The DEA continues to bump up against some reluctant partners in South America. In this instance, Bolivia isn’t budging.

President Morales

Judge Vernon Claville joins the corrupt-official-heading-off-to-jail club down in Louisiana. On Thursday,  former Caddo District Judge Michael Walker got a 10-year sentence. Both were convicted in a probe dubbed Broken Gavel.ST

ERN DISA

By Icess Fernandez
Shreveport Times
SHREVEPORT, La — Vernon Claville, a former juvenile court judge convicted of accepting cash payments for reducing bonds and lifting holds, was sentenced to five years in jail and ordered to pay $165,000 in fines.
The sentencing came this morning after a federal court judge threw out the guidelines and took Claville’s “history and character into consideration”.
U.S. Judge S. Maurice Hicks said the guidelines typically used by judges to render sentencing did not take into account this type of situation. As a result, he used his judgement to rule on Claville’s punishment.
“The seriousness of the offenses are not adequately addressed in the guidelines,” he said.
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photo/roger penske

Helio Castroneves knows what it’s like to be a champ and be beloved. Unfortunately, today he’s not feeling the love– at least not from the IRS.

By Curt Cavin
Indianapolis Star
Two-time Indianapolis 500 champion Helio Castroneves is expected to appear in federal court today after he was indicted on multiple counts of tax evasion Thursday in Miami.
Castroneves, a 33-year-old Brazilian who owns a home in South Florida, is charged with failing to report $5.5 million in income to the Internal Revenue Service from 1999 to 2002. Also named in the indictment were his sister Kati, who serves as his manager, and attorney Alan R. Miller.
Castroneves won the 500 in 2001 and ’02. He became a national celebrity last year when he won television’s “Dancing With the Stars” competition.
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BY Maggie O’Brien
Omaha World-Herald Staff Writer

OMAHA, Neb - Not many people know what part-time Von Maur employee Julie Fidler did to help authorities in the hours after a 19-year-old gunman walked into the Omaha store last December and killed eight people, then himself.
Julie Fidler, 52, who lives in Bellevue, would prefer to remain anonymous. But later this month, the boss from her other job – the full-time one – is giving her an award that won’t be easy to hide. That boss: FBI Director Robert S. Mueller.
Fidler, a full-time office manager for the FBI in Omaha, still works part-time on the store’s third floor – where most of the shootings occurred. She has worked at the FBI for 34 years, Von Maur for at least five.
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Jack Abramoff, a toxic Washington lobbyist who went off to prison, continues to amuse and mystify this city. Some groups are trying to dig a little deeper to untangle his web in the nation’s capital.

The Associated Press
WASHINGTON – A federal judge has rejected the Bush administration’s attempt to shield records that may shed light on the White House visits of now imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
In several orders this week, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth sided with watchdog groups Judicial Watch and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which are suing the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security for access to the logs.
The administration in 2006 agreed to produce all responsive records about the visits “without redactions or claims of exemption.” But it soon argued that the contents of certain “Sensitive Security Records,” which are created in the course of conducting more extensive background checks on particular White House visitors, cannot be publicly revealed even though they could show some of Abramoff’s visits.
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There was a time when Colombian drug dealers would never have been extradited to the U.S. Times have changed.

By Paul Egan
The Detroit News
DETROIT – Two alleged Colombian drug traffickers have been extradited to Detroit to face charges handed down by a federal grand jury, acting U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg announced Thursday.
Carlos Salguero-Bermudez and Ricardo Torres-Noack, both Colombian citizens, arrived in Detroit on Thursday to face charges they conspired to smuggle tons of ephedrine into the U.S. to manufacture methamphetamine in Michigan, Berg said in a news release. They also face drug possession and manufacturing and money laundering charges.
A federal grand jury in Detroit indicted the Colombians June 27 and the indictment was unsealed Thursday.
The two men were arrested by the Colombian National Police in Bogota, Colombia, in August and were held there pending the outcome of extradition requests made by the U.S. government in September, Berg said.
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FBI agents digging for dead mobsters came up empty handed on Thursday, but continued looking Friday. Will it end up being a wild goose chase?

By ROBERT E. KESSLER
Newsday
EAST FARMINGDALE, N.Y. – FBI agents spent their first full day digging yesterday at an East Farmingdale site that, according to sources, is described by an informant as an organized crime burial ground since at least 1994.
But the agents did not find any traces of the three bodies – one of whom could be Colombo family underboss William Cutolo – that were supposedly buried at the site, the sources said.
The agents suspended their work in the early evening at an industrial and commercial complex radiating out from Baiting Place Road and Del Drive, but plan to continue excavating today, said FBI spokesman James Margolin.
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The stories this week continue to trickle in about the injustice at Justice when it came to the firings of some U.S. Attorneys. In Missouri, blood flowed in the case of U.S. Attorney Todd P. Graves who was axed in 2006.

Ex-U.S. Atty Todd Graves/doj photo

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
In Missouri, evidently, Republican politics are exceptionally bloody, with clans fighting like rival mobs whose carnage spreads to other locales and sweeps in innocent civilians.
This is what former U.S. attorney Todd P. Graves discovered when he was ousted in January 2006 by the Justice Department. He got his first inkling of trouble in 2004 not from the department, but from an aide to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), whose office was then embroiled in a bitter dispute with Graves’s brother, a U.S. congressman.
In a telephone call, the aide angrily warned Graves that if he did not intervene on Bond’s behalf — against his brother’s chief of staff — the senator “could no longer protect [his] job.” Graves refused, and a little over a year later, he was bounced from his Kansas City office after Bond’s staff made repeated complaints to the White House counsel’s office.
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