By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com FBI agent Daphne Hearn is heading south — actually just a bit south — to head up the San Diego FBI office. Hearn, who has served as special agent in charge of the administrative division in Los Angeles, succeeds Keith Slotter, who is retiring after 25 years. Hearn, a Kansas City,…
Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com Bank robber Charles Estell, 38, of Illinois, spent the night trapped in a duct before police cut him free and arrested him, reports CBS News. Estell must have watched all the right movies to help plan his weekend bank heist. Problem is, he was more Charlie Chaplin than Sean Connery in his…
Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com The U.S. feds met with Italian law enforcement counterparts in Italy last week to make sure everyone was on the same page on organized crime. The summit gave the FBI and several federal prosecutors from the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office a chance to connect the dots with Italian officials on current investigations…
Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com Carla R. Walker, 43, of Lebanon, Ill. must not have listed “running away” in her escape plan when she wore flip-flops to rob her hometown bank. Walker pled guilty Thursday in federal court on one count of bank robbery, announced the Justice Department in a press release. They must have heard Walker…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com An FBI sting snared a white supremacist in Virginia who posted threats about President Obama on a hate-website. Douglas Story tried buying an illegal fully automatic machine gun from an undercover agent, Fox 5 reported. Story alleged paid the agent to convert a rifle into a machine gun. To read more…
By Jim Schoettler Florida Times-Union JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — On his first day at work, Mike Steinbach sat at a Chicago Denny’s drinking coffee, reading a newspaper and covertly protecting a nearby federal witness from a possible hit attempt by the mob. “I thought, ‘Holy moly.’ This is a pretty good deal,” Steinbach said. “I knew…
Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com Like the rest of the Etan Patz disappearance, the murder confession of Pedro Hernandez is not an open-and-shut case. Lack of evidence, inconsistencies in the suspect’s story, and mental health issues are bringing Hernandez’s confession into doubt, according to the NY Daily News. Since the 6-year-old Patz went missing in 1979, there…
By Adam Cohen Time magazine We may all be getting a new Facebook friend soon: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI wants to shift its wiretapping from old-school telephone lines to person-to-person platforms like email and instant messaging and even social media like Facebook. To help it make the switch, the FBI is asking…
