Drug Lord

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials detained Mel Hall of the New York Yankees yesterday because they thought he was a drug lord, the outfielder said.Hall, 31, went home to visit his family in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on his day off Thursday. When he arrived at Boston's Logan International Airport about 3:15 p.m., he was stopped by DEA agents.Hall said when he got of the plane, he "didn't have any luggage and was rushing" to get to his hotel before the game. Hall said the agents searched a carry-on bag and found his New York Yankees' identification.

In 1994, Baltimore's own Tupac Shakur was shot in a New York ambush and a decade later, the intrigue persists. The Village Voice earlier this month reported that a drug lord named James Rosemond, Jimmy Henchman on the street, long implicated in the crime, had admitted to it. The publication pointed to transcripts where Rosemond admitted to involvement in the rapper's ambush. Rosemond was talking with federal prosecutors under an agreement that the information wouldn't be used against him. Rosemond is already in jail on a drug conviction and won't be charged with the attack on Shakur.

Defiant till the end, Linwood R. "Rudy" Williams, whose criminal career spanned two decades and included acquittals that left police and prosecutors frustrated and angry, was sentenced yesterday in federal court to life without parole plus 130 years."

Donnie Andrews' life is one that David Simon and Ed Burns would have had to invent if he hadn't already lived it. "I am the real Omar," Andrews tells me by way of introduction, referring to how he was the inspiration for the ruthless yet moral stickup man in the Simon and Burns HBO series "The Wire. " Omar Little didn't make it through "The Wire's" five-season arc. He was shot to death in the final season — as was a member of his crew, Donnie, who was played by Andrews himself in a bit part.

Even in Baltimore's drug circles, they were particularly vicious crimes.A drug associate is shot in the head for a seemingly minor transgression. A year later, a state witness to the slaying is gunned down on a city street during a contract shooting, and an innocent woman bystander is killed in the barrage of bullets.Yesterday, the drug lord at the center of the slayings was sentenced to life without parole for murdering his associate as the mothers and other relatives of the two slain men and the woman sobbed in the back of the federal courtroom in Baltimore.

Anthony Ayeni Jones, the fast-talking drug lord who ruled over one of the most murderous narcotics organizations in Baltimore history, was convicted yesterday of conspiring to kill rivals, federal witnesses, police informants and their mothers.Jones, who relied on fear to run his $30,000-a-day cocaine and heroin operation, showed no emotion and popped a mint-flavored Lifesaver into his mouth as the verdicts were read in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in what would be the first execution for a federal crime committed in Maryland.

Baltimore drug lord Tommy Lee Canty Jr., the first drug dealer convicted in Maryland under the 1988 federal "super-kingpin" law, was sentenced today to a mandatory term of life in prison without parole and a five-year consecutive term on a related gun count.Canty, 24, accused his convicted accomplices of running his citywide cocaine-heroin organization and protested, "I don't think should be getting life without parole."Canty admitted his drug conspiracy and distribution, but said, "I didn't put out no 150 kilograms.

A Timonium doctor whose office was raided by federal agents investigating his use of cyberspace in prescribing fen-phen to people he never met says he is tired of "being treated like a Colombia drug lord" and may move his practice out of the Baltimore area."

HOUSTON -- A federal judge sentenced drug lord Juan Garcia Abrego yesterday to serve 11 life terms and ordered him to pay fines totaling more than $128 million, ending one of the most ambitious and costly joint U.S.-Mexican efforts to dismantle a major Mexican narcotics cartel.Those penalties, along with an order permitting the U.S. government to seize an additional $350 million in Garcia Abrego's assets, came almost four months after a federal jury convicted the Texas-born criminal on charges that he smuggled tons of cocaine and marijuana through Mexico into America and laundered millions of dollars in U.S. drug profits as head of Mexico's notorious Matamoros-based Gulf cartel.

Citing his disadvantaged childhood and other factors, a federal jury ruled yesterday that drug lord and killer Anthony Ayeni Jones will not be executed for running one of the most murderous narcotics rings in Baltimore history.Jones, as he had throughout his two-month trial, showed no emotion as the sentencing verdicts were read in a packed courtroom in Baltimore's U.S. District Court. A short time earlier he had chatted with his lawyers about basketball superstar Michael Jordan.The jury of nine women and three men, which convicted Jones May 27 on charges of murder in aid of racketeering, federal witness retaliation and drug dealing, deliberated just 2 1/2 hours in the "death phase" of the case before deciding against execution.

Police in Baltimore have had their share of problems over the years, but they've managed to avoid scenes like this one in 1994 in New York: After officers were led from their Harlem precinct in handcuffs, the city's disgusted commissioner dumped their badges in a trash can in front of camera crews at a news conference. That is, until Wednesday. Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III stole the playbook from New York when he personally helped arrest 15 of 17 officers charged in an extortion scheme that federal authorities say involved kickbacks from owners of a tow truck company.

Authorities say Terrell Allen was a Baltimore drug kingpin who kidnapped the teenage brothers of an alleged rival in 2008 and returned them for a half-million-dollar ransom, launching a string of retaliatory shootings that has continued right up until this summer. But his attorney denies the allegations, and Allen has never been formally charged with any of them. Instead, he was convicted Tuesday on the easiest thing to prove: possession of ammunition, a federal offense for a felon like Allen, who has prior convictions for manslaughter and drugs and has beaten dozens of other charges, including murder.

MEXICO CITY -- Breaking with long-standing practice, Mexico extradited four major drug traffickers to the United States late Friday and sent a signal that the country's newly elected president, Felipe Calderon, is serious about cooperating with his northern neighbor to dismantle cartels. U.S. law enforcement officials have long complained about Mexican reluctance to hand over drug traffickers indicted in crimes north of the Rio Grande, and many drug kingpins have continued to operate their deadly networks from inside Mexican prisons, where they have been able to corrupt officials.

MEXICO CITY -- Felipe Calderon takes office today as one of Mexico's weakest presidents, hemmed in by ruthless drug lords, industry monopolists, tax cheats and a bare-knuckled leftist movement that threatens to block his every move. Calderon's only chance of fixing the shopping list of Mexico's social and economic ills is with a cooperative, well-managed Congress. But lawmakers have taken over the lower house, sleeping overnight in chairs and aisles, pledging to disrupt his nationally televised inauguration.

MEXICO CITY - Six employees of a federal prison near the Texas border were shot to death and dumped outside the prison yesterday, apparently in retaliation for a week-old crackdown on corruption involving jailed drug lords. The slayings reportedly occurred during a shift change outside the maximum-security prison in Matamoros. That is where some of Mexico's most notorious narcotics traffickers were transferred this week after a dramatic police raid last week backed by army tanks on the La Palma prison outside Mexico City.

Is it that difficult for energy and intelligence to co-exist on-screen? You Got Served has plenty of the former, and barely one scintilla of the latter. As a pop-culture study of street dancers, those gravity-defying human rubber bands whose gyrations fly in the face of both physics and biology, it's endlessly fascinating. But as a film, it's nothing, a series of dance sequences unimaginatively staged and listlessly directed, strung together with melodramatic cliches, leaden dialogue and trite plot devices.

A veteran Baltimore police officer who patrolled the crime-weary east side was an integral part of a violent drug gang and conspired to help murder a rival drug lord, according to federal indictments.The charges are among indictments against 10 defendants handed up by a federal grand jury in Baltimore.They close out a lengthy investigation into two drug organizations whose feud, police say, led to dozens of shootings and slayings in East Baltimore.The officer's alleged role in the drug gang previously was described as tangential.

MEXICO CITY -- Federal authorities arrested Juan Garcia Abrego, a man accused of being one of the hemisphere's most powerful and murderous drug lords, and promptly expelled him to the United States, where he is wanted on drug trafficking and money laundering charges, the government announced yesterday.Mexican anti-drug agents seized Mr. Garcia Abrego Sunday night in the northern city of Monterrey and flew him to Mexico City.Yesterday, Mr. Garcia Abrego was put on a Mexican government plane and flown to Houston, where he had been indicted on charges of conspiracy to possess, distribute and import cocaine and for money laundering.

A convicted drug lord at the center of a high-profile probe of the rap music industry in New York and the investigation of a double homicide in Owings Mills was sentenced yesterday to 37 months in prison on a federal gun charge. Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff, who has been linked by authorities to other violence -- such as the well-publicized shooting of rap star 50 Cent -- was sentenced by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore for illegally possessing a handgun as a convicted felon when he took target practice at a Glen Burnie firing range.

A federal judge who abruptly released Melvin "Little Melvin" Williams in January from what had been a 22-year prison sentence for a gun crime now says the man considered to be one of the worst drug lords in Baltimore history must remain jailed on an old parole violation. Saying he would release Williams again if he had "legal authority to do so," U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis ruled this week that Williams was not unfairly detained on the parole charge and must complete his jail term for that violation.