DEA on Los Zetas Drug Cartel Leader Captured: “Thanks to the brave men and women of the Govmt. of Mexico"

Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:

Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, the notoriously brutal leader of the feared Zetas drug cartel, was captured before dawn Monday in the first major blow against an organized crime leader by a Mexican administration struggling to drive down persistently high levels of violence, officials announced.

Trevino Morales, 40, was captured by Mexican Marines who intercepted a pickup truck with $2 million in cash on a dirt road in the countryside outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo, which has long served as the Zetas' base of operations. The truck was halted by a Marine helicopter and Trevino Morales was taken into custody along with a bodyguard and an accountant and eight guns, government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez told reporters.

Sanchez said the Marines had been watching rural roads between the Texas border states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas for signs of Trevino Morales, who is charged with murder, torture, kidnapping and other crimes.

The Zetas leader and his alleged accomplices were flown to Mexico City, where they are expected to eventually be tried in a closed system that usually takes years to prosecute cases, particularly high-profile ones.

Trevino Morales, known as "Z-40," is uniformly described as one of the two most powerful cartel heads in Mexico, the leader of a corps of special forces defectors who went to work for drug traffickers, splintered off into their own cartel in 2010 and metastasized across Mexico, expanding from drug dealing into extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking.

Along the way, the Zetas authored some of the worst atrocities of Mexico's drug war, leaving hundreds of bodies beheaded on roadsides or hanging from bridges, earning a reputation as perhaps the most terrifying of the country's numerous ruthless cartels.

On Trevino Morales' watch, 72 Central and South American migrants were slaughtered by the Zetas in the northern town of San Fernando in 2010, authorities said. By the following year, federal officials announced finding 193 bodies buried in San Fernando, most belonging to migrants kidnapped off buses and killed by the Zetas for various reasons, including their refusal to work as drug mules.

Trevino Morales is charged with ordering the kidnapping and killing of the 265 migrants, Sanchez said.

President Enrique Pena Nieto came into office promising to drive down levels of homicide, extortion and kidnapping but has struggled to make a credible dent in crime figures. And his pledge to focus on citizen safety over other crimes has sparked worries among U.S. authorities that he would ease back on predecessor Felipe Calderon's U.S.-backed strategy aimed above all at decapitating drug cartels.

The arrest of Trevino, a man widely blamed for both massive northbound drug trafficking and the deaths of untold scores of Mexicans and Central American migrants, will almost certainly earn praise from Pena Nieto's U.S. and Mexican critics alike.

Trevino Morales' capture adds to the long list of Zetas' leaders who have been arrested or killed in recent years, including Zeta head Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, whose fatal shooting by authorities last year left Trevino Morales in charge.

"There continues to be the perception that capturing this type of individual has a strategic value and the logic persists that it's preferable to fragment criminal groups and reduce them in size. On this point there isn't much change," said Alejandro Hope, a former member of Mexico's domestic intelligence service.

The debilitation of the Zetas has been widely seen as strengthening the country's most-wanted man, Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who has overseen a vicious turf war with the Zetas from hideouts believed to lie in rugged western Mexico.

"El Chapo is greatly strengthened because he will now have access to the crown jewel of narco-trafficking, Nuevo Laredo," said George Grayson, an expert on the Zetas and professor of government at the College of William & Mary.

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Osama bin Laden Son-in-Law: Arrested and brought to New York

A son-in-law of Osama bin Laden who served as an Al-Qaeda's spokesman was arrested in Turkey and brought to New York, according to government sources.

After a joint operation by Jordanian authorities and the FBI, Suleiman Abu Ghaith was captured and is expected to be brought to trial in federal court.

Initial public confirmation of Abu Ghaith's capture came from Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a former chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

"I commend our CIA and FBI, our allies in Jordan, and President Obama for their capture of al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith," King said.

"I trust he received a vigorous interrogation, and will face swift and certain justice."

"Propaganda statements in which Abu Ghaith and his late father-in-law, Osama bin Laden, praised [the 9/11 attacks] are alone enough to merit the most serious punishment."

Sources indicate that while a CIA role in the capture of Abu Ghaith could not be ruled out, the FBI took the lead role in the operation this time.

Records compiled by a United Nations sanctions committee show that Abu Ghaith was born in Kuwait in 1965, but that he left Kuwait for Pakistan in June 2001.

It was after the September 11 attacks that forever altered U.S. foreign policy that Abu Ghaith first surfaced as one of al Qaeda's main spokesmen.

Later, U.S. officials believe he was part of a group of top al Qaeda figures that included one of bin Laden's sons, Saad, who allegedly traveled to Iran.

There, the Iranian government claimed they were being held "in custody."

It was reported in 2010, however, that Abu Ghaith had been inexplicably released by Iranian authorities and supposedly had returned to Afghanistan.

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