From Zest to Meth: Former Figure Skater Charged
July 9th, 2009 by Rick
Looks like this 1995 U.S. figure skating champion chose the wrong ice to make a career out of…
On Tuesday, Nicole Bobek, a former Olympic athlete, plead not guilty, via video from the Hudson county jail, to the charges of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine in Hudson County, New Jersey.
The 31-year old was arrested last week, at her house in Jupiter, FL, after a year long investigation into a drug ring. Bobek waived extradition rights and was sent to the Garden City. Nineteen people have also been arrested in connection with the drug ring.
Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said:
She played a significant role in this operation. [...] She was actively involved in the upper echelon of this ring.
Bobek is free on bond, more than likely heading back to her other home in Manhattan, which coincidentally is in the same state where the investigation into the drug ring first began. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years and a $150,000 fine.
DEA Splits, Bolivia Hits
July 7th, 2009 by RickA factory converted into a cocaine laboratory in Bolivia, that could produce up to 100kg (220 lbs) of cocaine per day, was raided by Drug Enforcement officers of the Bolivian government. According to senior Bolivian anti-narcotics officer, Oscar Nina, five Colombians were arrested.
The factory was the 4th largest raided since early 2009. Bolivian Interior Minister Alfredo Rada blames U.S. anti-narcotics officials for not locating the factory, that they estimate has been running for a year.
Previously in 2008, Bolivia booted the DEA from it’s borders and accused Washington with conspiring against the left wing government of President Evo Morales.
As a reward for doing and finding what the DEA could not, the U.S. announced last week that they were cutting trade benefits for Bolivia and reimposing duties on some imported Bolivian goods.
Teddy Bears Resort to Life of Crime
July 7th, 2009 by Russ
DEA agents and New York City’s finest were shocked last weekend to find yet another segment of society corrupted by the War on Drugs — Teddy Bears. In a raid on a Bronx safehouse, police and federal agents uncovered over 44 lbs of heroin and $150,000 in cash trafficked by the customizable bedtime friends known as Build-A-Bears.
According to one onlooking neighbor at the raid site:
My daughter has one of those toys. I’m very surprised something like that was going on right here and I’m especially surprised it was a Build-A-Bear.
While the news certainly comes as a shock to the community that calls the bears home, one wonders whether we might have seen this coming earlier. After all, these bears are so diverse in the way they choose to live their lives. There are firefighter bears, surgeon bears, even subprime mortgage-lending bears. Is it any wonder that some of these bears turned to the high-risk, high-reward lifestyle of smack trafficking?
In this economy, trying to eek out a living as a high school musical bear or a bear on a military pension just isn’t possible the way that it was in the halcyon days of beardom. A bear has got to make ends meet, just like anyone else.
Some will argue that these bears, as couriers, were just bit players; pawns in a game played by weathered New York City drug traffickers. And every single Build-A-Bear caught up in this mess will have his day in court. But before they go out and summon their fancy lawyer bears and publicity bears, they’ll have to own up to the part they had to play in this operation. Yes, these bears were built for a purpose. They were designed and raised as heroin mule bears. But does your build determine your fate? Does not every bear ultimately choose his or her own destiny?
Perhaps the most famous bear of all, Winnie the Pooh, once said:
People who don’t Think probably don’t have Brains; rather, they have grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake.
Even bears with grey fluff upstairs should have known better on this one. Thanks, Pooh.
Oklahoma Attempts to Extradite Medical Grower
July 7th, 2009 by Russ
Oklahoma officials are set to extradite a California prisoner who has already served his allotted sentence for growing marijuana plants over a decade ago. Will Foster, arrested in 1998 for growing marijuana in his home, was originally sentenced to an unfathomable 93-year sentence in an Oklahoma State Court.
After the Oklahoma Supreme Court found that the unfathomable sentence was also unconstitutional (it represented cruel and highly unusual punishment), it reduced his sentence to 20 years which Foster served. Upon earning his parole, Foster was allowed to relocate to California.
And so Will Foster met with his parole officer, and demonstrated that he was living the life of the law-abiding, and even started a new family with girlfriend Susie Mueller and her three daughters. But Oklahoma apparently was not satisfied with his California-approved parole term, and attempted to extradite him.
Even after having the new warrant dismissed by filing a writ of habeus corpus, Oklahoma persisted and successfully lobbied the Governator to sign an extradition order to send Foster back to Oklahoma.
And so Oklahoma officials are spending millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars because it feels that a man with a garden in his home needs to be punished more severely than he already has.
If ever the American populace decides to adopt a measure of compassion and rationality and put an end to the political and legal morass known as the War on Drugs, the entire state of Oklahoma may just spontaneously combust. It’s difficult to envision a role for Oklahoma that isn’t the one of mustache-twirling villain, ruining lives and displacing families with its draconian legal code and archaic notions of justice.
Will Foster still has some time before the extradition order is carried out. For information on how to participate in the campaign for his release, you can find useful contact info on Ed Rosenthal’s blog.
Teen Sells Fake Shrooms, Faces Real Time
July 6th, 2009 by Rick
Long story short.
Dumbass in New Hampshire and two accomplices come up with the brilliant idea of selling store bought shiitake mushrooms, mixed with blue food coloring, as a hallucinogenic drug for $900. Unfortunately for them, the person buying the mushroom was a CI (cooperating individual or confidential informant,) who gladly told the police about the deal. The Police used serial trackable money and staked out the “drug” buy.
The result lead the seller directly to jail and trial, where he was sentenced 1-3 years in a state prison for selling a controlled substance and conspiracy to sell a controlled substance. His other two buddies are facing charges as well. Only in America.
Appeals Court Upholds Sentence for Maimed Smuggler
July 3rd, 2009 by Russ
One of the most politicized cases in the Border Patrol’s history, crept on Monday as a federal appeals court upheld a sentence levied on a Mexican drug smuggler who was shot by two agents on the U.S./Mexican border. Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, who had tried to smuggle over 700 lbs of weed across the border, on several occasions, was given a nine and a half year prison sentence for smuggling that occurred after U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean shot him in the buttocks and groin.
The details of the shooting and subsequent trials and media circus are quite convoluted. Salon managed to wrap it up pretty well a few years ago. In a nutshell, Ramos and Compean botched an attempt to apprehend the smuggler (Aldrete-Davila), shot at him as he fled, attempted to cover up the shooting by having another agent return to clean up the shell casings, and couldn’t agree on a coherent story when pressed by prosecutors.
As the two agents were being sentenced for egregious violations of their enforcement codes (and attempted murder), some conservative media figures (including CNN zombie-anchor, Lou Dobbs) decided to brand the agents as patriotic, U.S. turf-defending heroes. In the interim, the peripheral press began reporting a completely revised version of the pursuit and shooting story, and a petition emerged to set the agents free. Luckily for the agents, former Premiere Bush does watch TV (he famously never read newspapers), and responded to the conservative pleas by commuting the sentences of Ramos and Compean.
So, two corrupt Border Patrol agents run free and one smuggler with a shot up urethra gets a full term. The moral of the story here is that what actually happens on the ground is never as important as how it all ends up in the spin room. When it comes to politics, the motives of interest groups far, far, outweigh reason and truth.
Drug Court Sympathetic to Affluent Frat Boy
July 2nd, 2009 by Russ
Christopher Duncan of Copiague, NY is thanking his lucky stars that he was born a white, rich, child. This week, his lucky accident of birth earned him a free pass in a federal drug court that fell all over itself to spare him the humiliation of going to prison for knowingly breaking the law.
A former University of Vermont student, Duncan, was running a cocaine trafficking operation out of his frat house back in 2007. Local authorities raided the house the week of graduation finding it full of drug paraphernalia, coke, and cash. In danger of receiving some serious jail time, the judge let him off with 100 hours of community service and two years of probation.
District Court judge William Sessions III saw fit to take it easy on the young cocaine trafficker because he was “a stupid kid” and, as he said to the defendant:
It shows your lack of serious involvement and your absolute naivete, frankly.
Speaking of naivete, one wonders why judges find their soft streaks only when faced with the Caucasian Children of the Rich? Couldn’t a little leniency be in order for the bus baggage-handler busted by the DEA for passing along small packages of contraband? What about the church minister that set up a little weed garden for some of his sick parishioners? Or any number of low level street dealers who were certainly naive, certainly bit players in their own little neighborhoods. Where is their leniency? Where is the compassion for them?
The simple truth is, what was going through this young man’s mind when he decided to play Blow Daddy with the local sorority girls, is the same exact thing that goes through the mind of every aspiring drug dealer, large or small. It’s a mixture of greed, opportunism, and indifference for his fellow man. Once this mindset is in place, it’s all just a question of scale; of entrepreneurship. And when the hammer comes down, it’s all a matter of skin tone.
Dayton Cops Concoct Weed Murder Mystery
July 1st, 2009 by Russ
Either the Dayton police have been up late staring at too many drug files, or they’re about to pitch a pilot of Unsolved Mysteries: Dayton Edition to their local network executives. It seems that the brass there would like to blame several recent area shootings on the assailant’s or victim’s possession of small amounts of weed.
According to baffled Lieutenant, Patrick Welsh:
The trend in several of the homicides and even non-fatal shootings is that they’re related to marijuana use and sales.
And the evidence for this? Apparently Dayton police found a man shot at a residence in which they had made a weed-related arrest three-months earlier. Let’s forget, for a moment, that the same residence was cited as an after hours alcohol distributor. This, combined with a few scattered cases of Dayton weed dealers being hit for either money or baggies prompted the Dayton Daily News columnist (of the story in question) to conclude:
Now, marijuana seems to be the dangerous drug.
Sherlock Holmes, this guy isn’t. Any Drug War newbie could tell you that the presence of the drugs in these cases are completely irrelevant, save for the fact that they’re worth money. And they’re worth so much money because of their illegality. Do you really think people would be shooting each other over this easily cultivated plant if anyone could grow it without fear of arrest or reprisal? Do people shoot each other over basil or tarragon? How many rosemary-related murders have we tallied this year?
Criminalization of plants is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you increase the value of an object and prohibit legal businesses from selling it, then you are literally handing a valuable monopoly over to the black market. That’s the market where business is settled with the business-end of a sawed-off shotgun. So, logically speaking, it was the police who were the cause of the very crimes that they were investigating. Elementary, my dear Watson.
