People of color are disproportionately prosecuted and sent to prison for drug crimes in Illinois, found a new study by the Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study Commission...
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Almost twenty percent of the arrested population in Tampa, Florida have a gambling problem, a new study from the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling found. The study, "Gambling, Problem Gambling, and Criminality in an Arrestee Population", also found that those with a gambling problem were more likely to be charged with a felony.
Read the study here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on gambling.
Read full entry »Twenty-seven members of the Outlaws biker gang were rounded in eight states Tuesday, charged with attempted murder, kidnapping and witness intimidation. The Outlaws’ reputed New England treasurer, Thomas “Tomcat” Mayne, 58, of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, was killed in a gunfight with an ATF SWAT team, reports the Boston Herald.
Federal search warrants were executed early Tuesday based on an indictment in Virginia. Federal authorities called the Outlaws “a highly organized criminal enterprise with a defined, multilevel chain of command.” It is alleged the Outlaws have participated in violent racketeering activities with the intent to leave rival gangs - in particular, the Hell’s Angels - in their dust.
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An art historian and criminologist argues that efforts to battle sophisticated art-theft rings are stymied by the lack of academic research and by public misconceptions about the trade in stolen art.
Once a gentleman-thief’s activity, art thefts now earn hundreds of millions of dollars for organized crime. Over the past 50 years, international syndicates have not only been responsible for most art thefts and forgeries, but have used the profits to fund activities such as the drug and arms trades, and terrorism.
According to the FBI, illicit gains from art crime run about six billion dollars annually.
Yet art-world outsiders, including law enforcement authorities and politicians, mistakenly believe that art crime is not particularly important. They argue that it only involves the collectibles of the wealthy, and that the only victims are other members of the elitist art world.
This misconception has not been helped by the fact that art crime has lacked the kind of scholarly research and analysis which is critical to safeguarding the multi-billion dollar legitimate art industry, and to protecting the variety of enterprises involved in the art trade and art preservation, from museums and auction houses to galleries and private collections.
One reason for these gaps in knowledge and perceptions is the lack of understanding of how art crime has been dramatically transformed since World War II. Until the 1940s, most art crime was perpetrated by idealistic individuals with gentlemanly aspirations. Thefts were non-violent and elegant, in their use of dexterity and intelligence over force. But in the post-war period, and specifically since 1960, international organized crime organizations have moved in.
Apart from the occasional individual thief or forger, syndicates ranging from smaller organized gangs to the Sicilian and Russian mafias now largely control all aspects of art crime, from planning the heist to transport and sale of the stolen goods.
And they have added their signature element: the use of violence. There is a new trend in so-called “blitz” thefts, in which armed and masked gunmen burst into museums, grab artworks nearest the door, and run out before the alarm has time to summon police. This occurred in the 2001 Stockholm Museum theft, the 2004 Munch Museum theft, and the 2008 Emil Buhrle Collection theft, to name but a few examples.
There are hundreds of thousands of art crimes every year, though the general public only hears about the handful that make international headlines because they involve major museums or masterpieces.
In Italy alone over 20,000 such crimes are reported annually, and many more go unreported. Few countries have dedicated art police, and fewer still have specialized training for their staff in how art crime, and the illicit art world, functions. In the U.S., the FBI has a small art squad that was founded only a few years ago. The Los Angeles Police Department has an art theft unit, and the New York Police Department's only detective specializing in art crime died in 2006. By contrast, the Italian Carabinieri have over 300 full-time art agents.
The paucity of solid, comprehensive empirical data begins with the fact that police are usually instructed to file art theft under the category of stolen property, resulting in the loss of valuable data from the outset, at a local level. The study of art crime has been inhibited by this lack of data, making the field, at this stage, insufficiently scientific, with an over-reliance on anecdotal history and the experience of those in the field.
One of the goals of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) is to encourage the academic study of art crime, and introduce the field to criminologists, who rely on data sets that have, until now, been both incomplete and inaccessible outside of national police forces.
Founded in 2006, with branches in the United States and Italy, ARCA is an international non-profit think tank and research group on issues in art crime and cultural property protection. ARCA also runs a new Masters Program on the study of art crime in Italy, and publishes the first peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject, The Journal of Art Crime, for which submissions and subscriptions are welcome.
Noah Charney, an art historian and criminologist, is founding director of The Association for Research into Crimes against Art and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Art Crime. He is the author of a novel, The Art Thief (Atria 2007), and is currently Adjunct Professor of Art History at The American University of Rome.
Picture Via Guardian Art Blog
U.S. retail thefts are becoming a big moneymaker for organized crime—pulling in as much as $10 billion a year.
Last year, police arrested a Polk County, Florida woman named Blanca Sevilla after she was caught walking out of a grocery store with her purse stuffed with $90 worth of Good Start Soy Baby Formula that she hadn’t paid for.
A classic case of petty shoplifting? Not exactly. After interviewing Sevilla and another baby formula booster named Jessie Lopez as they sat in the county jail, authorities learned that the thieves were part of a 21-member ring of shoplifters headed by Eli Nimrod Castillo-Almendarez, who was arrested in March 2009.
The ring, based in Georgia, was allegedly paid between $100 to $300 a day to methodically steal cans of baby formula in six Florida counties for eventual sale on the black market in North Carolina. The ring’s take in one year totaled $2.5 million, police said, adding that over the ring’s seven-year period of activity, it could have netted $17.5 million.
It wasn’t the first time that Polk County was victimized by what law enforcement and retail industry experts call “Organized Retail Crime” (ORC). In 2008, 18 people were arrested and charged with the theft of $100 million in cosmetic products over the span of five years.
ORC may not fit most people’s image of organized crime. And that may be one reason why it hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Such large-scale theft is often hard to detect from the thousands of shoplifting incidents reported around the country each year, but it “is an extremely sophisticated, coordinated crime, ” Frank Muscato, the ORC investigations supervisor at Walgreens, told Congress during a hearing on the subject in 2008. “It is not opportunistic theft where merchandise like food, clothing, sundries or music are stolen for personal use.”
No Federal Definition
Another reason why ORC often falls below the radar screen is that federal law provides no uniform definition for this type of crime, making it difficult to track. While the size and scope of ORC is thus hard to pin down, in a paper presented by University of Florida criminologists at the 2007 American Society of Criminology conference, ORC was calculated to be a $10 billion annual problem (other estimates have pegged it to as high as $30 billion a year), resulting in millions of dollars of losses to states in sales tax revenue. It’s certainly an issue that is of concern to retailers nationwide. According to the National Retail Foundation’s most recent annual survey , 92 percent of respondents in 2009 reported that their companies had been a victim of ORC incidents in the past 12 months.
According to Walgreen’s Muscato, ORC has grown in the past two decades. “ORC is a fairly new type of crime,” he told The Crime Report. “It started taking hold in the early 1990s. That doesn’t mean that people weren’t stealing to resell before, but they have become organized. As the years went on, ORC has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. No one was recognizing it, and now it is getting more recognition—that it is a specific crime and that people leave their house in the morning to do this.”
A 2009 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bulletin, for example, notes that “ORC rings are very sophisticated, compartmentalized and operate similar to criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking or human smuggling. Furthermore, transnational criminal syndicates such as Eastern European street gangs and organized crime elements have become increasingly involved, and utilize traditional money laundering techniques to conceal their profits.”
Retailers are slowly awakening to the threat. “Five years ago, Walmart, Walgreens and Target had ORC teams,” Muscato says. “Today, every chain retailer has an ORC team.”
Law enforcement and industry reps say that it can be difficult to pursue the crime because current laws don’t address some of the nuances related to it. For example, law enforcement can currently pursue these cases under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO)—both Polk County cases were prosecuted under the statute—but the standards can be difficult to meet in some ORC cases. “When a criminal goes out and steals [as part of a boosting crew], they don’t always meet the felony threshold per theft incident, and RICO is looking for that felony threshold,” says Millie Kresevich, a senior loss prevention manager at Luxottica Retail, a luxury and sport eyewear company.
And although ORC can also be pursued under state or local theft or burglary laws, these crimes are often multi-jurisdictional. “The (kind of) challenge we run into, for example, is a case where they’re stealing from San Francisco or Los Angeles and then selling it over the internet,” says Joe LaRocca of the National Retail Foundation (NRF). “No one agency has jurisdiction over the internet, and in those cases, law enforcement can be perplexed about where to file the case and who to go after: the group in California that’s stealing, or the seller in another state that’s fencing the goods?”
Adds LaRocca: “there’s a federal nexus that needs to be involved, but it’s up to local and statewide agencies to go after these problems, and that’s where the disconnect begins.”
Four Bills in Congress
Four bills aimed at addressing these shortcomings are currently wending their way through Congress, including one introduced late last year by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). These bills would specifically make ORC a federal offense under RICO, and create stiffer penalties for the crime. The bills would also allow the victims to pursue cases against the offenders, as well as the online marketplaces that are knowingly involved in the resale of stolen goods. (Some online retailers have expressed concerns about how these laws would be enforced.)
“(These bills) would start to get people on the same page in terms of calling this out as a serious problem, and provide some bite with the bark,” says LaRocca, who is lobbying for the bills. “(They will) hold people who are responsible for these crimes accountable.”
Ohio is one of 18 states with statutes that explicitly address ORC. A law that went into effect last April allows Ohio police to aggregate a number of misdemeanor theft cases to illustrate that an individual is part of a coordinated activity. “We saw a decline in ORC immediately after the bill was passed in Ohio,” Luxottica Retail’s Kresevich says. “Right now, our biggest challenge is to educate law enforcement on the bill and educate prosecutors on why using this statute is better than the previous laws.”
Pending the creation of new state and federal statutes to tackle the issue, retailers and law enforcement are increasingly creating formal partnerships to address ORC. Across the country—from San Diego to Albuquerque to Philadelphia—task forces comprised of local police and retailers meet regularly to stay abreast of ORC trends.
And last June, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency launched a pilot program to work with retailers in four cities to focus on ORC cases involving immigrants, or cases where products and money are being diverted outside of U.S. borders (some recent cases have involved boosting crews of undocumented immigrants, and there have also been some allegations that proceeds have funded terrorism efforts, such as a Texas case where money made by a boosting ring was traced to Hamas and Hezbollah).
Additionally, the NRF and the Retail Industry Leaders Association have developed a database—the Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network —to track and report ORC. In 2009, retailers provided information about nearly 100,000 retail crime incidents via the system, and in December, it was connected to a FBI database to assist federal law enforcement in investigating and tracking these cases.
“Organized theft rings steal billions of dollars of merchandise every year, which victimizes retailers, endangers the safety of retail employees, and raises the price of consumer goods,” says the NRF’s LaRocca. “Banding together with law enforcement sends a clear message to criminals: You will be stopped, caught and prosecuted for your actions.”
Bernice Yeung is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist. She was a 2010 John Jay CMCJ/H.F. Guggenheim Fellow.
Photo Via Retailer Daily
On April 1 and April 2, 2009, the Center on Media, Crime and Justice and McCormick Foundation hosted a specialized reporting institute, "How Do they get Away With it? Tracking Financial Crime in the New Era."
Twenty-One fellows from around the country joined panelists and speakers such as: Patrick Carroll, Supervisory Special Agent, FBI, New York Office, Sam Antar, Former CFO, Fast Eddie's, Peter Turecek, Senior Managing Director, Business Intelligence & Investigations, Kroll and Walter Ricciardi, Former SEC Deputy Chief, Division of Enforcement.
Access the program brochure here.
Researchers at John Jay College compiled a research guide of the most relevant contacts in the financial industry. Download a copy of the guide.
Before the sub-prime crisis captured national attention, a reporter for The Charlotte Observer noticed a strange pattern while compiling a list of foreclosed homes in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County -- clusters were concentrated in new developments and they wondered if faulty loans were behind the trend.
The year-long investigation led to The Charlotte Observer’s four-part series, “ Sold a Nightmare.” Lawmakers in North Carolina passed new mortgage regulations in response to the series and federal and criminal investigations of Beazer are underway.
Understand how the reporters investigated this fraud. Read the case study here.
Read live blogging from the conference.
Articles by conference fellows:
MSNBC
"Regulators Struggle to Contain Foreclosure Fraud" by John W. Schoen
SACRAMENTO BEE
"Ponzi Schemes Flourish with Vulnerable Victims, Underfunded Watchdogs" by Andrew McIntosh
"Ponzi Scheme Perpetrators Exploit Some Common Misperceptions" by Andrew McIntosh
Graphic: "Red Flags for Ponzi Schemes" by Andrew McIntosh
"Massive real estate losses hidden at California bank " by Andrew McIntosh
"Jerry Brown donations tied to businessmen" by Andrew McIntosh
"$2 million settles kickback " by Andrew McIntosh
"Brown returns $52,500 to donors" by Andrew McIntosh
VOICES OF SAN DIEGO
"A Staggering Swindle: How Could it Happen in 2008?" by Kelly Bennett and Will Carless
BLOOMBERG
"Stanford Coaxed $5 billion as SEC Weighed Powers" by Alison Fitzgerald and Michael Forsythe
Appearances/Articles
Professor William Black (panelist) discussing financial fraud on the Bill Moyers Journal and interviewed in Barrons.
Panelist William D. Cohan, author of "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" interviewed by The Crime Report.
Conference Handouts:
Resource Guide: Reporting on Financial Crime
Case Study: The Charlotte Observer
Prof. William Black Power Point: Accounting Fraud
More Reporting Resources (generously submitted by panelist Elaine Carey, Senior VP of Control Risks)
The lobbyist database from the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets) is great and easy to use. It links directly to pdf filings and lets you see if someone is a registered lobbyist, who they are registered with, and who they lobby. You can also see how much they make from each client.
The Environmental Working Group’s farm subsidy database is a great way of calling out politicians who complain about “government handouts” and then take tons of money in farm subsidies for their ranches and farms.
People frequently don’t think about state donations, but they can be incredibly important when looking to see if someone is buy influence at the state level. The National Institute on Money in State Politics is a great way to start when looking to see if someone is giving a ton at this level. You should always check out the state’s own website too, as they sometimes have more complete information.
The Federal Register lets you see copies of notices and actions published by federal agencies - helpful when looking to see if someone has been sanctioned, for instance.
FedSpending.org lets you see what groups have received federal grants and contracts.
The EPA has a good website that lets you check to see if a company/facility is EPA compliant or if there have been any enforcement actions taken against it.
WikiFOIA is a website that compiles information about open records availability en each state. It can help you find out what information is available and links to a “letter generator” for each state that conforms to that state’s open records laws.
The Center for Public Integrity compiles financial disclosure statements for state legislators. This is a good way to see who they’ve worked for, where they hold directorships, what they hold stock in, etc. It also has a rundown of various disclosure requirements for different states.
Video from the Conference
Video 1: Did white collar crime and fraud trigger the economic meltdown?
Video 2: Were regulators asleep?
Video 3: Did journalists miss the story?
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With the mill price for a black cherry tree currently at $850 per thousand board feet, sugar maple at $475 per thousand board feet and red oak at $380 per thousand board feet, timber theft is a lucrative and rising business across the nation. New York State recently released a report, "Timber Thieves in New York," based on an April 2008 symposium to address this issue. Advocates call for criminal charges to be levied against perpetrators of timber theft, and refer to States around the country that deal with similar issues. Louisiana has a central database to help law enforcement catch their timber thieves.
Read the report here.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Organized Crime .
Read full entry »The commission created to break the mob’s grip on the New York City waterfront became its own bastion of lawlessness, employing some of the same corrupt methods as the gangsters it was supposed to pursue, investigators said Tuesday in a scathing report. The New York Times said top officials at the $11-million-a-year bistate agency divided spoils, helped cronies evade the law and thwarted security provisions meant to safeguard the port against terrorism.
The report on the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor by the New York State inspector general capped a nearly two-year investigation that the commission had sought to block in court. As a result of the findings, virtually the entire executive staff has been ousted. New leadership was put in place starting last year. The commission is a throwback to days when the gun and the knife ruled the nation’s shipping, as depicted in the classic film "On the Waterfront."
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Notre Dame University
http://law.nd.edu/people/faculty-and-administration/teaching-and-research-faculty/g-robert-blakey
(574) 631-5717)
G.R.Blakey.1@nd.edu
Blakey helped draft the federal Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, Title IX of which is known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO). He has been involved in drafting RICO-type legislation in 22 states. He is an expert on organized crime, wiretapping, and other criminal law subjects.
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