This was a fantastic seizure by our colleagues at Border Force, and taking this amount of cocaine out of circulation will have deprived the organised criminals involved of millions in profits.
Humberto Caicedo Ramirez, 53, and Carlos Barbosa Arias, 61, were caught when police raided a laboratory inside a flat in Vauxhall, south London, where they were processing cocaine concealed in bars of soap.
Military police chief Marcelo Menezes Nogueira said that the raid resulted in a major armed confrontation. Dos Santos and six other suspected criminals were killed, and a local resident was reportedly caught in the crossfire after being taken hostage.
The victim had just left Lobito de Mar, the restaurant owned by chef Dani García, when three men forcibly removed him from the street, pepper-sprayed him, and threw him into a Ford Transit van. Several pedestrians and residents on nearby balconies immediately called authorities. Spanish National Police tracked the vehicle to Ronda de Toledo, about 15 minutes from the scene, and arrested two of the attackers.
Wives, he wrote, "have left the housework undone and husbands have slipped away from their jobs to watch." The subject of all this excitement was an unlikely one: Congressional hearings. Hours and hours of them. What made it all so fascinating was the topic: Organized crime. Gangsters. Or, as Americans were learning right there on TV, something called "the Mafia."
Two deeply incapable siblings who are in over their heads when a misguided theft for their dying grandmother accidentally pulls them into the world of organized crime. Blackmailed into increasingly dangerous assignments, they clumsily fail upwards, sinking deeper into chaos they're ill-equipped to handle.
Early on February 22nd, residents woke up to the whirl of Army helicopters buzzing low over their houses, while those on the western edge of town heard gunshots and explosions. By eleven that morning, news broke that the operation was targeting Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, better known as El Mencho, the fifty-nine-year-old head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or C.J.N.G., and the most powerful drug lord in Mexico.
The 59-year-old is accused of running the notorious 18th Street Gang on behalf of her Mexican Mafia husband, who rots in a state prison. She allegedly ran the organization's criminal operations - collecting rent, taxes and dishing out brutal discipline - on behalf of her husband Jorge Gonzales and three other Mexican Mafia leaders in prison.
Billups and Jones are accused of luring unsuspecting players to poker games rigged by the mob. They and the rest of the defendants, who include purported organized crime figures and suppliers of equipment to rig the games, have pleaded not guilty.
Benedetto Nitto Santapaola, a Sicilian mafia boss and one of the most dangerous figures in Italian criminal history, has died aged 87. Santapaola, who was widely believed to have been the architect of a campaign of bloodshed that scarred Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, died on Monday in a Milan prison where he was serving multiple life sentences.
This highly organised gang thought they were outsmarting the police and prison authorities. What they didn't know is they were subject to sustained specialist surveillance by Met officers. All seven men admitted their roles in a serious, organised, and prolific enterprise to supply Class B and C drugs, and conveying list A and B articles into prisons.
According to the annual ranking by the Mexican organization Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, which compiles a list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world, six Ecuadorian cities will appear among the top 10 in 2025. Babahoyo appears on the list for the first time as the second most violent, with 166 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
The ability of criminal groups to exercise this type of power and exercise this type of violence is closely linked to firearms trafficking, said Cecilia Farfan-Mendez, an expert on Mexican organised crime. If we want to see less violence in Mexico, this is a very important conversation.
In the 48 hours following the operation led by the Mexican army in Jalisco, hundreds of false or unverified posts circulated on various platforms. The attacks unleashed by the drug cartels in several states, with a succession of road blockades, vehicles set on fire, and clashes between federal security forces and armed groups, were magnified through content amplified by bots by the manipulation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and by the influence of the American far right.
Juan Carlos Valencia González has emerged as a key contender to take over the $20 billion criminal empire after "El Mencho" died in a Mexican special forces raid on Sunday. The 41-year-old is the slain chief's stepson. According to law enforcement, his mother Rosalinda "La Jefa" González Valencia was married to the drug kingpin and was a major player on the financial side of the cartel.
Persico Jr., 62, of Todt Hill, is facing a maximum of two years behind bars but was reportedly expected to receive anywhere from five to 11 months. In 2023, Persico Jr. was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a labor union extortion plot carried out by top leadership within the Colombo crime family. He was granted supervised release last summer on the condition he avoid all contact with members of organized crime.
The inspector general, a relatively new arm's-length position tasked by the province with overseeing policing, was asked to investigate Thursday after eight current and retired Toronto officers were charged in an organized crime and corruption investigation. The case immediately raised questions about whether systemic issues contributed to organized crime's alleged infiltration of the ranks, said Kent Roach, a University of Toronto law professor and contributor to several high-profile police inquiries. Those questions, he said, are best answered by a civilian-led investigation.
The cartel said it was seizing the store, which would only be allowed to sell online outside the state. That was in early 2022, when vapes were still legal in Mexico, a market worth $1.5 billion. But earlier this month, the country banned the sale - although not the use - of electronic cigarettes. Experts believe organized crime will now consolidate its control over the sale of the devices.
The Chinese government has executed 11 members of the Ming family crime syndicate. This comes after investigations into the criminal empire uncovered "intentional homicide, intentional injury, illegal detention, fraud, and operating gambling dens", as well as other penalties. In the announcement, which has been translated, the Supreme People's Court has confirmed that the group, led by Ming Guoping and Ming Zhenzhen, working alongside the "telecommunications fraud syndicate" led by other members, had conspired or committed various crimes.
