Authorities say $1 million worth of aquarium rocks are missing after an underwater heist in the Florida Keys.
Miami boat captain Neal Novak told investigators that sometime in the past 18 months someone stole about 300,000 pounds of decorative live rock he had planned to harvest at his aqua farm in the waters three miles of Islamorada.
The rock is used in salt-water aquariums and reef tanks. Novak says it took him more than two years to place the rock on the ocean floor, where it became home to coral and plant life.
The theft was discovered May 13.
The Monroe County sheriff and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are investigating. The theft is considered grand larceny of farm animal aquaculture species, a third-degree felony.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The Mexican army is claiming success in the struggle to combat rising drug violence and corruption with the arrests in separate operations of a drug cartel leader in Cancun on the Caribbean coast and 25 suspected drug traffickers dressed as soldiers in the north of the country.
Authorities say that cartel head Juan Manuel Jurado Zarzoza, known as El R and the Puma, was arrested with three other suspected traffickers in possession of drugs and weapons. He was among those listed as Mexico’s most wanted for being behind the torture-murder of a retired army general in February as well as for extensive drug-running and extortion operations.
Jurado’s arrest has been seen as a blow to the operations of his Cardenas Guillen cartel in Cancun City, an international tourist resort and key base for cocaine trafficking from South America to the United States via the Gulf of Mexico.
Federal Defense Ministry officials said Jurado controlled all drug sales, kidnappings and extortion in the Yucatan peninsula and organized protection-money collection from the local tourist businesses.
In February retired Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quinones was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Cancun only 24 hours after arriving to clean up the city’s corrupt police force.
In another operation last weekend Mexican troops responded to a tip by raiding a ranch close to the U.S.-Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. There they arrested 25 men dressed as soldiers and confiscated a large arsenal of weapons and narcotics.
The Defense Ministry said the haul consisted of 29 large-caliber firearms, three small-caliber guns, more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition, four vehicles, 95 pounds of marijuana, 35 pounds of cocaine and 2,500 doses of crack cocaine.
An army spokesman in Chihuahua state said the men, posing in soldiers’ uniforms, had been burning businesses and homes in Nicolas Bravo city.
But in a setback for authorities last weekend, 53 inmates — including a dozen members of a powerful drug cartel — escaped from a jail in central Mexico. Dozens of guards were detained Monday for questioning over the escape.
The Saturday morning jailbreak in Zacatecas state in central Mexico was caught on CCTV showing guards standing by as the inmates were led out by an armed gang. They then got into a convoy of some 15 vehicles and left.
An extensive army and federal police manhunt is under way for the escapees. Eleven of the men are very dangerous, prison officials said. Some of them are believed to belong to the Gulf Cartel drug-smuggling gang.
Meanwhile, the prison governor has been detained for questioning along with 40 guards and two police commanders.
Nearly 11,000 people have died since 2006 in territorial fights by drug gangs and government crackdowns after President Felipe Calderon launched his anti-drug campaign by sending 45,000 troops to hot-spot drug areas.
The U.S. Department of Defense has warned that Mexico is close to becoming a failed state because of drug lawlessness.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
U.S. bonds worth an astounding $134.5 billion were seized by Italian police as smugglers attempted to cross into Switzerland earlier this month. Authorities have not indicated if they are real or fake, but either way, it could have implications for the U.S. bond market and the value of the dollar.
AsiaNews is reporting that Italy’s financial police seized bonds worth $134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso, an Italian border city known for catering to Italians who want to keep their money out of the Italian banking system. The confiscations include 249 U.S. Federal Reserve bonds each worth $500 million, plus 10 Kennedy bonds with face values of $1 billion, in addition to various other bonds.
If proven real, it “would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history,” says AsiaNews.
But if the bonds are authentic, it raises the question: Who do they belong to? The high face-values of the bonds are not available in regular banking and financial markets and are typically only handled by states. That would mean that some government is trying to sell a huge chunk of its dollar holdings.
But which? There are very few countries that would be able to move such large amounts. $138 billion is approximately half the total value of all goods and services produced in a year by Iran (which is a major oil exporter). Only three candidates are easily identifiable: Japan, China and the United States.
Although China has been very vocal about diversifying its reserves away from the dollar, since the two foreign nationals arrested were supposedly Japanese, Japan is for obvious reasons the prime suspect.
The Italian daily Adnkronos did not report the official charges against the two nationals, but indicated they may have been detained on suspicion of attempting to take a large amount of securities out of Italy without declaring it.
But why would Japan risk covertly moving tens of billions across country lines in a briefcase with a false bottom? Was this an attempt to quietly unload U.S. treasuries without having to sell them on the open market and risk setting off a market stampede and causing a dollar panic?
“Notice, by the way, that the U.S. media has totally ignored this story—even though the securities in question are allegedly U.S. instruments,” writes Karl Denninger for The Market Ticker. “Might the authorities know they’re real and be just a wee bit nervous that disclosure of a sovereign attempting to covertly dump nearly $140 billion in debt could cause a wee bit of panic, given that we’re running nearly $200 billion a month in deficits?” (June 11).
For now, the jury is still out. The bonds may very well turn out to be forgeries. But even if the bonds are fake, the matter might be even more worrisome, and not just because it would be “the biggest counterfeiting operation ever, by a factor of many times” (ibid.). AsiaNews ominously reports: “[T]he quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are indistinguishable from the real ones.”
Picture the Bernie Madoff fraud times two—and that is if this is the only incident.
High-quality fraudulent treasury bonds measured in the hundreds of billions is the last thing the U.S. government needs to deal with right now. The U.S government is attempting to find lenders to finance record spending and stimulus packages to prop up the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, it is trying to convince those same investors that the dollar will not be devalued, and that it is a stable store of wealth. Hundreds of billions of fraudulent securities does nothing to secure that faith.
Students of history will know that various countries have counterfeited currencies of foreign nations to influence currency exchange rates and undermine faith in foreign central banks. Even today, North Korea is known for counterfeiting the U.S. $100 bills. It is possible that something along those lines is occurring here too.
This is a story that deserves watching. The ramifications could be very significant.
1. When it comes to Italy the world press has tended to focus on Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s personal problems rather than on stories like the bonds smuggling affair which has been front page on Italian newspapers.
2. The fear of counterfeit bonds and securities has spread across Asia with the result that real securities are also considered with suspicion.
3. During the Second World War several countries at war printed and put in circulation perfectly counterfeit enemy money. It is also historically established that some central banks, like the Bank of Italy 65 years ago, issued the same securities twice (identical registered number and code). This way they could print more money with legal tender than they officially declared. The main difference though is that 65 years ago the world was involved in a bloody war, which is not the case today.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The Border Patrol says a Mexican man has been arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle 24 pounds of marijuana ashore on his surfboard off the San Diego County coast.
The man was spotted Sunday morning about 200 yards off Imperial Beach, near the Mexican border.
The Border Patrol says the man threw a blue duffel bag into the water when agents ordered him to come ashore. The man was arrested in the water.
Agents say the duffel bag later washed ashore, with five packages of marijuana worth about $74,400.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
From watching a string of action movies, many of us are familiar with what protects banks – cameras, silent alarms, automatic shutters slamming down and exploding capsules of ink in wads of money.
But the use of fogging devices is now an established tactic to protect not just banks, but a host of other businesses.
“It might be an ordinary house where you have somebody with a lot of valuables,” says Carl Gibbard, managing director of Concept Smoke Screen, “convenience stores, filling stations, jewellers, large factories, warehouses with items that stand a chance of being stolen where the thieves are relying on a smash and grab.”
These devices, typically linked to an alarm or a panic button, consist of a well of either glycol or glycerine mixed with water and a heater. In a split second, the liquid is pumped over the heater and out where it condenses on contact with cold air.
The intention is to disorientate the robber or burglar and cause them to abandon their efforts and flee.
“It’s the same principle as a kettle and steam,” says Mr Gibbard. A device might pump anything between 300 and 1,000 cubic metres of smoke into a room within 30 seconds.
Jewellers Goldsmiths and Watches of Switzerland have stopped seven attempted raids using the devices, Mr Gibbard says, and Boots and Tesco also have them installed.
Corey Gunz – 1668
Rival fogging device firm Smoke Cloak lists Barclays, Argos, Carphone Warehouse, PC World, and 150 schools among its clients, says managing director Paul Dards.
“Originally, they were mostly used in empty buildings for overnight protection, but as crime has become more violent, more places want to use them to protect their staff during working hours.”
But there are those who are slightly concerned about the idea of an already edgy armed robber being suddenly wreathed in smoke.
“Armed robbery is a high intensity situation,” says Roy Ramm, former head of the Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Operations, as well as the Flying Squad. “What you really want is calm and for people not to be panicked. Most robbers are very susceptible [to panic].”
While fatal shootings during armed robberies are rare in the UK, many robbers who have shot people tend to reveal afterwards that they had not intended to fire, says Mr Ramm.
“In a situation where a room suddenly fills with fog, it gives somebody another reason to panic. You could quite easily end up with someone being shot.”
Criminologist Prof Roger Matthews, of London Southbank University, author of Armed Robbery, concurs.
“It sounds a little bit like a double-edged strategy. The last thing you want to do is panic and confuse an armed robber. The danger is that people start doing strange and undesirable things like shooting people.”
But the smoke screen manufacturers dismiss criticism.
“When we first introduced this product we got a knee jerk reaction, understandably, from people who were worried,” says Mr Dards. “We actually took out a £10m worldwide insurance policy to protect people in case anything bad happened, but we’ve never had to touch it. We haven’t had any incidents.
“The idea is not to trap people, but when the bad guy breaks into the buildings a wall of fog comes at him and drives him out.”
Of course even if you accept that the fogging devices are safe it’s not easy to assess just how effective they are at stopping crimes.
Many will be installed in businesses that already have excellent security precautions, says Prof Matthews.
“A lot of the places that use these kinds of devices are the better organised institutions, which are already very well protected.”
And in the case of high value targets like prestige jewellers a different kind of thief is in operation.
“At that end of the market, you are not talking about amateur people who thought about doing it in the morning and went in the afternoon. They will know there is a smoke device and they will find some way to deal with that.”
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
