Word: cartel
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...Paradise Lost days, Hirschhorn worked the white-powder bar, representing Medellín cartel leaders and other cocaine cowboys. Then he wore a pinkie ring with a two-carat diamond; now he wears Brooks Brothers and defends fraud cases. "It's where the action is," he explains with a grin. An epidemic of inflated appraisals, exaggerated incomes, straw buyers - and the lax regulation to enable it all - has made Florida tops in mortgage fraud, according to the Mortgage Asset Research Institute; in a recent Palm Beach County case, a grocery cashier's salary was listed as $344,000 a year...
...earned from kidnapping - are said to net the FARC hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Colombian government, as well as its allies in Washington, have long used the term "narco-guerrillas" to describe the FARC, which they accuse of morphing from a guerrilla force into a drug cartel. "If not for drug trafficking, the FARC would not exist today," argues Colombian Foreign Minister Fernando Araujo, who spent six years as a FARC hostage, not far from the 18th Front's territory, before he escaped...
...kind of a patron saint by the northern province's drug traffickers. Sinaloa is the cradle of Mexico's narco-trafficking industry, producing the majority of the nation's drug kingpins in recent decades. Their number includes such storied figures as Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who ran the Guadalajara Cartel and ordered the savage killing of a DEA agent; Amado Carrillo Fuentes, alias "The Lord of the Skies," who died in plastic surgery while attempting to change his appearance; and the Arellano Felix brothers, who ran Tijuana as a personal fiefdom. The state of 2.5 million people consistently...
...FARC's overwhelming strength sprang from sources as mafioso as they were military. After the demise of Colombian drug cartel bosses like Pedro Escobar, the FARC stepped into the vacuum and earned hundreds of millions of dollars each year protecting traffickers as well as the growers of coca, cocaine's raw material. The guerrillas earned just as much via ransom kidnapping - they're estimated to hold more than 700 Colombian army, police and civilian hostages today, including three U.S. defense contractors whom the FARC abducted...
Guillermo Prieto Quintana, police chief of the Mexican border town Ciudad Juárez, resigned in the face of a large increase in violence against law-enforcement officers during President Felipe Calderón's continuing crackdown on drug cartels. Out of 22 senior Ciudad Juárez officials named on a cartel death list, seven have been killed and three wounded; except for one, the rest have quit...