Mexican Gulf Cartels Surveillance Systems

Posted on June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 by Denise Simon

From Breitbart:

The former Tamaulipas governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores was charged on May 27, 2015 on two counts, money laundering and crimes against the United States.

MCALLEN, Texas — The U.S. federal government has formally announced that yet another former governor from Mexico has now become a fugitive sought by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District Of Texas announced Friday morning that former Tamaulipas governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores has been charged with money laundering and money laundering conspiracy charges.

As previously reported by Breitbart Texas, Hernandez has been implicated in money laundering through a series of civil forfeiture cases accusing him of laundering bribe money that he received for government favors, as well as from Mexican drug traffickers including Los Zetas.

Hernandez, who was the governor from 2005 to 2010, is the second Tamaulipas governor to be criminally charged in the U.S. on money laundering charges connected to taking money from Mexican drug cartels. Tomas Yarrington Ruvalcaba, who served as governor before Hernandez, is currently facing money laundering and drug trafficking charges for his alleged role in helping the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas and other Mexican cartels.

It gets worse as Breitbart publishes the following:

Mexican authorities take down a complex surveillance system made up of a range of <a href= home security cameras, set up by the Gulf Cartel in the border city of Reynosa” width=”398″ height=”359″ />

REYNOSA, Tamaulipas – Once again, Mexican authorities have dismantled a complex video surveillance system set up by the Gulf Cartel in order to keep tabs on authorities, their rivals and their future victims. Breitbart Texas reported on the discovery and destruction of a similar system in May.

This time, authorities seized 39 video surveillance cameras set up around the city under orders from the criminal organization, information provided to Breitbart Texas by the Tamaulipas government revealed.

The seizure began on Tuesday evening, when state police officers spotted two men setting up one of the cameras in the Doctores (Doctor’s) neighborhood. Once in police custody, the two men told authorities that they had just finished setting up another 38 cameras around the city, the information provided by authorities revealed.

Under police guard, the two men took the authorities to the various spots where they had set up the cameras so that officers could take them down. The police did not release the names of the two suspects because the investigation into the cameras remains ongoing.

As previously reported by Breitbart Texas, last month Mexican authorities had discovered a sophisticated surveillance network in which the Gulf cartel placed video cameras in at least 52 different spots around the city. Some of the cameras worked wirelessly and would be controlled remotely.

At the time, Mexican officials confirmed to Breitbart Texas that the Gulf Cartel used the surveillance network in an effort to try to stay one step ahead of law enforcement, as well as to track their victims.

Honduran President at WH, Where is the Money?

Posted on June 17, 2015June 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

Juan Carlos Hernandez has been a busy man reaching out to the White House several times since 2014. He is after money and he is likely getting it.

Hernandez has a big problem that the White House and the State Department are overlooking….it is called corruption and Hondurans know it well. Earlier this month, the protests began against the president and the with some amazement the United Nations anti-corruption body actually uncovered corruption in Guatemala but not so much in Honduras. Hondurans are calling for the resignation of Hernandez and the country has one of the highest murder rates globally for 2014.

Honduras is a key country in the matter of the DACA insurgency of people coming across our southern border in 2014. The matter was so bad that both Obama and Biden spoke to President Hernandez on the phone in 2014 on humanitarian issues and that those fleeing the country are not eligible for the DACA program.

Still desperate, President Hernandez was in the United States and had important time allotted to him at the State Department that was part of a 2 day program titled ‘Americas Society and Council of the Americas’ where the charter is to cover items including LGBT rights, economic development and the rule of law.

At the core of the corruption charges against President Hernandez is social security embezzlement. In 2014, yet another Honduran official was arrested for stealing more than $330 million in public money from a health pension fund.

Under Hillary Clinton at the State Department and with collaboration with the World Bank loans for more than a billion dollars have been pledged and then the United States augmented those dollars with 200 and 300 million going separately to countries in the region. With all this monetary infusion, why no clean up in corruption or a global cocaine network or an exodus of Hondurans?

Well at 3:00 PM, on June 17, 2015, President Hernandez just left the White House again.

President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez speaks to reporters on June 17, 2015 in Washington, DC

In part from AFP news: Hernandez has come to Washington to meet with the new secretary general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, and with US Vice President Joe Biden to discuss the development plan.

President Barack Obama has asked Congress for one billion dollars for the initiative but Republicans in Congress have expressed reservations.

– Taking responsibility –

To overcome those misgivings Honduras will disclose details of the plan to leaders of the two chambers, Hernandez said.

A Central American region that is prosperous and peaceful “is a tremendous investment for the American people”, the president said.

“I would hope that the leaders in Washington would understand that,” he added.

Still, the American aid is only symbolic.

Passing the package, he said, would mean Washington acknowledges that a huge part of the problem is Americans’ appetite for drugs like cocaine that are produced in South America and smuggled through destitute nations like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to reach the streets of the United States.

“In the end, it is not so much the money. It is the message that the United States takes responsibility for generating violence and migration as a result of drug trafficking in the region,” he said.

Paying Too Much for United Nations Failures

Posted on June 17, 2015June 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

The summary failure of the United Nations in regard to the Congo. There more recently there is the admitted inability to stop the atrocities in Syria.

In 1945, the United Nations Charter, which was adopted and signed on June 26, 1945, is now effective and ready to be enforced.

The United Nations was born of perceived necessity, as a means of better arbitrating international conflict and negotiating peace than was provided for by the old League of Nations. The growing Second World War became the real impetus for the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union to begin formulating the original U.N. Declaration, signed by 26 nations in January 1942, as a formal act of opposition to Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis Powers.

The principles of the U.N. Charter were first formulated at the San Francisco Conference, which convened on April 25, 1945. It was presided over by President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and attended by representatives of 50 nations, including 9 continental European states, 21 North, Central, and South American republics, 7 Middle Eastern states, 5 British Commonwealth nations, 2 Soviet republics (in addition to the USSR itself), 2 East Asian nations, and 3 African states. The conference laid out a structure for a new international organization that was to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,…to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,…to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

Today, the United Nations is a failed global operation and the United States pays the largest share of the financial freight. All of it is too much.

By: Brett D. Schaefer is the Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.

America, we pay way too much for the United Nations

‘Each year the United States gives approximately $8 billion in mandatory payments and voluntary contributions to the United Nations and its affiliated organizations. The biggest portion of this money – about $3 billion this year – goes to the U.N.’s regular and peacekeeping budgets.

If that seems like a lot, it is—far more than anyone else pays And it’s also, in some cases, bad value for money.

The U.N. system for calculating member nations’ “fair share” payment toward its regular and peacekeeping budgets has increasingly shifted the burden away from the vast majority of the 193 members and onto a relative handful of high-income nations, especially the U.S. Indeed some nations pay next to nothing.

Over the last six decades, the share of the U.N. expenses borne by poor or small member states has steadily ratcheted downward to near- microscopic levels. From 1974 to 1998, the minimum mandatory payment for the regular budget for example, fell from 0.04 percent to 0.001 percent. For the peacekeeping budget, the minimum is 0.0001 percent.

The U.N. system for calculating member nations’ “fair share” payment toward its regular and peacekeeping budgets has increasingly shifted the burden away from the vast majority of the 193 members and onto a relative handful of high-income nations, especially the U.S. Indeed, some nations pay next to nothing.

In addition, over three quarters of the total U.N. membership get additional discounts, with the cost also shifted to wealthier countries.

The end result is a hugely skewed bill for U.N. expenses.

In 2015, 35 countries will be charged the minimum regular budget assessment of 0.001 percent which works out to approximately$28,269 each. Twenty countries will be charged the minimum peacekeeping assessment of 0.0001 percent or approximately $8,470 apiece.

By contrast, the U.S. is assessed 22 percent of the regular budget (approximately $622 million) and over 28 percent of the peacekeeping budget (approximately $2.402 billion).

Put another way, the U.S. will be assessed more than 176 other member states combined for the regular budget and more than 185 countries combined for the peacekeeping budget. Who says America isn’t exceptional!

This is more than a complaint about dollars. It’s also about the value received for those outsized contributions. Consider:

· An independent academic study assessing best and worst practices among aid agencies ranked U.N. organizations among the worst.

·Numerous reports, audits, and investigations have revealed mismanagement, fraud and corruption in procurement for U.N. peacekeeping.

· Studies and reports have identified U.N. peacekeepers as the source of the cholera outbreak that ravaged Haiti starting in 2010, leaving more than 8,000 dead and more than 600,000 seriously sickened.

· A 2014 study of eight of the nine U.N. peacekeeping operations with a mandate to protect civilians found that peacekeepers “did not report responding to 406 (80 per cent) of [the 570] incidents where civilians were attacked.”

· U.N. personnel have been accused of sexual exploitation and abuse in Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. Recent news stories from the Central African Republic and Haiti indicate the problem is still far too common and the U.N. is more interested in concealing the issue than in confronting it

· Atop all that, U.N. employees enjoy extremely generous benefits and salaries—over 32 percent higher than U.S. civil servants of equivalent rank.

Moreover, the U.N. and its employees enjoy broad protections and immunities and cannot be sued in national courts, arrested, or prosecuted for actions related to their official duties unless those immunities are waived. This places an extremely heavy responsibility on the U.N. to self-police, correct, and punish wrongdoing by the organization and its employees.

Unfortunately, oversight and accountability at the U.N. have historically been weak. And on the rare occasion when internal watchdogs bite, the organization moves to defang them.

Take the case of the Procurement Task Force (PTF) , a special U.N. unit that went to work in 2006 to root out corruption. It uncovered fraud, waste, and mismanagement involving contracts valued at more than $630 million. It led to misconduct findings and convictions of U.N. officials.

Unfortunately the PTF was eliminated in 2008—at the behest of countries angry about PTF actions against their nationals holding U.N. staff positions. The U.N. has not completed any major corruption cases since the PTF was eliminated.

Poor oversight is made worse by U.N. hostility toward its own whistleblowers. Only a few weeks ago, nine staffers from various U.N. organizations sent a letter to the Secretary-General asserting that the U.N. affords “little to no measure of real or meaningful protection for whistleblowers.”

The U.N. badly needs reform, but the U.S., despite the mammoth checks it writes, can’t reform the U.N. alone. In the one-nation, one-vote world of the U.N., it needs support from other nations. Unfortunately, many of them remain blasé about U.N. budget increases, corruption, and inefficiencies because the financial impact on them is miniscule.

To change the institution, the first thing that needs to change is the thumb-on-the-scales system that makes the U.S. the biggest bill-payer, but just one of 193 voting members when it comes to demanding honesty, efficiency and effectiveness in return for its over-generous payments.

Congress and the Obama administration have both said they want the United Nations to be more transparent and accountable and to use its resources more effectively. To make that happen, major donors must have a greater say in budgetary decisions, and smaller donors must assume financial responsibilities that lead them to undertake budgetary decisions and conduct serious oversight.

Every three years the U.N. General Assembly approves adjustment to its scale of assessments: 2015 is one of those years. The U.S. should not let this opportunity slip away to get more for its money—and make other nations actually try to make the U.N. live up to the image that the organization likes to show the world.’

If you agree that the United Nations should have funding cut, you’re in luck. Here is the link to sign the petition.

ISIS New Mansion for Their Headquarters

Posted on June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 by Denise Simon

WASHINGTON — An internal State Department assessment paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama administration and its foreign allies to combat the Islamic State’s message machine, portraying a fractured coalition that cannot get its own message straight.

The assessment comes months after the State Department signaled that it was planning to energize its social media campaign against the militant group. It concludes, however, that the Islamic State’s violent narrative — promulgated through thousands of messages each day — has effectively “trumped” the efforts of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations.

It also casts an unflattering light on internal discussions between American officials and some of their closest allies in the military campaign against the militants. A “messaging working group” of officials from the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, the memo says, “has not really come together.” More here.

Islamic State leaders claim to be living in luxury in a vast mansion seized from a billionaire Arab sheikh.

The jihadi group’s social media sites posted photographs of the spectacular mansion, under the headline: ‘A castle for the tyrants of Qatar in Palmyra’.

The sprawling hilltop mansion is similar in style to the soon-to-be London home of the current emir, who was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst.

Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, 55, one of the three wives of Qatar’s former emir Sheikh Haman bin Khalifa Al Thani, bought three prime properties in London’s Regent’s Park for an estimated £120million in 2013.

Once completed, the 13-bedroom palace will be the London home of Sheikh Hamad’s son, the 35-year-old Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad.

It is expected to be the most valuable residential property in London in private hands, with estimates claiming it will be worth about £280million.

It will also be the first residential property in the UK to break the £200million mark.

The family also own the Shard – the tallest skyscraper in Europe, Harrods and the Olympic Village.

In recent years, Qataris are thought to have bought almost one in 30 homes in London worth more than £2million.

Photo essay of the mansion is here.

The Fourth Reich, the essay of 2015 on Islamic State.

In a hard-hitting essay on ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) for The Daily Mail, the 2001 Nobel Prize winning author, V.S. Naipaul, wrote: “ISIS could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.” Among the writings on Islam and Muslims in recent years, Naipaul’s, as in the books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, have been perhaps the most incisive and penetrating in exploring the extremist politics of the global Islamist movement from inside of the Muslim world. And that ISIS on a rampage, as Naipaul observed, revived “religious dogmas and deadly rivalries between Sunnis and Shi’as, Sunnis and Jews and Christians is a giant step into darkness.”

Ever since the relatively obscure Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stepped forth on the pulpit of the Great Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, on June 28, 2014 to announce the rebirth of the Caliphate (abolished in 1924 by the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), with al-Baghdadi himself assuming the title of Caliph Ibrahim, the ruling head of the ummah, or worldwide community of Muslims, many might agree with Naipaul, despite the hyperbole — he has left out a potentially nuclear Iran — that “ISIS has to be seen as the most potent threat to the world since the Third Reich.”

It is baffling to read about or watch the sweep of terror spawned by ISIS in the name of Islam — a world religion with a following approaching two billion Muslims. It is insufficient merely to point out that the barbarism of ISIS reflects its origins in the fetid swamps of the Sunni Muslim insurgency of post-Saddam Iraq. But ISIS is neither a new presence in the Arab-Muslim history, nor is the response to it by Western powers, primarily Britain and the United States, given their relationship with the Middle East over the past century.

We have seen ISISes before, and not as al-Qaeda’s second coming.

The first successful appearance of an ISIS in modern times was the whirlwind with which the Bedouin warriors of Abdulaziz ibn Saud (1876-1953) emerged from the interior of the Arabian Desert in 1902 to take hold of the main fortress in Riyadh, the local capital of the surrounding region known as Najd. Some twenty-four years later, this desert warrior-chief and his armies of Bedouin raiders defeated the ruling Sharifian house in the coastal province of Hejaz, where lie Islam’s two holy cities, Mecca and Medina. The full detailed summary and essay is here.

Baltimore Infected With Gang Members, BGF

Posted on June 11, 2015June 11, 2015 by Denise Simon

14 alleged gang members indicted on racketeering charges

BALTIMORE (AP) — Local and federal authorities announced indictments against 14 men they say are members of a notoriously vicious gang known for violence, drug trafficking and witness intimidation both on Baltimore’s streets and in its jails.

U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein on Wednesday announced indictments against more the men they say are members of the Black Guerilla Family, a gang so brutal it is considered “the FBI’s number one violent gang target in the city of Baltimore,” said Stephen Vogt, FBI special agent in charge in Baltimore, on Thursday.

In the indictment, the alleged gang members are charged with conspiracy and racketeering. The indictment says those charged are responsible for drug trafficking, intimidating witnesses, drug overdoses that resulted in three deaths, two attempted murders and two murders, including one in which a teenage gang member was fatally shot.

The document describes the Black Guerilla Family as a meticulously organized criminal enterprise with a code of conduct so strict violating it is punishable by essay assignments, fines, beatings, stabbings and sometimes murder.

The gang garnered international media attention in 2013 after a sweeping federal indictment charged 44 inmates and prison guards at the Baltimore City Detention Center with participating in a widespread drug and cellphone smuggling operation.

Timothy Michael Gray, who federal officials say was the gang’s citywide commander until 2013, collected cash from members who oversaw the gang’s operations in Baltimore. Under his watch, the indictment alleges, Marshall Spence murdered a teenage gang member, then threatened a juvenile who had witnessed the crime. In a subsequent phone conversation with other gang members, the indictment says, Spence then discussed murdering witnesses.

“That’s what we’re facing on the street,” Rosenstein said at a news conference on Wednesday. “It’s important for us to intervene in these gang disputes and take the perpetrators off the streets and eliminate the opportunity for retaliation that we’ve seen fuel some of the violence we’ve seen over the last six weeks.”

The indictments are the result of an 18-month investigation, Vogt said, that demanded a strong partnership between local, state and federal law enforcement. On Wednesday Vogt praised Police Commissioner Anthony Batts for his patience and willingness to dedicate resources to such a “slow-moving” probe.

But over the past six weeks the bloodiest period in Baltimore in decades, with 42 murders in the month of May and 13 so far in June_the city’s arrest rate has plummeted, leaving Batts to defend a police force critics say have abandoned their posts in the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods following unrest and rioting prompted by the death of Freddie Gray.

“These police officers have gone through trauma,” Batts said, adding that he has taken a group of officers from the Western District, where Gray was arrested and the majority of violence erupted during the April 27 riots, off the streets this week so they could participate in team-building exercises, retraining and education. “My guys are going out there, getting into officer-involved shootings and taking guns of the streets.

“My officers have an ethical obligation to the babies, to the kids, to the mothers, to the weak ones out there to protect this city as a whole and keep their jobs going in that direction,” Batts said. “We are providing them with insight, we are providing them with counseling, we are providing them with opportunities to share what they need to do, but at the end of the day we get paid to get the job done.” ***

From the FBI in 2013:

BALTIMORE—A federal grand jury returned a racketeering indictment charging 25 individuals, including 13 correctional officers with the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, for conspiring to run operations of the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) gang inside correctional facilities. All 25 defendants also are charged with conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute drugs, and 20 of the defendants are charged with money laundering conspiracy.

The indictment and a detailed affidavit were unsealed today upon the arrests of the defendants and the execution of 15 search warrants. Approximately 170 agents and officers assisted in today’s arrests and search warrants. The indictment was returned on April 2, 2013. One defendant was killed in a robbery several hours before the indictment was filed. The defendants are identified at the conclusion of this press release.

The indictment arose from the efforts of the Maryland Prison Task Force, a group of local, state, and federal stakeholders that met regularly for more than two years and generated recommendations to reform prison procedures.

The indictment was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein; Special Agent in Charge Stephen E. Vogt of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts; Secretary Gary D. Maynard of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services; and Chief Mark A. Magaw of the Prince George’s County Police Department.

U.S. Attorney Rosenstein also recognized the efforts of the other members of the Maryland Prison Task Force in this investigation and prosecution, including: Baltimore City State’s Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein; Colonel Marcus L. Brown, Superintendent of the Maryland State Police; United States Marshal Johnny Hughes; Special Agent in Charge Karl C. Colder of the Drug Enforcement Administration-Washington Field Division; Tom Carr, Director of the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area; and Dave Engel, Executive Director of the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center.

“Correctional officers were in bed with BGF inmates, in violation of the first principle of prison management,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. “Preventing prison corruption requires intensive screening at prison entrances and punishment for employees who consort with inmates or bring cell phones and drugs into correctional facilities.”

“This investigation revealed the pervasive nature of prison corruption in Baltimore City’s Detention Centers,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen E. Vogt. “Such corruption causes the FBI to divert crucial investigative resources away from addressing violence on the streets of Baltimore. In this case, the inmates literally took over ‘the asylum,’ and the detention centers became safe havens for the BGF. Such a situation cannot be tolerated. Law enforcement should not have to concern itself with criminal subjects who have already been arrested and relegated to detention centers.”

“Ninety-nine percent of our correctional officers do their jobs with integrity, honesty, and respect,” said Secretary Gary Maynard of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. “Today’s indictment, along with those in the past, show that our department will not stand idly by and let a few bad actors affect the security of our institutions. Nor will we allow them to impugn the reputation of the men and women who come to work every day and go about their jobs honorably. Those who would break the law should know we will always work tirelessly with our federal, state, and local partners to root out corruption.”

“Today’s multi-jurisdictional takedown of suspected BGF gang members and orchestrators who infiltrated the criminal justice system is another example of the Baltimore Police Department’s relentless focus on targeting the malignant gang organizations that plague our communities,” said Police Commissioner Anthony Batts. “Thanks to the hard working detectives, federal agents, and prosecutors who worked behind the scenes to build these cases. Our continued pledge to the people of Baltimore is that we will leverage the full capacity of our state and federal partnerships to identify those responsible for violence and bring them to justice.”

The 10 men and 15 women charged in the indictment are alleged to be members or associates of the BGF, a gang active in prisons throughout the United States. According to the indictment, BGF has been the dominant gang at the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC) and in several connected facilities, especially the Baltimore Central Booking Intake Center, the Women’s Detention Center (which houses many men), and in the Jail Industries Building. The indictment alleges that since at least 2009, BGF members and associates in BCDC and related prison facilities engaged in criminal activities, including drug trafficking, robbery, assault, extortion, bribery, witness retaliation, money laundering, and obstruction of justice.

BGF members and associates allegedly bribed correctional officers at BCDC and related prison facilities to smuggle drugs, cell phones, and other contraband. Correctional officers arranged favored treatment and privileges for imprisoned BGF gang members, and officers thwarted interdiction and law enforcement efforts against BGF inmates. BGF members and associates allegedly had long-term sexual relationships with several correctional officers and impregnated them.

BGF leaders allegedly used contraband cell phones to order contraband. Co-conspirators delivered contraband to corrupt correctional officers who smuggled the items into the prisons. Correctional officers often arranged payment for the contraband. Some gang dues and drug profits were used to support activities of BGF street organizations outside the prisons.

The charging documents allege that correctional officers were able to bring contraband directly into the prisons through the main entrances. Inside the prisons, BGF was able to control contraband smuggling because BGF gang members were designated as “working men.” Working men are inmates who are paid to assist management and are free to move about the facility.

Green Dot cash debit cards were allegedly used by inmates to pay BGF for smuggled contraband and used by BGF to transfer criminal proceeds. Luxury automobiles were among the purchases made by BGF with Green Dot cards.

According to the indictment, members, and associates followed directions from the ranking BGF members in BCDC, especially inmate Tavon White. On January, 5, 2013, White explained in a phone call:

“This is my jail. You understand that? I’m dead serious….I make every final call in this jail…and nothing go past me, everything come to me….Any of my brothers that deal with anybody, it’s gonna come to me. You see what I am saying? Everything come to me. Everything. Before a mother-f—— hit a n—— in the mouth, guess what they do, they gotta run it through me. I tell them whether it’s a go ahead, and they can do it or whether they hold back. Before a mother-f—— stab somebody, they gotta run it through me….Anything that get done must go through me. ”

Tavon White summarized his position in a conversation with correctional officer Adrena Rice on February 11, 2013:

“I told them worker men that they had to step down off the worker men spots or they was getting hit….I hold the highest seat you can get….My word is law…so if I told any mother-f—— body they had to do this, hit a police, do this, kill a mother-f——, do anything, it got to get done. Period.”

White allegedly used contraband cell phones to discuss BGF activities inside BCDC, such as the collection of fees and taxes, to request information about inmates, to hear grievances from other BGF inmates, and to coordinate his contraband smuggling operation. White and other gang members developed sexual relationships with officers in order to gain influence over them.

White allegedly had long-term sexual relationships inside BCDC with four correctional officers—Jennifer Owens, Katera Stevenson, Chania Brooks, and Tiffany Linder—impregnating each of the four officers at least once. Owens had “Tavon” tattooed on her neck and Stevenson had “Tavon” tattooed on her wrist. All four officers allegedly help smuggle contraband into BCDC and related facilities. White allegedly gave Owens a diamond ring and provided luxury automobiles to Owens, Stevenson, and Brooks. The indictment includes many overt acts in furtherance of the racketeering enterprise. For example, in November 2012, correctional officer Jasmin Jones allegedly stood guard outside a closet in BCDC so that correctional officer Kimberly Dennis and inmate Derius Duncan could have sex. Corrupt officers also warned BGF inmates about law enforcement operations. For example, Brooks and Linder allegedly notified White when they learned about upcoming canine scans and jail cell searches. The affidavit specifies two occasions in which warning calls to White were intercepted: December 21, 2012 (from Brooks) and January 6, 2013 (from Linder). White then used his cell phone to spread the word to other inmates.

On January 6, 2013, White allegedly said:

“I just got a message (from Officer Tiffany Linder) saying that they was going to pull a shake down (prison search) tonight. Let me call all these dudes in my phone and let them know.”

The U.S. Attorney expressed appreciation to Secretary Maynard and select members of his senior staff who confidentially arranged for 30 trusted correctional officers from outside Baltimore to join with federal agents and conduct surprise searches of BGF members and their jail cells on February 14, 2013, resulting in the discovery of important evidence.

The indictment seeks the forfeiture of $500,000 and other proceeds of the enterprise, including luxury automobiles.

The defendants face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on the racketeering and drug conspiracies, as well as for conspiracy to commit money laundering. Stevenson, Yarborough, and Pinder each also face five years in prison for possession with intent to distribute marijuana.

The defendants are expected to have initial appearances in U.S. District Court in Baltimore this afternoon.

An indictment is not a finding of guilt. An individual charged by indictment is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty at some later criminal proceedings.

United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein praised the FBI, Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Baltimore Police Department, the Prince George’s County Police Department and Maryland Prison Task Force, Baltimore City Assistant State’s Attorneys Kevin Wilson, and Katie O’Hara for their work in the investigation. Mr. Rosenstein thanked Assistant United States Attorneys Robert R. Harding and Ayn B. Ducao, who are prosecuting this Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case.

The following defendants are charged in the indictment unsealed today:

Inmates:

Tavon White, a/k/a Bulldog and Tay, age 36, of Baltimore
Jamar Anderson, a/k/a Hammer and Hamma Head, age 26, of Baltimore
Derius Duncan, age 26, of Baltimore
Steven Loney, a/k/a Stevie, age 24, of Baltimore
Jermaine McFadden, a/k/a Maine, age 24, of Baltimore
Kenneth Parham, age 23, of Baltimore
Joseph Young, a/k/a Monster, age 30, of Baltimore

Correctional officers:

Antonia Allison, age 27, of Baltimore
Ebonee Braswell, age 26, of Baltimore
Chania Brooks, age 27, of Baltimore
Kimberly Dennis, age 26, of Baltimore
Jasmin Jones, a/k/a J.J., age 24, of Baltimore
Taryn Kirkland, age 23, of Baltimore
Katrina LaPrade, a/k/a Katrina Lyons, age 31, of Baltimore
Tiffany Linder, age 27, of Baltimore
Vivian Matthews, age 25, of Essex, Maryland
Jennifer Owens, a/k/a O and J.O., age 31, of Randallstown
Adrena Rice, age 25, of Baltimore
Katera Stevenson, a/k/a KK, age 24, of Baltimore
Jasmine Thornton, a/k/a J.T., age 26, of Glen Burnie

Outside suppliers:

Tyesha Mayo, age 29, of Baltimore
Teshawn Pinder, age 24, of Baltimore
Tyrone Thompson, a/k/a Henry, age 36, of Baltimore
Ralph Timmons, Jr., a/k/a Boosa, age 34, of Baltimore (deceased)

James Yarborough, a/k/a J.Y., age 26, of Baltimore.