Jesse James Hollywood was convicted this afternoon of first-degree murder and kidnapping for ordering the slaying of a San Fernando Valley teenager in 2000.
The Santa Barbara County Superior Court jury was given the case July 1 after a six-week trial and nine years after the kidnapping and murder of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz of West Hills. Hollywood was the alleged mastermind behind the slaying.
The crime was the model for the 2007 movie “Alpha Dog.” Defense attorneys argued that the crime’s notoriety tainted the testimony of witnesses and prejudiced the public against their client.
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One of Britain’s most notorious criminals, Ronnie Biggs, has been refused parole by Justice Secretary Jack Straw who says the 79-year-old train robber is “wholly unrepentant”.
Straw on Wednesday said Biggs had “outrageously courted the media” during more than three decades on the run after escaping from prison in 1965, where he was serving a 30-year sentence for his role in the 1963 Great Train Robbery.
In a statement, Straw said: “Mr Biggs chose to serve only one year of a 30-year sentence before he took the personal decision to commit another offence and escape from prison, avoiding capture by travelling abroad for 35 years whilst outrageously courting the media.
“Had he complied with his sentence, he would have been a free man many years ago.”
Biggs’ lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano told the BBC the decision was “perverse” and “obscene”, and said his client was in an extremely frail state.
He said: “He is in hospital, he has a nasal gastric feed, he has had three strokes, he can’t walk, he can’t talk… all the other (Great Train Robbers) served a third of their sentences. Why should Mr Biggs be different?”
The Great Train Robbery saw a 15-strong gang hold up a London to Glasgow mail train, making off with 2.6 million pounds in the money of the day.
The gang attacked the train driver with an iron bar. The driver never returned to work and died seven years later without making a full recovery.
Biggs played a minor role in the hold-up but was jailed for 30 years in 1964, but escaped by scaling the wall of the prison and jumping onto the roof of a furniture van.
He eventually fled to Brazil, where he was often pictured in British newspapers enjoying a party, but handed himself over to the British authorities in 2001 and was sent back to jail.
Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs has led a colourful life, taking part in a record-breaking robbery and becoming a world-famous fugitive from British justice, before eventually returning to the UK of his own free will and subsequently imprisoned.
1929
8 August: Ronald Arthur Biggs is born in Lambeth, south London.
1947
Joins the RAF aged 18, but dishonourably discharged in 1949
1963
Ronnie Biggs received about £140,000 from the Post Office train theft
8 August: Biggs is one of a gang of 15 masked men who stop the Glasgow to London mail train near Cheddington in Buckinghamshire.
They manage to steal 120 bags of money worth £2.6m – a record haul.
Train driver Jack Mills is beaten with an iron bar during the heist and suffers head injuries.
1964
20 January: The trial of the train robbers begins at Buckinghamshire assizes in Aylesbury.
16 April: Biggs is sentenced to 30 years for his part in the robbery.
1965
8 July: Biggs scales the wall of Wandsworth prison with a home-made rope ladder and drops on to a waiting removal van.
He then flees to Paris, where he has plastic surgery.
1969
He is tracked down to Melbourne, Australia, where he has been living with his first wife, Charmian, and their children.
Before the authorities can catch up with him, he flees to Brazil. The South American country had no extradition treaty with the UK at the time.
1970
Train driver Jack Mills dies of an illness unrelated to the injuries he sustained during the robbery. He never returned to work after being attacked.
1974
Scotland Yard detective Jack Slipper manages to arrest Biggs in Rio de Janeiro after he was tracked down by the Daily Express newspaper.
But Biggs successfully argues against extradition because he has fathered a son, Michael, by his Brazilian girlfriend, Raimunda.
Police in France have made 26 arrests and recovered a series of stolen rings, necklaces and watches as part of an investigation into last year’s spectacular multimillion-pound robbery at the luxury Paris jewellers, Harry Winston.
The daring heist last December saw a group of robbers, some dressed as women and wearing wigs, steal almost every piece of jewellery on display in the chic boutique. They stuffed diamond rings, necklaces and luxury watches into bags as well as emptying two backdoor storage cases before getting away within minutes. Items worth about €85m were stolen – the biggest jewellery robbery ever in France, and one of the world’s biggest gem heists.
It emerged last night that investigators had been monitoring suspects in and around Paris in recent months. On Sunday, they learnt that some foreign nationals were due to arrive to collect some of the stolen jewels to sell them on. The police swooped and made arrests on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.
There are several women among the suspects, who are aged between 22 and 67. Police said 26 people, including a security guard at the jewellery shop and several known gangsters, had been placed under investigation.
They are accused of having taken part in the raid or the preparations for it, or of having helped sell the jewels. Police also recovered weapons, as well as €250,000 in cash.
Originally, members of the Pink Panthers gang that operates out of the Balkans, and which has been involved in other high-profile jewel thefts, were suspects, but they appear to have been ruled out, according to police.
The robbery, carried out in daylight a few weeks before Christmas, had led police to suspect experienced professionals and “real pros”. The gang appeared to have a detailed knowledge of the boutique’s lay-out, knew the location of supposedly top-secret storage boxes, and referred to staff by their first names.
The American jewellery boutique on Paris’s chic Avenue Montaigne has been the target of previous heists. In October 2007, armed robbers made off with jewels worth more than €10m.
The late actor Richard Burton bought jewels from the store for his wife Elizabeth Taylor; the late shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis also bought an engagement ring there for the former US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
Last year, cocaine production fell by 28 percent in Colombia. In addition, security forces seized and destroyed a record 200 tons of the stuff. The main causes for this decline are a drop in demand from the 17 million cocaine users world-wide. Another side effect of the global recession. But the cocaine gangs are also being driven out of business by the security forces. Many are moving operations to Peru (where production was up 4 percent last year, to 302 tons) and Bolivia (up 9 percent to 113 tons). Last year, Peru and Bolivia together produced about as much cocaine as Colombia. The president of Bolivia is a former coca farmer (although he only backs the traditional chewing of the coca leaves, which has a mild narcotic effect). In Peru, the most productive coca growing areas are controlled by Shining Path, a vicious leftist movement that was almost wiped out in the 1990s, but is now making a comeback via cocaine profits. As more Colombian cocaine operations move to Peru and Bolivia, the ones remaining in Colombia come under greater pressure from the security forces, and a population glad to see the drug trade move somewhere else, or just disappear.
The reason for the many recent defeats of the drug gangs and leftist rebels has been better trained and equipped military and police units. The navy has bought 60 patrol boats from European builders, and 25 Super Tucano counterinsurgency aircraft from Brazil. Over a hundred other aircraft (including helicopters) have also been obtained in the last six years. The security forces are now better fighters, with much better mobility, than the gangsters and rebels they face.
The collapse of the cocaine industry in Colombia is causing more fighting between the cocaine gangs, and even within leftist rebel groups like FARC (sometimes for ideological reasons, but more often over money and personality issues.) FARC’s leftist allies in the United States and Europe have tried to paint the government as the bad guys in all this, but that has had no effect on Colombians, who are safer, and more prosperous, than they have been in decades. Violent deaths have declined sharply in the last six years, and the economy is booming. The global recession caused a less than one percent dip in GDP during the first quarter of the year, and that’s apparently as bad as it’s going to get.
As the army goes deeper into areas long controlled by FARC, the more surprises they encounter. So far this year, for example, troops have come upon a small oil refinery, that produced about 250 gallons (1,000 liters) a day. The raw material is a nearby oil pipeline, that had a tap built into it. Troops have also come upon small factories for making landmines and booby traps, as well as workshops for repairing weapons.
THE street price of cocaine varies enormously. The drug costs less in South and Central America, where most cocaine is produced, but it is also low in Morocco, a trafficking destination. Worldwide, prices range from $2 a gram in Panama to over $300 in New Zealand, according to the UN’s World Drug Report. Generally, the farther away a country from the main producers and the more isolated it is, the higher the price charged. The priciest places for a cocaine habit are New Zealand and Australia, where a gram typically costs $312 and $285 respectively. Prices in Canada and America, after years of cheaper drugs for Canadians, are now on a par at around $97 a gram.
