Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com A tenacious reporter who covers urban affairs and the D.C. Council received a troubling email from the U.S. Attorney’s Office: His voice was picked up after agents tapped the cell phones of now-disgraced Councilman Michael Brown, WUSA9 reports. “I’m not going to be surprised if I call someone at some point in…
By Allan Lengel Deadline Detroit DETROIT — Allison Leotta, a Detroit native living in the D.C. area, likes to send her parents in Michigan a draft of her new novels — minus the chapters with the steamy sex scenes. “I take out those chapters,” says Leotta, a Michigan State University graduate. But her mother, Diane…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com A tiff between the ATF and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Reno has left crime-stopping teams without the proper equipment to conduct undercover gun operations and gun buyback programs in northern Nevada, the Reno Gazette Journal reports. Since ATF agents left the Nevada office, local and regional police have been unable to…
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 Keith Franklin Simmons, 47, of North Carolina, was sentenced Wednesday to 50 years in prison for an elaborate Ponzi scheme that devastated hundreds of investors, mostly elderly and vulnerable, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced. A disgusted U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad Jr. and agents involved in his case described Simmons as a…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com A former Washington area federal prosecutor who helped put away some key spies including CIA double-agent Aldrich Ames, died this past weekend of colon cancer, the Washington Post reported. He was 53. Mark J. Hulkower, 53, worked at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va.,from 1989 to 1995 and went into…
By Matt Castello ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — Even on Halloween, it’s probably not a good idea to impersonate a Secret Service agent. Frederick James Nickerson, of Hopatcong, N.J. was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington to three years of probation for posing as a Secret Service agent. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Nickerson…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Who says wiseguys aren’t sensitive? The New York Daily News reports that Genovese mobster Joseph “JB” Barone, 49, who was an FBI informant for 18 years, cried late last week after he was acquitted by a federal jury in Manhattan of in a $1 million murder-for-hire plot. But it may not…
