Legal news for Mafia continually updated from thousands of sources on the web – Global Mafia News. News about organized crime. Commentary and archival information about organized crime from Lawstarz.
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.
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.
The man known as Otoniel is accused of smuggling tons of cocaine and assassinating police officers and civic leaders.
A man accused of leading a Colombian cartel was extradited to face federal drug-trafficking charges in Brooklyn, ending a yearslong effort to hobble an organization that a federal prosecutor said on Thursday smuggled an “outrageous” amount of cocaine into the United States.
Dairo Antonio Úsuga, more commonly known as Otoniel, led a force thousands strong. He was arrested in October and has long stood accused of carrying out assassinations of police officers and civic leaders.
Juan Orlando Hernández, aka JOH, 53, the former President of Honduras, will make his initial appearance tomorrow, April 22, before Magistrate Judge Stewart D. Aaron in federal court in New York after being extradited today from Honduras. A federal court unsealed drug-trafficking and weapons charges today in a superseding indictment against Hernández.
The indictment charges that from at least in or about 2004, up to and including in or about 2022, Hernández, the former two-term President of Honduras, participated in a corrupt and violent drug-trafficking conspiracy to facilitate the importation of hundreds of thousands of kilograms of cocaine into the United States. Hernández allegedly received millions of dollars to use his public office, law enforcement, and the military to support drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere.
“The Justice Department is taking a comprehensive approach to protecting our communities and our country from violent crime,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Department is committed to disrupting the entire ecosystem of drug trafficking networks that harm the American people, no matter how far or how high we must go.”
“Juan Orlando Hernández, the recent former President of Honduras, allegedly partnered with some of the world’s most prolific narcotics traffickers to build a corrupt and brutally violent empire based on the illegal trafficking of tons of cocaine to the United States,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “Hernández is alleged to have used his vast political powers to protect and assist drug traffickers and cartel leaders by alerting them to possible interdictions, and sanctioning heavily armed violence to support their drug trade. I commend the career prosecutors of the Southern District of New York for their tireless efforts to disrupt the entire illicit drug trafficking ecosystem, from street-level dealers to a former world leader, and everything in-between.”
Six members of a notorious New York City crime family were charged with a racketeering conspiracy involving illegal gambling and extortion in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.
Prosecutors said the six alleged mobsters, associated with the Genovese organized crime family, made money through illegal gambling and loan sharking by saddling victims with incredible debt that they could not pay back. The suspects include alleged high-ranking members Nicholas Calisi and Ralph Balsamo, known as “captains,” as well as alleged “soldiers” Michael Messina and John Campanella and alleged “associates” Michael Poli and Thomas Poli.
“From extortion to illegal gambling, the Mafia continues to find ways to prey on others to fill its coffers,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “Our office and our law enforcement partners remain committed to putting organized crime out of business.”
