A Horse Farm of a Different Color - Drug Cartels to Oklahoma Horse Farm

Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:

By outward appearances, the owner of an Oklahoma farm bought American quarter horses to train, breed, and race. But Jose Trevino Morales, the brother of two leaders of the violent and powerful Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, was not just in the horse business: He was using the farm as a front to launder millions of dollars of the cartel’s illicit profits.


A three-year investigation led by the FBI resulted in convictions recently in federal court against Trevino and three others for conspiracy to commit money laundering. The case was significant because it revealed the reach and influence of Los Zetas in the U.S.—and it also illustrated how effective our investigators have become at targeting the cartel’s leaders.


“Core family members of the cartel and key business partners were impacted by this case,” said Special Agent David Villarreal, who supervised the investigation from our Laredo, Texas Resident Agency. “The FBI is targeting the highest echelons of the cartel’s leadership, and that sends a strong message not only to the cartel but to the people who are laundering their money on the American side of the border.”


The investigation, conducted through the Department of Justice-run Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) program, showed that since 2008, Trevino and his associates bought and sold racehorses with Los Zetas drug money using shell companies and front men. Testimony at trial revealed that during a 30-month period, the defendants spent $16 million in New Mexico, Oklahoma, California, and Texas on the horse farm operation.


U.S. Attorney Robert Pitman, who prosecuted the case, said after the trial, “The government was able to show how the corrupting influence of drug cartels has extended into the United States with cartel bosses using an otherwise legitimate domestic industry to launder proceeds from drug trafficking and other crimes.”


Investigators traced “upwards of $22 million that was laundered and shipped back to Mexico,” Villarreal said. “And that was just a piece of the operation that we used as a snapshot to prove our case in court.”

Source... FBI

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First U.S. Marijuana Brand‏ is Being Planned by Ex-Microsoft Manager

A former Microsoft executive plans to create the first U.S. national marijuana brand, with cannabis he hopes to eventually import legally fromMexico, and said he was kicking off his business by acquiring medical pot dispensaries in three U.S. states.Jamen Shively, a former Microsoft corporate strategy manager, said he envisions his Seattle-based enterprise becoming the leader in both recreational and medical cannabis - much like Starbucks is the dominant name in coffee, he said.

Shively, 45, whose six years at Microsoft ended in 2009, said he was soliciting investors for $10 million in start-up money.
The use, sale and possession of marijuana remains illegal in the United States under federal law. Two U.S. states have, however, legalized recreational marijuana use and are among 18 states that allow it for medical use.
"It's a giant market in search of a brand," Shively said of the marijuana industry. "We would be happy if we get 40 percent of it worldwide."

A 2005 United Nations report estimated the global marijuana trade to be valued at $142 billion.

Washington state and Colorado became the first two U.S. states to legalize recreational marijuana when voters approved legalization in November.
Shively laid out his plans, along with his vision for a future in which marijuana will be imported from Mexico, at a Thursday news conference in downtown Seattle.
Joining him was former Mexican President Vicente Fox, a longtime Shively acquaintance who has been an advocate of decriminalizing marijuana. Fox said he was there to show his support for Shively's company but has no financial stake in it.

"What a difference it makes to have Jamen here sitting at my side instead of Chapo Guzman," said Fox, referring to the fact he would rather see Shively selling marijuana legally than the Mexican drug kingpin selling it illegally.

Shively told Reuters he hoped Fox would serve an advisory role in his enterprise, dubbed Diego Pellicer after Shively's hemp-producing great grandfather.

The sale of cannabis or marijuana remains illegal in much of the world although countries mainly in Europe and the Americas have decriminalized the possession of small quantities of it. A larger number of countries have decriminalized or legalized cannabis for medical use.

Shively acknowledges that his business plans conflict with U.S. federal law and are complicated by regulations in both Washington state and Colorado. He said he is interested in buying dispensaries that comply with local and state rules and are less likely to attract the scrutiny of authorities.
"If they want to come talk to me, I'll be delighted to meet with them," he said of federal officials. "I'll tell them everything that we're doing and show them all our books."

Washington state's marijuana consultant, Mark Kleiman, said he was skeptical of Shively's plans, and feared that the businessman is seeking to profit off others' addiction.
"It's very hard for me to understand why anybody seriously interested in being in the marijuana business, which after all is against the federal law, would so publicly announce his conspiracy to break that law," said Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Emily Langlie, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle, referred questions to the Department of Justice headquarters. Department officials did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Washington state Representative Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat, sees promise in Shively's initiative. Any industry emerging from the shadows will inevitably undergo consolidation - and thereby simplify the task of regulators, he said.
"The fact that an entrepreneur is publicly pushing the envelope around a branding and value-based pricing opportunity, I would say that's in the water in Seattle," said Carlyle, chairman of the House Finance Committee. "That's in our DNA ... We could have predicted that as much as the rain."

Shively said he has already acquired the rights to the Northwest Patient Resource Center, a medical marijuana operation that includes two Seattle store fronts. He added that he was close to acquiring another dispensary in Colorado, as well as two more each in Washington state and California, with the owners given the option to retain a stake in their businesses.

"We've created the first risk-mitigated vehicles for investing directly in this business opportunity," he said.

Read More.... http://worldtruth.tv/ex-microsoft-manager-plans-to-create-first-u-s-marijuana-brand%E2%80%8F/

Law Offices of Jonathan Franklin
Open Evenings and Weekends this Summer
Call Us Now (310) 273-9600   
 http://www.jonathanfranklinlaw.com

Mother Active in her Morman Church! Horror in Mexico: US Mother Jailed For Drugs Found Under Her Seat on Public Bus (+video)

A Goodyear couple traveled to Mexico last week to attend a family funeral…

The wife is in a Mexican jail right now accused of smuggling marijuana…

The couple, with seven children and two grandchildren between them, were on their way back to Arizona [on a Mexican bus] after attending a funeral for Yanira Maldonado’s aunt.

“They interviewed several of the other passengers and after about 2 1/2 hours they came to him [Gary] and said unfortunately some of these drugs were found under your seat and you’re under arrest,” Klippel said.

After arresting Gary Maldonado, Mexican officials said they’d made a mistake – that marijuana was actually found underneath Yanira Maldonado’s seat and an empty seat next to her.

See Video...   http://joemiller.us/2013/05/horror-in-mexico-us-mother-arrested-held-for-drugs-found-under-her-seat-on-public-bus-video/#ixzz2UW4QmWAE

"You hear all of these horror stories about Mexico and you think it's just something in the movies, right?" said Klippel. "You don't believe it's something that could happen to someone you know. But, when it happens to your brother and your sister - it's hard, it's tough to take."

He said the bus the Maldonados were on was stopped at a military checkpoint near Hermosillo on Wednesday.

The couple, with seven children and two grandchildren between them, were on their way back to Arizona after attending a funeral for Yanira Maldonado's aunt.

"They interviewed several of the other passengers and after about 2 1/2 hours they came to him [Gary] and said unfortunately some of these drugs were found under your seat and you're under arrest," Klippel said.

After arresting Gary Maldonado, Mexican officials said they'd made a mistake – that marijuana was actually found underneath Yanira Maldonado's seat and an empty seat next to her.

Gary Maldonado was let go and they arrested his wife - something that has terrified their 21-year-old daughter, Anna Soto, who spoke with CBS5 News on Sunday.

"I know there's people out there saying or asking 'did she really do it?" she said. "Are you sure? And, you know, it hurts to see that. If you would've known my mom, if you would've met her - you would know she had nothing to do with it."

And, then there's the concern of who to trust in a foreign country.

"His attorney had talked to the prosecuting attorney there and came back to him and said, 'You know how it works in Mexico, right?" Klippel told CBS5 News. "He said, 'no I don't.' He [attorney] said, 'well, if we bribe the judge - then he'll let you go.'"

Klippel said after Gary Maldonado frantically scraped together $5,000 to free his wife Thursday, but he was told it was too late.

Yanira Maldonado had been transferred to a holding facility in Nogales.

"When he [Gary] got there they said, ‘we don't have any record of her at all,'" said Klippel. "He panicked. He told me terror struck him. And he thought, for that period of time, that he'd never see his wife again."

That was Friday morning.

By Friday night, officials confirmed Yanira Maldonado was, in fact, in Nogales – and her husband was able to visit her Saturday morning on the one-year anniversary of their wedding.

"Yanira saw me from a distance and she just started like jumping up and down and gave me a big hug and we just cried," said Gary Maldonado, who spoke with CBS5 News via Skype on Sunday.

Klippel said the reunion was a major relief for the couple - especially after what Yanira had been through in the past 24 hours.

"She had a rough night," he said. "Their interrogation included putting her in a non-air-conditioned room and waking her up several times in the middle of night - trying to get her to sign documents that she said she couldn't read."

He said Yanira Maldonado maintains her innocence and believes those documents were probably admission of guilt statements.

"In Mexico, I guess you're guilty until proven innocent," said Klippel. "So, it's just been a real nightmare for them."

Klippel said the Mexican Consulate is working this case and that Sen. Jeff Flake is in contact with the family, in an effort to bring Yanira Maldonado home.

Gary Maldonado tells CBS5 News his wife is due in court Monday morning where she's expected to give an official declaration - essentially her side of the story.

A Mexican attorney, hired by Gary Maldonado, will be present.

Typically, a defendant has 72 hours after that to prove their innocence.

Gary Maldonado said they have a woman and her son who can testify they saw they couple enter the bus without any packages - and, he's hoping the charter bus company Tufesa will have surveillance video they can also use as evidence.

CBS5 News is waiting to hear back from the Mexican Consulate and the U.S. Embassy's Office.

Flake's office sent us the following statement, "Senator Flake is personally monitoring the situation and he has had multiple conversations with the deputy Mexican ambassador."

Read More... http://www.kpho.com/story/22424879/az-family-says-sister-in-law-unjustly-jailed-in-mexico

Drug Cartels Invasion on the USA

Far from being a south-of-the-U.S.-Mexico-border problem alone, at least 1,000 U.S. cities reported the presence of at least one of four Mexican cartels in 2010. Meanwhile, south of the border, the machinery of drug creation and facilitation grind away, spitting out addicts in the U.S. and more than 50,000 dead bodies in Mexico since 2006. The cartels are looking to spread their tentacles wider.

With this in mind, the National Post’s graphics team takes a look at the flow of drugs across the continent.

 A United States  border  patrol agent opened fire while responding to reports of alleged drug smugglers on Arizona’s southern border late Wednesday night,  the U.S. Border Patrol.

Nicholas Ivie was killed before daybreak on October 2 as he responded to a tripped ground sensor in a well-known smuggling corridor near Naco, Arizona. A second agent was shot and wounded, while a third was unharmed.

Agents witnessed the smugglers drop a narcotics load on the Arizona side of the border and flee to Mexico, the agency said. One agent discharged his firearm after he was pelted with stones at the scene after his verbal commands were disregarded, the agency said.

Ivie, 30, was the fourth Border Patrol agent to die in violent circumstances in less than two years in Arizona, and his death heightened concern about border security in a state at the forefront of the national immigration debate in a presidential election year.

The Drugs and Where They Come From

Methamphetamines
Methamphetamines have become a sophisticated international business, which includes securing supplies from as far away as Asia, processing the methamphetamine in large, elaborate labs in Mexico, and transporting the drugs across the U.S. border via tunnels, commercial vehicles or human mules. Mexico is estimated to supply 70% of the methamphetamine consumed In the United States.

Marijuana
Mexican marijuana production is concentrated in nine states: Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, Michoacan, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Sonora and Durango; Guerrero, Nayarit and Michoacan are the traditional production areas, but U.S. intelligence reports say large cartels have shifted their grow-ops to avoid increasing eradication efforts by the Mexican government and to get closer to the United States. The cartels also operate large, open-air-grow-ops in more northerly states, such as Oregon and Washington. There are reports cartels are increasingly building connections to groups east of the Mississippi River.

Cocaine
Cocaine is the most lucrative of illegal drugs. The United Nations estimates that sales of the drug net $88-billion a year on the street. Most shipments of cocaine involve numerous parts of the cartel federations. While the largest federations were once Colombian, now it appears they are Mexican.  The UN estimates two-thirds of the cocaine that left the Andean region of South America for the United States In 2008 passed through the hands of Mexican cartels.

Heroin
Most Colombian heroin flows to the United States directly via commercial airlines – primarily to New York and Miami. The Central America-Mexican corridor appears to serve as a secondary transit route for South American heroin. The drug is moved by cartels to northern Mexico for smuggling across the U.S.’s southwest border in vehicles or on foot.

Source... http://worldtruth.tv/invasion-of-the-drug-cartels/