All posts tagged "Organizedcrime"

NEW YORK — The leader of an Eastern European organized crime gang accused in the failed murder-for-hire plot of Iranian dissident journalist Masih Alinejad has been extradited to the U.S. to face justice, federal officials said Wednesday. Polad Omarov’s arrest means all three suspects accused of participating inthe July 2022 attempt on Alinejad’s life at her Flatbush, Brooklyn, home are now in federal custody. Omarov was located and arrested in the Czech Republic in January 2023 and extradited Wednesday from Prague to the U.S. to await his presentment in Manhattan federal court. The New York D......

Gangsta Boo, the Memphis-area rapper best known as a member of Three 6 Mafia, died earlier this year from an accidental overdose, her autopsy confirmed. The beloved hip hop artist, whose real name was Lola Mitchell, consumed a lethal cocktail of fentanyl, cocaine, and alcohol prior to her death, Fox 13 reported. She was found unresponsive at a home in Memphis on New Year’s Day around 2:00 p.m. and pronounced dead on the scene. She was 43. Musicians and fans alike flocked to social media in wake of her shocking death, all of them remembering her as a pioneer for women rappers. “I normally don’t......

A man prosecutors call “one of New York’s finch-smuggling kingpins” got a year and a day behind bars for his last bird-trafficking bust. Insaf Ali, 62, isn’t a simple bird courier, he’s the boss, federal prosecutors said, and he refused to change his ways, despite being nabbed at Kennedy Airport in 2018, and the 2021 arrest of one of his minions. But the Bronx resident contended that his lifetime of bird smuggling isn’t about the money — it’s about his enduring love for finches, or towa towa, and the role they play in Guyanese culture. “His need to have these specific birds to train, sing with......

Notorious accused Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested at a medical clinic in Sicily on Monday while he was undergoing treatment under an alias, Italian police said. Denaro, nicknamed The Skinny One, had long been considered one of Italy’s most wanted criminals. He spent the last three decades on the lam following accusations he committed a string of high-profile crimes, including massacres and kidnappings, according to police and Italian news reports. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni tweeted that his capture marked a great victory for the government. Denaro, the son of a mafia b......

SAN DIEGO — For the better part of a decade, federal prosecutions of Mexican drug cartel leaders carried out in San Diego have focused largely on the Sinaloa Cartel, and before that the Arellano Félix Organization, the two groups that have historically dominated the lucrative Tijuana-San Diego smuggling route. But last month, a federal judge sentenced two former high-ranking members of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, part of an ongoing prosecution against at least 12 people charged with drug trafficking and money laundering crimes. The case may be one of the first local prosecutions to ta......

SAN DIEGO — A three-month investigation in southeastern San Diego resulted in charges against five men and a woman who authorities say planned violent crimes, sold drugs and stored guns in a house at the direction of the Mexican Mafia prison gang, officials announced Tuesday. San Diego police Chief David Nisleit said the house on Wunderlin Avenue in the Encanto neighborhood was used to sell drugs, store guns and plan violent crimes, including kidnappings. San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan called it a house "full of plans to cause murder" and other crimes. The defendants were ar......