Sheriff Joe Arpaio

If controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona gets his way, unmanned drones will be patrolling Maricopa County in search of drug dealers and other scofflaws, News 92 FM reports.

Arpaio, who is a lightening rod on immigration issues, said the idea is to help Border Patrol locate undocumented immigrants and drug dealers.

“We have danger out there. We have dope peddlers shooting each other and I have my deputies to worry about,” he told News 92.

The ACLU expressed concerns, saying drones are an invasion of privacy because they put “everyone else who happens to be nearby underneath the drone as it travels to the target area.”

Steve Neavling

One of the top drug dealers on the illicit website Silk Road became an informant after he was busted selling drugs, The Smoking Gun reports.

Steven Sadler, known as “Nod” on Silk Road, sold high-quality heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, feds say.

TSG reported that he was busted July 31 and “began cooperating, working for the government for the past two months.”

Prosecutors didn’t seek detention for Sadler after he was arrested.

The site’s alleged mastermind, Ross Ulbricht, has been charged.

image from istockphoto.com

The head of the ATF’s St, Paul Field Division acknowledged mistakes were made during a botched undercover sting operation of gun and drug dealers at a store in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

The Journal Sentinel recently exposed serious problems during a 10-month ATF sting. Among them: the theft of nearly $40,000 in merchandise; an agent’s machine gun was stolen; wrong suspects were charged; and sensitive information about undercover help was lost.

Scott Sweetow, special agent in charge of the ATF’s St. Paul Field Division, which oversees the Milwaukee office, said some mistakes were made but he also defended the sting.

“Absolutely there were some administrative mistakes made, some procedural mistakes made, and we are very aggressively looking at all of those issues from top to bottom,” Sweetow said, noting that more than 30 people have been arrested as a result of the sting.

Mexican drug dealers are getting pretty darn imaginative when it comes to using tunnels at the border.

ABC News reports that authorities found smugglers had dug more than a dozen tunnels at the border in Nogales, Az, that opened up right under a parking lot with meters.

ABC reported that the smugglers cut neat rectangles out of the pavement under parking spots.

People on the U.S. side then parked cars with false bottoms in the spots and fed the meters. Then someone would come under the car and load it with drugs.

After that, someone would put the concret blocks back in place, using jacks, ABC reported. Then someone would drive off with the car.

ABC reported that U.S. Border Patrol agents found 16 tunnels leading to the 18 metered parking spaces on International Street in Nogales.

“It’s unbelievable,” Nogales mayor Arturo Garino told Tucson, Arizona ABC affiliate KGUN. “Those are the strides these people take to get the drugs across the border.”

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
Undercover ATF agents learned how easy it is to get someone to rob a drug dealer during a sting they pulled off in Phoenix.

The Arizona Republic reports that agents were able to get complete strangers to agree to help rob dope dealers. In the end, agents arrested 70 people.

“This proved what we know to be true,” said Dennis Burke, the new U.S. attorney in the District of Arizona  said, according to the Arizona Republic. “When drugs and distribution of drugs are in our neighborhoods, violent armed criminals follow behind them.”

To read more on this click here.

U.S. federal agents are recruiting Mexican drug traffickers as informants. That may be a nice break through in the battle against the violent activity, but it’s causing friction with local law enforcement, which is often left in the dark. That’s the situation with Jose Daniel Gonzalez, a drug trafficker who was living in El Paso.

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
EL PASO, Tex. — José Daniel González was living the sweet life in America. He bought the $365,000 two-story Mediterranean with the tile roof and swimming pool. He started a trucking company, was raising a family. But on a Friday night in May, he was executed in his front yard — eight shots, tight pattern, close range.

According to police detectives, González knew the man who ordered his killing. He also knew the man who stood on his lawn and watched him die. These things are often personal, especially among high-level drug traffickers.

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By Suzanne Smalley
NEWSWEEK
The image of a drug dealer driving a Mercedes is a Hollywood favorite, so maybe it’s not surprising that the African-American preacher, speaking on a panel about how to shut down urban drug markets, went for the cliché. It’s hard to get the dealers off the corners and into straight jobs, said the preacher, since selling drugs pays so well. A voice piped up. “This is not true,” said David Kennedy. “They’re scraping by, living at home.” Kennedy offered advice: when confronting dealers who say they’re getting rich, tell them, “I’m calling bulls—.”
Kennedy is a rail-thin white man with weary eyes, a goatee and hair down his back; he resembles country singer Willie Nelson. He has never been a cop, and, as one friend says, he “looks more like a biker than a professor.” He has no Ph.D. or masters in criminology; he studied philosophy as a Swarthmore undergrad. But in the hotel ballroom packed with police and U.S. Justice Department officials, everyone was listening-because Kennedy is the only person who has ever come up with a consistently viable (and cost-effective) strategy for helping the inner city with its chronic blight and shame, the dope dealer on the corner.
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