The G Manifesto

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.

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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.

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The Rest is Up to You…

Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com

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Tags: Crime, tinypass, Travel

The Street Price of Cocaine

The G Manifesto » 02 July 2009 » In Crime, Travel » 1 Comment

The Street Price of Cocaine

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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.

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Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com

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Melbourne Gang War Update

The G Manifesto » 02 July 2009 » In Crime, Travel » No Comments

Melbourne Gang War Update

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A brazen gangland murder has shed rare light on Australia’s seamy underworld and captivated the public with surreal details of a mob scene that has already inspired a smash-hit television series.

Desmond “Tuppence” Moran became the latest victim of Melbourne’s notorious crime wars last Monday, when balaclava-clad gunmen surprised him in the Ascot Pasta and Deli Cafe and shot him several times.

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Within hours, police were unravelling an incestuous and amateurish plot allegedly implicating close relatives of the victim and associates with colourful pasts and nicknames to match.

Accused killer Geoffrey “Nuts” Amour appeared in court sporting a black eye, while Moran’s sister-in-law Judy, who arrived at the crime scene within minutes crying “Dessie, Dessie,” has been arrested as an accomplice to murder.

How to Swoop Girls and Influence People (Australia Style)

Police searches reportedly turned up the getaway car, a self-loading rifle, pistols and a wig. Amour’s girlfriend Suzanne Kane, a member of another crime family closely linked to the Morans, was also arrested.

On Tuesday, a mysterious blaze broke out at Judy Moran’s home as she languished in a police cell, prompting suspicions of either a reprisal attack or an attempt to torch evidence. Arson investigators are probing the blaze.

“Fact is almost stranger than fiction with what we’ve seen,” said Victoria police commissioner Simon Overland.

“If you were a scriptwriter and sat down and wrote this stuff you’d probably say: ‘Look, no, it’s a bit far-fetched. No one will believe it.'”

Newspaper articles have pored over the details, unearthing comment from retired gang figures such as Mark “Chopper” Read, anti-hero of the eponymous 2000 film starring Eric Bana.

“Whoever hatched this plan, it was their first attempt at it. It was a dog’s dinner — a pig’s breakfast of a plan,” he scoffed.

Media have also spoken of the Moran family’s “missing millions” and attempted to untangle the web of murders and grudges that wrapped Melbourne in a nine-year turf war and inspired the popular “Underbelly” TV show.

The multi-award winning series was one of Australia’s top-rating shows last year, even though it could not be shown in Melbourne because some of the characters depicted were still facing trial in real life.

Among the underworld identities it dramatised was Judy Moran, a flashy 64-year-old blonde known as the family’s matriarch, who lost her husband Lewis and sons Mark and Jason to battles with the rival Williams clan.

Mark was shot outside his home in 2000, while hitmen murdered Jason in 2003 as he picked up his children from a football match, prompting a theatrical graveside threat from his mother.

“All will be dealt with, my darling,” Judy Moran famously vowed as she leant over her son’s coffin.

Husband Lewis, leader of the clan, survived until 2004 when he was chased through the Brunswick Club pub by a shotgun-toting assassin and dispatched as he cowered in a corner.

Kane, the alleged accomplice in Monday’s killing, also has a bloody past, starting from 1978 when she, her mother and her sister were locked in a bedroom by gunmen who executed her father, Les, with machine guns fitted with silencers.

Four years later, Suzanne’s uncle Brian Kane was killed by masked gunmen as he drank in a Melbourne bar, while her sister Trisha is Jason Moran’s widow.

With about 30 dead and gang boss Carl Williams in prison, Melbourne may have thought it had seen the last of its gang wars — until last week.

However, police and experts believe the murder is unlikely to spark another round of killing, speculating that the hit was prompted by simmering bad blood and a row over money.

“It’s just another insane chapter in an insane story. If you told a donkey this, he’d kick you in the head for telling lies,” Chopper Read told the Daily Telegraph.

“No one would believe it. It’s ridiculous.”

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Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com

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Cocaine Cowboys: Jon Roberts

The G Manifesto » 24 June 2009 » In Crime, People, Travel » 2 Comments

Cocaine Cowboys: Jon Roberts

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The Miami New Times which gave The G Manifesto, The Best Manifesto Award for 2007 has an update on Cocaine Cowboy Jon Roberts:

Former mega-smuggler Jon Roberts, who flooded Miami with $2 billion worth of cocaine in the ’80s, naps away his days in a quiet lakefront Hollywood home. But soon, if what he says is true, a book, a high-octane movie, and videogame contracts will again make him a player. But he doesn’t want you to know this. He’s worried this article could spoil the publicity for his book deal. When I told him last week this story would be published, the craggy, gray-mustached ex-gangster vowed, “You will never write another word in this town again… I will go on TV and tell them everything in your article is bold-faced lies. I hope you get hit by a truck, you little scumbag.”

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The outburst is in character with Roberts’s gangster-flick biography, which he described in an on-the-record interview before changing his mind about publication. It begins with a hardscrabble childhood, continues through an astronomic ascent, and concludes with the inevitable prison reckoning. What probably won’t make the official cut, however, is his post-incarceration life, which his ex-wife claims included snitching on friends for cash.

Roberts was born and raised in New York’s Little Italy in 1948. His Mafioso dad was deported when the future smuggler was still a kid, he says. His mother died during a medical operation when he was a young teen. “Everybody told me it was a hysterectomy,” he recalls. “I don’t believe that was true. I think she went into the hospital to have an abortion, which was illegal at the time.”

Cocaine Cowboys : John Roberts Fabulous Life

A budding violent criminal as a teenager, he bounced among relatives’ homes. His sister, who lived in Brunswick, Maine, booted him when he was around 16, he says, and he drove back to Mulberry Street, where he entered the family business. He worked as an enforcer for a loan-sharking uncle, he says, augmenting his income with two-bit capers. “This was the early ’60s — everybody was ‘love, peace, and hope,'” Roberts says. “So I’d tell some hippie I had 20 pounds of pot. He’d give me $10,000. I’d take the money and not give him any pot.”

After a failed kidnapping involving a debtor escaping from a basement “with a chair tied to him and no clothes on,” the adolescent mobster shipped off to Vietnam for five years. “I thought it was great,” he says. “There were no rules. You could kill people, do whatever you want.”

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After an explosion in an ammunition dump, he was sent home with four screws and a metal plate in his head, he says. Back in New York, he began opening nightclubs — until the late ’70s, when one of his partners turned up dead after taking 11 bullets. Roberts headed to Miami. He explains simply: “I heard there was a lot of coke down here.”

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The Rest is Up to You…

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

Nore – Cocaine Cowboys

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Tijuana Street Drug Dealers Targeted

The G Manifesto » 24 June 2009 » In Crime, Travel » No Comments

Tijuana Street Drug Dealers Targeted

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Drug dealer Hector Rodriguez Estrada had a feeling he was next.

His boss was beaten to death and dumped in an empty lot, his teeth and fingers missing. Then one of Rodriguez’s underlings turned up in a soccer field, his head next to his body.

Rodriguez, 30, knew his enemies could only get him if he was asleep or high. But the thought made the longtime addict, who sold methamphetamine in his eastern Tijuana neighborhood, more jittery than usual.

“He felt like something was about to happen,” said his mother, Maria de la Luz Estrada.
With good reason.

Much attention is given Mexican drug cartels warring over lucrative transport routes to the U.S. But more and more, they’re battling for an exploding number of Mexican consumers, a market that barely existed a decade ago. While the U.S. is expected to remain the largest and most-coveted market, local consumers are a big and rapidly growing source of cash.

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That makes street dealers like Rodriguez prime targets for assassins. Low-level sellers are easy prey for rivals seeking to expand turf, because they work openly on street corners without bodyguards or armored cars.

Drug dealers account for many of the 10,800 people killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began a crackdown on cartels in 2006 – particularly in border cities where the battles are fiercest. In Tijuana, they fill at least 90 percent of the body bags, according to top law enforcement officials.

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