the crime report

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Stashing cash in spare tires, engine transmissions, and truckloads of baby diapers, couriers for Mexican drug cartels are moving tens of billions of dollars in profits south across the border each year, dirty money that has overwhelmed U.S. and Mexican customs agents, reports the Washington Post. Officials said stemming the flow of cash is essential if Mexico and the U.S. hope to disrupt powerful transnational criminal organizations that are using their wealth to corrupt, terrorize, and kill. Despite unprecedented efforts to thwart the traffickers, U.S. and Mexican authorities are seizing no more than 1 percent of the cash. (more…)

Obama administration drug policy director Gil Kerlikowske, along with his predecessors, John Walters, Barry McCaffrey, Lee Brown, Bob Martinez, and William Bennett, have joined in opposition to the marijuana legalization initiative that will be voted on by Californians in November. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, the sextet of drug czars reject the arguments that “legalizing and taxing marijuana would generate much-needed revenue, and that legalization would allow law enforcement to focus on other crimes.” (more…)

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The Department of Justice is seeking to hire linguists fluent in Ebonics to help monitor, translate, and transcribe the secretly recorded conversations of subjects of narcotics investigations, reports The Smoking Gun. Up to nine Ebonics experts will work with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta field division, where the linguists, after obtaining a “DEA Sensitive” security clearance, will help investigators decipher the results of “telephonic monitoring of court ordered nonconsensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media.” (more…)

Memphis’s Shelby County, a crossroads for drug dealers in the United States since at least the 1930s, was designated yesterday as part of a federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, tying the county into a formal network aimed at curtailing the flow of illegal drugs nationally, reports the Memphis Commercial Appeal. The Office of National Drug Control Policy said 8 other counties wre added to HIDTA areas: Navajo County, Az., Jefferson County, N.Y., and Mecklenburg, Gaston, Union, Buncombe, Henderson, and McDowell Counties in North Carolina.

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