By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com More signs of the Mexican drug cartels reaching into the U.S.: The Washington Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security is warning Arizona authorities that Mexican drug gangs have sent assassins or “sicarios” into the state to kill bandits who are ambushing and stealing loads of cocaine, marijuana and heroin,…
By Allan Lengel For AOL News WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama insulted — albeit inadvertently — the folks at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration today by mentioning the FBI instead of their agency in remarks about the war on drugs. At a town hall meeting in Washington aired on MTV, the president told a group…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Atlanta cop Lucius T. Solomon got tripped up in an FBI sting and will likely head off to prison. The 31-year-old, now a former cop, pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to corruption and drug charges. He could get up to life in prison at sentencing, which is…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Despite their efforts, U.S. and Mexican authorities are seizing no more than one percent of the billions of dollars in drug proceeds being smuggled south into Mexico, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. The cash is being smuggled in spare tires, engine transmissions and truckloads of baby diapers, the…
By Allan Lengel For AOL News If you speak Ebonics, the federal government may have a job for you. The Drug Enforcement Administration wants to hire people fluent in Ebonics to help monitor, transcribe and translate secretly recorded conversations in narcotics investigations, according to the website The Smoking Gun and DEA documents. The Smoking Gun…
The Washington Post Editorial Page WASHINGTON — Give Mexican President Felipe Calderon credit for honesty as well as courage. Last week he presided over a three-day public conference to assess the results of nearly four years of war against Mexico’s drug cartels. Most of the facts were grim: — According to the chief of the…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com The murderous ways of the Mexican drug cartels may seem very scary, but so is another phenomena: The cartels are apparently shutting up the media. The Washington Post reports journalists, fearing for their lives, “are adhering to a near-complete news blackout, under strict orders of drug smuggling organizations and their enforcers,…
By Jackson Diehl Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Writer WASHINGTON — Last month, 303 people were murdered in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, which lies alongside El Paso. This month, the dead include three men killed by a sophisticated, remote-controlled car bomb — the first in Mexico’s drug wars. In a city of…
