Featured Post

New York Police Chief Imprisoned

Bernard Kerik was on top of the world.  He had served gloriously as police commissioner of New York City for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.  Bernie was famous in his own right, often on television screens, sporting his trademark mustache and shaved head.  He was sent by President George Bush to reorganize the police force in Iraq.  Finally, he was nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security.   After that, things went downhill. Kerik was indicted in federal court with corruption for allegedly accepting unreported gifts of construction work on his home.   Kerik failed to report as income more than $200,000 in rent paid on his behalf to use a luxury apartment where he lived with his family when he left his city post, paid for by Steve Witkoff, a commercial real estate developer. Also, a construction company with alleged mob ties paid for the $165,000 in renovations on Kerik’s home in Riverdale, the Bronx, apparently in hopes of obtaining a city license. In 2006, Kerik plead guilty in the Bronx to state misdemeanor charges stemming from those renovations. In 2004, after nomination by Rudy Giuliani, President George W. Bush nominated Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security.  Seven days later, Kerik withdrew his name from consideration.  Then fell the avalanche of questions about Kerik. Had Kerik inappropriately lobbied New York City on behalf of Interstate Industrial, a construction company with alleged links to organized crime?  At first, Giuliani denied he knew about Kerik’s ties to Interstate Industrial when he appointed Kerik as police commissioner. Then in 2006, Guiliani acknowledged that city investigations commissioner, Edward Kuriansky, said Kuriansky has stated he told Giuliani in at least one briefing about Kerik’s problems, but Giuliani said he did not remember any such briefing. Kuriansky’s diaries confirm that one of those briefings did take place.  Additionally, Kuriansky stated, based on his recollections and his diaries, he also briefed Dennison Young, Jr., one of Mayor Giuliani’s closest aides, about Kerik’s ties to the construction company only days before Mayor Giuliani appointed Kerik police commissioner.  Giuliani is well-known for the premium he places on loyalty and his own loyalty to others.  Giuliani Partners, his consulting firm did employ Kerik and continues to employ Alan Placa, a high school friend, in spite of allegations he molested young men years ago. By the time Giuliani recommended Kerik for the Homeland Security job, his administration knew Kerik had acted on behalf of Interstate Industrial and knew about other criticisms of Kerik, including sending detectives to look for his lover’s cell phone and using police officers to research his autobiography. In 2000, more than half the mayor’s cabinet opposed Bernie Kerik’s appointment to police commissioner.  They had concerns that included the fact that Kerik did not have a college degree, a police department requirement at the time for captains and above. Giuliani met Kerik in 1990 at a fund raiser in New Jersey honoring a slain new York City police officer. Kerik was a decorated undercover detective with a ponytail and earrings, big biceps. Kerik cultivated political connections, such as the sheriff of Passaic County, N.J., who had made Kerik five years earlier the youngest jail chief in the county’s history.   When Giuliani ran for mayor in 1993, Kerik organized Giuliani’s security detail of off-duty officers to reserve the weekend shift for Kerik himself. A year after Giuliani became mayor, he appointed Kerik first deputy correction commissioner to include supervision of Riker’s Island.   One year after that, Kerik was appointed  correction commissioner, where he showed up for spot inspections at 2:00 a.m.  When violence in the jails dropped, public praise climbed.  Now reported are some of his questionable activities then, such as his dating a woman who was a correction officer and his getting close to the department’s inspector general, whose responsibilities required him to avoid such closeness with other city personnel.  Later, one of his top deputies was convicted of taking $142,000 from a Correction Department that Kerik headed.  Another deputy was convicted of forcing staff members to do political campaign work and dispatching officers to renovate his home. Lawrence Ray was a friend of Kerik and served as best man at Kerik’s wedding.  Ray even paid for much of the wedding, and Kerik in turn recommended Ray for a $100,000 job at Interstate Industrials, a New Jersey construction company with tens of million dollars in contracts with New York City. Interstate Industrials hoped that Lawrence Ray could change relations with the City because, two years before, city investigators had found the company employed mob figures and denied the company an operating license. After hiring Ray, Interstate hired Kerik’s brother, and from then on, the then-correction commissioner began lobbying unofficially for Interstate. Kerik defended Interstate to the chief of enforcement for the city commission, a cousin of Giuliani who was reviewing Interstate’s license application.  Kerik telephoned an assistant commissioner at the Department of Investigation to say Interstate’s owners were clean of mob ties, so far as he knew.  He even had city detectives who were investigating Interstate meet Lawrence Ray in Kerik’s own city office, sending a strong signal to the detectives.  But the lobbying stopped in March, 2000, when Lawrence Ray and Edward Garafola, a mob soldier associated with Interstate, were indicted on a federal stock scheme not related to Interstate’s business.  New York City suspended Interstate’s $85 million in city contracts. Three weeks later, Bernie Kerik interviewed for two hours with the Department of Investigation and talked about his relationship with Lawrence Ray, Interstate and its owners and his brother.  However, Kerik never mentioned that Interstate was paying for $165,000 worth of renovations on his new apartment in the Bronx. That is when the police commissioner job came open.  Bernie Kerik was one of the candidates with his eight years experience as a police officer.  Edward Kuriansky, the city investigations commissioner, was assigned to oversee background investigations of Kerik and the other candidate, Joseph Dunne.    Kuriansky’s agency was supposed to be semi-independent, but Kerik had coopted it to some extent, appointing friends like Kuriansky to the commission and having them attend his morning meetings.  Kuriansky was a former prosecutor, and he knew Kerik had intervened on behalf of the company suspected of mob ties and that Kerik’s best friend and brother worked for that company.  Kuriansky, however, did not know Interstate was renovating Kerik’s apartment. Giuliani selected Kurik as his police commissioner, and he served in that capacity for 16 months.  Crime fell, and Kerik enjoyed not only public approval during his tenure but celebrity.   Bernie Kerik adopted the persona of a steady figure after the World Trade Center attack on 911.  He continued to receive good press.  Three years later, after he had withdrawn his nomination as head of Homeland Security, it came to light that Kerik had used an apartment dedicated for weary rescue workers at ground zero for an extramarital affair with his book publisher, Judith Regan. After Kerik’s three months in Iraq, he spoke at the Republican National Convention. But his candidacy to head Homeland Security lasted only a week.  He withdrew himself, saying he discovered his nanny was in the country illegally and he had not paid taxes on her. Kerik couldn’t even stay out of trouble after he was indicted in federal court.  U.S. District Judge Stephen Robinson revoked Kerik’s bail when the judge found Bernie had, in apparent hopes of generating sympathy in his trial, leaked information the judge had ordered sealed.  Kerik ultimately pled guilty to eight counts in hopes of receiving a  two or three years sentence, as indicated by the Sentencing Guidelines and the expectations of the prosecutors.      Whoops. The judge gave him four years and said Kerik had violated the public trust immeasurably.   While waiting for his sentencing, Kerik complained that he had not heard from Rudy Giuliani.  Small wonder why.  The wonder is that he overlooked Kerik’s fleas so long.

Read More

Prison Gangs help Mexican drug trafficking Cartels

Posted by Edmond Geary on 07-19-2010

Federal authorities have documented many links between most of the major U.S. prison gangs and Mexican drug trafficking organizations.      The most recent National Drug Threat Assessment from the Justice Department reported prison gangs were operating in all 50 U.S. states are increasing their influence over drug trafficking along the U.S.-Mexican b order.

Federal prosecutors in San Diego charged 36 defendants of racketeering for their activities between the Arellano Felix drug trafficking network and California’s Mexican Mafia prison gang, the gang members allegedly working in drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder attempts for the Mexican cartel.

Baldemar Rivera for years ran a Texas prison gang named Raza Unida while he was in isolation. Reportedly, this is common for gang members for the organization to be run from someone in solitary confinement.  Rivera says he used sign language to discuss gang business with one of his minions who visited him.  Rivera communicated with gang members in other Texas prisons through his captains in prison, who wrote to the soldiers, also in prison.  Within 3 or 4 days, the word had been passed, the word was out.  Rivera, now 50, and now serving a 60-year sentence for murder, says he left the gang life 10 years ago after completing the state’s gang-renouncement program.

Rivera was running Raza Unida in the 1990s, when prisoners used mail to communicate with each other and the outside world.  Now they use cell phones.  Texas prisons seized 1200 cell phones from prisoners last year.  And Texas prisons do not allow prisoners to mail letters to other inmates, so they mail to third parties, who then pass on their letters to the prisoner intended.

Prisoners also hold conference calls provided by friends on the outside.  Mail censors watch their mail, so some prisoners communicate in Nahuatl, language of the Aztecs.  It is an ancient language, but it’s still spoken by about a million and a half people in Mexico.  The gang members learn Nahuatl from books, and some of them adopt Aztec names.  They claim they are honoring their heritage, but they are just concealing their communications.

The gangs sometimes get their hooks into prison employees or even court employees.  One woman who worked in the federal defender’s office in El Paso was convicted of acting as liaison between gang members behind the walls and their confederates outside.

Gang members have testified in at least two federal cases about how money from the gang’s outside businesses of extortion, drug sales, and other illegal undertakings, ultimately found its way into the gang members’ commissary accounts in prison.

An FBI agent testified last year in a prosecution against Texas’ Mexican Mafia prison gang that the gang collected at least $8,000 a week, sometimes $40,000 a week, in San Antonio alone.  The proceeds were sent to gang members in prison, where they spent the money on food, personal items, or they could send money to their family members on the outside. Drugs were available to gang members and visitations from girls.

Contraband is smuggled in by guards, lawyers, and visitors.  Revenue from drug sales on the street pays for it.      A cell phone cost $2,000. Contraband is dropped off at pre-arranged locations accessible to prisoners on work detail.  Sixty phones were discovered on one occasion in an air compressor delivered to a prison workshop.

When gang members are released from prison, they are expected to report to gang leaders on the outside, attend gang meetings and make their contribution to making money for the gang. That usually means selling drugs or enforcing on the street dealers.

The number of active gang members nationally is estimated at about 1 million.  Prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia, the Texas Syndicate, Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos (the Brotherhood of Latino Gunmen), Raza Unida, and Mexikanemi comprise only about 45,000 members.  However, they control most of the local street gangs as well, especially in southern California and south Texas.

Posted in Drug trafficking, Kidnapping, Murder, Racketeering

Tags: , ,

Comments (1)

LUTHER said on 20-07-2010


Medicamentspot.com. Canadian Health&Care.No prescription online pharmacy.Best quality drugs.Special Internet Prices. High quality pills. Buy pills online…

Buy:Lasix.Aricept.Acomplia.Cozaar.Ventolin.Benicar.Female Pink Viagra.Amoxicillin.Zetia.SleepWell.Wellbutrin SR.Female Cialis.Advair.Zocor.Nymphomax.Seroquel.Lipitor.Prozac.Lipothin.Buspar….

Write a comment