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Carlos Slim, the NY Times, & the trial of El Chapo Guzman
Former 17-year old beauty queens; diamond-encrusted pistols; cocaine in cans of hot peppers and gallons of cooking oil; 18-wheeler’s and ‘cocaine trains;’ drugged 13- year old girls at $5K a pop; a view of the Brooklyn Bridge through the windows of a cartel stash house. The trial in Brooklyn of El Chapo Guzman, a short…
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American Show Trial
It was a show trial. Except it wasn’t in Moscow. It was in Brooklyn. The guilt of the defendant was never in question. It was an honest-to-God American show trial. It was a display of an “enemy of the people” at the moment he is smitten by the righteous might of American justice. It was…
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Governments, Gangsters, & the Trial of El Chapo Guzman
The trial of El Chapo Guzman is as disappointing to criminologists trying to understand the deep structure of the drug trade as a rained-out series between The Yankees and Red Sox is to baseball fans waiting to place bets on who’s going to win the American League. This week in El Chapo’s trial was like…
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The Lie at the Heart of the Trial of El Chapo Guzman
The lie at the heart of the trial of El Chapo Guzman is one familiar to every American who understands what happened to this country during Prohibition: Men and women are human. They can be bought, bribed, threatened or cajoled. It is the basis of organized crime. Getting the ‘go-ahead’ from Marta Fernando…
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THE SECRET TRIAL OF ‘EL CHAPO’ GUZMAN
The government’s star witness in the trial of El Chapo Guzman was trying to buy information from a man who was instrumental in the purchase of the DC-9 — dubbed “Cocaine One” for its resemblance to official U.S. government planes — busted in Mexico in April of 2006 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine. Fernando Blengio Cesena, alias…
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Free press in U.S. vs Mexico: Que es mas macho?
Three Mexican journalists—each a woman who has spent years living with the real possibility that the death threats she regularly receives will one day result in a slow, gruesome death—heroically continue to report the truth about the drug war in their country that no mainstream American journalist has the balls to report about the drug war in ours:…
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True Detective III: “The Cowles’ Identity”
According to the DEA—which, caveat emptor, lies like a dog when it suits its purposes—El Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel “supplies 80% of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine, with a street value of $3 billion, that floods Chicago each year.” Though it seldom comes up, that flood flows both ways. And since the money from…
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True Detective: Chicago, El Chapo, & Vince Vaughn’s Mom
Actor Vince Vaughn, in the news for his starring role in HBO’s True Detective and recent controversial statements advocating more guns in schools, now has a new source of notoriety guaranteed to keep him in face time: his family. Vaughn’s mother, Sharon Vaughn, a sparkling and vivacious Chicagoland socialite, and his step-father, Stephen Ferrone, a…
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Pics of new Mexican President with Sinaloa cartel lieutenant
He hasn’t even taken office yet, but Mexico’s new President Enrique Peña Nieto has already got some ‘splainin’ to do. Mexico City newspapers today reported the discovery of pictures of the not-yet-inaugarated new President in which he appears chummy with a man arrested yesterday in Madrid and charged with importing 337 kilos of cocaine into…