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.
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.
He was writing from hell, 8,000 miles away. A summer shower had left a rainbow over my Brooklyn neighborhood, and my two children were playing in a kiddie pool on the roof of our apartment building. Now the sun was setting, while I-in typical 21st-century parenting fashion, forgive me-compulsively scrolled through every app on my phone. The message had no subject line and came from an address on the encrypted email service Proton Mail: "vaultwhistle@proton.me." I opened it.
In February 2023, an article in the Mexican press announced the capture of a vessel some 195 nautical miles from the port of Lazaro Cardenas in the state of Michoacan. It had been carrying nearly 700 pounds of cocaine packaged in plastic-wrapped bricks, in addition to 1,650 liters of hydrocarbons in 33 plastic containers. Two Ecuadorian fishermen were among the five detainees, and their immigration records showed unusual activity.
Our hope is that later this year, with bringing some stability with Venezuela, with some help from American assistance, commercial help - no money from our government, no subsidies - but by getting a more stable business environment, we'll see growing production out of Venezuela that'll increase dramatically,
Hannah Beech, a New York Times reporter, gained rare access to one of Myanmar's notorious cyberscam centers to see how Chinese criminals have been targeting Americans in the middle of a war zone. Holy moly. Look at these phones. The floor is just littered with SIM cards. We're in Myanmar. Only weeks after rebel fighters took control of a cyberscam center near the border with Thailand.
It accuses the captured Venezuelan leader of running a state-sponsored drug terror network for years. Maduro, it says, collaborated with the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua, which now operates throughout Latin America, as well as with the Colombian FARC guerrilla group and the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, to smuggle cocaine into the US and enrich himself personally. The indictment described Venezuela as being systematically developed into a hub for international cocaine trafficking, with state aircraft and even the presidential hangar being used to transport cocaine.
Trump administration officials announced a sprawling probe into benefits fraud across California on Friday, citing what they called a massive, coordinated effort by "foreign actors" to fleece government healthcare to the tune of billions of dollars. The crackdown appeared to center on bogus hospice providers first exposed by The Times in 2020 and later investigated by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. "Eighteen percent of the whole country's home healthcare billing is coming out of Los Angeles County - how is that possible?" said Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. "It's about $3.5 billion just in L.A. County for hospice and home healthcare."
Andalucia is famous for its variety: high alpine mountains and snow-capped peaks, river plains and rolling olive groves, sun-baked coastlines and arid deserts. It is the perfect setting for Neil Rollinson's debut novel, which is its own kind of spectacular mosaic. Built from short, seemingly discrete chapters that take us between Spain in 2003 and the coalfields of Northumberland in the 70s and 80s, The Dead Don't Bleed coheres into an extraordinarily tense and tender portrait of two brothers trying to escape their father's gangland past.
His career is, in itself, a map of both the transformation and the limitations of states in the face of organized crime: he played a key role in the downfall of Colombia's major cartels in the 1990s; led the intelligence services during the moments of greatest threat to his country; spearheaded police reforms that professionalized criminal investigations; and, as vice president, participated in the construction of peace agreements that marked a turning point in Colombia's recent history.
