Word: ganges
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than a year, a band of white supremacists known as the Order has waged its own private war against the "Zionist Occupation Government" of the U.S. In Seattle last week, federal officials continued their all-out attack on the neo-Nazi gang, announcing the indictment of 23 members under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The indictment charges that members of the Order were responsible for crimes including counterfeiting, armored-car robberies and two murders, one of them the assassination of radio Talk-Show Host Alan Berg in Denver. It was the first time the RICO statute...
...sentence: life imprisonment. Wang's two aides, Major General Hu Yi-min, deputy director of the bureau, and Colonel Chen Hu-men, another Defense Ministry official, were each given 2½-year jail terms. The verdicts came ten days after the leader of Taiwan's powerful Bamboo Union Gang, Chen Chi-li, and his lieutenant, Wu Tun, were sentenced in a civilian court to life imprisonment for carrying out the murder...
...more than 30 other members of the special forces began working for drug lord Osiel Cárdenas, head of the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel, which at the time controlled almost one-third of the Mexican drug trade. As Cárdenas' enforcers, protecting drug shipments and rubbing out foes, the gang members--who dubbed themselves Zetas after the radio call name of their original leader, who was killed in 2002--were paid as much as $15,000 a month, compared with their $700 army salary. Zeta bosses like Lazcano wore Rolex watches and ostrich-skin boots and imitated other famous drug...
...their own. They launched a lethal campaign against Mexican authorities and rival traffickers gunning for control over Cárdenas' former trafficking routes. Mexican officials insist that half the original Zetas have been arrested or killed, but because of intense recruitment and training of hundreds of Zetitas (Little Zetas), the gang has cells scattered around Mexico. They engage in ransom kidnappings and the extortion of businesses, from convenience stores to car dealerships. "The Zetas now victimize the general population," says Art Fontes, an FBI agent in Laredo. "Honest businesspeople are coming here from Nuevo Laredo out of fear...
Some U.S. officials privately complain that many Mexican police aid the Zetas. And other potential microcartels are proliferating on the U.S.'s doorstep: in the Tijuana--San Diego corridor, police are dealing with a gang known as Narco-Juniors, a group of affluent juvenile delinquents recruited as hit men in the 1990s by the Tijuana drug cartel. Authorities in the Juarez--El Paso corridor, meanwhile, report a growing presence of the Mara Salvatrucha, a machete-wielding gang that has terrified Central America in recent years. The threat from groups like the Zetas may persist for years. "This is like...