Guardian Express seeking reporters with a nose

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13 Dec 2012

Reporters

by admin

The Guardian Express of Los Angeles is seeking reporters without borders to contribute news, views and gossip from all corners of the globe as it happens or…

We are independent online publishers we are not looking for rightists or leftists but for neutralists and if you consider yourself you have the nose for hard-hitting articles write to us and let us know.
All correspondents must be addressed to guardianexpressla@gmail.com with subject line REPORTERS.

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Warning! Scams being perpetrated by criminals aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

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02 Nov 2012

by admin

WASHINGTON—The Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Center for Disaster Fraud (NCDF) remind the public there is a potential for disaster fraud in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Suspected fraudulent activity pertaining to relief efforts associated with Hurricane Sandy should be reported to the toll-free NCDF hotline at  866-720-5721 . The hotline is staffed by a live operator 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the purpose of reporting suspected scams being perpetrated by criminals in the aftermath of disasters.

NCDF was originally established in 2005 by the Department of Justice to investigate, prosecute, and deter fraud associated with federal disaster relief programs following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Its mission has expanded to include suspected fraud related to any natural or man-made disaster. More than 20 federal agencies—including the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, and the FBI—participate in the NCDF, allowing the center to act as a centralized clearinghouse of information related to disaster relief fraud.
In the wake of natural disasters, many individuals feel moved to contribute to victim assistance programs and organizations across the country. The Department of Justice and the FBI remind the public to apply a critical eye and do due diligence before giving to anyone soliciting donations on behalf of hurricane victims. Solicitations can originate as e-mails, websites, door-to-door collections, mailings, telephone calls, and similar methods.
Before making a donation of any kind, consumers should adhere to certain guidelines, including the following:

• Do not respond to any unsolicited (spam) incoming e-mails, including by clicking links contained within those messages, because they may contain computer viruses.
• Be cautious of individuals representing themselves as victims or officials asking for donations via e-mail or social networking sites.
• Beware of organizations with copycat names similar to, but not exactly the same, as those of reputable charities.
• Rather than following a purported link to a website, verify the existence and legitimacy of non-profit organizations by using Internet-based resources.
• Be cautious of e-mails that claim to show pictures of the disaster areas in attached files, because those files may contain viruses. Only open attachments from known senders.
• To ensure that contributions are received and used for intended purposes, make donations directly to known organizations rather than relying on others to make the donation on your behalf.
• Do not be pressured into making contributions; reputable charities do not use coercive tactics.
• Do not give your personal or financial information to anyone who solicits contributions. Providing such information may compromise your identity and make you vulnerable to identity theft.
• Avoid cash donations if possible. Pay by debit or credit card or write a check directly to the charity. Do not make checks payable to individuals.
• Legitimate charities do not normally solicit donations via money transfer services.
• Most legitimate charities maintain websites ending in .org rather than .com.

In addition to raising public awareness, the NCDF is the intake center for all disaster relief fraud. Therefore, if you observe that someone has submitted a fraudulent claim for disaster relief or observe any other suspected fraudulent activities pertaining to the receipt of government funds as part of disaster relief or clean up, please contact the NCDF.
If you believe that you have been a victim of fraud by a person or organization soliciting relief funds on behalf of hurricane victims, or if you discover fraudulent disaster relief claims submitted by a person or organization, contact the NCDF by phone at  (866) 720-5721 , fax at  (225) 334-4707 , or e-mail at disaster@leo.gov.

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Staggering 22 million birds killed every year in “window accidents” in Canada

(Edmonton) The thud of a bird hitting a window is something many Canadian home owners experience. Up until now, little research has been done to document the significant these collisions for Canada’s bird populations. A University of Alberta biology class project supervised by researcher Erin Bayne suggests that many birds meet their end in run-ins with Canadian homes.

The U of A students estimate a staggering 22 million birds a year die from colliding with windows of homes across the country.
The research was done in Edmonton and surrounding area using evidence gathered from more than 1,700 homeowners. Homeowners were recruited to become citizen scientists for the study. The citizen scientists were required to complete an online survey where they were asked to recall fatal bird hits over the previous year.
Bayne and his team processed the Edmonton data and concluded that with approximately 300,000 homes in the study area the death toll for birds from window strikes might reach 180,000 per year.
The researchers applied that figure to national housing statistics and arrived at the 22 million figure for bird vs. window fatalities. Bayne says that many people recalled bird strikes at their homes, but there was little awareness that residential window deaths might affect bird populations.
The main factors influencing the frequency of bird – window collisions were the age of the trees in the yard and whether or not people fed birds.
“In many cases people who go out of their way to help birds by putting up feeders and bird friendly plants are unwittingly contributing to the problem,” said Bayne.
One tip the researchers have for the safer placement of a bird feeder concerns its distance from the house. Bayne says the safety factor has to do with a bird’s flying speed. As with car crashes; speed kills.
“A feeder three to four metres from a window is bad because the bird has space to pickup lots of speed as it leaves the feeder,” said Bayne.
Fast-flying birds like sparrows and chickadees and aggressive birds like robins are apt to collide with windows placed too close to free food.
Placing the feeder either closer or much further are options.
Researchers believe many window collisions are caused by in-flight mistakes. “It’s called a panic flight; a bird startled by a cat or competing with other birds at the feeder may suddenly take flight and doesn’t recognize the window as a hazard” said Bayne.
The research was published in the journal, Wildlife Research.

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U.S government rewards Belgium in the arrest of global Gangster Ricardo Fancini

Ricardo Fanchini is one of the world’s most well-connected gangsters, with mobster friends as far afield as Moscow, New York, London, Antwerp, Naples, Poland and Israel.

“He was like the CEO of crime and used to organise crime summits in Austria, where people from the Camorra [Neapolitan mafia], the Colombian cartels, the Russian mafia, met up and divided up the world,” said a Belgian reporter who has investigated Fanchini for years but does not wish to be identified.

BRUSSELS — US law enforcers on Tuesday handed Belgium an $800,000 (625,000-euro) reward for assisting in the arrest of gangster Ricardo Fancini, a Polish-born drugs baron connected to the Russian mafia.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency reward, the first in Belgian history, was handed over following the 2007 arrest of Fancini, up until then an elusive operator described by DEA regional chief Russell Benson as “an untouchable criminal figure.”
Fancini, nabbed in his London townhouse after authorities received help from Belgium, was suspected of heading a gang that smuggled drugs from Asia to the United States via Poland and Belgium, stuffed in the back of television sets, for many years.
Connected to Colombia’s cartels and Russian mafia bosses, he ran a money-laundering and cigarette smuggling business through Antwerp, where he had settled.

“He was very smart,” Benson said at the reward ceremony. “He succeeded in keeping impunity during decades.”
After a long inquiry involving investigators from across the world, he was picked up for conspiring to distribute 400 kilos (880 pounds) of ecstasy pills but entered a plea bargain that led to the dismantlement of his network and the arrest of some 40 people.
He is serving a 10-year sentence in the US.
Video
Source: AFP
Background…
Ricardo Fanchini is one of the world’s most well-connected gangsters, with mobster friends as far afield as Moscow, New York, London, Antwerp, Naples, Poland and Israel.

“He was like the CEO of crime and used to organise crime summits in Austria, where people from the Camorra [Neapolitan mafia], the Colombian cartels, the Russian mafia, met up and divided up the world,” said a Belgian reporter who has investigated Fanchini for years but does not wish to be identified.

Born in 1956 in the industrial city of Katowice in southern Poland to a Polish mother and an Italian father who had himself grown up in the mafia-infested city of Naples, Fanchini fled to the West in 1977, settling first in Germany and eventually moving to the Belgian port of Antwerp. But he was one of several gangsters who returned to the East in the early 1990s to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of communism and became known as the Polish Al Capone. Polish journalist Jaroslaw Jakimczyk told the BBC: “He was one of the most dynamic of that group in the 1990s, and was linked with the Pruszkow Gang.”

The Pruszkow Gang dominated Polish organised crime, being responsible for the trade in drugs, stolen luxury cars from Germany and black-market vodka.

Although their power was broken and most are now in jail or dead, Fanchini continued to prosper, partly because of his connections to Russian mafia bosses including Semion Mogilevich, who was a guest at his wedding, and arms smuggler Viktor Bout. He and his Russian partner, Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, set up an import-export business that traded in everything from cigarettes and chocolates to electronic goods. He also benefited from a tax exemption, for the importation of vodka into Russia, granted by corrupt officials close to the then President Boris Yeltsin. At the time he also bought a luxury yacht, the Kremlin Princess, and often turned up in Monte Carlo. Mobster Semion Mogilevich was a guest at Fanchini’s first wedding But Fanchini lost powerful friends when Yeltsin left office, his company went bankrupt and he was prosecuted by the Belgian authorities for embezzlement and money laundering. While in prison serving a four-year sentence, Fanchini was dealt a further blow when a huge consignment of drugs was seized by the Dutch police. The 1.8 million ecstasy pills, weighing 424kg, were destined for sale to the US market, where Fanchini and Nayfeld had links with the Russian community in the Brighton Beach district of Brooklyn, New York. When Fanchini left prison he moved to London. In 2006 he hired out the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Berlin for a sumptuous party and followed it up with another bash in Moscow, which was attended by hundreds of gangsters as well as celebrities and legitimate businessmen. But Fanchini was living on borrowed time. In England he reportedly split his time between a Mayfair townhouse and a plush mansion in a gated community in Surrey, not far from the home of Formula One driver Jensen Button. But the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) caught up with him and on the morning of 3 October 2007 officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Extradition and International Assistance Unit knocked on the door of his townhouse in Mount Street. He was using the name Ricardo Rotmann, which was the surname of his third wife, Katja, a German, with whom he has a child.
Fanchini had been identified by various European law enforcement agencies as an international criminal for years His second wife, Jolanta, is still in prison in Belgium after being convicted of money laundering. Fanchini made no attempt to fight extradition and in January last year he was handed over to US marshals at London’s Gatwick Airport. He was due to go on trial later this year. According to the indictment, Fanchini’s gang smuggled heroin and cocaine from Thailand to the US, via Poland and Belgium, for 17 years. The drugs were hidden in the back of televisions and eventually found their way to Brighton Beach and Staten Island in New York. But his attorney, Gerald Shargel, obtained a plea bargain and in November he pleaded guilty to a single charge – conspiring to distribute 424kg of MDMA (ecstasy) – and he now faces 10 years in jail.

Journalist Vladimir Kozlovsky, who has covered the activities of the Russian mafia in New York for years, said: “The indictment was massive. He was accused of a million crimes going back 20 years. There were so many boxes of evidence that he had to have a separate cell to house it all.

“The trial was due to last at least four months so, like 90% of cases over here, it was plea bargained and he could be out in seven years.”
Another former Fanchini associate, Viktor Bout, was arrested last year But the DEA has also hit him hard financially. Fanchini has agreed to forfeit $30m – $2m of which will have to be paid on the day of sentencing – and DEA officers have also seized more than 40 properties across the world with an estimated value of more than $67m. Nayfeld and two other co-defendants, Arthur and Nikolai Dozortsev, all pleaded guilty to laundering Fanchini’s money. Speaking at the London School of Economics last year, the US Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, highlighted Fanchini as an example of close global co-operation in the fight against crime. He said: “Fanchini had been identified by various European law enforcement agencies as an international criminal for years. “It took a lot of co-operation and co-ordination between the US, UK and other countries to bring about his arrest.”Detective Inspector Paul Fuller, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Extradition Unit said: “We work tirelessly to ensure that those wanted for crimes are brought to the justice system. It is important that Londoners know that we are arresting and extraditing foreign criminals on a daily basis.” Dominique Reyniers, of the Belgian Justice Department, confirmed Fanchini was also the subject of a separate investigation into alleged money laundering in Antwerp. It is thought that inquiry looked at property investments he made in the Ukrainian resort of Odessa. Fanchini’s friends Mogilevich and Bout have both been arrested in the past year and he himself will be in his 60s by the time he comes out of jail in the US.

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Federal Court in Texas Orders Robert Mihailovich, Sr. and Growth Capital Management LLC to Pay over $9.3 Million in CFTC Anti-fraud Action

Washington, DC – The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today announced that it obtained an order of permanent injunction against defendants Robert Mihailovich, Sr. (Mihailovich, Sr.) of Rockwall, Texas, and Growth Capital Management LLC (GCM) requiring Mihailovich, Sr. and GCM to make restitution to defrauded customers, disgorge ill-gotten gains, and pay a civil monetary penalty together, totaling over $9.3 million for fraudulently soliciting over $30 million from customers to trade commodity futures contracts and foreign currency (forex). The order also imposes permanent trading and registration bans against the defendants.
The court’s order, entered on June 26, 2012, arises out of a CFTC complaint filed on July 27, 2010, against Mihailovich, Sr., GCM, and Robert Mihailovich, Jr. (Mihailovich, Jr.), Mihailovich, Sr.’s son. As alleged in the complaint, Mihailovich, Sr. was convicted and incarcerated on federal wire fraud charges, served 27 months, and while on a three-year supervised release, fraudulently solicited and accepted more than $30 million from approximately 93 customers to open managed trading accounts. The complaint also alleged that Mihailovich, Jr., at the time of GCM’s initial registration, failed to disclose Mihailovich, Sr.’s involvement with GCM, and failed to disclose in CFTC registration filings that his father was a controlling principal of GCM. (See CFTC Press Release 5863-10, July 28, 2010.)
Previously, the federal court had entered an order of default judgment against GCM on March 15, 2011. The federal court later also entered an order of default judgment against Mihailovich, Sr. on November 22, 2011, as a sanction for discovery violations.

The federal court’s June 26, 2012, order finds that during discovery Mihailovich, Sr. engaged in a pattern of willfulness and bad faith. Mihailovich, Sr. failed to attend a number of court-ordered hearings, repeatedly failed to abide by court orders, failed to communicate with plaintiff CFTC, failed to appear or respond to his scheduled deposition, and failed to respond to written discovery requests, according to the order.
The June 26, 2012 order imposes sanctions against Mihailovich, Sr. and GCM arising out of the prior default judgments against them. The order requires Mihailovich, Sr. and GCM jointly and severally to pay $3,475,112 in restitution, to disgorge $389,006 in ill-gotten gains, and to pay a civil monetary penalty of $5,440,000. The order also permanently prohibits the defendants from violating the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations, as charged, and from engaging in certain commodity-related activities, including personal trading and applying for registration or claiming exemption from registration with the CFTC.
The CFTC previously obtained a consent order against Mihailovich, Jr., that imposed a $40,000 civil monetary penalty and banned him from seeking registration with the CFTC for 10 years and from engaging in certain commodity-related activities, including trading, for 5 years (see CFTC Press Release 5679-12, June 13, 2012).
The CFTC thanks the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Fort Worth Regional Office, and the National Futures Association for their assistance.
CFTC Division of Enforcement staff members responsible for this case are Alison B. Wilson, Boaz Green, Stephen T. Tsai, Maura M. Viehmeyer, Philip Tumminio, Michelle Bougas, Anne Termine, Gretchen L. Lowe, and Vincent A. McGonagle.

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