Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes

The Even Darker side of the Downward Spiral, Venezuela

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Primer: It is just a few days ago, that Russia was muscling the United States with regard to policy in Venezuela. Really Moscow?

Image result for venezuela protests ABC

Russia Warns Against US Interference in Venezuela, Calls for Dialogue

Russia’s foreign ministry voiced its concern over violence by right-wing protests in Venezuela while rebuking recent threats by the U.S. Southern Command, saying these would only stoke violence and ultimately act against U.S. interests. More here.

Meanwhile: Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA, sent a tanker in October to the Caribbean with the expectation that its cargo of crude would fetch about $20 million – money the crisis-stricken nation desperately needs.

Instead, the owner of the tanker, the Russian state-owned shipping conglomerate Sovcomflot, held the oil in hopes of collecting partial payment on $30 million that it says PDVSA owes for unpaid shipping fees.

Despite a longstanding alliance between Venezuela and Russia, Sovcomflot sued PDVSA in St. Maarten, a Dutch island on the northeast end of the Caribbean.

“The ship owners … imposed garnishment on the aforementioned oil cargo,” reads a March decision by the St. Maarten court.

Five months after crossing the Caribbean, the NS Columbus discharged its cargo of crude at a storage terminal on St. Eustatius, an island just south of St. Maarten, under a temporary decision by the court. Another tribunal in England will decide if Sovcomflot will ultimately take the oil.

***

Update: Reuters: A prison riot in Venezuela’s eastern state of Anzoategui has left at least 12 people dead and 11 wounded, a spokesman at the Prisons Ministry said on Wednesday, the latest incident in the crisis-hit country’s overcrowded and violent jail system.

Venezuela’s public prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the deaths of “several” inmates on Tuesday during a shootout between the prisoners at the Jose Antonio Anzoategui prison.

Critics have said that Venezuela’s prisons are controlled by gangs with ready access to machine guns and even hand grenades.

“There are 12 people dead, nine shot, two due to drug overdoses, and one due to multiple injuries,” the spokesman told Reuters, asking not to be identified by name because he was not authorized to speak to media about the riot.

“It’s a prison that was going through a transition … the clashes were between those who wanted it and those who didn’t,” the official said in reference to a government push to end overcrowding and weapons in jails.

Further details were not immediately available. It was not immediately clear if all the dead were inmates.

Venezuela is one of the world’s most violent countries and inmates often plan kidnappings and robberies from their cells.

 Dark Times in Venezuela Signal Bright Future for Organized Crime

Venezuela Today

The social unrest in Venezuela over the last two weeks has been the most widespread since Leopoldo López, the opposition leader, was arrested and subsequently imprisoned by the administration of President Nicolás Maduro in 2015.

The latest anti-government demonstrations were sparked by a decision by the country’s Supreme Court, which is controlled by the regime, to nullify the National Assembly, which is dominated by the opposition. The Supreme Court later backtracked, but it was too late — critics of the regime had been emboldened once again by the audacious move. Luisa Ortega Díaz, the country’s attorney general and traditionally a supporter of Maduro, also condemned the Supreme Court’s attempt to consolidate power, further eroding Maduro’s legitimacy.

Their indignation was stoked by the move a few days later to ban Henrique Capriles, a prominent member of the opposition, from politics for 15 years. Capriles, who has run twice as a presidential candidate, is one of the opposition’s strongest hopes for winning presidential elections against Maduro’s United Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela – PSUV) at the end of 2018.

A chronic economic recession in Venezuela has provoked sky-high inflation, shortages of basic foods and goods, and a collapse in the health and education systems. Maduro’s popularity has dropped steadily, yet the Venezuelan people have so far showed incredible tolerance for what many of them have been reduced to — searching for food in the trash, waiting for hours in line to buy basic goods, often at inflated prices, and scouring the country for black market medicines as they watch their family members suffer and even die.

But the current economic and social predicament has had another sinister consequence: It has fed the growth of criminality and organized crime to unprecedented levels.

Venezuela’s homicide rate is one of the highest in the world, and Caracas is now the deadliest city on earth. New forms of organized crime have emerged in the country’s prisons, within its armed forces and on its streets in the form of megabandas since Hugo Chávez took power in 1999. Drug trafficking has penetrated the highest levels of the current regime, all the way up to the family of President Maduro. Armed, civilian groups known as colectivos, which were embraced and nurtured by Chávez as defenders of the revolution, have gone rogue and are increasingly supporting themselves through criminal earnings. Unbridled corruption has allowed for kleptocrats to plunder the country’s public coffers via artificial exchange rates and the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA).

Below, we look at some possible future scenarios and their implications for organized crime.

The Regime Remains or Renews

Criminal elements within the regime and outside it would like nothing more than to maintain the status quo.

The armed forces are the muscle and political backbone of the sitting government. Out of Maduro’s 32 government ministers, 11 of them are acting or retired military officers. Some have been sanctioned or indicted by the United States for their links to drug trafficking (see graphic below). The armed forces have deepened their role in transnational cocaine trafficking since 1999, in part as a direct result of political decisions by Hugo Chávez, and profit from other criminal incomes such as the sale of government-subsidized contraband petrol on the Colombian border and the process of food distribution, of which they are in charge. The National Guard controls the nation’s borders, airports and ports and has been implicated in some of the biggest cocaine seizures in recent years.

Venezuela-Gov Drugs insightcrime

Criminality isn’t just limited to military members of the government. Vice President Tareck El-Aissami was recently sanctioned by the United States for his alleged role in drug trafficking, dating back to his time as governor of the state of Aragua.

Should Maduro decide to fall on his sword, El Aissami is in line to replace him as president. That could result in a political shakeup and give the regime a chance to renew itself with some internal changes and shifts. If El Aissami changed tack on the regime’s economic policies and reversed some of the damage done in recent years, he could improve the PSUV’s chance of winning presidential elections at the end of next year — something that Maduro almost certainly couldn’t pull off at this stage.

It is unclear, however, which way El Aissami, a party hardliner, would go if he became president, and his status as a suspected drug trafficker might not inspire new confidence in Venezuelans already sick of corruption and the abuse of power within the current system.

For other criminal elements, maintaining the status quo remains the best option. The armed pro-government colectivos, many of which are perceived as violent thugs by those living in territories they control, depend utterly on the socialist regime for their survival. InSight Crime investigations in the 23 de Enero neighborhood of Caracas, once a bastion of Chavismo, show that these groups are increasingly profiting from criminal activities such as extortion and micro-trafficking.

They are also involved in anti-crime raids, known as Operation Liberation and Protection of the People (Operación de Liberación y Protección del Pueblo – OLP), in which they work alongside state security forces to supress criminal groups and megabandas.

Those raids were instigated as the result of the government’s failed “peace zone” policy, which handed swathes of territory over to the criminal gangs that occupied them. In effect, the plan made megabandas the de facto law in those areas, because security forces were prohibited from entering without prior permission. Many of those peace zones still exist. Although the megabandas openly attack patrols and headquarters of Venezuelan security forces, and have been forced to regroup following the elimination of many of their original leaders, they continue to run their criminal economies that include extortion, kidnapping, contract killing and micro-trafficking.

As for the country’s prisons, criminal business has never been so good, even though violence and overcrowding are serious human rights problems. The creation in 2011 of a Ministry of Penitentiary Services effectively handed governance of the country’s jails to the powerful bosses on the inside, known as “pranes,” who now run them like their own fiefdoms. Violence remains one of the main means of maintaining control.

The Regime and the Opposition Form a Joint Government

The decision to reverse the Supreme Court ruling to annul the National Assembly could be a sign that the Maduro administration is faltering. The Miami Herald reported this week that the president has secretly offered the opposition a deal that would result in regional elections supposed to take place this year, in which the opposition looks set to win a strong foothold.

Given the hostility between the government and the opposition, and the failure of Vatican-monitored talks at the end of last year, this seems like the least likely scenario. Should it happen, it is likely to be thwarted by infighting and disagreement between the different sides. The coalition would have to come to an agreement on long-term and fundamental issues such as the role of the military in the country, security, the prison system and economic controls.

In this unlikely scenario, the main casualty could be the colectivos, which the Maduro administration might be forced to call to heel as a condition of a joint government. They may have limits put on their weapons as well as their role as repressors of the media and critical protests. Other than that, there would be little change on the ground in the short term as far as criminal dynamics are concerned.

Armed Forces Stage a Coup or Force Maduro into a Political Transition

The importance of the support of the armed forces for President Maduro and the regime cannot be overstated. But factions have turned against the regime before, as was seen in the failed coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002, which removed him from power for a couple of days.

In the short term, the colectivos and the military itself would be the criminal elements most impacted by a move by parts of the military to force Maduro’s hand. The armed forces would want to assure their place at the table in the new government, and might offer the colectivos — who are despised and feared by the opposition — as a sacrificial lamb.

“Colectivos really imagine themselves as being put on the offing block as sacrificed pawns in a negotiated context,” Alejandro Velasco, author of the book Barrio Rising, told InSight Crime. “They very much imagine that the struggle to come is going to be a struggle, not against the opposition, but really against the military in the context of survival. Both of them are kind of in a maneuvre for survivability in a transition context.”

Should this scenario arise, the political uncertainty it could generate might push the reality on the streets in Venezuela to get worse before improving. It would have little immediate negative impact on the megabandas or the criminal enterprises being run in the prisons. If anything, criminality and impunity would only increase, giving these elements more freedom of movement. Longer-term, an administration capable of governing could take steps to curb their criminal freedoms and fiefdoms.

SEE ALSO: Venezuela News and Profiles

The military, as broker and mediator, would have to make some concessions of its own. Should the armed forces be involved in brokering or forcing this potential transition, implicit in its negotiations would be the continuation of its stewardship of the country’s ports, borders and airports — a fundamental element of its role in profiting from transnational organized crime.

The amount of coca and cocaine being produced in neighboring Colombia is booming, and the network of Venezuelan military officials involved in the drug trade, known loosely as the Cartel of the Suns, would want to keep its interests safe.

But heads would have to roll as part of a change in government, and many on the chopping block would be those military officials seen as being the most corrupt and most loyal to the socialist regime. There is little doubt, however, that they would be replaced with others equally willing to profit from their power and position in this key transit nation in the global cocaine trafficking industry.

China is Charged With Control of North Korea, Bad Idea?

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President Trump has conferred to Asian leaders over the matter of North Korea’s missile tests and the threats of a nuclear strike. Many conversations have been filling the phone wires that put President Xi of China in charge of handling Kim Jung Un. Okay, but can or will China do all that is necessary and will it resolve the threat of an escalated war in the region? The answer is unknown.

In part from FNC: U.S. commercial satellite images indicated increased activity around North Korea’s nuclear test site, while Kim has said that the country’s preparation for an ICBM launch is in its “final stage.”

South Korea’s Defense Ministry has said the North appears ready to conduct such “strategic provocations” at any time. South Korean Acting Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn has instructed his military to strengthen its “immediate response posture” in case North Korea does something significant on the April 25 anniversary of its military. North Korea often marks significant dates by displaying military capability.

In a statement released late Friday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry accused Trump of driving the region into an “extremely dangerous phase” with his sending of the aircraft carrier and said the North was ready to stand up against any kind of threated posed by the United States.

With typical rhetorical flourish, the ministry said North Korea “will react to a total war with an all-out war, a nuclear war with nuclear strikes of its own style and surely win a victory in the death-defying struggle against the U.S. imperialists.”

*** So, China appears to have taken some steps to send North Korea a message like refusing a coal shipment. But was that just a one off tactic? Cutting off oil and gasoline shipments…was that too yet another gesture by China? How about access to banking and ATM machines?

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — No modern airport terminal is complete without an ATM, and Pyongyang’s now has two. But they don’t work — because of new Chinese sanctions, according to bank employees — and it’s not clear when they will.

ATMs are an alien enough concept in North Korea that those in the capital’s shiny new Sunan International Airport have a video screen near the top showing how they work and how to set up an account to use them. The explanatory video is in Korean, but the machines, which are meant primarily for Chinese businesspeople and tourists, don’t give out cash in the North Korean currency.

Humm right? But can we really trust China to go the distance to stop North Korea? I offer this answer…NO.

China has been angry with the United States over deploying the THAAD missile defense system in S. Korea. China is one of the largest know hacking networks in the world…remember that? Alright, how about this lil gem?

***

Researchers claim China trying to hack South Korea missile defense efforts

Deployment of THAAD upsets China, seen as espionage tool.

Sean Gallagher: Chinese government officials have been very vocal in their opposition to the deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea, raising concerns that the anti-ballistic missile system’s sensitive radar sensors could be used for espionage. And according to researchers at the information security firm FireEye, Chinese hackers have transformed objection to action by targeting South Korean military, government, and defense industry networks with an increasing number of cyberattacks. Those attacks included a denial of service attack against the website of South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which the South Korean government says originated from China.

FireEye’s director of cyber-espionage analysis John Hultquist told the Wall Street Journal that FireEye had detected a surge in attacks against South Korean targets from China since February, when South Korea announced it would deploy THAAD in response to North Korean missile tests. The espionage attempts have focused on organizations associated with the THAAD deployment. They have included “spear-phishing” e-mails carrying attachments loaded with malware along with “watering hole” attacks that put exploit code to download malware onto websites frequented by military, government, and defense industry officials.

FireEye claims to have found evidence that the attacks were staged by two groups connected to the Chinese military. One, dubbed Tonto Team by FireEye, operates from the same region of China as previous North Korean hacking operations. The other is known among threat researchers as APT10, or “Stone Panda”—the same group believed to be behind recent espionage efforts against US companies lobbying the Trump administration on global trade. These groups have also been joined in attacks by two “patriotic hacking” groups not directly tied to the Chinese government, Hultquist told the Journal—including one calling itself “Denounce Lotte Group” targeting the South Korean conglomerate Lotte. Lotte made the THAAD deployment possible through a land swap with the South Korean government.

APT = Advanced Persistent Threat 10 refers to China as noted here with this summary which was found as early as 2009.  In part it includes:

“Operation Cloud Hopper” uses internet addresses also used by the threat actor known in the cybersecurity community as “APT10.” Using a combination of unique hacking tools and open source software, it has attempted to gather information about diplomatic and political organizations, as well as intellectual property, according to the report.

APT10 was identified in a 2013 report by FireEye detailing its use of the Poison Ivy family of malware, which the new report says ceased after FireEye revealed its findings. Also in 2013, FireEye identified APT1, which appears to be Unit 61398 of China’s People’s Liberation Army. The PwC-BAE report notes that the “Operation Cloud Hopper” attacks tend to occur during business hours in China.

Since 2009, APT10 has been observed to target mostly government and U.S. defense organizations, but now “has almost certainly been undertaking a global operation of unprecedented size and scale targeting a number of MSPs,” the report says.

New Chiquita Papers, Bankrolled Terror in Columbia

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Washington, D.C., April 24, 2017 – Ten years ago, Chiquita Brands International became the first U.S.-based corporation convicted of violating a U.S. law against funding an international terrorist group—the paramilitary United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). But punishment for the crime was reserved only for the corporate entity, while the names of the individual company officials who engineered the payments have since remained hidden behind a wall of impunity.

As Colombian authorities now prepare to prosecute business executives for funding groups responsible for major atrocities during Colombia’s decades-old conflict, a new set of Chiquita Papers, made possible through the National Security Archive’s FOIA lawsuit, has for the first time made it possible to know the identities and understand the roles of the individual Chiquita executives who approved and oversaw years of payments to groups responsible for countless human rights violations in Colombia.

Today’s posting features the first in a series of articles published jointly by the National Security Archive and Verdad Abierta highlighting new revelations from the Chiquita Papers, identifying the people behind the payments, and examining how the Papers can help to clarify lingering questions about the case.

* * *

The New Chiquita Papers: Secret Testimony and Internal Records Identify Banana Executives who Bankrolled Terror in Colombia

 

In the last few years of the 1990s, Chiquita Brands International, the U.S.-based fruit company, fell under a cloud of suspicion. An exposé in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the company’s hometown paper, revealed some of the banana giant’s dirtiest secrets—among them: the messy fallout from bribes paid to Colombian customs agents by officials at Banadex, Chiquita’s wholly-owned Colombian subsidiary.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the U.S. financial crimes watchdog—was also looking into the bribery allegations. The agency subpoenaed thousands of Chiquita’s internal records and soon made a startling discovery. Tucked away in the same accounts where Chiquita concealed the bribes were millions of dollars in additional payments to a rogues’ gallery of armed groups, including leftist insurgents, right-wing paramilitaries, notorious army brigades, and the controversial, but government-approved, “Convivir” militias.

SEC Testimony of Robert Kistinger, January 6, 2000, p. 87.

With these documents in hand, the SEC deposed seven Chiquita executives, each of whom played a different role in administering the so-called “sensitive payments.” In secret testimony on January 6, 2000 Robert F. Kistinger, head of Chiquita’s Banana Group based in Cincinnati, Ohio, told the SEC he had direct knowledge about many of the payments to armed groups, especially when they began in the late 1980s, but claimed that he had become less and less involved with the specifics over time. In his view, the amounts of money paid to the groups—hundreds of thousands of dollars per year—were simply not large enough to affect the company’s bottom line.

Kistinger, who is a named defendant in a massive civil litigation case pending against former Chiquita executives in U.S. federal court, and a likely target of future investigations in Colombia, said it was “not realistic” to halt Chiquita’s Colombia operations over such insignificant amounts of money. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it doesn’t hit the scorecard.”

“We’re not going to stop doing business in Colombia, because, you know, we’re going to have to spend an extra $25,000. That’s not realistic. Right?”

In 2013, Chiquita brought a rarely-seen “reverse” Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the SEC in an effort to block the agency from releasing transcripts of these depositions (and thousands of additional documents) to the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research group based in Washington, D.C. Two years later, a federal appeals court panel rejected Chiquita’s claim, clearing the way for the release of more than 9,000 pages of the company’s most sensitive internal records.

It’s easy to see why the company would want to keep them under wraps. The secret, sworn statements from the SEC probe are the de facto oral history of Chiquita’s ties to terrorist groups in Colombia—a unique and damning firsthand account of how one multinational corporation developed and routinized a system of secret transactions with actors on all sides of the conflict in order to maintain normal business operations—even thrive—in one of the most conflictive regions of the world, all the while treating the payments as little more than the “cost of doing business in Colombia.”[1]

Chiquita auditor’s notes, ca. 1997.

This article is the first in a series from the National Security Archive and Verdad Abierta, the award-winning Colombian news website, highlighting new revelations from the Chiquita Papers, identifying the people behind the payments, and examining how the Papers can help to clarify lingering questions about the case. What was behind Chiquita’s decision to wind down payments to guerrillas and increase payments to their right-wing rivals? Exactly how much money did Chiquita pay to the various armed groups? What was the role of the Colombian security forces in encouraging the tilt toward paramilitaries? Did Chiquita knowingly fund specific acts of violence? And at what point did employees and executives with knowledge of the payments understand that the company was dealing with paramilitary death squads and not a government-sponsored militia group?

* * *

The new set of Chiquita Papers has for the first time made it possible to know the identities and understand the roles played by individual Chiquita executives like Kistinger who approved and oversaw years of payments to groups responsible for countless human rights violations in Colombia. These records are of particular importance now that Colombian authorities have signaled that they are prepared to prosecute business executives for funding groups that committed war crimes and other atrocities during the conflict.

Ten years ago, Chiquita became the first major multinational corporation convicted of “engaging in transactions with a specially-designated global terrorist.” In a March 2007 sentencing agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Chiquita admitted transferring some $1.7 million[2] to the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) from September 10, 2001, when the group was first named on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list, through June 2004, when the payments ceased.

Even after outside attorneys warned in February 2003 that it “[m]ust stop payments” to the outlaw paramilitary organization, Chiquita continued to pay the AUC for another 16 months. Until that point, Chiquita’s strategy, set forth by senior executives in Cincinnati, was to “just let them sue us, come after us.”[3]

The AUC was a loose federation of rightist militants and drug traffickers responsible for a terrible legacy of violent acts in Colombia going back to the 1980s. Chiquita began to pay the AUC sometime in 1996-1997, just as the group launched a nationwide campaign of assassinations and massacres aimed at unionists, political activists, public officials and other perceived guerrilla supporters, often working with the collaboration or complicity of Colombian security forces. Over the next several years, the AUC dramatically increased its numbers and firepower, raised its political profile, infiltrated Colombian institutions, drove thousands of Colombians from their homes, and for the first time challenged guerrilla groups for control of strategic areas around the country.

Chiquita agreed to pay a relatively modest $25 million fine as part of its deal with the DOJ, but not a single company executive has ever been held responsible for bankrolling the AUC’s wave of terror. Nor have any Chiquita officials faced justice for millions more in outlays to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), and practically every other violent actor in the region.

Efforts to hold individual Chiquita executives accountable for financing the groups are complicated by a deliberate decision on the part of the U.S. Justice Department to withhold the names of the people behind the payments scheme. At the September 2007 sentencing hearing in the terror payments case, U.S. government attorneys specifically argued against the public identification of the Chiquita officials “to protect the reputational and privacy interests of uncharged individuals.”

Instead, the Factual Proffer memorializing the plea agreement revolves around ten anonymous “Relevant Persons” identified only as “Individual A” through “Individual J.” The public version of a 2009 report by Chiquita’s Special Litigation Committee (SLC) likewise omits the names of most of the individuals identified in the report, replacing them with anonyms like “Chiquita Employee #2,” “Banadex Employee #1,” and “Chiquita lawyer.”

In 2011, the Archive published its first Chiquita Papers, posting, revealing, among other things, that the company appeared to have engaged in quid pro quos with guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia, contrary to the Factual Proffer’s finding that Chiquita had not derived any benefit from the payments.

The original Chiquita Papers revealed the company had engaged in quid pro quos with guerilla and paramilitary forces in Colombia

The first Chiquita Papers collection offered some important new revelations, but lacked a coherent contextual narrative. There were few indications as to who had written the documents, and it was nearly impossible to say for sure how the named individuals related to one another. Handwritten notes, auditing records, legal memos, and accounting schedules—among thousands of pages of internal records released under FOIA by the DOJ—offered tantalizing clues, but few concrete conclusions could be drawn from them.

The key that unlocks many of the mysteries of the Chiquita Papers is the secret testimony given by Kistinger and six other Chiquita officials during the SEC’s expansive bribery investigation. Through a relatively simple, if laborious, process of cross-referencing among the three sources, it is possible to identify almost all of the individuals whose names were scrubbed from the Factual Proffer, the SLC Report, and the SEC testimony—effectively stripping away the redactions that have shielded Chiquita personnel from scrutiny and that have helped guarantee impunity for individuals linked to the payments.

Jeff Sessions/FBI and MS-13

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Four members of the violent, foreign MS-13 gang were convicted on federal racketeering charges, some of which involved murder.

Miguel Zelaya, 20-years-old, Luis Ordonez-Vega, 36-years-old, Jorge Sosa, 24-years-old and William Gavidia, 23-years-old, were all convicted on a count of conspiracy to commit racketeering, according to the Charlotte Observer:

Zelaya, who also goes by “Most Wanted” and “Ne Ne” is a member of MS-13’s “Coronados Little Cycos Salvatrucha” clique. On Dec. 18, 2013, he shot and killed Jose Orlando Ibarra, an associate of The Latin Kings, a rival gang, the release said.

Ordonez-Vega, also known as “Big Boy,” is a member of the Brentwood Locos Salvatrucha” clique, according to the news release. On June 6, 2013, Ordonez-Vega shot and killed Noel Navarro Hernandez in a strip mall parking lot in Charlotte, believing the victim was a member of a rival gang.

Sosa, who goes by “Koki” and “Loco” is a member of the “Charlotte Locotes Salvatrucha” clique. Prosecutors say he’s been involved in multiple gang-related crimes. In Feb. 2008, he flashed MS-13 gang signs at a rival gang member’s mother and pointed a gun at her while they were stopped in traffic. In June, 2013, he was involved in a gang-related shooting where he and another person followed victims in a neighborhood in Charlotte and opened fire with a high-caliber rifle, the release said.

All of the gang members are either immigrants or the children of immigrants in the U.S. and they are also facing state charges for their crimes.

“Today’s guilty verdicts underscore that even though gang membership may in some ways ‘protect’ gangsters from outsiders, it certainly won’t protect them from the vast reach of the US. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners,” U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina Jill Westmoreland Rose said in a statement.

The MS-13 gang members were four of 37 who were charged with racketeering after an investigation into the criminal activity by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Thirty of the other gang members charged with racketeering are either awaiting sentencing or have pleaded guilty to the charges.

According to the U.S. District Attorney, Ordonez-Vega and Zelaya were convicted on charges to murder in aid of racketeering. Those charges are connected to two separate murders. Meanwhile, Sosa was convicted for attempted murder in the aid of racketeering.

***

Image result for ms-13  InSightCrime

In 2015 the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of three members of the gang who were funneling funds back to higher-ups in El Salvador from prison. These actions were an attempt “disrupt” MS-13’s financial network by cutting off profits from illegal activities in the United States, the Treasury Department said. In 2012 the Obama administration designated MS-13 a transnational crime organization and implemented sanctions against six members in 2013.

While the U.S. government attempts to target MS-13’s earnings, targeting its culture is proving more difficult. The fierce loyalty among members is unique, Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, told FOX Business.

“They’re very cohesive and often directed by imprisoned bosses in El Salvador to recruit and expand in American communities. That tends to mean there’s an aggressive internal enforcement mechanism which equates to internal discipline involving physical violence and murder for disrespect or betrayal,” he said.

The FBI in El Salvador Because of MS-13:

CNN Reported Dossier Basis for Trump Surveillance, But…

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The FBI last year used a dossier of allegations of Russian ties to Donald Trump’s campaign as part of the justification to win approval to secretly monitor a Trump associate, according to US officials briefed on the investigation.

The dossier has also been cited by FBI Director James Comey in some of his briefings to members of Congress in recent weeks, as one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation, according to US officials briefed on the probe.
This includes approval from the secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor the communications of Carter Page, two of the officials said. Last year, Page was identified by the Trump campaign as an adviser on national security. More here from CNN.
Okay, so everyone remains angry with James Comey right? Okay, well hold on….this could get complicated. We cant dismiss the notion that Obama and Susan Rice had a valid reason for their surveillance
actions, at least some as the below case was provided to the White House.
Enter Evigeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev.
Image result for evgeniy mikhailovich bogachev

U.S. v Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev et al by Brian Ries on Scribd

Bogachev was a case from 2014 investigated by CrowdStrike and then later offered help to the FBI office in Omaha and later the FBI office in Pittsburgh finally after countless months, ran a global cyber operation and succeeded in stopping international bank thefts in the millions of dollars. Many Russian immigrants located in Brighton Beach were recruited to be mules going to domestic banks, opening accounts and later withdrawing funds, cleaning all traces of the stolen millions. It should be noted that CrowdStrike was the same firm the Hillary campaign hired to investigate intrusions.

Image result for evgeniy mikhailovich bogachev

Now it gets even more interesting.

The matter of Bogachev with his named operation of ‘Business Club’ and his global cyber operatives hacking with sophisticated bots, malware and remote servers came to the attention of the Russian Federation. They liked what the Bogachev Zeus operation had the ability to do. So, top Kremlin officials allowed the operation to continue without prosecution if they would work to gather intelligence on the global reaction to Putin annexing Crimea and moving in on Ukraine.

All of this came to the attention also of U.S. based private cyber professional where they studied the code, the IP addresses, the servers, the patterns, names and other common cyber traits. The DNC hack attributions are a dovetail to the ‘Business Club’ operation due to style, coding, networks, language and server locations.

In 2015, the Obama State Department issued sanctions and a $3 million dollar bounty on Bogachev who operated with the alias of ‘Slavik’. Russia of course is not only not cooperating but refuses to admit any such action was real and the evidence is not vetted. This is a usual response by top Russian officials.

An estimated $100 million was stolen via cyber operations by Slavik and computers infected with various versions of Zeus still exist while the FBI was able to seized all those known to their sting operation.

The FBI described the cyber sting operation as hand to hand combat with Bogachev and his operation on the Zeus case was deemed successful. It is unknown at this time who and where is he still operating. The summary of this operation was taken from the full article published by ‘Wired’ under the title ‘The Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker’

Late last year, the DHS released a joint statement which read in part:

This activity by Russian intelligence services is part of a decade-long campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. Government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing, campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations; theft of information from these organizations; and the recent public release of some of this stolen information.  In other countries, Russian intelligence services have also undertaken damaging and disruptive cyber-attacks, including on critical infrastructure, in some cases masquerading as third parties or hiding behind false online personas designed to cause victim to misattribute the source of the attack.  The Joint Analysis Report provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government.

A great deal of analysis and forensic information related to Russian government activity has been published by a wide range of security companies.  The U.S. Government can confirm that the Russian government, including Russia’s civilian and military intelligence services, conducted many of the activities generally described by a number of these security companies.  The Joint Analysis Report recognizes the excellent work undertaken by security companies and private sector network owners and operators, and provides new indicators of compromise and malicious infrastructure identified during the course of investigations and incident response.  The U.S. Government seeks to arm network defenders with the tools they need to identify,, detect and disrupt Russian malicious cyber activity that is targeting our country’s and our allies’ networks.