MS-13's Active Members Are Laughing At Trump's Crackdown (HBO)

The Mob versus the Nazis was an offer an Obama predecessor couldn't refuse.

THE WAR ON TERROR SPECTATOR
OPERATION UNDERWORLD


By Eric Dezenhall – From the September 2011 issue





Quentin Tarantino's darkly comic 2009 film, Inglourious Basterds, was rollicking Nazi vengeance porn, the core shtick being a handful of Jewish American soldiers wreaking havoc on Hitler, Goebbels, and their goose-stepping ilk. The movie was alternative history, of course, but the story of shtarkers, Jewish tough guys, going after Nazis has a basis in fact.

This is the theme of my new historical novel, The Devil Himself, which is about the very real collaboration between Jewish mob boss Meyer Lansky and U.S. Naval Intelligence.

I have known Meyer Lansky's family for years and had access to his personal recollections and private papers. Meyer's activities, sanctioned by the government as part of "Operation Underworld," included a Tarantinian mobilization of Jewish American mobsters against Nazi sympathizers and saboteurs, a campaign as cloaked in secrecy as SEAL Team Six's recent takedown of Osama bin Laden.

On that subject, my early admiration of President Obama's handling of bin Laden's killing lost steam when his administration began twisting itself into pretzels to convey that the terrorist's killing was done, uh, politely. Heaven forbid we hurt the feelings of the other homicidal maniacs that have Americans in their crosshairs.

As contemporary America contemplates how to deal with its enemies, it is worth looking at what the wartime administration of another liberal Democrat did when faced with foreign terrorists.

OPERATION UNDERWORLD began shortly after Pearl Harbor, when the cruise shipNormandie caught fire and capsized at Pier 88 in Manhattan in early February, 1942. TheNormandie, the largest luxury liner in the world, was seized by the U.S. after France fell to the Nazis. It was being retrofitted for U.S. troop deployment when it was destroyed.

Many blamed the ship's destruction on Nazi sabotage. In retrospect, it probably wasn't, but at the time it was a reasonable assumption. The German American Bund had been a thriving pro-Nazi advocacy group in New York before the war. German U-boats were destroying U.S. ships in the North Atlantic at such a successful clip that Admiral Karl Dönitz dubbed his campaign the Third Reich's "Happy Time." More American sailors were killed under this initiative than died at Pearl Harbor.

Navy intelligence swarmed the New York docks to solicit the cooperation of the longshoremen to ferret out German spies. They were heartily rebuffed. The operating theory about the Navy's cold reception was that the largely Italian dock workers may have been loyal to Hitler's partner in mayhem, Italy's Mussolini. While such an allegiance may have been the case with some of the stevedores, there was a better explanation: The men who worked the docks were averse by nature and culture to help out any authorities.

Gravely concerned, the Navy sought the advice of New York law enforcement. Prosecutors conceded that, yes, the mob-controlled longshoremen were a tough lot, but not all mobsters were knuckle-dragging simians--especially ones whose Eastern European Jewish landsmen were being rounded up by Hitler.

Indeed, Meyer Lansky had tried to enlist in the army after Pearl Harbor, but was rejected because of his age, just shy of 40, and his height, 5' 4" in socks. Other Jewish mobsters had better luck. One of Meyer's men, Doc Stacher of Newark, served in the Army. Cleveland boss Moe Dalitz entered the Army a private and came out a captain. Minneapolis killer Davie Berman and Chicago's Charlie Barron were rebuffed, but enlisted in the Canadian army using fake names.

A meeting was arranged between Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden of the Third Naval District and Meyer Lansky at Longchamps restaurant. Haffenden was stunned when the diminutive mobster introduced himself, donning a conservative business suit, looking like a cross between an accountant from Arthur Andersen and a violin instructor. His eyes, hard and black, told a different story.

Haffenden's pitch was simple: The Navy understood that the mafia controlled the waterfront, Nazi sabotage was suspected in the Normandie fire, German U-boats were likely getting information from somebody on the docks, and the longshoremen weren't cooperating. Could Meyer's men be of any assistance?

Meyer acknowledged he had been giving Bund members the business for years. With the help of men like his childhood friend, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, cutthroats like Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, Allie "Tick Tock" Tannenbaum, and Seymour "Blue Jaw" Magoon, Jewish racketeers had been breaking up Bund rallies in the Yorkville section of Manhattan using guns, knives, and baseball bats. The mob hastened the Bund's demise by introducing mortal risks to its leadership.

Meyer clarified for Haffenden that there was no such thing as the mafia (heh), that he was a simple investor and music distributor (uh huh), but that he'd help because "it's patriotism."

He added that there was a man who was greatly respected by the Italian toughs on the waterfront who might be able to assist. The good news was that this man was Meyer's old friend. The bad news was that this friend was doing a 30- to 50-year prison sentence in an upstate New York prison known as "Siberia."

Charles "Lucky" Luciano had been convicted of running prostitution rackets six years earlier. After Meyer advised Haffenden that one shouldn't approach a Sicilian expecting something for nothing, a bewildered Luciano was moved in the dead of night from the inclement Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, to the more hospitable Great Meadow Prison in Comstock.

Shortly after his arrival, Luciano was escorted into the warden's office where he was greeted by Meyer and his attorney Moses Polakoff. The men had brought the overjoyed Luciano Italian and Jewish delicacies from Manhattan.

Luciano agreed to help. He ordered his capos, who were permitted to visit him, to cooperate with the Navy. Of course, he wanted something in return for his cooperation: his freedom. Haffenden agreed to do his best.

IN THE SUMMER of 1942, eight Nazi saboteurs were captured soon after they came ashore via U-boat near Amagansett, Long Island, and Jacksonville, Florida. They had brought with them lots of cash, explosives, and plans to blow up American defense plants, bridges, railways, and Jewish-owned department stores.

These saboteurs weren't the Third Reich's first string. Their leader turned himself in to J. Edgar Hoover. Some of the others were captured when mob-controlled union members employed at New York hotels reported them to naval intelligence.

For his part, President Roosevelt, a nighttime reader of gangster novels, was ruthless when it came to dealing with the Nazis. He wanted to execute all of the saboteurs without as much as a public utterance. Instead, two of the saboteurs were given long prison sentences and six of them, after one of the swiftest Supreme Court reviews in history, were executed at the District of Columbia jail and buried in a nearby potter's field. Roosevelt even joked about the executions while mixing drinks at the presidential retreat, Shangri-La.

In one of the stranger coincidences in history, FDR was very close to the powerful journalist Walter Winchell, who was, in turn, a friend and neighbor of Meyer Lansky in the Majestic House apartments on Central Park West. Winchell was an unrepentant propagandist for the American cause, and he was unafraid to work with gangsters to publicize their beat-downs of Nazi sympathizers.

While history is clear about Roosevelt's active engagement in wartime espionage, the substance of any FDR-Winchell-Lansky interaction remains unknown. Still, imagine the mere spectacle of such a dotted-line triangle given today's transparency fetish.

Domestic sabotage was a non-issue for the remainder of the war. This was due to factors besides Operation Underworld, of course, but German spies mustn't have found the New York waterfront hospitable with the likes of Bugsy, Lepke, & Company roaming Lower Manhattan.

Meyer and Luciano's services didn't stop here. When it came time to invade Sicily, Commander Haffenden again brought in the boys. They provided naval intelligence with mafia contacts in Sicily that were instrumental in both the initial landing (courtesy of maps provided by local fishermen) and in locating strategic Nazi strongholds. It wasn't all about patriotism: Mussolini had cracked down hard on the Sicilian mafia and homegrown gangsters wanted him out.

For his service, Luciano's prison sentence was commuted by New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had been the very prosecutor to put him behind bars. Luciano, who never bothered to become an American citizen, was deported to Italy, never to regain his position atop the American underworld.

To be sure, mafiaphiles have exaggerated the contributions of racketeers to the war effort. Especially preposterous is the folklore that has Luciano storming onto Sicilian beaches beside Patton waving a yellow flag emblazoned with the letter L to liberate the countryside.

It's hard to imagine either the president or the media in the age of WikiLeaks tapping the Sopranos to whack al Qaeda. Both the successful conquest of Sicily -- which, nevertheless, included the Allied air bombing of our own troops -- and the initial slaughter at Normandy would have been declared "quagmires" by today's reporters. Contrast this with American journalists during FDR's day, who barely reported Hitler's demoralizing "Happy Time" duck shoot against U.S. vessels.

Somewhere along the line, being seen as apologetic and gentle has trumped other priorities in international affairs. Envision FDR or Truman offering frantic assurances that Hitler's body reached its final resting place in strict accordance with Waffen SS tradition. Or that the Hiroshima bomb incinerated tens of thousands humanely.

Still, at least one thing about Operation Underworld would translate to 21st-century Washington, namely the fate of the Navy officer who ran the program. Commander Haffenden was shipped to Iwo Jima in the hope he wouldn't make it back. He did, but was severely injured. His reputation was dragged through sea clutter when word of Operation Underworld leaked and became the subject of investigations. Positioned as a rogue agent, Haffenden turned to alcohol and became a Dictaphone salesman, dying on Christmas Eve, 1952.

MEYER LANSKSY'S best days were ahead of him. He attempted to clean up his fortune in Las Vegas and Havana, where he was the czar of Cuba's legal gaming and resort industries. When Havana fell to Castro, he lost his most lucrative legal holdings. His every move shadowed by law enforcement, Meyer attempted to gain Israeli citizenship under that country's Law of Return, but was considered a liability and was forced to return to Miami Beach, where he died in 1983 of natural causes--in bed, with his shoes off.

As I portray in The Devil Himself, Meyer was intensely proud of his service in World War II. He was motivated by an immigrant's desire to prove he was a "real American," a concept that is hard to imagine in today's climate, in which such a wish would be greeted by the dominant media culture with an eye roll.

Unlike his partner Luciano, Meyer was an American citizen who received his Certificate of Naturalization after the war. He was so enthralled with his Navy collaboration that he sent his son Paul to West Point.

The deranged mob boss Albert Anastasia was said to have told Meyer, "Someday, my boy's gonna run the Brooklyn waterfront." Meyer responded, "That's nice. My son works at NASA."

He wasn't kidding. Paul Lansky was an engineer on the Apollo space program and one of the first military advisors in Vietnam.

The value of Operation Underworld can be legitimately debated. What cannot is how far our leaders were once willing to go to defeat our country's enemies. There was a time--bada bing!--when even a mobster's contribution was an offer we couldn't refuse. 

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Long-Running Gang-Intervention Program Squeezed By Budget

EndrTimes:

Even more propaganda for the Roman Catholic Agenda on National Public Radio -

February 16, 2014 5:00 PM



Listen to the Story
All Things Considered

5 min 23 sec



Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, talks with NPR's Arun Rath about his organization's mission and financial struggles. The nonprofit, which is going into its 26th year, is the largest gang-intervention program in the country.


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6 evangelical church members shot to death by suspected gang members in rural El Salvador

Published January 12, 2014
Associated Press


SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador – Officials in El Salvador say six members of an evangelical church were shot to death in a rural western province by suspected gang members.

The federal prosecutor's office says the victims, ranging in age from 16 to 54, were riddled with bullets Saturday night in Ahuachapan state near the border with Guatemala. There are no details on why they were targeted.

Heavily armed gangs control much of El Salvador and are blamed for the Central American country's high murder rate.

Three members of the 18th Street Gang were killed in a separate incident in central El Salvador over the weekend.

The 18th Street and the Mara Salvatrucha are the country's the two biggest gangs. They signed a truce in March 2012 designed to cut the violence.

 
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The Department of Homeland Security steps in to help SJPD with gang violence

June 25, 2011 2:48 pm PT
Glendale Calmerin
San Jose City Buzz Examine

San Jose Police Department

Credits:

Dai Sugano/San Jose Mercury News/AP

San Jose City is dealing with its highest murder rate in 20 years and most of these murder cases are gang-related. The Department of Homeland Security is stepping in for the first time on Monday to help the San Jose Police Department decrease gang violence.

The two agents of The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are giving a helping hand as well to reduce street gangs. The police chief is assuring the people of San Jose that the ICE is not interested in people's immigration status.

“The ultimate goal is to protect the community, protect the public and try to remove those folks from the community that are there who exploit people and commit crimes,"said Shane Folden, spokes person for ICE, during an interview with ABC 7 News.

According to the San Jose Police Department, there are 100 known gangs operating in the city with a total of around 6,500 members. San Jose City has witnessed six gang-related murders in 2010 and has doubled to 14 gang-related murders this year.

“The government laying off cops isn't helping lower the crime rate,” said Brandon Swaim, a deputy.

Due to the budget cuts, the police department dealt with 100 layoffs this year.

“A lot of people don't think that cops do much for our society when in fact they do,” said Bernardo Mulingtapang, a San Jose State student, “so it's obvious, then, that cutting our support for law enforcement is going to be detrimental in homicide prevention measures.”

Mulingtapang is encouraging the community to step up and help as well by continuing to support the SJPD. He recalls the McDonalds brawl in downtown San Jose on June 10. He said that a witness called for help when the brawl occurred but assistance didn't arrive until it was too late.

Dozens of people were involved in this massive brawl that was gang related out in the parking lot of a McDonald’s near San Jose State University at around 10 p.m. Two people were stabbed and hospitalized, and three others were injured.

“I think that bringing in the Department of Homeland Security is a good thing but it just shows that the SJPD is weak, “said Andre Lopez, a college student, “ and it continues to weaken with the mayor laying off cops.”


Source: http://www.examiner.com/city-buzz-in-san-jose/the-department-of-homeland-security-steps-to-help-sjpd-with-gang-violence#ixzz1QaFgp59Q

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Mexico: Migrants should form convoys for safety

Nov. 22, 2010 08:37 PM
Associated Press
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MEXICO CITY - Mexico's government is telling migrants driving home for the holidays from the United States that they should form convoys for their own safety while traveling through Mexico, and an official said Monday that police will accompany convoys on the most dangerous stretches of highway.

A seemingly intractable wave of drug cartel violence has made some border highways, especially in the states of Tamaulipas, Sonora and Sinaloa, so dangerous that the U.S. State Department urges travelers to avoid driving on some of the roads.

"When there are hot spots, we can request that a patrol escort the convoy," said Itzel Ortiz, the director of the Paisano Program, which is in charge of welcoming returning migrants and ensuring their trips home are safe.

Demands for bribes by police and officials at Mexican customs checkpoints used to be the worst problems for returning migrants, who often bring cash, new vehicles and appliances with them.

But that seems almost innocuous compared to the challenges posed by drug cartel gunmen, who frequently set up roadblocks on northern highways to steal vehicles and cash, kidnap or kill travelers.

Ortiz noted that those returning home have already reported "extortion attempts by members of drug cartels" and she confirmed that a family of returning migrants had been attacked on a highway in Sinaloa last week.

She did not give details, but local media reported that gunmen followed the family's vehicle and sprayed it with bullets, wounding a girl. Sinaloa prosecutors were not immediately available to confirm those reports.

Ortiz said the idea for the convoys began last year, when relatives of migrants returning from Las Vegas, Nevada, to the central state of Guanajuato approached the program to ask if a caravan could be organized.

"This year we are recommending it more because of some families' concerns about safety," she said.

Ortiz said the program often works with migrant clubs in U.S. cities. Such clubs are often organized by migrants from a given region or state of Mexico to keep community ties alive.

If a group is returning, they can give the Paisano Program a copy of their intended route, and program offices in each state along the way will check in with the migrants to see if they have made it safely to that day's destination.

In a statement, the Interior Department said the Mexican army would assist in the program to help migrants return safely from the United States.

"The main recommendation for travelers is that drive during the day and in groups, and with that aim in mind they should contact Paisano Program offices to organize caravans, so that they can be escorted or monitored," according to the statement.

While drug violence has claimed over 28,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against the cartels in late 2006, migrants are also often targeted by common criminals for robberies or extortion.

An estimated 12 million Mexicans live in the United States, and the money they send home is Mexico's second-largest source of foreign income after oil exports.

The U.S. State Department has urged U.S. citizens to avoid traveling on the highway between the border cities of Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, south of the Texas border, due to drug gang violence. The department also noted that "criminals have followed and harassed U.S. citizens traveling in their vehicles in border areas including Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and Tijuana."

The situation has become so bad that the State Department has prohibited its employees from traveling by vehicle across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Source: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/11/22/20101122mexico-holiday-convoy-safety.html#ixzz16Q38dnLT

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Gunmen Kill 13 in Massacre at Party in Mexico

Updated: 1 day 7 hours ago

Olivia Torres
AP

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Oct. 23) -- Gunmen stormed two homes and massacred 13 young partygoers in the latest large-scale attack in this violent border city, even as a new government strategy seeks to restore order with social programs and massive police deployments.

Attackers in two vehicles pulled up to the houses in a lower-middle-class neighborhood late Friday and opened fire on about three dozen youths attending a party. The dead identified so far were 16 to 25 years old, the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said Saturday in a statement. Fifteen were wounded, including a 9-year-old boy.

Police found 70 bullet casings from assault weapons typically used by drug gangs whose bloody turf battles have killed more than 2,000 people this year in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The attackers escaped, and police said they had no immediate information on any suspects or possible motive.

Ciudad Juarez has become one of the world's deadliest cities amid a turf war between the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels, which frequently go after each other in mass attacks on bars, drug rehab centers and parties.

Some have resulted in apparently innocent people being killed, either because someone else at a gathering was the target or gunmen simply had the wrong address.

Most recently, attackers stormed two homes on Oct. 17, killing seven at a party and two more in another house nearby.

And in January, gunmen massacred 15 people at a party in a house not far from the site of Friday's killings. Most of the victims were teenagers, students and athletes.

Investigators later said the attack was apparently carried out by Juarez cartel gunmen looking to kill allies of the Sinaloa cartel. There is no evidence the youths were the targets, and police said the killers may have hit the wrong house.

The city was outraged by the January massacre, leading President Felipe Calderon's government to vow to implement a new strategy for restoring order in Ciudad Juarez, where the army had by then had replaced the disorganized, outgunned local police.

In April, federal police took over public security duties from the army, and about 5,000 federal officers were deployed in Ciudad Juarez.

The federal government also stepped up social programs to try to break the cycle of poverty, broken homes and lack of opportunities that make the city's youths a fertile recruiting ground for the gangs.
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Arizona Sheriff claims Mexican assassins ‘national security threat’

Voters will be remembering in November
Photo: Elizabeth Delaney

October 18th, 2010 7:07 pm ET.Do you like this story?

Several law enforcement agencies in Arizona were notified by Homeland Security about the ominous plans of the Mexican Drug cartel. Assassins, also referred to as "sicarios”, are planning to attack anyone who interferes with their drug runs into the US. Sheriff Paul Babeu says that it’s a very serious problem because innocent bystanders have been attacked, kidnapped, killed, and the houses of citizens have been robbed. He referred to its severity as one that is a “national security threat.” While the video to the left also indicates that the notification was “leaked” from Homeland Security, a http://www.washingtontimes.com/ article on Sunday says that the Vekol Valley precincts were “warned”.

This particular area in Arizona is considered a “well-established and widely travelled drug-smuggling corridor running north and south across Interstate 8 between the Arizona towns of Casa Grande and Gila Bend. The valley is a direct link to both the interstate and to Phoenix, giving drug smugglers the option of shipping their goods to California or to major cities both north and east.” In addition, there are 15 assassins who are considered “very well-equipped and armed”. The Sheriff has told the Washington Times that, “Mexican drug cartels have posted scouts on the high points around the valley to control movement in the area. He said they have radios, optics and ‘night-vision goggles as good as anything law enforcement has.’"

The Sheriff has requested the assistance of 3000 National Guards soldiers, but Washington’s ludicrous response was to send 15 signs to post along Interstate 8 that warn American citizens and travelers that the area is an "active drug- and human-smuggling area" and that they might be attacked and injured by "armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed." And people wonder why Arizona passed an immigration law.

The irony of all this is that back in June, when news was breaking about 18 other states who were planning to introduce a law similar to Arizona’s, which then started the nonsense of the feds suing Arizona, Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was insisting that the boarder was secure. Her exact words, according to a www.cnsnews.com article were, “The plain fact of the matter is the border is as secure now as it has ever been.”

The immigration issue, the economy, joblessness and Obamacare are the main issues that have most Democrats nervous about Election Day. In fact, a http://www.nytimes.com/ article in July stated that Democrat governors were voicing “deep anxiety about the Obama administration’s suit against Arizona’s new immigration law, worrying that it could cost a vulnerable Democratic Party in the fall elections.” Democrats have been afraid of losing their majority even as far back as December, and the polls are now showing that 2010 has the potential to be a landslide loss that wipes out their majority.

According to a http://www.rasmussenreports.com/ article on Monday, “The economy continues to be the most important issue on voters’ minds this election, and 49% place their trust in Republicans to handle this issue. Thirty-nine percent (39%) trust Democrats more.” The other issues in which Rasmussen Reports a majority of voters trust Republicans over Democrats include: immigration; national security; healthcare; lower taxes; and the war in Iraq. In addition, “Republicans now hold a nine-point lead on the Generic Congressional Ballot.”

A http://www.ft.com/ article on Monday stated that president of the Chicago Fed Charles Evans has described the US economy as “being in a bona fide liquidity trap.” To make matters even more interesting, a Monday http://www.breitbart.com/ article noted that sometime this week, “a key Group of 20 (would be) meeting in South Korea where currency reform is expected to dominate talks, amid fears that nations could adopt trade barriers in the face of competition from Asian exports” (emphasis added). It was pointed out by IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn that “The spirit of cooperation must be maintained. Without that, the (global economic) recovery is in peril.” Those who have an interest in Bible prophecy will recognize that currency reform is the precursor to a One World monetary system.
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Gang goes on sick rampage, sodomizing teen with plunger and forcing another to burn lover with cigs

BY Rocco Parascandola, Joe Jackson and Corky Siemaszko
DAILY NEWS WRITERS

Saturday, October 9th 2010, 4:00 AM


Florescu for News

The so-called Latin King Goonies used Osborne Place building as headquarters for their sick attacks.

Fueled by hate for homosexuals, a sick crew of Bronx gang members went on a wave of sadistic violence that included forcing a teen to burn his gay lover with cigarettes, cops said Friday.

The cowardly creeps then made the 17-year-old watch as they sodomized the tortured man with a miniature baseball bat.

The gang members, who call themselves the Latin King Goonies, also sodomized another 17-year-old with a toilet plunger before capping their reign of terror by beating up and robbing a fourth person. The last man attacked was the older brother of one of the earlier victims.

"These suspects employed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, odds which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Seven hoods, ages from 16 to 23, have been rounded up. Cops are looking for at least two other members of the cruel crew, Kelly said.

Their leader was identified by sources as 23-year-old Ildefonso (Cheto) Mendez. They're charged with unlawful imprisonment, abduction, assault, robbery, menacing and sodomy - all as hate crimes.

The suspects, including one who was taken out of the 41st Precinct stationhouse on a stretcher and transported to a hospital because of a seizure, were waiting to be arraigned last night.

They were still passing blame to one another last night, said a law enforcement source.

"Nobody wants to take responsibility for the plunger," the source said. "One guy is lying through his teeth."

"This was not part of an initiation," Kelly said. "This was a reaction to the fact that they had engaged in homosexual activity."

The arrests came just days after two young men were busted for attacking a gay man in the bathroom of the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the gay rights movement.

And with gay-bashing on the uptick - 44 attacks as of Monday compared with 41 at the same time last year - city leaders reacted with outrage.

"These attacks are appalling and are even more despicable because the victims were clearly targeted in acts of hate simply because they are gay," City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said.

"Bronxites will not tolerate any form of bigotry in our borough," Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. said.

The torture took place in an abandoned Morris Heights building across the street from a public school. Area residents called it the Goonie House. Gang members threw parties and had sex there. As many as a dozen pit bulls guarded the place.

"They'd have meets there every Friday," said a 33-year-old woman too terrified to reveal her name. "They're running crazy from there - hurting people, taking stuff. Latin Kings don't let gay people in their nation."

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Crime blotter has a regular: Yankees caps

'It's a shame ... It makes us Yankees fans look like criminals'

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Yankees caps seem to turn up on suspects and in police sketches more often than those from other teams.

By Manny Fernandez

updated 9/16/2010 3:45:59 AM ET
Two men and a woman broke into a locker at a Manhattan gym in February and stole credit cards, the first in a series of similar thefts.

Three months later, in May, a young man tried to rob a Chase bank in the Bronx armed with only a note, which he slipped to a teller. She read it and stepped away, and he fled empty-handed. Weeks later, in June, a gunman robbed a Family Dollar store in Queens.

Gym-locker heists, bank robberies, daylight holdups — these New York City crimes have only one thing in common, and it is not the culprits.

A curious phenomenon has emerged at the intersection of fashion, sports and crime: dozens of men and women who have robbed, beaten, stabbed and shot at their fellow New Yorkers have done so while wearing Yankees caps or clothing.

One of the three suspects in the gym break-ins wore a blue Yankees cap. A security camera photographed the man who tried to rob the Bronx bank, and though his face was largely obscured, his Yankees hat was clearly visible. The Queens robbery suspect was last seen with a Yankees cap on his head.

Gangsta rap link?
In some ways, it is not surprising that Yankees attire is worn by both those who abide by the law and those who break it. The Yankees are one of the most famous franchises in sports, and their merchandise is widely available and hugely popular.

But Yankees caps and clothing have dominated the crime blotter for so long, in so many parts of the city and in so many types of offenses, that it defies an easy explanation. Criminologists, sports marketing analysts, consumer psychologists and Yankees fans have developed their own theories, with some attributing the trend to the popularity of the caps among gangsta rappers and others wondering whether criminals are identifying with the team’s aura of money, power and success.

Since 2000, more than 100 people who have been suspects or persons of interest in connection with serious crimes in New York City wore Yankees apparel at the time of the crimes or at the time of their arrest or arraignment. The tally is based on a review of New York Police Department news releases, surveillance video and images of robberies and other crimes, as well as police sketches and newspaper articles that described suspects’ clothing. No other sports team comes close.

The Mets, forever in the shadow of their Bronx rivals, are perhaps grateful to be losing this one: only about a dozen people in the same review were found to be wearing Mets gear.

“It’s a shame,” said Chuck Frantz, 57, the president of the 430-member Lehigh Valley Yankee Fan Club in Pennsylvania. “It makes us Yankees fans look like criminals, because of a few unfortunate people who probably don’t know the first thing about the Yankees.”

The Yankees organization declined to comment for this article.

Antisocial behavior has no dress code; people wear what they please when they please, whether they are going to see a movie or going to rob a bank. And in New York City, that often means Yankees attire, regardless of the hour or the season.

In April 2008, on the day after the Boston Red Sox defeated the Yankees in the Bronx, a man in a Yankees cap robbed a bank about a mile from Yankee Stadium. The woman who robbed a Manhattan bank on July 7 was diplomatic in her clothing choices: she wore an orange Mets cap and a gray Yankees T-shirt.

Three gunmen burst into an apartment in Washington Heights on July 23, bound the hands and feet of the tenants and left with cash. A surveillance video released by the police and broadcast on television showed one of the suspects in a Yankees cap — one of the most iconic brands in sports represented, however briefly, by someone accused of helping tie up a 9-year-old girl.

In 2007, after activists protested the sale of Yankees caps that bore the colors and symbols associated with three gangs, Major League Baseball’s official cap manufacturer pulled the headwear, and the Yankees said in a statement that they were unaware of the caps’ symbolism.

Yankees caps have even played a central role in a few crimes. One day in 2003, a fight over a missing Yankees cap broke out between two brothers in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. One brother, an ex-convict, ended up stabbing and killing the other.

One criminologist said the trend might be a result of what could be called the Jay-Z effect.

The rapper Jay-Z has worn a Yankees cap for years — on his album covers and in his videos — and has helped turn the cap into a ubiquitous fashion accessory for urban youths (“I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can,” he boasts in one song).

'Street rep'
Criminals might be wearing Yankees merchandise not because they are fans of the team, but because they are fans of the cocked-hat look popularized by Jay-Z and other rappers, said the criminologist, Frankie Y. Bailey, an associate professor at the University at Albany, who is writing a book about the role of clothing and style in criminal cases.

“He wears it and makes it look cool,” Ms. Bailey said of Jay-Z and the cap. “It’s almost like the Yankees have acquired a kind of street rep, a coolness.”

It is but one of several theories. Sports marketing analysts say it is a matter of numbers: the Yankees sell more merchandise than any other baseball team. As of August, they hold a 25.13 percent market share of nationwide sales of merchandise licensed by Major League Baseball, with the Red Sox second at 7.96 percent and the Mets seventh at 5.32 percent, according to SportsOneSource, a firm that tracks the sporting goods industry.

For criminals outside New York, the team’s caps and clothing are nearly as popular.

The man who robbed a Chase branch in a Chicago suburb in May wore a Yankees cap. In July, a young man in a Yankees cap assaulted an 81-year-old woman in her home, about 2,800 miles from Yankee Stadium, in Seattle.

“Why people pick the Yankees over the Mariners, I don’t know,” said Detective Mark Jamieson, a Seattle police spokesman. “It just happened to be an article of clothing he was wearing on that particular day.”

And Yankees caps hold a distinguished place in the annals of crime: the man who robbed more banks than anyone else in American history wore one. Edwin Chambers Dodson, known as the Yankee Bandit because he wore a Yankees cap and sunglasses during most of his holdups, robbed 72 banks in Southern California in the early 1980s and the late 1990s.

Mr. Dodson, who died in 2003, was a fan of the team. “We did everything we could to get this guy,” said William J. Rehder, 69, a retired special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was the longtime coordinator of bank robbery investigations in the Los Angeles area.

Mr. Rehder not only named the Yankee Bandit, but helped put him behind bars twice. “I couldn’t figure out why he was so lucky,” he said. “I didn’t attribute anything to the cap, but I’m sure he did.”

Mr. Rehder, now a security consultant in Los Angeles, is a Dodgers fan. Nevertheless, he keeps an old, worn Yankees cap on a shelf in his office at home. Mr. Rehder never wears it. It belonged to the Yankee Bandit.

This story, " Crime Blotter Has a Regular: Yankees Caps," originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39206923/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/?GT1=43001
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Hundreds Hurt in 11-Hour California Prison Riot

By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: August 9, 2009


LOS ANGELES — Rioting inmates smashed and burned a large California prison on Saturday night and Sunday morning, injuring 250 prisoners and hospitalizing 55.

The 11-hour riot, at the Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men in Chino, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, broke down along racial lines, with black prison gangs fighting Latino gangs in hand-to-hand combat, the authorities said.

No prison employees were injured, no deaths were reported, and no inmates escaped, state officials said. But 10 of the 33 prisons in the state system were put on lockdown to prevent unrest from spreading. Those 10 were in the southern part of the state.

Damage to the 1,300-inmate medium-security prison was “significant and extensive,” said a spokesman, Lt. Mark Hargrove. One housing unit was virtually destroyed by fire, Lieutenant Hargrove said. The other housing areas were so badly damaged that they were uninhabitable, he said, so some inmates were being temporarily housed in tents while others were sent to alternate prisons.

With more than 150,000 inmates, the California prison system is one of the most crowded in the nation, with many of its facilities holding more than double the number of inmates they were designed for. A federal three-judge panel ruled last week that crowding and poor health care caused one avoidable inmate death each week and that the system was “impossible to manage.”

Lieutenant Hargrove said prisoners had smashed windows, torn down gates and used whatever they could to battle one another in the riot.

“Inmates broke out glass and used shards as knives,” he said. “They used pieces of metal, wood, whatever they could break off the walls, pipes.”

The Chino prison is trying to put into effect a 2005 Supreme Court decision that prohibits automatic and systematic racial segregation of prison inmates after more than three decades of racial separation in the corrections system.

Lieutenant Hargrove said that inmates could now opt out of segregation and that a growing number of black, Latino and white prisoners shared cells, increasing racial tensions in the prison.

“All races had injuries,” Lieutenant Hargrove said of the weekend riot. “But there are a greater number of injuries among Hispanic and black inmates. And we did have another incident that occurred in May, a riot between blacks and Hispanics, and this may be associated with that incident.”

Prison officials said they were still questioning inmates to understand what set off the uprising. They said no demands or complaints had been directed at the guards.

Inmates in one of seven 200-man housing units began brawling around 8:20 p.m. Saturday, officials said. Overwhelmed guards set off an alarm and retreated as unrest spread.

Thirty minutes later, a crisis response team of about 80 guards arrived, but the chaos inside prevented them from entering. Guards watched as prisoners constructed barricades of broken bunk beds, desks and other furniture and clashed in the prison yards and on rooftops.

As inmates tired on Sunday and fighting died down, guards re-entered the prison and reasserted control, officials said, staving off sporadic attacks from prisoners throwing scrap metal and glass.

Lieutenant Hargrove said that the entire prison was being treated as a crime scene and that new charges would probably be filed against prisoners who participated in the violence, which was mainly between inmates.

In its order last week, the court directed the state to come up with a plan to reduce its prison population by 40,000 inmates within two years. Attorney General Jerry Brown, a possible candidate for governor next year, said he would probably appeal the ruling.

Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, said the riot illustrated the many problems plaguing the state prison system, including growing cost overruns and pending cuts.

“There are proposals to eliminate all programs including reducing visiting days for inmates participating in programs,” Mr. Krisberg said. “But if you isolate these men from their families and cut down even the most basic educational and counseling programs, you’re going to create more idleness, and this is what happens.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 10, 2009, on page A9 of the New York edition.
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/us/10prison.html?hp
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