Tag: crime

Prison football

Within the prison there are 10 football clubs, some of them almost 20 years old, each with their own players, boards and constitutions. Alongside Moses’s old team Aston Villa, there is Liverpool and Manchester United, Everton and Chelsea, Arsenal and Newcastle United

Synthetic poaching

We are fabricating wildlife products, such as rhino horn and elephant ivory, at prices below the levels that induce poaching. Our goal is to replace the illegal wildlife trade, a $20B black market, the fourth largest after drug, arms, and human trafficking, with sustainable commerce.

people will have to decide whether they can get over their fears of biotech for this.

Wine heists

They took a little Dom Pérignon, some cabernet sauvignon from the Napa Valley estate Screaming Eagle, and 63 bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the most coveted–and expensive–French pinot noirs being made today. DRC, as collectors like to call it, runs as much as $25000 a bottle

the hijinx in the wine snobbery world always crack me up, since it is well-established that you can’t tell the difference between these hyper-expensive wines and reasonable ones

London mystery mansion

If a vast and lavishly appointed house in Manhattan—a palace nearly 2x the size of the White House—were being redeveloped on the edge of Central Park, New Yorkers would want to know who lived there. Londoners are equally inquisitive, and concerted efforts have been made to uncover the identity of Witanhurst’s owners

Criminal lawyers

The New Mexico Law Review just published an issue dedicated entirely to Breaking Bad. It features 8 articles that analyze the illegal acts committed on the show, their real-world parallels, and the consequences attached. Some of the greatest legal minds in New Mexico (and the country) came together to examine how Walter White would look to a jury, how the war on drugs affects peripheral citizens like Skyler, and whether Heisenberg could have stayed legit by fighting for his stake in Grey Matter in the courts.

The Wedding sting

Over the years, other agents have pulled off similar stings—like the one in 2009 where 2 FBI agents staged a wedding aboard a yacht and trapped an Asian counterfeiting gang, scoring over $100M in cash. In 2015 Houston police created a fake modeling studio in an operation designed to trap 40 johns. In 2013 Belgian police caught a Somali pirate by hiring him as a consultant for a fake movie. The Michigan wedding in 1990 was the original, and the greatest.

The White Devil Kingpin

Willis was the most notorious gangster in Asian organized crime – and, even more remarkably, the first white man to rise so high in this insular underworld. He was once just another hockey-playing Catholic kid in this working-class Boston neighborhood. But now they knew him here as Bac Guai John. White Devil. 3 years later, he’s sitting in prison khakis across from me in a small room at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he recently started serving a 20-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. Armed guards patrol watchfully nearby. In person, Willis is cautious but respectful as he shares his story publicly for the first time, but he’s an intimidating presence nonetheless. On his left arm is a tattoo of a dragon, for strength; a koi, for prosperity; and, on his elbow, the Chinese characters tong fu, for pain. “My life’s been pain,” he tells me in his thick Boston accent. “It hasn’t been easy. You might look at a guy who’s driving around in a Bentley and think that guy’s got the world by the balls. But you don’t know his mind, what he’s been through. I’ve struggled for everything that I did. Look at me now. I’m sitting in prison. It’s not as simple.”

Spam Nation

Fascinating writeup

But Krebs’s access to the inner workings of the spam underground was massively expanded when the 2 largest spam-bosses went to war against one another, paying corrupt Russian cops to investigate and incarcerate one another. Part of this war involved rival hackers breaking into one another’s internal networks and grabbing enormous troves of emails, chat-logs, and message-board databases that were fired off to law enforcement — and Krebs. From these insider resources, Krebs pieces together a gripping — and even, at times, thrilling — story about the strange business of pharmaceutical spam, an industry that is bizarre, sprawling, dysfunctional and contradictory. Fueled by world-beatingly high price of pharmaceuticals in the USA, the pharma-spam business uses millions of hacked PCs to send out come-ons advertising all manner of drugs, from anti-depression meds to fertility meds to powerful, controlled painkillers — and, of course, erectile dysfunction medication.

The $9b Witness

Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of deals: cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials, only secret negotiations that ended with vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.

turns out the change we can believe in was not what you thought when you naively cast your vote in 2008, and again in 2012.