Anger between Congress and the Obama administration over Operation Fast and Furious produced an exchange yesterday "notable for its vitriol even by current...
Read full entry »In a sign of the cost of widespread U.S. weapons smuggling into Mexico, federal law enforcement sources confirmed that two guns, part of a series of purchases that were being monitored by authorities, were found at the scene of the firefight that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona, reports the Los Angeles Times. Sources said U.S. authorities did not have the ability to monitor adequately the movement of the guns toward the southern border, in part because current laws and low levels of staffing.
The disclosure comes amid a widening congressional investigation into allegations lodged by whistleblowers within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They allege the agency has been aware of the purchase of assault weapons in the U.S. by buyers suspected of selling across the border, but failed to track them adequately. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, has asked the bureau for detailed answers about its gun smuggling investigation, known as Project Gunrunner. Grassley said there are "serious concerns that the ATF may have become careless, if not negligent, in implementing the Gunrunner strategy."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-atf-guns-20110203,0,6169639.story
The Obama administration appears to have changed course and will support a budget increase for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, says the Washington Post. The White House had planned a proposed 13 percent cut in the agency's budget. Now, it will call for an increase.
In an editorial, the Post says that, "Chipping away at the agency's modest budget would do little to reduce the deficits that continue to imperil the country's financial health, but it could have serious consequences for the effort to ensure that only law-abiding citizens get their hands on lethal weapons." Because of federal hiring rules, ATF employees brought on to stanch the flow of U.S. guns used by Mexican drug cartels to murder thousands of their compatriots would probably face layoffs if the agency is squeezed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/02/AR2011020205779.html
Read full entry »Six former officials of the agency have joined the chorus calling for President Obama to name a new director for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The agency has not had a permanent director since 2006. Its current leader, Ken Melson, was downgraded in title to deputy director when his tenure exhausted the statutory limit for an acting director because Obama did not nominate him for permanent status. In a letter to the White House, the former ATF officials said, "It is critical that ATF have a leader who will marshal ATF’s resources to aggressively combat America’s gun violence epidemic."
The signers of the letter were former directors Stephen Higgins and John Magaw and former senior agents Joseph Vince, William Vizzard, Gerald Nunziato and Julius Wachtel. They wrote, "Americans need an ATF director who will aggressively enforce the law, shut down corrupt gun dealers, and fight gun trafficking. Every day that passes with a
leaderless ATF, the consequences grow deadlier." The ATF is the primary federal agency for enforcing gun laws, and many see politics at play in the delay. Writing recently on the Huffington Post, Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said, "A headless ATF is but the latest symptom of a paralyzing disease -- the Obama Administration's fear of the gun lobby." Main Justice reported last week that Andrew Traver, a 20-year ATF veteran in charge of the Chicago office, is a leading candidate for the directorship.
The ATF traced 32,964 crime guns that were recovered by statewide California law enforcement agencies in 2009, new online statistics revealed. Fifty percent of all the guns were found in Los Angeles County and 21 percent of all guns were recovered from Los Angeles. Over 3,000 guns were traced to youth between 18-24 years of age.
Read the full report here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on guns.
Read full entry »
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ New York Division traced 9,673 guns in 2009, more than half were recovered in New York City. Handguns outnumbered long guns in New York by two and a half percent, and in New York City that number increased to four to one.
Read the full report here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on Guns.
Read full entry »The federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is all but ignoring the lucrative cigarette-smuggling racket, says the Center for Public Integrity. Citing a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the center says just 2 percent of the ATF’s budget over the past six years has gone toward cigarette smuggling, is controlled by organized crime.
With cigarette taxes as high as $4.25 per pack in New York City, smugglers can reap huge profits on cartons of tobacco products. The Public Integrity blog linked below includes a closer at transnational cigarette smuggling by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Read full entry »U.S. authorities are increasingly concerned about another dangerous import from Mexico: grenades. The Associated Press says grenades have become a weapon of choice among Mexican drug cartels. The weapons are preferred by drug hit men because they are cheap and easy to find. Many are left over from Central America's civil wars and sold on the black market. Some are brought in by weapons smugglers. Others are diverted from the region's militaries.
And there is evidence that those grenades are making their way north. Last January, a grenade believed to have come from Mexico was tossed in a south Texas bar, although it failed to explode. U.S. firearms agents began taking a harder look at the grenade threat from Mexico after explosives popped up near the border. The Mexican military seized 165 grenades and 14 sticks of TNT last fall in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, a dozen miles south of McAllen, Texas. That month, grenades were used as diversions in the fatal ambush of a state police chief a few miles south of Arizona in Nogales, Mexico.
Read full entry »Los Angeles Times reporter Scott Glover writes about his experiences at the eight-week Citizens' Academy program of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "As a reporter covering federal law enforcement in Los Angeles, I enrolled in the class to learn more about the ATF and what its agents do," he writes. "Though I've been writing about law enforcement for years, I knew far less about the agency than I did its better-known cousins, the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration."
Glover says the classes began with a history lesson about the 2,600-agent bureau and eventually included firearms training. He writes, "The academy, which is free, is offered twice a year. Each participant must be at least 21 years old, live in Southern California and be 'a civic, religious or community leader.' Despite this last requirement, I received an e-mail in February letting me know that I'd been accepted. My 35 classmates included several lawyers and support staff from the city attorney's office, some film and television producers, a Superior Court judge, a real estate attorney, an aspiring ATF agent and one very gung-ho looking insurance agent."
Read full entry »The south dominates a list of "iron pipeline" states that channel guns to other places, the anti-gun violence Brady Center said this week. The Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier said that, using federal data on the origins of guns recovered nationally in 2008, the group said dealers in states with weak gun laws supplied out-of-state guns at more than five times the rate that dealers in the states with stronger gun laws did.
Mississippi had the highest rate of recovered crime gun exports, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Virginia and South Carolina. The ratings were based on the per capita rate of crime gun exports and guns taken across state lines and recovered in a crime. The National Rifle Association was quick to discount the report, saying the Brady organization is misusing the data to advance a political agenda.
Read full entry »
The Bureau of Justice Statistics just released statistics for the 9.9 million applications for firearm transfers in 2008. Among the findings, BJS reports that approximately 1.5 percent of applications were denied last year, down from a high of 2.4 percent in 1999. The number one reason for denial was a felony conviction or indictment; number two was a domestic violence conviction or retraining order.
Click here to access the full report.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Guns and Brady Law/Straw Purchasing.
Read full entry »
Firearms trace data was released by the New York field office in July. The data was compiled from crime guns gathered in New York State from Jan 1. to Dec. 31 2008. The review found that 54 % of all firearms were recovered in New York City. The report breaks down gun recovery by region.
The report can be found here.
Read full entry »
Tom Diaz, author of a new book, “No Borders: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement,” looks at the potentially ominous future of criminal street gangs in the U.S.
In the 1980s, few law enforcement officials had heard of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or the 18 th Street gang. Yet within two decades, these gangs metastasized from local urban-based organizations in Los Angeles and other California cities into transnational criminal enterprises operating throughout the Western Hemisphere, including El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
As Mexico’s violent drug-fueled turf wars threaten to spread north of the border, many wonder whether the gangs have become integrated with Mexican drug cartels.
One way to answer this question is to ask a better one: what will these gangs look like in ten or twenty years?
Street gangs are important to the Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). Their profits depend on the activities of such gangs as primary retail distributors of illicit drugs in the United States. Latinos are not the only groups who serve DTOs’ interests: African-American, outlaw motorcycle, prison, Asian, and other street gangs have also been identified as significant players in the trade in cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and other illegal drugs in the U.S.
Estimates of the annual value of the illicit drug trade vary widely. The Congressional Research Service estimates a range of $13.6 billion to $48.4 billion. The private intelligence service Stratfor puts the upper limit as high as $100 billion. Whatever the actual value, there is no doubt that Latino gangs are in the thick of the business, and are involved in a range of drug-related crimes associated with organized criminality, such as extortion and murder. To that extent, they are certainly an integral part of the DTO’s operations.
Data on gang membership and gang crime are notoriously subjective. They are based largely on estimates collected by federal agencies from local law enforcement agencies. Given that caution, the National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) reported in its National Gang Threat Assessment 2009 that in September 2008, “approximately” 1 million gang members belong to “more than” 20,000 gangs that were criminally active within all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report states that criminal gangs “commit as much as 80 percent of the crime in many communities.” NGIC has identified 11 gangs that operate nationally, among them four Latino gangs. Of the latter, the 18th Street gang and MS-13 also operate trans-nationally.
But the current relationship between transnational gangs and drug cartels cannot be neatly described. A major problem is that abstract terms like “affiliation” and “integration” are often used in government and media reporting alike in this context without concrete definition or specific example. My own view has been refined the more I look into the specifics. In looking at gangs and DTOs, I now take “affiliation” to mean a criminal business relationship, in which occasional or ongoing contacts between the organizations are primarily for the purpose of buying, selling, or trading goods and services, but the two do not share a command structure or employer-employee relationship.
On the other hand, I take “integration” to mean a relationship in which the gang is a functional part of a larger enterprise, subject to the latter’s command structure. The difference might be thought of as that between a local independent drug store and the local outlet of a chain drug store. They might each buy similar products from the same source, but the chain store is directed by, and answers to, corporate headquarters.
Law enforcement opinion is divided on the extent to which gangs like MS-13 are actually integrated into DTO structures. Based on what I have learned from my continuing discussions with U.S. and Mexican sources, I believe that the better view today is that gangs are “affiliated” with, but not yet “integrated” into the Mexican DTOs. Depending on circumstances and opportunity, the gangs operate principally as “contractors.” Have gangsters been used as “muscle” to protect cartel interests and “hit men” in cartel battles? No doubt. Have some opportunistic gang leaders made deals with DTOs for profit or power? Yes. But, are the gangs integrated as DTO “soldiers”? Almost certainly not.
Observers and students of transnational criminal enterprises largely see them as flexible cellular networks that change in response to opportunity, need and law enforcement pressure. Little is to be gained by such a fluid network from integrating street gangs who are often resistant to outside management directly into DTO structures. More specifically, many DTO leaders see the gangs as too volatile to embrace organizationally. DTOs certainly do not shy away from extreme violence, but many of their leaders regard street gang violence as reckless, often pointless, and therefore hard to control.
The next two decades however could see some significant changes in the structure and operation of Latino gangs.
Predicting the behavior of these dynamic human structures is difficult. But three factors – and one wild card – suggest more growth, violence and challenge to U.S. law enforcement and society from transnational Latino gangs.
First, the proportion of second-generation Latino youth (those 18 and under born of immigrant parents) grew from 30 percent of the U.S. Latino youth population in 1980 to 52 percent in 2007. This proportion will not shrink for another decade. Second generation youth are precisely the population from which ethnic street gang members are drawn. Caught between old and new cultures, these youngsters often face “multiple marginalities” that make their socialization – education, employment, and cultural integration – difficult. Although most of these young people will socialize and raise stable third-generation families, a small but significant portion – perhaps ten percent – will fail to adapt, fall between cultures and seek the gang as alternative to school, family and nation. Gangs are therefore likely to grow from this pool, no matter what happens to border control.
Second, the National Gang Threat Assessment 2009 states that some Latino street gangs are moving into the wholesale drug trade, “increasingly distributing wholesale-level quantities of marijuana and cocaine” in urban and suburban communities. Some of these gangs are assessed as “capable of competing with U.S.-based Mexican DTOs.” Other government reports echo these assessments. These developments mean market change, which in the drug trade means violent conflict: drug markets are rationalized by guns, not negotiations.
Finally, there are reports that Mexican cartels are shifting operations into Central America in response to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement pressure. Central America is the queen’s nest of the two most dangerous transnational Latino gangs, MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs. A variety of scenarios – none of them good – could develop from this mix.
There is, however, a wild card: so far, no one has succeeded in forging MS-13, the 18th Street gang or any other transnational Latino gang into a unified, well-coordinated enterprise. One ambitious gangster, Nelson Varela Comandari, wanted to hammer MS-13 into an integrated empire. Born in El Salvador and raised in the United States, Comandari was charismatic and feared enough to have succeeded—had his career not been cut short by a federal drug trafficking indictment and other charges.
Comandari has been in federal custody without hearing or trial for four years. As I explain in detail in No Boundaries, he has almost certainly been negotiating an omnibus plea agreement to resolve multiple, serious felony charges from different jurisdictions, including the federal government and the city of Los Angeles at a minimum. Such a deal would certainly require him to “flip,” or cooperate. One law enforcement agent told me Comandari could be the equivalent of the notorious informant Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.
There is no reason to think that other ambitious gangsters of similar mold won’t try to turn their gangs into powerful, mafia-like organizations. The natural next step would be to challenge existing organizations, especially the Mexican DTOs, for control of lucrative transnational operations.
If that happens, all bets about the future are off. A well-integrated, consolidated transnational Latino gang would naturally connect every form of transnational crime imaginable from whatever its global source to communities throughout the United States. In the classic style of the Mafia, a true Latino mafia would turn its attention to existing smaller local gangs and criminal operations of whatever ethnicity. (Some of that “muscling in” is going on now between national gangs and local gangs.) A war between U.S.-based Latino gangs and Mexican DTOs would be extremely violent, witness current events in Mexico.
All of this would put enormous stress on all levels of law enforcement, and most particularly local agencies. For all of its façade of being in control everywhere, the federal law enforcement community is stretched thin. This is why a principal objective of the U.S. Department of Justice is precisely to prevent the emergence of a genuine Latino mafia in the form of a consolidated and empowered transnational gang.
How I Got the Story
I utilized four types of sources: (1) in-depth interviews with law enforcement agents and prosecutors; (2) deep research into the records of selected criminal trials (and appeals) I used for case studies; (3) media reports; and (4) academic books and articles.
I also attended two law enforcement gang seminars. One of them was a highly restricted week–long event in El Salvador, sponsored by the FBI and Salvadoran National Civil Police. I got there because two key people trusted me. My experience has been that the best contacts open up only if the researcher is vouched for by someone in the law enforcement community.
The FBI was by far the most helpful federal law enforcement agency. The Department of Justice was also helpful in making available to me knowledgeable senior lawyers and prosecutors. On the other hand, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security (ICE and CPB) were useless. Their public affairs officials promised that they were seeking interviews for me, but none materialized despite repeated efforts on my part.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was of marginal use. After a good start, ATF’s management seemed to be “spooked” by their perception of where I wanted to go with my research. I thought ATF had a story to tell, so I found a good case involving the Latin Kings in Chicago, dug the records out of the Federal Records Center, and pestered ATF into letting me sit down with some of the agents involved.
In contrast, local law enforcement and prosecutors in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Texas, and Virginia were cooperative and interested in telling their stories.
Generally speaking, the lawyers – prosecutors and their supervisors – were much more comfortable about sharing details and documents than the cops and agents. This is probably because their organization is less “militaristic” than the typical law enforcement agency, and lawyers know better the bounds of what they can and ought to make public.
I love court records. They are a seriously underutilized source for crime writers. Transcripts, affidavits, and motions often contain rich detail.
Tom Diaz is a lawyer, author, and former journalist. He is senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center a national nonpartisan educational organization working to stop gun death and injury in America. He wrote Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, and co-authored Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil. Diaz was counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice from 1993 to 1997. He was an assistant managing editor at The Washington Times for six years and covered the Supreme Court and national security affairs for three years before that. He is currently researching a book on “sophisticated techniques” of investigation. Email him at tdiaz@vpc.org
A new report from the Department of Justice examines how the DOJ's five law enforcement arms (the ATF, FBI, DEA, Bureau of Prisons and US Marshall Service) use different types of less-lethal weaponry, including Tasers and rubber projectiles.
Click here to view the report.
Use The Crime Report for resources on the FBI, DEA and other federal law enforcement issues.
Read full entry »The National Rifle Association and big-city mayors have found something they may both support: the Obama administration’s call for full law-enforcement access to data from traces of guns used in crimes, reports Politico.com. The rare, and somewhat vague, consensus between the NRA and the mayors appears likely to increase the chances that Congress will pass the reform.
The administration is proposing a partial rollback of a 2003 amendment named for Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.). Under the changes, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would be able to share gun-tracing information with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, and prosecutors would be privy to the information. Supporters say the change would help law enforcement target the source of guns used in crimes and would help prevent illegal drug trafficking.
Read full entry »
