Brazil police scour sewers for druglords - Yahoo! News UK: "Police scoured sewers under Rio's sprawling slums for hundreds of drug traffickers who fled an unprecedented military onslaught on the favelas that netted Brazil's biggest seizure of marijuanaThe crackdown on the Alemao was the culmination of an offensive that began last week
 Brazil claims 'D-Day' victory on Rio slums.  With Rio's World Cup and Olympic hosting duties looming, some 2,600 paratroopers, marines and elite police backed up by helicopters and armored personnel carriers led a pre-dawn assault Sunday on the traffickers' bastion of Grota, a lawless city within a city with a population of 400,000.
Grota is just one of 15 favelas that make up the Complexo do Alemao. But with an estimated 500 drug dealers thought to be hiding in the maze of slums, only 130 arrests were made.
Officials said the dealers may have escaped through a large network of sewers before the police arrived."

Real IRA turns screw in gangland drug war - National News, Frontpage - Independent.ie: "two young men shot dead in a filling station forecourt last week may have been caught up in the feuding between the republican/drugs gang terming itself the 'Real' IRA in Dublin and the remnants of slain gangland boss Eamon Dunne's drug network.
Gardai believe that the Real IRA hired hitmen, believed to be based in the Border area, to assassinate figures associated with Eamon Dunne's drugs distribution network in north inner-city Dublin. Dunne himself was shot dead by two gunmen in April as he sat in the Fassaugh House pub in Cabra with friends. Gardai believe hired professional gunmen were responsible for Dunne's murder and the same pair may have been behind last Tuesday night's double murder.
Glen Murphy, 19, and his cousin Mark Noonan, 23, both had garda records but only for petty offences. They were followed from an apartment in Rathborne Drive in south Finglas to the Clearwater Tesco filling station on the Finglas Road at around 11.40pm on Tuesday.
A black Five Series BMW was waiting in the forecourt when they arrived. The two gunmen got out as the victims' Toyota Avensis arrived and opened fire, hitting both young men repeatedly. Both died at the scene."

Murder in the rainbow nation - Telegraph: "townships of Cape Town carjacking and murder are grimly routine, so commonplace they barely register in the press, investigated by local police with scant hope of the culprits ever being caught.
But there was nothing routine about the shooting two weeks ago of Anni Dewani, the elegant 28-year-old honeymooner of Indian extraction whose body was found in an abandoned car in Khayelitsha, South Africa's largest shantytown.
Victims tend to be local not foreign like Mrs Dewani, a Swede whose family had been forced out of their home in Uganda by Idi Amin in his anti-Asian pogroms of the early 1970s and given asylum in Scandinavia."

Register-Pajaronian: "Watsonville man arrested last week on murder charges has ties to a Chicago gang known for drug sales, kidnapping and robbery, according to a federal indictment from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Manuel “Manny” Uriarte, 33, was arrested Friday at his place of employment by Santa Cruz County sheriff’s deputies. He is suspected of committing two murders for the “Rodriguez Enterprise,” an organization thought to have operated between 1999 and 2009 in the Chicago area."

WHDH-TV - Teen shoots crossbow at car in Charlton: "Not your ordinary drive by shooting - a teenager armed with a crossbow fired at a car full of people on Friday.
The arrow attack happened in Charlton on Friday afternoon. The teen was found a short time later and arrested.
“I’d consider them very lucky. This absolutely if it would have struck any one of them anywhere on their body definitely could have either injured them very severely, if not killed them,” said Keith Cloutier of the Charlton Police Department.
Paul Edwards, 18, was arrested and is now being charged with firing an arrow from a crossbow into a car with four teenagers inside."

CTV British Columbia - Back-to-back suspicious fires in B.C. linked to gangs - CTV News: "Gang warfare has landed a disabled woman in hospital with severe burns after her home was apparently set on fire, according to Prince George RCMP, who are linking the blaze to a suspicious fire at a tattoo shop one day earlier.
A 60-year-old woman who is confined to a wheelchair had to be rescued when firefighters discovered her home fully engulfed in flames shortly after midnight on Wednesday.
She is now in critical condition with severe burns at a Vancouver Hospital.
Mounties in the northern city say the injured woman is related to a known gang member, who is currently in jail. The prisoner was formerly a tenant at the burnt home, located in the 4000-block of Foster Road.
Just a day earlier, firefighters were called to a suspicious blaze at the Twisted Soul Tattoo Shop on 7th Avenue -- an establishment that just happens to be operated by the same incarcerated gang member.
'We believe the suspicious fire at the Twisted Soul Tattoo Shop and this fire are somehow connected. This is an unsettling example of how innocent people are affected by organized crime as the violence they inflict on each other also affects the entire community,' RCMP Const. Lesley Smith said in a release.
'It is not uncommon for a rival gang to inflict harm on their opponent by targeting a friend or family member.'"

Blog del Narco presents a video of a series of photographs which appear to show the apprehension and execution of several members of the Zetas by the Gulf cartel in Tampico, Tamaulipas.

The video mentions that some of the people shown executed were captured during an operation by by SEDENA (Secretary of National Defense) but were later released.

Among those captured were men and women who worked directly for a man identified as Comandante Quique, de Los Zetas.

Cold blooded BMW assassins lured their two victims to Tesco - National News, Frontpage - Herald.ie: "GARDAI were seconds away from catching the three man hit squad behind the Tesco murders.
A patrol car chased the BMW 5 series carrying two gunmen and their driver as it sped from the filling station at Clearwater, Finglas. The getaway car hit speeds of up to 200kph as it fled the scene.
Cousins Glen Murphy (19) and Mark Noonan (23) were gunned down in a hail of 15 bullets a minute earlier.
A marked garda car -- with unarmed officers inside -- pursued the killers' BMW from the Finglas Road onto the M1.
The killers' car, travelling at speeds of up to 180kph, sped north on the motorway. The garda car could not keep up and lost the dark-coloured vehicle."

Violence Rises in Brazil - WSJ.com: "Armored personnel carriers on loan from the Brazilian military rumbled through the streets of Rio de Janeiro as police with assault rifles battled heavily armed gangs for a fifth day, raising concerns about the seaside city's ability to keep visitors safe when it hosts soccer's 2014 World Cup and the 2016 summer Olympic Games.
Authorities said the death toll had hit at least 23 since Sunday night, including a teenage girl hit by a stray bullet, as live television carried scenes of paramilitary police shooting their way deeper into the hillside shantytowns that form a backdrop to the beaches of the famous tourist destination.
The wave of violence began Sunday night, when groups of armed men began setting vehicles ablaze, in many cases after stopping them on roadways and clearing out the occupants."

Defiant Va. gang leader gets life term: "One-time federal death row prisoner Richard Thomas Stitt was sentenced to life in prison without parole Tuesday.
Stitt, one of Portsmouth's more notorious gang leaders who had the nicknames 'Death' and 'Tom-Tom,' remained defiant, proclaiming his innocence and telling the judge he was framed.
'I had nothing to do with these murders,' Stitt told U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson. 'I never had nobody killed or shot.'
He said if a number of co-defendants hadn't cut deals with the government to testify against him, 'the truth would have come out.'
Stitt, now 37, ran a violent drug gang in Portsmouth for nearly a decade before his arrest in the late 1990s. He was convicted in 1998 and received three death sentences - one for each of three killings he ordered.
Wayne A. Griffin Sr. testified Tuesday that his family remains impacted by the 1993 murder of his brother, James Michael Griffin Jr. Stitt was convicted of ordering the killing.
'It's like a hole in your heart,' Griffin said. 'It's something missing.'"

Getting a grip on gun crimes - The Irish Times - Fri, Nov 26, 2010: "THE THREAT posed by organised drug gangs is reflected in lives destroyed by substance abuse and in a spate of killings that has given Dublin the unenviable status of having the highest rate of gun murder in Europe. The double shooting of cousins Glen Murphy and Mark Noonan in Finglas, last Tuesday, brought to 23 the number of gun murders so far this year, compared to 19 in 2009. At a time when activity in drug dealing has fallen because of the recession, that is a deeply troubling development"

Gardai hope phone records will shed light on murders - National News, Frontpage - Independent.ie: "GARDAI are examining mobile phone records for vital clues to the identity of the callous killers responsible for the brutal murder of two cousins in a petrol station forecourt.
The phone checks will determine whether the victims, Glen Murphy (19) and Mark Noonan (23), were lured to their bloody deaths shortly before midnight on Tuesday.
They died in a hail of bullets after stopping at the station beside a Tesco supermarket at the Clearwater shopping centre in Finglas, Co Dublin.
Two gunmen fired up to 15 shots from automatic pistols into their victims.
The gunmen and an accomplice, who was driving their dark-coloured BMW car, had been seen in the forecourt about five minutes before the victims arrived in Mr Noonan's grey Toyota Avensis."

2 bodies hung from bridge, man beheaded in Tijuana: "Two men were slain and hung from a bridge, another was decapitated and a fourth was shot to death over 24 hours in Tijuana, the latest gruesome killings in a Mexican border city where hopes had risen that cartel violence was decreasing.
The bodies of two men were found hanging from the Los Alamos bridge early Friday, said Fermin Gomez, Baja California state's deputy attorney general for organized crime.
Both victims had their hands and feet bound and one had his head covered with a black plastic bag. One of the bodies fell into traffic when the rope broke.
A day earlier, a human head was found underneath another bridge in Tijuana, which sits across from San Diego, California. The body of the 24-year-old man was found 12 hours later alongside the highway from Tijuana to the beach town of Ensenada."

Accused killer to represent himself in court - ContraCostaTimes.com: "Rodney Colonel Perez, 30, could face the death penalty for allegedly shooting and killing 24-year-old Roberta Romero last year in Pomona.
Prosecutors believe that Romero, of Azusa, was killed on May 11, 2009, because she testified against a high-ranking member of the Azusa 13 street gang who was convicted of four murders and sentenced to death.
Before Judge Tia Fisher relieved Perez's attorney and placed Perez in control of his case, she warned him of the difficulty of representing himself.
'I think that that's a bad choice,' Fisher told Perez in Pomona Superior Court. '... It would certainly be against my advice.'
Perez told Fisher he has no legal training and has never acted as his own attorney in prior criminal cases. He said his highest education level is 11th grade. He also said he completed one semester at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut.
Perez's former attorney, Antonio Bestard, said after the hearing that Perez was adamant about representing himself.
'He feels he can represent himself better,' Bestard said. 'He said he just wants to do this.'"

man believed to be filling the spot of west Kingston crime boss now that Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke is gone is at the top of the list of the country’s most wanted.

Police say Omar ‘Fowl’ Miller is now know as the interim leader of the Tivoli Gardens Gang.

Coke was caught in June, a few weeks after a battle between his supporters and the security forces in Tivoli Gardens and surrounding areas, and subsequently extradited to the US where he has been charged with drug dealing and gun running. Miller, who moved out of the community just before police and soldiers went in search of Coke is said to be trying to take over.

“He is also attempting to retrieve weapons from gang members that were issued by the leadership of the gang in preparation for the confrontation with security forces in May of this year, but this is being resisted by the members. He is also influencing criminal activities within the Kingston Western Division,” Deputy Superintendent Arthur Brown told a press conference yesterday as the names of the wanted men were released.

Others on the list include “the number one gang leader in St Andrew Central”, Christopher "Dog Paw" Linton who has eluded several police dragnets.

Drive-by shooting at S.A. home sparks more questions than answers | kens5.com | San Antonio News, Weather, Sports, Traffic, Entertainment, Video and Photos: "Fifteen rounds were fired at a home Sunday in a drive-by shooting. Though no one suffered injuries, the homeowner's wife claims the incident could have been intended as retaliation for a deadly home invasion last October.
Police investigated the incident around 3 a.m. Sunday in the 4800 block of Castle Path.
The homeowner was inside the house during the shooting.
In October, he reportedly shot and killed an intruder attempting to break into the same home."

A mayor-elect from the Mexican state of Veracruz was kidnapped and killed along with two companions on Monday, local media reported.
 
The reports did not link the killings to the violence sweeping Mexico as the government fights powerful drug cartels. Several mayors and other elected officials have been targeted by drug gangs in recent months. (Reuters)

LEADERS of a major drug-trafficking gang are being questioned by gardaí in five counties following one of the biggest operations against organised crime in recent years.

Some 300 gardaí met at Garda Headquarters, Phoenix Park, Dublin, and in Wexford and Cork stations from 4am yesterday before raiding over 30 locations in a co-ordinated pre-dawn operation.

The target of the so-called “super raid” was a drug-trafficking gang based mainly around Sheriff Street in Dublin’s north inner city but with criminal contacts nationally. The gang has been involved in a feud in recent years with another faction also based in Sheriff Street. The feud has cost five lives, two of them this year.

Gardaí yesterday searched 33 addresses in Dublin, Cavan, Wexford, Cork and Kildare. A total of 13 people, including all of the key targets, were arrested – nine of them in Dublin, and two in both Cork and Wexford.

Gardaí seized a small quantity of cocaine and confiscated mobile phones, computers and bulletproof vests. Records linked to property investments were also taken from the offices of solicitors and accountants by members of the Criminal Assets Bureau.

Mexico’s armed forces killed one of the nation’s top drug kingpins this weekend, but signs that the death will lead to more violence and turf battles have terrified residents.
Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, also known as “Tony Tormenta,” the highest-profile leader of the powerful Gulf Cartel, was gunned down in the northern state of Tamaulipas after hours of street battles resembling urban warfare.

President Obama called Mexican President Felipe Calderón to congratulate him for bringing down the cartel leader and the two governments said Mr. Cardenas’s death was a major blow to organized crime. The US State Department had targeted the drug lord with a $5 million bounty after he’d inherited the cartel from his brother, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, following his arrest in 2003.

Cardenas’s death comes as Mexico has scored a string of victories against major drug figures over the past year, including the December 2009 killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva, leader of the Beltran Leyva criminal syndicate; the August arrest of the man fighting to replace him, American-born Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as “La Barbie"; and the July killing of Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, a top boss in the Sinaloa cartel.

The slaying of Cardenas in effect destroyed the powerful Cardenas family legacy that, at its height, ruled one of the nation's top cartels. But it may have also emboldened the more ruthless and powerful Zetas, formed by ex-military that broke away from the Gulf Cartel and has unleashed beheadings and massacres arguably more brutal than any other drug gang. The group has been tied to the butchering of 72 South and Central American migrants in August.

RELATED: How the drug war is pushing cartels into human trafficking

“The reality is that [Zetas leader] Heriberto Lazcano, 'El Lazca,' is the top guy in Tamaulipas. He and his Zetas will now likely have even more power in the region, and sadly this probably will result in more extortion, kidnapping, and fear for the people of Tamaulipas,” said Malcolm Beith, a freelance journalist and author of a book on the drug war, “The Last Narco.”

Some experts have questioned the government’s method of taking down cartel heads, saying it leads to bloody fights for succession and the splintering of cartels into many crime groups.

“They cut off one head and many more grow back,” says Humberto Palomares, a researcher at the Colegio de Frontera Norte (College of the North Border) in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. For example, Osiel Cardenas’s arrest only led to the eventual split between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, according to Mr. Palomares.

Woman shot 13 times in drive-by-shooting - NBC-2.com WBBH News for Fort Myers, Cape Coral & Naples, Florida: "woman survived being shot 13 times in a drive-by shooting, according to Lee County Sheriff's Office reports.
It happened late Wednesday night, early Thursday morning at Wallace Avenue and State Road 82 in Lehigh Acres.
The woman told deputies a dark car drove up and a man began shooting at her.
She was shot two times in the left thigh, four times in the left calf, two times in the right calf, one time in the right him and four times in the right arm."

The Canadian Press: Mexican police find body of former state attorney general's brother, arrest 8: "Eight members of a drug cartel were arrested in the torture and slaying of the brother of a former Mexican state attorney general, federal police announced Friday. The man had been forced to appear at gunpoint in a video saying his sister worked for a rival gang.
The body of Mario Gonzalez was found half buried in a house under construction in Chihuahua city after one of the suspects told officials where they could find him, federal police commissioner Facundo Rosas told a news conference. He said the body showed signs of torture.
The suspect said a man known as 'The Vulture' ordered the group to kidnap Mario Angel Gonzalez Rodriguez, Rosas said. The men are suspected of working for the Sinaloa cartel."

More than 70 gang members charged after task force raids - dailytribune.com: "Almighty Latin King Nation is a nationally recognized gang with tens of thousands of members worldwide, the release stated.

Originating in Chicago in the 1940s, the gang’s initial intent was to foster unity and provide protection for its Latino membership, but it soon evolved into a street gang involved in drug trafficking, assaults, robberies and murders.

The New World Order is a Pontiac-based multi-racial street gang. The gang is also involved in armed robberies, assaults, attempted murders and murders, according to the release"

Builder faces shooting death charge - Yahoo! News UK: "Marvin Henry, 17, was shot in the chest on an estate near Bray Road in Mill Hill, north-west London, shortly before 12.30am on Wednesday.
Ithai McPhee, 21, of Abbots Road, Edgware, will appear in custody at Enfield Magistrates' Court, Scotland Yard said.
Marvin, known as Spooky, was taken to Barnet General Hospital by ambulance but died on arrival.
The teenager had recently left a referral unit designed to help expelled pupils get back into mainstream education.
Some friends described him as a cheerful and friendly teenager who enjoyed playing football and rap music."