On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced plans to deploy more agents and equipment along the border with Mexico to tackle the increase in drug-trafficking and related violence.
The BBC’s Stephen Gibbs in Mexico City says that with some evidence that drug violence is crossing the border, both governments have been are under pressure to find a more co-ordinated policy to undermine the immensely powerful Mexican cartels.
The drug gangs have splintered into six main cartels, under pressure from law enforcement action on both sides of the border, according to the attorney general’s office in Mexico.
For example, one gang once affiliated with the Sinaloa group under the Pacific cartel alliance was now listed as its own cartel the Beltran Leyva organisation.
Another gang, La Familia, which operates in central Mexico and was previously believed to answered to the Gulf cartel, is now listed as a separate group.
Among the men on the most-wanted list are the alleged head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” or Shorty Guzman, who gained recent additional notoriety after being named by Forbes magazine as one of the world’s billionaires.
Authorities in Spain said they have seized a 42-piece dinner set made from 42 pounds of cocaine and arrested the intended recipient.
Police said a 35-year-old Spanish man, identified only as JVLL, was arrested and charged with an offense against public health after police seized the package in an international operation coordinated with Venezuela, where the package originated, The Times of London reported Friday.
Investigators said they believe the man was forced to become involved in the cocaine trade by drug traffickers in Venezuela.
Police said the cocaine had been destined for sale in Catalonia, Spain.
According to the police, parcels sent in the post are a popular method of smuggling medium-size shipments of cocaine.
The drug can be diluted within liquids. Another method is to impregnate clothing or other materials with the cocaine.
Two weeks ago, Spanish police arrested a Chilean man with a broken leg whose “plaster cast” had been made with the illegal substance.
Rosalio Reta and his friend, Gabriel Cardona, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later.
In interviews with CNN, Laredo police detectives and prosecutors told how Cardona and Reta were recruited by the cartel to be assassins after they began hitting the cantinas and clubs just across the border.
Over a nearly one-year period starting in June 2005, the border town of Laredo, Texas, saw a string of seven murders. At first glance, the violence looked like isolated, gangland-style killings. But investigators started suspecting something more sinister.
Prosecutors say they quickly discovered these two teenagers were homegrown assassins, hired to carry out the dirty work of the notorious Gulf Cartel.
“There are sleeper cells in the U.S.,” said Detective Garcia. “They’re here, they’re here in the United States.”
The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.
As the teens became more immersed in the cartel lifestyle, their appearance changed. Cardona had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. Reta’s face became covered in tattoo markings. (Prosecutors say during his trial Reta used make-up to cover the facial markings.) And both sported tattoos of “Santa Muerte,” the Grim Reaper-like pseudo-saint worshipped by drug traffickers.
I haven’t read Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life yet, but I am going to buy it. Its basically about Multiple Passports, Swiss Banking, and Crossing Borders among other things.
Here is an excerpt from Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life:
Lesson 22 – The Gone With the Wind Guide to Asset Protection
If you wanted to withdraw your entire life savings and move it to a bank in Switzerland, what would you do?
Now that I’d decided to hide my assets offshore, the information from the Sovereign Society conference about the government tracking withdrawals and transfers of more than $10,000 applied to me. It seemed impossible to get the money from my American bank to the Swiss bank Spencer recommended without ringing alarm bells. Even if I moved it in small increments, there would still be a paper trail detailing exactly how much money I’d transferred.
After all, it isn’t a crime to move money secretly as long as the income’s been reported to the IRS and any other necessary reporting requirements are met. And my intention wasn’t to hide my earnings from the government, customs, or creditors, but to protect it from bank collapses, inflation, seizure, and lawsuits, which required leaving few traces of where it went.
Securing money overseas is not a new idea. Even in the novel Gone With the Wind, Rhett butler keeps his earnings in offshore banks, enabling him to buy a house for Scarlett o’Hara after the Civil War—in contrast to his Southern colleagues, who lose their fortunes due to blockades, inflation, and financial collapse.
For more practical, non-fictional inspiration, I bought Jeffrey Robinson’s 1996 book The Laundrymen. I’d always wondered how empty video stores renting movies for $3 a day could stay in business, and why I’d see Russian thugs running clearly unprofitable frozen yogurt stands on deserted side streets. According to Robinson, it’s because, in order to make illegal funds appear legitimate, crooks will slowly feed the money into the cash registers of a normal business.
“It’s almost impossible to spot an extra $500 coming in daily through the tills of a storefront stocked with 15,000 videos,” he writes. “Nor would anyone’s suspicions necessarily be raised if that same owner ran a chain of twenty video rental stores and, backed up with the appropriate audits, awarded himself an annual bonus of $3.96 million.”
Buried elsewhere in Robinson’s book was the answer I was looking for. The best legal way to surreptitiously move money, it seems, is to buy something that doesn’t lose its cash value when purchased. For example, there’s a black market for people who transfer money by buying expensive jewelry, art, watches, and collectibles, then selling them in their destination country for a small loss—usually no greater than the percentage banks charge for exchanging currencies.
So once AIG private bank in Switzerland returned my phone call—assuming that, unlike Spencer’s [a billionaire who appears earlier in the book] lawyer, they were actually willing to work with me—I planned to go shopping for rare coins.
But if it was all so legitimate, why did it feel so wrong?
While I waited to hear from the Swiss bank, I drove to Burbank to meet with the asset protection lawyers Spencer had recommended, Tarasov and Associates. The receptionist led me into a room with black-and-silver wallpaper where Alex Tarasov sat at a large mahogany desk with a yellow legal pad in front of him. With this pad, he would rearrange my business life forever.
“You did a very smart thing by coming here,” Tarasov said. Twenty- five years ago, he had probably been a frat boy. Maybe even played varsity football. But a quarter century spent sitting at desks scrutinizing legal papers had removed all evidence of health from his skin and physique. “By taking everything you own out of your name, we can hide it from lawyers trying to do an asset search on you.”
“So if they sue me and win, they won’t be able to get anything?”
“We can make it very difficult for them to find the things you own and get at them. It’s not impossible, but the deeper we bury your assets, the more money it’s going to cost to find out where they are. And if we can make that time and cost greater than the worth of the assets, then you’re in good shape.”
Like Spencer had said, this was just insurance. The cost of setting this up would be like taking out a policy against lawsuits.
“So what do you own?” he asked.
I laid it all out for him. “I have a house I’m still paying for. I have some stocks and bonds my grandparents gave me when I was a kid. I have a checking and a savings account. And I have the copyrights to my books.” I paused, trying to remember if I owned anything else. I thought there was more. “I guess that’s about it. I have a secondhand Dodge Durango, I guess. And a 1972 corvette that doesn’t work.”
In truth, I didn’t own that much. But ever since my first college job, standing over a greasy grill making omelets and grilled cheese sandwiches, I had started putting money in the bank. Since then, I’d saved enough to live on for a year or two if I ever fell on hard times or just wanted to see the world. I didn’t want to lose the freedom that came from having a financial cushion and not being in debt for anything besides my house.
“Here’s what we can do,” Tarasov said. He then sketched this diagram on his legal pad:
The stick figure was me. as for the boxes, I had no idea what those were. “These are boxes,” Tarasov explained. I was clearly getting the asset-protection-for-dummies lecture. “Each box represents a different LLC”—limited liability company. “If we can wrap everything in an LLC, and then all those LLCs are owned by a holding company, and that holding company is owned by a trust that you don’t even technically own, then you’re safe.”
I liked that last word. But I didn’t understand the rest of it.
“So we’re just basically making everything really complicated?” I asked.
“That’s the idea. We’ll even put your house in a separate LLC, so that if someone trips and falls, they can’t get at anything else you own.”
When Tarasov was through explaining everything, I couldn’t tell whether I was protecting myself from being scammed or actually being scammed myself. But I trusted Spencer, because he seemed too rich, too smart, and too paranoid to get taken in. So I told Tarasov to start wrapping me up in LLCs until my net-worth was whatever spending money I had in my pocket.
“Once we have these entities set up, we can talk about transferring them to offshore corporations,” Tarasov said as I left.
The music thumps, the lights flash, the shot glasses wait for willing lips. But the bouncers are reduced to kicking at the curb, hoping somebody, anybody, will round the corner. Friday nights are slow lately in Rosarito Beach’s party zone, and everyone knows the drug war is to blame.
Hundreds of corpses discovered in and near Tijuana. Some of them headless, others dissolved in barrels of lye. People hear that, and they stay away.
It may not be surprising to hear that as bodies accumulate in Tijuana (843 homicides in 2008, compared with 376 in the much larger city of Los Angeles), Rosarito Beach’s hotel occupancy rates spiral downward. On Feb. 20, the U.S. State Department issued a 12-paragraph “alert” on the perils of travel in Mexico, especially near the border.
Most of Baja’s drug-war deaths have been registered in Tijuana, about 12 miles north of Rosarito. And perhaps the most notorious case — the January arrest of a suspected cartel associate who authorities say has laid claim to dissolving 300 bodies in vats of lye — took place near Ensenada, about 50 miles to the south. A 2007 spate of armed robberies and carjackings against Americans played out along the same geographical lines. But Rosarito has seen plenty of its own trouble too.
In February 2008, Daniel LaPorte, 27, of San Diego and a 28-year-old woman named Libey (also known as Libe) Craig, of La Mesa, Calif., were killed in an apparent soured drug deal that also left three Mexican nationals dead on the outskirts of Rosarito Beach. Authorities said all of the dead had drug-related arrest records except LaPorte, a suspected marijuana smuggler whose remains were found in a barrel of chemicals.
Since September, at least eight Rosarito Beach police officers have been killed, more than two dozen have resigned, and the town’s main street, Benito Juarez Boulevard, has been the scene of at least two shootings. In one, a drive-by assailant shot and killed a 15-year-old boy and three others in a pet store.
