#but the local dea division she was a part of did work closely with them when necessary.. so she's worked with these two plenty in the past

[rebouks]

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Transcript:

Darrell: C’mon, Mik. Mikaela: We’re letting strangers into the house now? I think oughta stay n’ make sure-… Isaac: They’re mommy’s old colleagues.

Mikaela: Prove it. Joslyn: How about, we do as we’re told? Isaac: We’ll gather some evidence later, go on…

…

Darrell: I don’t think-… Mikaela: What’s trafficking? Darrell: Erm.. controlling the flow of traffic n’ stuff, cars, roads, whatever…

Mikaela: We shouldn’t be listening, should we? Darrell: Uh, no. Mikaela: Maybe we should do something else.

…

Eugene: Well, I wasn’t expecting all that… Isaac: You didn’t tell me about no home visit. Joslyn: I didn’t see the point in worrying you.

Norma: You should’ve told us. Joslyn: Maybe I should’ve, but I didn’t think it was a good idea, not with Spencer still in control. Norma: Thankfully, he’s no longer an issue.

Eugene: I’m impressed how much they managed to achieve without any help. Joslyn: Oscar’s very determined, and more than a little reckless. Norma: Clearly! Although, if you came to us; we could’ve done this properly.

Joslyn: I tried to pass it on; though it didn’t go unnoticed-.. working the Bay was as boring as it gets, I was glad to retire. Isaac: [scoffs] That’s a lie. Eugene: We want you to come and work with us again.

Norma: As we correctly assumed, Mr Finch and co. know much more than they’re letting on; I have more questions now than when we set out-.. we’re hoping they’ll help us fill the gaps, especially given what happened to his girlfriend. Joslyn: What happened to his girlfriend?

Eugene: Mr Flanagan told us she wound up in Del Sol after being kidnapped, Mr Finch spent over a month out there looking for her. Isaac: Jesus-… Joslyn: Why do you need me?

Norma: They’re not going to trust us, but based on what you’ve told us; they might trust you. Joslyn: I wouldn’t count on that. Isaac: C’mon, since when did you ever leave a case half finished?

Joslyn: [sighs] They’re good people-.. they’ve risked so much to get this far; I can’t take everything away from them now. Isaac: If they’re good folk, then they have nothing to be afraid of. Joslyn: We all know what people are capable of when they’re backed into a corner…

Eugene: This is bigger than them. Joslyn: Exactly, they deserve a little leeway. If I convince them to speak with you, I want you to promise you’ll do right by them. Norma: You have our word.

Isaac: That’s sorted then? Joslyn: I suppose. Isaac: I’ll let the inquisitors back in.

Eugene: We’re about to be interrogated, aren’t we? Joslyn: [laughs] By the very best. Norma: Aha, let’s see how it feels when the tables are turned.

[thewebofslime]

Sheriff Jon Lopey was startled when a stranger offered him $1 million if he would keep deputies away from certain illegal cannabis farms in Siskiyou County. Lopey called in the FBI, and, later, deliveries of envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash were recorded by cameras and microphones hidden on the sheriff’s cluttered, wooden desk. Two people were later indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of attempting to bribe the elected sheriff. “I was surprised and offended that a citizen would believe a law enforcement administrator would compromise his ethics and morals by accepting money,” said Lopey, whose rural county abuts the Oregon border and outlaws outdoor marijuana farms. In the more than two years since California voters approved the licensed growing and sale of recreational marijuana, the state has had a half-dozen government corruption cases as black-market operators try to game the system, through bribery and other means. The cases are tarnishing an already troubled introduction of the state permitting of marijuana businesses as provided for when voters approved Proposition 64 in November 2016. Opponents of the initiative say the cases confirm their campaign arguments that legalization wouldn’t end the black market and the criminal behavior it has unleashed. “We knew this was going to be an issue. The money is so great that the temptation is always there,” said William Lowe, a leader of the group Americans Against Legalizing Marijuana. California is awash in cannabis cash from inside and out of the state, partly because marijuana remains an illegal drug under federal law, so banks won’t accept cash from the businesses. The state’s black market for cannabis was estimated to be worth $3.7 billion last year — more than four times the size of the legal market, according to the firm New Frontier Data. Proposition 64, approved in 2016, allowed the state to license businesses to grow and sell marijuana but required the companies to get approval from the cities and counties, most of which have outlawed marijuana operations. Experts say local resistance explains why many of the corruption allegations center on illegal attempts to buy help from city and county officials. “There is no doubt in my mind that the multibillion-dollar nature of the marijuana industry is corrupting public officials,” said Lopey, a 41-year veteran of law enforcement who began his full-time career as a California Highway Patrol officer stationed in East Los Angeles. Proposition 64 also outlawed the transportation of cannabis out of the state, which was an issue in the Siskiyou County indictments against Chi Yang and his sister, Gaosheng Laitinen. Yang allegedly approached the sheriff in his county office in Yreka in the summer of 2017, and initially suggested the $1 million could go to a foundation headed by Lopey. At one of the subsequent meetings where Lopey was handed the envelopes of cash, Laitinen allegedly sought assurances about what their payments would buy: “Are we talking about protection from being raided?” she asked the sheriff, according to a DEA agent’s affidavit attached to the criminal charging document. The two allegedly paid Lopey $10,500, including four $500 cash bonuses, before they were arrested, according to court records. That case is one of several that have involved cannabis sellers and growers allegedly bribing or trying to bribe government officials, or public officials acting illegally to get rich from marijuana. Last year, Jermaine Wright, then the mayor pro tem of Adelanto, was charged with agreeing to accept a bribe to fast-track a marijuana business. Wright’s trial is scheduled for August. In May, FBI agents served search warrants at the home of Rich Kerr, who was mayor of Adelanto at the time. City Hall and a marijuana retailer were also served with warrants. Also in May, Humboldt County building inspector Patrick Mctigue was arrested and charged with accepting $100,000 in bribes from marijuana businesses seeking expedited help on county permits, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. Last March, a federal jury reached guilty verdicts on bribery and extortion charges against Michael Kimbrew, who was a field representative to U.S. Rep. Janice Hahn when he accepted cash from an undercover FBI agent while pledging his “undying support” to protect a marijuana dispensary that the city of Compton was trying to close. (EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM) Last Tuesday, developer Dorian Gray was held to answer by a judge in a preliminary hearing on charges of offering bribes to Oakland City Council President Larry Reid and Assistant City Administrator Greg Minor, according to court records. Gray allegedly offered the councilman cash to help obtain a cannabis dispensary permit, and Reid reported the offer to authorities. Gray is charged with offering Minor, who oversees marijuana permitting for Oakland, a trip to Spain. Reid said he was offended by the offer made by Gray in his City Hall office, and reported it to the city administrator’s office. “He (Gray) said he had an envelope with $10,000 and my name on it in his pocket, and I told him I don’t work that way,” Reid said. “Everybody thinks they can become an instant millionaire by getting a dispensary permit.” Autumn Paine, an attorney for Gray, said the two city officials offered “wildly different” stories about what occurred. As for the allegation of bribery against Gray, “He absolutely denies that,” she said. An attorney for Laitinen declined comment beyond noting that she pleaded “not guilty.” Yang has also denied the charge in court, but his attorney did not return calls for comment. An attorney for Wright declined comment. (END OPTIONAL TRIM) Not all of the recent cases involve elected officials. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Marc Antrim pleaded guilty two weeks ago to federal charges stemming from his arrest for robbing a warehouse of a half-ton of marijuana in October. While some cases filed in the last year are still pending trial, there have been convictions in other corruption cases in recent years. California was the first state to legalize the sale of marijuana for medical use two decades ago. The former mayor of the city of Cudahy was sentenced to one year in federal prison in 2013 for taking cash bribes in exchange for supporting the opening of a “medical marijuana” store in the city. The head of the city’s code enforcement division and a city councilman were also convicted of taking part in the corruption scheme. Law enforcement agencies are investigating possible corruption in other Southern California cities, according to Ed Muramoto, a private attorney for medical marijuana dispensaries that have complained about cities locking them out of competition for permits. “We have been contacted regarding a good handful of cities and jurisdictions with respect to investigations that law enforcement is engaging in,” Muramoto said. He declined to identify the cities involved, saying he has been asked by investigators not to talk about pending inquiries. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Proposition 64 supporter, declined to comment on the numerous bribery cases involving marijuana growers and sellers. State law gives too much authority to local officials to dictate terms of city licenses, according to Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, a pro-legalization group that supported Proposition 64. “Corruption is always worse at the local level because there are so many more local officials and they aren’t under as much scrutiny as those in Sacramento,” he said. State agencies, he said, “have been doing their best to expedite licensing, but too many local players have been getting their hands in the pie.” (EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) The Siskiyou County case provides further evidence that California remains the largest exporter of marijuana in the nation. Yang allegedly told the sheriff he wanted to ship California-grown cannabis to Missouri. Sam Clauder can speak from personal experience about being caught up in illegal, interstate activity after succumbing to financial temptation. The former congressional aide and San Bernardino County Democratic Party official pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges in Texas of possessing 130 pounds of cannabis that he was transporting back east from California. Clauder started out driving marijuana from Humboldt County to legal medical cannabis dispensaries in Southern California. He turned to illegal transportation out of state after he was fired from a job as an aide to U.S. Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif.) over an unrelated criminal case in which he was later found innocent. Clauder said cannabis growers paid him about $30,000 for every 100 pounds of marijuana he transported back east, and he made the cross-country trip about 45 times before he was arrested in Texas. “I think it’s a temptation, if you can’t make it legally, to cross a line,” Clauder said. “I went from working for a U.S. congressman to being homeless and destitute overnight. What was I supposed to do? I just fell into it.”

[citizentruth-blog]

Bad Law Men: A Devil’s Half-Dozen Drug-Corrupted County Sheriffs - POLICE/PRISON

New Post has been published on https://citizentruth.org/bad-law-men-corrupt-sheriffs/

Bad Law Men: A Devil’s Half-Dozen Drug-Corrupted County Sheriffs

(Stop The Drug War) Last week, the good citizens of Mississippi’s Tallahatchie County got a rude shock. The county’s top lawmen, Sheriff William Brewer, was at the courthouse, which was not unusual. This time, though, he was dressed not in his sheriff’s uniform but in an orange prisoner jumpsuit to face federal criminal drug trafficking charges.

Image via Stop the Drug War.

According to a federal indictment, over a period of 15 years, Sheriff Brewer had conspired with a local ne’er-do-well to have that person repeatedly rob drug dealers, give stolen cash to Brewer, sell the drugs, then give Brewer part of the proceeds. In return, that man got a free ride for his own methamphetamine trafficking activities. Well, until he started coming up with his own meth supply. When Brewer found out about that, he started demanding a $500 or $600 payment every week for the dealer to carry out his work unimpeded. The dealer eventually became an FBI informant and took his former partner down.

Brewer has now resigned as sheriff, and he has not yet been convicted of anything, but his arrest on drug and extortion charges is yet another disturbing example of the corrosive impact on law enforcement of enforcing drug prohibition.

County sheriffs are unique figures in the American law enforcement landscape. Unlike police chiefs or the heads of federal law enforcement agencies, they are typically elected, not appointed. They are subject to little effective oversight except from voters at the polling booth. They control policing not only of all county territory not handled by municipal police forces, but also the county jail and the policing of the courthouse. They control their own law enforcement fiefdoms.

And they sometimes turn to the dark side. For the past dozen years, Drug War Chronicle has covered drug prohibition-related law enforcement misbehavior in a recurring feature, “This Week’s Corrupt Cops Stories.” During that period, hundreds of police officers, DEA agents, FBI agents, Customs and Border Patrol agents, jail and prison guards, and sheriff’s deputies have gone down for one or more of the myriad forms of dirty drug policing.

Law enforcement misbehavior has run the gamut from planting drugs on innocent people to ripping off drug dealers and selling their stashes to sexual coercion to lying on search warrants to lying in court to pocketing cash from drug busts to embezzling asset forfeiture funds, and even stealing drugs from those drug dropoff boxes.

It’s bad enough when the people charged with enforcing the law flout it, but it’s arguably more disheartening and corrosive when the corrupt cops are the very people charged with heading law enforcement offices, such as county sheriffs. There are more than 3,000 of them, holding office in every state except Alaska (no county governments), Connecticut (replaced by State Marshals), and Hawaii (deputies serve in a division of the Department of Public Safety). The vast majority of them are honest law enforcement professionals.

But some are notoriously not. Each year, one or two or three county sheriffs find themselves on the wrong side of the law because of drugs, whether it’s stealing them, selling them, or gobbling them down themselves. And sometimes, when they break bad, they do so in a spectacular fashion. Here are a half-dozen of the most outrageous from the past decade alone:

Oklahoma’s Custer County Sheriff Mike Burgess Burgess was hit in 2008 with a 35-count indictment charging him with coercing and bribing female inmates to participate in sex acts. He was hit with 14 counts of second-degree rape, seven counts of forcible oral sodomy, and five counts of bribery by a public official, among other charges. A federal lawsuit filed by 12 former inmates alleges that Burgess and his employees had them participate in wet T-shirt contests and gave cigarettes to inmates who would flash their breasts. Another prisoner alleged she was given trusty status after agreeing to perform a sex act on Burgess, but lost that status when she later refused. After a jury trial, now former Sheriff Burgess was convicted of 13 felonies, including five counts of second-degree rape and three counts of bribery by a public official. Testimony included that of several former female inmates who testified they feared they would be sent to prison if they did not provide sexual favors to the sheriff, as well as two female drug court participants. Burgess sexually assaulted one of them in his patrol car after arresting her for a drug court violation. In March 2009, he was sentenced to 79 years in prison.

Texas’s Montague County Sheriff Bill Keating. Another badge-wearing pervert, Keating, 62, went down for a November 2008 drug raid at a home where the victim and her boyfriend lived. The boyfriend was arrested on outstanding warrants and removed by sheriff’s deputies, who then searched the house and found meth paraphernalia. Sheriff Keating shooed the remaining deputy out of the bedroom, closed the door, and told the victim, “You are about to be my new best friend.” He then threatened to arrest her on drug charges unless she “assisted” him by performing oral sex on him on multiple occasions and becoming a snitch for him. Keating pleaded guilty in that case in January 2009, but was then indicted along with nine jail guards — seven women and two men — for official oppression over allegations that the county jail was like Animal House. That indictment features multiple allegations of guards and inmates doing drugs and having sex with each other under Keatings’ watch. Keating was looking at up to 10 years in prison on the original charge when he died of a heart attack in July 2009. The federal charges against him were subsequently dismissed.

Illinois’s Gallatin County Sheriff Raymond Martin. Sheriff Martin found himself in hot water in 2009, when he was indicted on federal marijuana trafficking charges after being videotaped repeatedly providing pounds of marijuana to a local man, who would sell the weed and then give Martin the proceeds. That man became an informant for the DEA after Martin threatened him with death when he said he wanted out. It only got worse from there. While in jail awaiting trial, Martin, his wife, and their 20-year-old son were all arrested again, this time on solicitation of murder charges for plotting to knock off the guy who ratted them out. In September 2010, Martin was convicted of 15 counts in the drug trafficking and murder-for-hire scheme. He was sentenced to two life terms in federal prison in January 2011.

South Carolina’s Florence County Sheriff E.J. Melvin. The only black sheriff on this list, Melvin was indicted on dozens of federal charges along with 11 others in 2011 for a massive and complex cocaine trafficking conspiracy. He was accused of dealing cocaine from his official vehicle, extorting money from drug dealers for protection or to get reduced charges. State police agents testified that they give Melvin a list of possible drug dealers, only to have him tip them off and arrange to get payments from them to keep the agents away. In addition to the massive cocaine conspiracy, involving multiple kilograms of the drug over a multi-year period, he was also accused of ripping off $5,000 in victim assistance funds for personal use. He ended up convicted on 37 of 43 counts and is now serving a 17-year federal prison sentence.

Kentucky’s Whitley County Sheriff Lawrence Hodge. Hodge was indicted on both state and federal charges in 2011 for stealing around $350,000 over a seven-year period, including $100,000 he claimed was used in drug investigations. That wasn’t all: Hodge was also charged with ripping off drug dealers and then funneling them to a local attorney. He would get a $50,000 kickback, the department would get a $50,000 “donation,” and the dealers would get more lenient treatment. Oh, and he admitted to being strung out on pain pills. Hodge is now doing 15 years of federal time and 17 years of state time, and when he gets out, he has to pay back some $350,000.

Oklahoma’s Love County Sheriff Marion “Joe” Russell. Russell was arrested in 2016 on charges of corruption, neglect of duty, and housing a fugitive, but it gets hinkier than that. He was accused of turning a blind eye to meth dealing out of his own home by his adult son, covering up a missing person case where another family member is the main suspect. His son, Willie Russell, had already pleaded guilty to meth dealing. The fugitive, a young woman, was dating Willie and staying at the sheriff’s house even though she had four arrest warrants outstanding. Russell would remind her that she was in a “safe haven,” and when she left anyway, he arrested her and the man she moved in with — for harboring a fugitive. He was also accused of arresting drunken women in bikinis and taking them to his house instead of to jail. There, they were allegedly sexually assaulted and given meth. The missing persons case involves a young couple who were last seen in a car owned by Russell’s nephew. That couple, Molly Miller and Colt Haynes, are still missing, but Russell is now in the clear, having copped a plea deal that resulted in one year of probation and $370 in court costs.

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