Posts Tagged ‘Crime’
Wednesday, November 11th, 2015
106 bikers involved in the Waco biker shootout have been indicted. (A complete list of those indicted can be found here.)
However, as far as I can tell, the indictment is only for engaging in an “organized criminal conspiracy.” No one has yet been charged with murder.
More indictments may be due the next time a grand jury meets, which will be later this month. Hopefully standard information (like ballistics reports) the Waco police have thus far withheld will finally be released.
Tags:Bandidos Motorcycle Gang, Cossacks Motorcycle Gang, Crime, Texas, Waco
Posted in Crime, Texas | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 11th, 2015
Looks like it’s going to be all crime blotter news today.
First up: Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow’s racketeering trial started November 9.
Chow, 56, is charged with running the Ghee Tung Kong, a Chinese American community organization he has led since 2006, as a racketeering enterprise that trafficked in guns, drugs and stolen goods. He is also charged with arranging the murder of the organization’s previous leader, Allen Leung, and with conspiring to seek the murder of an alleged gang rival, Jim Tat Kong, who was shot to death in Mendocino County in October 2013. He has been held without bail since his arrest in March 2014.
First Democratic State Senator Leland Yee was supposed to be the big fish, but then he plead guilty to one piddling count of racketeering. That leaves Chow as the big fish, especially since so many lesser defendants have plead guilty to lesser charges.
The biggest charge against him is, of course, murder, but the evidence presented thus far on that is hardly conclusive.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Tags:California, Crime, Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, November 6th, 2015
Another Friday, another LinkSwarm:
What’s Obama’s strategy in Iraq and Syria? He doesn’t have one. “Without a clear overarching strategy to resolve the conflict.” Say what you want about Bush, he wanted to win in Iraq. Obama wants to do just enough to not get blamed for losing.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is not wild about George Soros encouraging waves of Islamic refugees in Europe.
Speaking of Islamic refugees, shotguns (which don’t need a permit) are selling like hotcakes in Austria. Whatever could be the reason?
“The Democratic party is mainly a coalition of interest groups, and the current model of Democratic politics — poor and largely non-white people providing the muscle and rich white liberals calling the shots — is unsustainable…Democrats gleefully predict that demographic changes are going to give their party a permanent majority. The unspoken corollary to that is that white liberals think they’re going to remain in charge of it.”
Forget all those Republican obituaries: Democrats are the ones being booted out of office.
Victories in Houston and Kentucky were stinging rebukes to cultural war overreach by the left.
Ted Cruz, Jedi Debater.
Jeb Bush needs an intervention.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General, facing criminal indictment and calls to resign on all sides, instead send out porny emails.
Announce that you’re abandoning your Vegan diet because it was making you sick? That’s a death threat.
Owner of bankrupt Atlantic City casino threatens to house thousands of Syrain refugees there.
Denmark to Bernie Sanders: Stop calling us socialists, you pinko!
Free market economics: It even makes formerly socialist food banks run better!
Students entering Yale are evidently ignorant as fark all. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Dashcam video proves black Texas professor lied about being racially profiled. Hat Tip: Instapundit.)
Matt McCall takes another run at Rep. Lamar Smith.
I’ll take Least Surprising Sports Headlines for $400, Alex: “Former Raiders first-round pick convicted on three counts of murder.”
Tags:2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Atlantic City, Austria, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Europe, gambling, George Soros, Guns, Houston, Hungary, Iraq, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jeb Bush, Jihad, Kentucky, Lamar Smith, LinkSwarm, Matt McCall, New Jersey, Oakland Raiders, Pennsylvania, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Syria, Ted Cruz, Texas, Welfare State
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | No Comments »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2015
“Health investigators with the state of Texas went into Planned Parenthood’s clinic in San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas Thursday morning, but declined to say why.”
Snip.
“Earlier this week, the [Texas Health and Human Services Commission] alleged that Planned Parenthood “committed and condoned numerous acts of misconduct captured on video that reveal repeated program violations and breach the minimum standards of care required of a Medicaid enrollee.”
I’m sure Planned Parenthood’s backers will soon tell us why abortion is such an important and fundamental right that the organization should be allowed to commit Medicaid fraud at will…
Tags:abortion, Crime, fraud, Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, Texas
Posted in Crime, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
Thursday, October 15th, 2015
“After spending more than a decade on death row, a 33-year-old man was put to death by lethal injection at a Huntsville, Texas, prison Wednesday evening for the 2001 murder of a Dallas police officer.
Licho Escamilla was pronounced dead at 6:31 p.m., 18 minutes after the injection was administered.”
A reminder to the Scumbag American community not to mess with Texas. Kill a cop in Illinois or Massachusetts, and you’ll get three hots and a cot for life. Do it in Texas, and we will kill you…
Tags:cop killer, Crime, death penalty, execution, Licho Escamilla, police, Texas
Posted in Crime, Texas | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 13th, 2015
I had previously reported on the coup of Sacramento’s Democratic Mayor Kevin Johnson in taking over the National Conference of Black Mayors (NCBM), though at the time the reasons behind it seemed murky.
But I missed this follow-up in Deadspin, because it’s pretty far from my regular reading list, plus the Gawker ickiness factor.
But there does seem to be enough smoke there to suggest some sort of fire:
Johnson is a youngish, attractive Democrat with a reputation as a national leader on education issues, a gift for making powerful friends, and a superficially impressive background—UC Berkeley, a long run as a top NBA star, a successful business career. He’s just the sort of politician a lot of people want to believe, and a lot of people have done so. His mayoralty will even soon be the subject of a laudatory entry in ESPN’s acclaimed 30 For 30 documentary series.
The scandals didn’t much matter in 2008, when he easily won election in the face of credible accusations that he’d molested teenage girls, defrauded the federal government of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and lorded over an empire of slum holdings. And they haven’t much mattered since, as he’s gone from success to success, his star rising ever higher in the Democratic Party firmament through most of his career.
As mayor, he’s incurred sexual harassment charges in the course of waging a bizarre war on an obscure non-profit organization; soaked taxpayers in his hometown for hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new arena for the Sacramento Kings; and used public employees to do his own private political work while attempting to hide the evidence by keeping email records off the books, Hillary Clinton-style.
Deadspin lays the cause of Johnson’s recent actions to his desire to profit from private charter schools.
Johnson’s latest scandal involves:
“He got a major national law firm to sue both the city of Sacramento and the Sacramento News & Review simply because the tiny weekly newspaper had filed a public-records request.”
He’s claiming attorney/client privilege for any records related to the NCBM.
He’s asserting that “40 people besides Johnson whom they claim are covered by attorney/client privilege, including 10 lawyers from the firm who worked for Johnson on NCBM-related matters,” also including “every member of his official mayoral staff—including communications director Ben Sosenko, chief of staff Daniel Conway, and advisors[sic] Patti Bisharat, Cassandra Jennings, Helen Hewitt, and Adrianne Hall.”
“Lots of folks who used Sacramento city government titles and worked out of City Hall while doing Johnson’s dirty work in the NCBM fiasco were in fact not employed by the city government. They were instead charter school advocates, funded by charter school ideologues, who kept their true allegiances and mission hidden.”
“Johnson has a history of not abiding by disclosure rules. In 2012, the California Fair Political Practices Commission (CFPPC), a panel charged with enforcing state financial disclosure laws, found that Johnson had failed to report at least 25 donations totaling $3.1 million made at his direction to his non-profits…To settle the case, Johnson agreed to pay a fine of $37,500, the largest penalty ever handed down to a public official in the state for non-disclosure violations.”
One need not embrace Deadspin’s, er, spin, which seems to be an attempt to keep money keep money going to failing unionized public schools (which I take to be their real reason in going after Johnson) to see many of Johnson’s actions as unethical and probably illegal.
All of this may go a long way to explain why ESPN has shelved an installment of their acclaimed 30 for 30 documentary series about Johnson.
Now, I happen to be a lot more pro-charter school than Deadspin evidently is. So if Kevin Johnson’s people want to contact me and explain his side of the story, I’d be happy to run a follow-up…
Tags:Adrianne Hall, Ben Sosenko, California, Cassandra Jennings, Crime, Daniel Conway, Democrats, Gawker, Helen Hewitt, Kevin Johnson, National Conference of Black Mayors, Patti Bisharat, Sacramento
Posted in Crime, Democrats, unions | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 7th, 2015
More than four months after nine people were killed in the biker shootout at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, the details of who did what to who and why remain as murky as ever.
Of 170 (per the Dallas Morning News, 177 from other news sources) bikers arrested, all are now out of jail and none have been charged with murder.
As far as I can tell, ballistics reports for the shooting have never been released, and a gag order on all attorneys involved in the case remains in place, and restaurant surveillance video of the shootout has never been released to the public.
Something isn’t adding up here.
We know that at least some of the bikers involved were hit by police bullets. In a piece by Nathaniel Penn in GQ, he suggests that the vast majority of deaths from the shootout came from law enforcement.
Now, the first two or three pops—me and half my crew being ex-military, we know what small-arms fire from pistols sounds like. We also know what squad automatic weapons [typically used by the military and law enforcement] sound like. After the third pop, it was nothing but squad automatic weapons.
Snip.
Not a single law-enforcement person lifted a finger to help any of the wounded. And they made it pretty clear that they were going to be violent if we tried to take our guys to the ambulance. Three men were bleeding out before our eyes. If those men were still alive 30, 40 minutes after being shot, they could have been saved. A prospect named Trainer from out of Tarrant County chapter was shot. They zip-tied him and laid him on the ground next to a Bandido they had handcuffed. I noticed him jerk a few times, laying there. We were sitting there, 30 feet from him, and weren’t able to help him. About two hours later, somebody walked over, looked at him, and covered him with a yellow sheet.
Nor has the post-shootout response of the local criminal justice system been a model of impartiality:
Justice of the peace Walter “Pete” Peterson’s across-the-board imposition of $1 million bonds—“to send a message,” he said—was almost certainly illegal. Waco P.D. officer Manuel Chavez later admitted in court that Peterson signed all 177 of the so-called cookie-cutter probable-cause affidavits in bulk, without specifying the evidence against each individual defendant. Peterson, it turns out, is a former state trooper with no legal training.
Nevertheless, the Waco 177 still have their work cut out for them. The judge in the case, Matt Johnson, is the former law partner of district attorney Abel Reyna. Incredibly, the foreman of the first grand jury to be convened, James Head, is a Waco P.D. detective. “He was chosen totally at random, like the law says,” Reyna insisted to local reporters. If this seems brazen, consider that the commission to appoint jurors was originally going to be led by Reyna’s own father. Reyna only backed down under pressure, acquiescing to the process that led to Head’s selection. Asked why he’d permit an active police officer to lead a grand jury investigating possible police misconduct, state district judge Ralph Strother said, “I just thought, ‘Well, he’s qualified. He knows the criminal-justice system.’”
One need not take every statement of motorcycle gang members facing possible capital murder charges at face value to believe that something went badly wrong with the police response in the Waco shootout…
(Hat tip: Reason.)
Tags:Bandidos Motorcycle Gang, Cossacks Motorcycle Gang, Crime, Nathaniel Penn, Texas, Twin Peaks, Waco
Posted in Crime, Texas | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 5th, 2015
This didn’t seem to get much national play, but the murderers of border patrol agent Brian Terry were convicted:
Two men were convicted of murder charges Thursday in the killing of a Border Patrol agent whose death brought to light the bungled federal gun-tracking operation known as Fast and Furious.
The jury found Jesus Leonel Sanchez-Meza, also known as Lionel Portillo-Meza, and Ivan Soto-Barraza, guilty of all counts. They face a sentence of life in prison.
The 2010 killing of agent Brian Terry exposed the Fast and Furious operation in which agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed criminals to buy guns with the intention of tracking the weapons. But the agency lost most of the guns, including two that were found at scene of Terry’s death.
It is my understanding that both Sanchez-Meza and Soto-Barraza are illegal aliens. It is also my understanding that no one in the BATF has been fired over Fast and Furious…
Tags:Border Controls, Brian Terry, Crime, Fast and Furious, Guns, Obama Scandals
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Guns | No Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2015
How about a short LinkSwarm to get the Friday LinkSwarm back on Friday?
Bernie Sanders roughly matches Hillary’s fundraising total. Man, she’s going to need to start raking in a lot more foreign bribes…
This just in: Jeb Bush’s poll numbers suck.
“So we know that 99% of the data has been adjusted, and we know that over 80% of the reported warming in the lower 48 States over the entire 20th Century was due to adjustments – the raw data simply do not show this warming.”
Mark Steyn offers another dispatch from post-Jewish Europe. Bonus: Facebook is going to “do more” to suppress anti-“refugee” posts.
Islamic State fighters start defecting because ISIS can’t make payroll. Time to consider marrying Len Trexler…
Obama Administration grants asylum to 1,519 foreigners with terrorist ties.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he’s no longer bound by Oslo Accords. Because why should you let a little piece of paper get in the way of the all-important task of exterminating the Jews?
Dear Brookings Institute scholars: Please note that you’re not allowed to have opinions different from those of Elizabeth Warren. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
The Oregon shooter was a mixed race skinhead who targeted Christians. By the time the media gets done, he’ll be an “angry white man.”
Five benefits from owning guns. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll on Instapundit.
Eight members of Iran’s women’s soccer team are actually men.
Tags:2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Bernie Sanders, Brookings Institute, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, Foreign Policy, Germany, Guns, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Illegal Aliens, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Israel, Jeb Bush, Jihad, Mahmoud Abbas, Media Watch, Military, Oslo Accords, Palestinians
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military | No Comments »
Thursday, October 1st, 2015
Ah, that October chill…is not evident yet here in Austin. It’s supposed to hit 94° today.
Time for another Texas vs. California roundup:
The joys of working in Los Angeles: a $30,000 tax bill on $500 worth of freelance income.
California nears passage of another trial lawyer full employment act.
Texas had five of the ten fastest growing metropolitan areas in 2014. Austin isn’t on this list, but Midland and San Angelo are numbers one and two. (San Jose, California’s lone entry, checks in at eight.)
72% of Californians polled thinks the state has a pension crisis. Too bad this thinking doesn’t seem to influence their voting patterns yet… (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
And yet a new bill would exempt some new hires from paying their fair share of pension costs. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
New pension accounting rules are about to show that a lot more California municipalities are insolvent.
“Instead of building freeways, expanding ports, restoring bridges and aqueducts, and constructing dams, desalination plants, and power stations, California’s taxpayers are pouring tens of billions each year into public sector pension funds.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Stockton’s bankruptcy didn’t solve it’s pension crisis.
Texas had a net gain of 103,465 people in 2014, the largest number of which came from California.
San Francisco wants to keep housing affordable…by restricting supply. Looks like somebody failed Economics 101…
Pension reform initiative to be refiled?
Unions are trying to undo San Diego’s voter-approved pension reforms. Because of course they are.
“Texas is like Australia with the handbrake off. There is no individual income tax and no corporate income tax, which explains the state’s rapid economic and population growth. A recent downturn has sparked some concern, however. Apparently Texas will only create another 150,000 jobs during 2015 – about the same number as Australia, from a population only a few million larger. In a good year, that number of jobs is easily generated by a single Texan city.” Also: IowaHawk’s illegal human organ trafficking!
Texas ranks 13th in budget transparency. California? Dead last.
Even some California Democrats balked at increasing the state’s already high gas prices.
As part of the bankruptcy of northwest supermarket chain Haggen (which bought a bunch of Albertson’s stores just six months ago), they’ll be closing all their California stores. And if you guessed that Haggen is unionized, you would be correct.
Jerry Brown revives the state’s redevelopment agency…and its potential for eminent domain abuse.
Reminder: Texas is enormous.
A scourge spreads out upon California. Crack gangs? Illegal aliens? Try “short term rentals.”
Historical note: 105 years ago today, three union guys bombed the Los Angeles Times, killing 21 people.
Tags:Albertson's, Australia, California, Crime, Democrats, Haggen, Jerry Brown, Los Angeles, Midland, pension crisis, San Angelo, San Jose, Stockton, Texas, unions, Welfare State
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Uncategorized, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »