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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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A Prime Minister, a Drug Pilot, an Oligarch, & RussiaGate
(WARNING: A long read…but worth it) RussiaGate is all about the Mob, says the current meme. Not ‘The’ Mob, or just one Mob, but a gamut of players— Russian, American, British, Israeli, Saudi—belonging to a global criminal network connecting the forces of transnational organized crime across nation-states, time-zones, and continents. ‘Transnational organized crime’ doesn’t have…
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Con man for Christ Floated ‘Cocaine One’ Drug Plane
Doug McClain Sr’s financial fraud career as a grifter, racketeer, and flimflam man can be traced back more than two decades, and likely extends much further into his past. The so-far unanswered question about him has been where he first acquired powerful patrons whose clout could—and did—keep him out of jail despite his record for flagrant…
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NSA links to St Petersburg FL Drug Ring
Skyway Global LLC, the St. Petersburg, FL company that owned the DC-9 airline busted in Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, made its headquarters in a 79,000 sq ft building owned by Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT), a foreign tele-communications company with a contract to wiretap the U.S. for the NSA through the communication lines of Verizon,…