Why the DEA’s Private Plane Was Forced Out of Mexico

The latest setback to U.S. anti-narcotics efforts in Mexico came earlier this month, when the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was forced to remove its flagship plane from the country for the first time in some 30 years.

According to a report by Reuters, Mexican officials revoked the plane’s parking space in a hangar at the Toluca airport about 25 miles outside of Mexico City. The plane, a Beechcraft twin-turboprop King Air, can carry about ten passengers and was often deployed for elite-level ops in Mexico and Central America.

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EXCLUSIVE: Is THIS notorious mafia hitman Tony Spilotro the man behind Lake Mead’s Mobster in the Barrel mystery? Mafia experts reveal tantalizing new link between killer who inspired Joe Pesci’s role in Casino, three missing gangsters and Vegas reservoir

  • The remains of a decomposed human body stuffed inside a corroded metal barrel and discovered stuck in Lake Mead’s mud has all the makings of a gangland hit
  • Our research has found three possible victims who may be the body in the barrel, each with links to the mob, who disappeared at that time and their bodies were never found
  • If that theory holds, it may also lead us to a likely killer — one of the most notorious enforcers in mob history
  • The thread that strings these men together is that they were all linked to the most powerful Las Vegas mob operation of that time

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Ukrainian refugees in Italy housed in properties seized from mafia

More than 116,000 Ukrainian refugees have arrived in Italy since Ukraine was invaded by Russia in late February. To house them, Italian authorities have started to use properties seized from the mafia. Our correspondent in Italy, Natalia Mendoza, brings us the story.

Italy already had the second largest Ukrainian population in Europe before the war began. Now tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have arrived.

One of these is Tetiana, who fled the town of Bucha, 30 kilometres north of Kyiv, with her four children and her mother. “The fighting was intense.  When the bombing started in our area, we would constantly hear missiles over our heads,” she says. 

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Meet Ovidio Guzmán López, El Chapo’s Drug Lord Son Who Walks Free Today

Born in 1990, Ovidio Guzmán López was 18 when he joined his father’s Sinaloa Cartel. Now, he helps produce and traffic thousands of pounds of narcotics every year.

Since the late 1980s, the Sinaloa Cartel has been laundering money and trafficking drugs into the United States and bribing, torturing, or murdering anyone who crosses it. While its leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was captured in 2016, his son, Ovidio Guzmán López, remains at large — but not for lack of trying.

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Trump suggested launching missiles into Mexico to destroy cartels’ drug labs, former defense secretary says

  • Former defense secretary Mark Esper said Trump suggested missiles to wipe out Mexico’s drug cartels.
  • He suggested shooting missiles at drug labs in Mexico at least twice in 2020, Esper said.
  • Esper recounted the exchange in his memoir, excerpts of which were published by The New York Times.

Former President Donald Trump suggested launching missiles into Mexico to destroy cartels’ drug labs, the former defense secretary Mark Esper wrote in his upcoming memoir, according to The New York Times.

Several excerpts from Esper’s book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times,” were published by the Times on Thursday. The memoir will be published on May 10.

Esper, who served as defense secretary from July 2019 until November 2020, wrote in the book that Trump had become increasingly unhappy about drugs coming through the Mexican border.

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