WASHINGTON — The White House got another reminder this weekend of the impact the violence in the drug-cartel dominated border towns of Mexico has on the U.S.

CNN reports that a drive by shooting in the border town of Ciudad Juarez on Saturday resulted in the deaths of three people connected to the U.S. Consulate.

The network reported that one victim was an American employee at the consulate and that another victim was the husband of that employee. The third person was the husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate.

“The President is deeply saddened and outraged by the news of the brutal murders of three people associated with the United States Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez,” National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement Sunday.

To read more click here.

U.S. Atty.  Ronald Machen

WASHINGTON – The District’s U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen has a potentially big  headache on his hands.

The Washington Post reports that Machen’s office “has found more than 100 cases since the mid-1970s that need to be reviewed because of potentially falsified and inaccurate tests by FBI analysts.”

That information, the paper reports, was included in a report filed Friday in D.C. Superior Court, the city’s criminal court.  An internal review of the wrongful imprisonment of Donald E. Gates, who was exonerated in December because of new DNA evidence. He had serving 28 years for the 1981 rape and slaying of a Georgetown University student that he never committed.

The initital review of 20 cases found that only Gates’ case was impacted by the misinformation. But Justice came up with 100 more cases, the paper reported.

Of those 100, the paper reported that the U.S. Attorney’s Office conducted a preliminary review of 78 and found no misconduct. The paper reported that no findings have been presented for the other 22 cases thus far.

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WASHINGTON – Mir Aimal Kasi had earned a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and Brad Garrett, a mild-mannered but dogged FBI agent out of Washington, wanted him badly. Kasi, a Pakistani, had stood outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 1993 and methodically opened fire, shooting into car windows, killing two CIA employees and wounding three others.

Like most fugitives on the list, Kasi was no easy find. Garrett and others spent four-and-a-half years continent-hopping, tracking endless leads before finding him in a seedy hotel in Pakistan at 4 a.m. Kasi was about to head off to prayer. He was brought back to the U.S., where he was eventually executed by lethal injection by the state of Virginia.

James Earl Ray/fbi photo

“It’s probably every agent’s dream to capture a top 10 most wanted fugitive,” Garrett, who retired from the FBI in 2006, told AOL News. “It wasn’t my driving force, of course, but the idea of being able to arrest a top 10 fugitive is really something. If you’re on the top 10 list, you must be a really bad person, a big deal.”

On March 14, the bigger-than-life list, which has included some of the most notorious criminals of our time, from assassin James Earl Ray to serial killer Ted Bundy to terrorist Osama bin Laden, turns 60.

The list has become part of Americana. First seen in post offices and banks, now the Ten Most Wanted photos are more likely to show up on TV shows, billboards and the Internet through Web sites and trendy social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

“We recognize the unique ability of the media to cast a wider net within communities here and abroad,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said in a statement marking the 60th anniversary. “The FBI can send agents to visit a thousand homes to find a witness, but the media can visit a million homes in an instant.”

Authorities say the list came about after a reporter for the International News in 1949 told the FBI he was interested in writing a story about the “toughest guys” the FBI was after. The FBI provided the names and descriptions of 10 fugitives — four escaped prisoners, three con men, two murder suspects and a bank robber — and the reporter wrote a story that captured national attention and triggered hundreds of tips.

The FBI figured it was on to something. On March 14, 1950, Director J. Edgar Hoover launched the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives program. The first fugitive was Thomas J. Holden, a bank robber who murdered his wife and her two brothers. A little over a year later, he was spotted in Beaverton, Ore., by someone who recognized his photo in the newspaper.

The first fugitive listed by the FBI was killer and bank robber Thomas J. Holden in 1950. He was caught a year later.

Holden was one of 494 fugitives who have made the list in the past six decades. Of those, the FBI says, 463 have been captured or located, and 152 of those were “the direct result of citizen cooperation.” More specifically, two fugitives were captured as a result of the Internet, 27 from television broadcasts, two from radio coverage, three from newspapers, three from magazines and 49 from FBI posters.

Cases that involved tips from a top 10 poster included fugitive Joseph Martin Luther Gardner, a Navy man who was wanted in the 1992 gang rape and murder of a 25-year-old woman in South Carolina. Authorities caught the other suspects, but not Gardner — at least not for a while.

Mir Aimal Kansi/fbi photo

Jeffrey L. Covington, an FBI agent from Philadelphia who retired in 2007 and worked on the Gardner case, recalled that a woman had gone into a convenience store in 1994 in Philadelphia. Later, she returned home to New York and was in a post office when she saw an FBI wanted poster of Gardner.

“She said, ‘Oh my God, that’s the guy in the store,’” Covington recalled. She called authorities, and Covington said he and members of the Philadelphia Fugitive Task Force moved in and made the arrest.

“He was absolutely startled,” Covington said of Gardner. “And then he lied about his name. The usual stuff.”

Over the years, as times changed, so did the composition of the list. At first in the 1950s it consisted of bank robbers, murderers and car thieves. In the 1960s, some fugitives included kidnappers and militants who had destroyed government property. By the 1970s, there were organized crime and terrorist figures and radicals like H. Rap Brown and Angela Davis. And in by the 1990s, sexual predators, drug traffickers and gang members had joined the list.

For the most part, the list has been dominated by males. Only eight fugitives have been woman, with ’60s militant Davis among them.

A lot of thought goes into who makes the list, and who doesn’t, according to Rex Tomb, who headed the FBI’s chief fugitive publicity unit in Washington and helped decide who made the list. He retired in 2006.

“Many times a particularly aggressive agent would want us to put their fugitive on the list,” Tomb told AOL News. “In looking at the submission, however, we realized that the case, though very serious, might be either too complicated or uninteresting to potential readers or viewers. Photographs might also be of such quality that we knew the public would be unable to notice key, distinguishing physical traits. The top 10 list is media driven. If certain elements are not present, reporters won’t use it. We had to learn which cases would fly and which wouldn’t.

“There are only 10 slots on the list,” he said. ” If the media won’t cover it, the list is of no help. If it can’t help a case, why put it on the list?”

On nine occasions, the top 10 list has actually had 11 or more fugitives.

“This has occurred when there was not a vacancy on the list and the FBI determined that there was an overriding need that an individual be added to the list,” said FBI spokeswoman Debbie Weierman.

She said some of the 11th fugitives have included Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was implicated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray. Ray was one of six people who twice appeared on the list: once when he shot King in 1968 and again in 1977 when he escaped from prison.

Fugitive Donald Eugene Webb holds the record for the longest time on the list — 25 years, 10 months and 27 days — for the murder of Police Chief Gregory Adams in Saxonburg, Pa., in 1980. In 2007, without any real explanation, he was removed from the list even though he remained at large. The FBI now says he no longer fits the criteria, but he remains a fugitive.

Whitey Bulger

The shortest time on the list — two hours — was claimed by bank robber Billie Austin Bryant, who had killed two FBI agents in the late 1960s in Washington. The oldest person to be placed on the list — and who still remains on it — is Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger. He was 69 in August 1999 when he was put on the list.

Today he is 80.

Alive and well? Who knows.

H. Rap Brown

WASHINGTON — A fire in a trash compactor in the parking garage at FBI headquarters on Saturday around 12:15 p.m. was quickly extinguished, the Associated Press reported.

D.C. fire department spokesman Pete Piringer told the AP that the fire was not suspicious.

The headquarters is located at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, several blocks from the Capitol.

OTHER WEEKEND STORIES OF INTEREST

• Prosecutors Need More Time to Review Flawed FBI Lab Work
  

WASHINGTON – Fraudulent crime on the Internet doubled in dollar value in 2009 compared to the year before, according to a report by the Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center.

The report released Friday by the FBI showed that the total loss resulting from online fraud amounted to $559.7 million last year compared to $265 million in 2008.

The report said the number one fraud involved advance fee schemes using the FBI’s name. That accounted for 16.6 percent of the scams. The second most reported offense involved non-delivery or merchandise or failing to make a payment.

“Law enforcement relies on the corporate sector and citizens to report when they encounter on-line suspicious activity so these schemes can be investigated and criminals can be arrested,” Peter Trahon, section chief of the FBI’s Cyber Division said in a statement. “Computer users are encouraged to have up-to-date security protection on their devices and evaluate e-mail solicitations they receive with a healthy skepticism—if something seems too good to be true, it likely is.”

Donald Brackman, director of the White Collar Crime Center  said criminals are “developing increasingly sophisticated means of defrauding unsuspecting consumers. Internet crime is evolving in ways we couldn’t have imagined just five years ago.”

To Read the full report click here.

Atty. Gen. Holder/doj photo

WASHINGTON — Attorney Gen. Eric Holder Jr. is finding out just how fun it can be to head the Justice Department when some politicians want your head.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Holder failed to notify the Senate last year during the conformation hearings that “he had signed several briefs urging courts to reject President George W. Bush’s claim that he had the power to imprison an American citizen as an “enemy combatant,” the Justice Department acknowledged Thursday.”

The Times reported that Republicans are likely to attack Holder over failing to turn over the documents as he was required to do.

“The briefs should have been disclosed as part of the confirmation process,” said Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, according to the Times. “In preparing thousands of pages for submission, it was unfortunately and inadvertently missed. In any event, the attorney general has publicly discussed his positions on detention policy on many occasions, including at his confirmation hearing.”

Meanwhile, on Friday the news website Main Justice that Holder turned over to the Senate half a dozen Supreme Court briefs he failed to disclose.

“We regret the omission,” Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich said in a letter accompanying the list of amicus briefs not included in Holder’s Senate questionnaire, as required, according to Main Justice.

Read NY Times Story

Read Main Justice Story

Brian Lamkin/fbi photo

WASHINGTON — Brian D. Lamkin, assistant director of the FBI Training Division in Quantico, has been named special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta office.

Lamkin entered the FBI in February 1987 and was first assigned to the Norfolk Division. Three years later, he headed south to the Dallas Division, where he worked on the Dallas Bank Fraud Task Force, which addressed the largest savings and loan failure crisis in U.S. history, according to the FBI.

In May 1997, he was promoted to supervisory special agent in the Financial Institution Fraud Unit at FBI Headquarters.

Two years later, he went to Baltimore to serve as the coordinator for the White Collar Crime Program and supervised the White Collar Crime Squad in the Maryland Metropolitan Office in Calverton.

In September 2002, he became assistant special agent in charge of the Louisville Division and the following year he was appointed to the ranks of the FBI’s Senior Executive Service as the chief of the Financial Crimes Section in the Criminal Investigative Division at FBI Headquarters, the FBI said.

In August 2005, he became special agent in charge of the Columbia, S.C. division. Two years, later,  he was named assistant director of the FBI’s Training Division in Quantico.

WASHINGTON — Mir Aimal Kasi had earned a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and Brad Garrett, a mild-mannered but dogged FBI agent out of Washington, wanted him badly. Kasi, a Pakistani, had stood outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 1993 and methodically opened fire, shooting into car windows, killing two CIA employees and wounding three others.

Like most fugitives on the list, Kasi was no easy find. Garrett and others spent 4½ years continent-hopping, tracking endless leads before finding him in a seedy hotel in Pakistan at 4 a.m. Kasi was about to head off to prayer. He was brought back to the U.S., where he was eventually executed by lethal injection by the state of Virginia.

“It’s probably every agent’s dream to capture a top 10 most wanted fugitive,” Garrett, who retired from the FBI in 2006, told AOL News. “It wasn’t my driving force, of course, but the idea of being able to arrest a top 10 fugitive is really something. If you’re on the top 10 list, you must be a really bad person, a big deal.”

On March 14, the bigger-than-life list, which has included some of the most notorious criminals of our time, from assassin James Earl Ray to serial killer Ted Bundy to terrorist Osama bin Laden, turns 60.

To read more click here.

Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick

WASHINGTON –  In the Motor City, Spring is near and scandal is in the air.

U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, 64, the  mother of ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, has been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury, the Detroit Free Press reported. She said Thursday that she is not the target of the probe.

What is known is that her son, who pleaded guilty to perjury in a text message scandal, and was forced from office, is under FBI investigation.

The Free Press recently reported that a contractor who pleaded guilty to corruption charges has told the feds that he gave the mayor bribe money in 2002.

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