snapchat, a type of taunting known as “cyberbanging.”

Gangs have learned to avoid Facebook, which police have scoured for years for evidence used to lock up suspected leaders.

“They call Facebook ‘Fedbook’ now, because if you talk on Facebook, the feds will be monitoring,” Nugent said.

Gangbangers now prefer WhatsApp, CoverMe, Kik Messenger and Yubo — a dating app marketed to teens — where their messages quickly disappear, making it harder for cops to track them, according to lawmen.

“They’re pretty smart,” said Detective Belinda Delgado, also with the Bronx Gang unit. “WhatApp — the minute you delete it from your phone, it disappears.”

Messages sent in chat apps are not visible to the public, so there’s no way for cops to monitor conversations.

Nugent said gangs are using emoji to recruit new members and to demand they commit crimes.

He said gangs might order new members to run a credit card or check scam, using digital symbols of a man running, a money bag and a credit card.

“Members we have identified will ask for anyone who is 18 and over and who has a valid ID to private message them,” Delgado said.

Gang activity is also carried out on gaming consoles, according to Nugent.

In one robbery, a Crip set up a purported cellphone sale while chatting via PlayStation. When the victim showed up, someone pulled a gun on him and robbed him, Nugent said.

“In these chats sometimes people sell items, sneakers, headphones or cellphones, etc.,” Nugent said. “The gamers can pull up pictures of each other, so they know who they are communicating with.”

Police rely heavily on confidential informants (CIs) to fill them in on gang methods, according to Delgado.

“A CI who says, ‘Hey, our set uses Snapchat, and we communicate there when we have meetings’ . . . when we have a problem he gets us the screenshots.

“Without a court order, we can not monitor in real-time.”

The NYPD has enlisted parents to monitor potential gang activity on social media, and teaches them what to look for at gang-awareness seminars.

“I can’t go to every kid and look through his phone, but the parent can,” Nugent said.

Police said teens with big social-media followings should be a red flag for parents.

“If your kid has 3,000-5,000 friends — that could be a problem if you live in a certain neighborhood,” Nugent said.

 

Waivers? China Pharmaceuticals Killing Americans

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Primer:

Image result for chinese pharmaceuticals
In part from Reuters: “My friend President Xi said that he would stop the sale of fentanyl to the United States – this never happened and many Americans continue to die,” Trump said in a tweet.

“We’re losing thousands of people to fentanyl,” he later told reporters.

The Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fentanyl is an opioid painkiller 50 times more potent than heroin, and has a central role in the devastating U.S. opioid crisis. In the United States, fentanyl and all of its analogues are controlled substances subject to strict regulation.

More than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths, mostly from fentanyl related substances, were recorded in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Image result for chinese pharmaceuticals

Added from Bloomberg:

China has become the world’s largest supplier of active pharmaceutical ingredients, or API, providing key components to drugmakers worldwide. But a yearlong recall of tainted heart drugs taken by millions of Americans is prompting U.S. national security officials to ask whether China’s growing role in the pharmaceutical supply chain could pose a threat to the health of military personnel.

“The national security risks of increased Chinese dominance of the global API market cannot be overstated,” Christopher Priest, the acting deputy assistant director for health care operations and Tricare for the Defense Health Agency, told a U.S.-China advisory panel last week in Washington.

The Defense Health Agency manages much of the health care of military members, including prescription drugs.

Concerns about the safety and efficacy of Chinese-made drugs are rising at a time of heightened trade tensions between Washington and Beijing. Last week, Trump unveiled plans for new tariffs on Chinese goods; China plans to halt imports of U.S. crops in response. The yuan sank on Monday against the dollar.

The National Security Council is looking into Chinese drug manufacturing and trying to identify the most at-risk medications, Priest told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in Washington, without elaborating. The National Security Council declined to comment.

The Defense Health Agency is supposed to use drugs that comply with the Trade Agreements Act, a 1979 law that requires many federal purchases to be made in the U.S. or another compliant country. China isn’t on the approved list, but the agency has waivers for almost 150 drugs they otherwise wouldn’t be able to procure, Priest said. The TAA covers only finished products, not their components.

Many drugs taken by military members and civilians have active ingredients made in China. While drugmakers typically don’t disclose where every molecule in a pill comes from, the recall of contaminated blood-pressure drugs has shown that many of their active components originated in Chinese factories.

Rocket Fuel

Larry Wortzel, a member of the U.S.-China commission and a military retiree, said four of his blood-pressure medications were recalled in three months. Wortzel’s pills, versions of a drug called valsartan, were manufactured in India but had active ingredients from China.

“They were contaminated with rocket fuel,” Wortzel said. “I imagine active people have the same problem. This affects the readiness of our troops.”

The recalled valsartan contained a probable carcinogen known as NDMA, a manufacturing byproduct once used to make rocket fuel and also found in grilled and cured meats.

Priest called the recalls “a never-ending saga” and a “wake-up call.”

The recalls began in July 2018 with valsartan made by China’s Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Co. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has largely blamed the company’s manufacturing process for creating the NDMA, which went undetected for as long as four years. Drugmakers in other countries who used similar processes have also had to recall blood-pressure pills.

Some valsartan purchased by the Defense Logistics Agency and later recalled was TAA-compliant, said Patrick Mackin, a spokesman for the DLA. The agency manages the supply chain for the U.S. military, including ensuring pharmaceuticals make their way to military treatment facilities. With valsartan in shortage, according to the FDA, the agency sought a TAA waiver for valsartan on July 15, Mackin said.

A Bloomberg investigation this year detailed doubts among U.S. health officials about the data generic-drug companies, including Zhejiang Huahai and others involved in the valsartan recalls, use to prove their products are safe and effective.

“We wouldn’t have our aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines built in China, and for very important medications, we really should look at what it takes to purchase based on value not just price,” Rosemary Gibson, the author of the book “China Rx,” told the commission. “We want cheap, we can buy cheap. But what’s missing from the whole equation is quality.”

Shortage Fears

Quality isn’t the only concern. Shortages could also arise from attempts by the Chinese to cut off supply, particularly amid the U.S.-China trade standoff.

“If China shut the door on exports, our hospitals would cease to function, so this has tremendous urgency,” Gibson said.

Priest said pharmaceutical companies should be compelled, using the buying power of the entire federal government, to maintain the infrastructure to make drugs without relying on countries like China.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the FDA’s ability to police foreign manufacturing. The committee’s leaders asked the agency for more information on the valsartan recall in June, including about a dispute between senior officials and an agency inspector who raised red flags at Zhejiang Huahai more than a year before the NDMA was detected. The panel also asked the Government Accountability Office to look at the FDA’s oversight of foreign drug manufacturing.

“Shame on us for not paying attention to something so critical and assuming, which has been the orthodoxy for a long time, that the industry would regulate itself,” Benjamin Shobert, senior associate for international health at The National Bureau of Asian Research, told the commission.

 

Venezuelan Shipwreck Defines Drug Route

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Written by
Venezuela Investigative Unit

The sinking of a small boat heading from Venezuela to Curaçao and the disappearance of all the migrants aboard suggest that drug trafficking groups are also controlling human smuggling routes in the region.

On June 7, the group of 32 migrants, along with three crew members, set sail from Punta de Aguide in Venezuela’s Falcón state, on the Caribbean coast. On June 11, the boat was was declared missing, and a month later, the whereabouts of it and its passengers remain unknown.

The disappearance was reported as a shipwreck, an increasingly common disaster in the Caribbean as Venezuelans resort to desperate measures to flee the country. So far this year, three shipwrecks involving over 80 migrants have been reported.

After the latest shipwreck, family members reported that all the migrants had been wearing life-jackets. Yet only one body has been recovered to date — that of Elio Ramones, identified in Curaçao on June 12. To the surprise of authorities, his corpse seemed fresh, suggesting that the man had died several days after the supposed shipwreck.

Oswaldo Rodríguez León, Falcon’s security secretary who is coordinating the search for the missing, said that “it is not possible for no trace to be found of the 32 people who disappeared in that shipwreck; the bodies should be floating if they were drowned. We must investigate [the fact] that pirates could have taken them.”

On July 11, two men were arrested for recruiting the migrants in their hometown of Vela de Coro, along Venezuela’s northern coast.

But the arrests have brought authorities no closer to finding the disappeared.
In June, survivors of a previous shipwreck exposed a human trafficking route used to transport vulnerable women and children from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago, where they were sold into the sex trade.

After the latest shipwreck, residents in Falcón told InSight Crime that human smuggling is used as a front for drug shipments to the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which are between 15 to 50 miles off the coast of Venezuela.

According to local sources, both cocaine and marijuana arrive overland and are stored in huts along the beaches of Falcón. It is then loaded onto small boats by night and shipped to neighboring islands under the guise of migrant transports, in quantities of up to 8,000 kilograms per day.

Although not officially corroborated, the locals’ claims are supported by recent large drug seizures on the Lara-Falcón highway, headed for the Falcón coast.

Mapa mostrando as ilhas ABC - Aruba, Bonaire e Curaçao e ...

Migrants are lured into the scheme by the low rates charged. The 32 missing people had reportedly paid $400 for the journey, compared to the standard rate of between $650 and $700.
In Vela de Coro, InSight Crime spoke to three families whose loved ones were aboard the shipwrecked boat and who are now missing. They said that following the disappearance they have begun their own investigations, including making inquiries with relatives on Curaçao. They claim that the missing boat was carrying a drug shipment to Curaçao and that the shipment did arrive, but 500 kilograms lighter than expected, giving rise to their belief that the migrants were kidnapped because the captain did not deliver the full drug shipment.

Full circle - Drugs trafficking in the Caribbean

The families have also begun searching hills near Punta de Aguide, where they believe the migrants were held before boarding the boats. Helicopters, however, are needed to comb over the mountainous territory largely controlled by drug traffickers.

Relatives of the missing migrants point to the inadequate official response as evidence of criminal complicity. Although the authorities were notified within a day of the disappearance, a search was not initiated until June 11, four days later.

Furthermore, authorities are alleged to have known of the voyage before the boat set sail. The family members who spoke with InSight Crime said that the migrants had intended to depart on June 6, but were intercepted by officials from the country’s criminal investigation unit (Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminalísticas – CICPC) who stole some of their belongings, including mobile phones, and took $1,000 from the captain. The migrants spent the night hiding in the woods before setting sail the following evening.

CICPC officials have also allegedly been involved in previous cases of predation on migrants, including the sex trafficking route to Trinidad and Tobago exposed in June.

This is not the first boatload of Venezuelan migrants to disappear. A boat vanished on May 16 in route to Trinidad and Tobago, and no corpses, wreckage or surviving passengers have been found. Hat tip to InSight for continued stellar investigations/reporting.

More ‘Narco-Subs’ Still Out There

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The clip, which appears to have been recorded via helmet cam, ends with the narco sub crew opening the hatch, and emerging with their hands in the air.

The footage is from just one of 14 similar drug interdictions that the Munro and two other Coast Guard cutters pulled off between May and July 2019 along the coasts of Mexico and Central and South America, according to a July 11 statement from the U.S. Coast Guard Pacific Area.

***

The NarcoSub: A Cutaway Illustration | Earthly Mission

InsightCrime: The operation, which took place on June 18, ended with the arrest of five smugglers and the seizure of the cocaine valued at $232 million.

The US Coast Guard has seen an uptick in these vessels recently. In a span of two months in 2017, the Coast Guard stopped seven “low-profile drug smuggling vessels,” according to a news release, seizing around 10,300 kilograms of cocaine worth more than $306 million.

Authorities in Colombia are also seeing an increase in this trafficking method.

In August of 2018, for example, Colombia’s navy intercepted two semi-submersible vessels, one of which was carrying more than two tons of drugs valued at $66 million, and the other which was carrying more than 1,700 kilograms of cocaine. By September of the same year, the Colombian navy had captured 14 semi-submersibles in the Pacific Ocean, more than three times the prior year, Business Insider reported.

Drug submarines largely depart from Colombia’s Pacific coast, where mangroves provide the perfect cover for submarine builders.

The increasing use of so-called narco-submarines to smuggle drugs between Colombia and the United States reflects two realities of the cocaine trade: coca production is at an all-time high in Colombia, and traffickers still see the high seas as one of the most effective ways to move drugs.

In 2018, coca cultivation in Colombia stood at 208,000 hectares, just a fraction less than the record 209,000 hectares seen in 2017. Such a bonanza has led traffickers to turn to all types of maritime transport.

The longtime smuggling method of concealing cocaine within cargo ships docking at US ports has been employed by traffickers recently, evidenced by massive drug seizures at ports in New York and Philadelphia.

Traffickers also clearly see semi-submersible vessels — first used by Colombian drug smugglers in the early 1990s — as an effective method of delivery. These vessels are largely employed to skirt improved radar technology and authorities’ use of high-speed boats.

Sitting below the waterline, semi-submersible vessels usually just have their exhaust pipes above the surface. As far back as 2009, such vessels could be constructed for as little as $50,000 and assembled in less than 90 days. Since then, they have only become faster, more sophisticated and likely cheaper to build.

Traffickers have also used fully submersible versions, which cost millions of dollars to build but have enough room for a few crew members and massive drug hauls.

The uptick in interdictions of semi-submersible vessels shows that the Coast Guard’s tripling of resources in the Pacific has been effective. Yet traffickers’ continued use of submarines likely indicates that a portion still manage to get through.

Even when stopped, these submarines can prove frustrating for authorities. They are built to be easily sunk, and their crews are difficult to prosecute, once the drug cargo and vessel sit at the bottom of the ocean.

***

A 2008 U.S. military Southern Command report predicted that semi-submersible vessels would soon be able carry 330 tons north each year or close to half of all cocaine moving north.

There is some evidence this may already be the case. A 2010 United Nations report on The Globalization of Crime said that in 2008, 46 percent of all cocaine seized by Colombia in the Pacific was found on semi-submersibles. With the U.S. estimating that 69 percent of cocaine entering the country in 2007 left Colombia via the Pacific, semi-submersibles have in the last few years been responsible for a very sizeable proportion of the global cocaine trade. More here.

2008 documentary on drug subs.