Rivers of gasoline flow across the border from Venezuela into Colombia’s La Guajira department, feeding an immense illegal market and enriching a new criminal group in the fuel smuggling world. Known as the Contraband Cartel, (Cartel del Contrabando) it controls the area’s lucrative fuel smuggling business.
Product travels from Maracaibo, the capital of Venezuela’s Zulia state, to the city of Maicao in La Guajira.
Once Venezuelan gasoline enters Colombia, the price skyrockets 3,700 times, costing between $0.84 and $2.07 per gallon. La Guajira’s last city before entering Venezuela offers the sale of gasoline in “pimpinas,” plastic containers with a five-gallon capacity. The pimpinas are the last link in the fuel smuggling chain.
Any product that makes it to Santa Marta, the capital city of Magdalena department, further down on the Caribbean coast, would sell for $3.07
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela announced an adjustment to the price of gasoline to the international standard specifically to put an end to the contraband mafias.
Cape Town gang boss Jerome “Donkie” Booysen has dodged death for the sixth time in 15 months. The leader of the Sexy Boys gang came under fire at a Mall shortly after having lunch. In March, Booysen was driving when gunmen opened fire on his vehicle. Booysen survived the attack because his car, a black Porsche Cayenne, is bulletproof.
There were four attempts on Booysen’s life last year, including one at the Cape Town International Airport. The first attempt was in May, when he was shot in the neck in a drive-by shooting. The second attempt was in September when the car the shooters thought he was travelling in was shot at 50 times, with 21 bullets hitting the target.
In October, another attempt on his life was made at the airport where the gang boss was hit four times in the upper body. His killer's gun jammed. A week later, while recovering at a Bellville hospital, an assassin allegedly tried to take Booysen out with snake venom.
A court in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City sentenced South African Coetzee Tyron Lee to death after finding him guilty of trafficking nearly 1.5kg (3.3 pounds) of cocaine. Lee was arrested in June 2016 upon arriving at the city's Tan Son Nhat international airport. Officials found the drug in his bag.
Lee said he was hired by a Nigerian to transport the drug for $3,500. His claims of schizophrenia did not sway the court.
Vietnam has some of the world's toughest drug laws. Trafficking 100 grams or more of heroin or cocaine is punishable by death.
Well-known cocaine smuggler
Guy Therrien, 53, was the victim of the 17th murder of the year in Montreal in Saint-Léonard.
A 21-year-old man with Therrien was also shot and is in critical condition.
Therrien was sentenced to prison terms twice in the last 15 years. The Montrealer was on parole at the time of his assassination. His last arrest came in 2012 when he was busted along with nine others. An alliance of traffickers formed with the Montreal Mafia, the West End Gang and the Syndicate, a street gang known for ties to Hells Angels.
Therrien pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 70 months in penitentiary.
In March 2002, he was sentenced to four years in prison for a Colombian-based cocaine smuggling operation.
Sherbrooke Hells Angels member Christian Ménard is claiming $ 3 million from the Attorney General of Quebec, the former Chief Prosecutor of SharQc Madeleine Giauque and informer Sylvain Boulanger .
Accused of first-degree murder and conspiracy for murder during SharQc in 2009, Christian Ménard was released from all charges six years later. He remained "illegally incarcerated for 17 months" and was subjected to "demanding" conditions of release for five years, he said in his lawsuit.
Ménard denounces the "malice" and "blatant disregard" for the protection of his rights. "These breaches of the constitutional disclosure requirements are very serious, malicious, inexcusable and have caused serious damage." He argues he lives a "deep sense of injustice". He claims $ 2m for stress, loss of enjoyment and loss of liberty, as well as $ 1m in punitive damages. He describes himself as a "nationally recognized" fitness coach.
Influential Hells Angel Salvatore Cazzetta kicked off the lawsuits last May by suing authorities for $ 2m. Two weeks later, Daniel Beaulieu, a founder of the Quebec chapter of the Hells Angel filed a similar lawsuit.
A gunbattle took place this week in the town of San Julian, Jalisco. State police responded to an anonymous call of several men carrying firearms. When police arrived at the scene they were overwhelmed with firepower and called for backup. The gunmen were reportedly the personal bodyguards of Ruben Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of Mexico’s Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG).
During the gun battle, the gunmen deployed .50 caliber machine guns, grenade launchers, and other pieces of artillery they had mounted on vehicles. The two sides fought for almost an hour until the gunmen escaped.
Federal authorities have discovered a sophisticated drug-smuggling tunnel that went from a home in Mexico to an abandoned fast-food restaurant in Luis, Arizona, about 200 yards (180 metres) north of the border. Police began trailing the owner of the abandoned building, Ivan Lopez, and arrested him this month after finding methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and fentanyl in the back of his truck.
The abandoned KFC which Ivan Lopez bought in April for $389,000
Police don't know how long the tunnel had been used, but Lopez bought the property in April. According to court documents, the government believes Lopez is a well-trusted cartel member.
Nearly 200 cross-border tunnels that have been discovered since 1990. Border agents are seeing an increase in tunnels, which are expensive to build and take long periods of time to construct.
The last of 14 people charged in a 2014 police probe that targeted high-level cocaine dealers in Manitoba are headed to prison. Jared Devloo 38, and Jason Ong 32, were convicted of a number of drug offence in October 2017. Devloo was sentenced to two 10-year prison terms to be served concurrently and fined $212,000 — the price the police agent paid for four kilos of cocaine in the covert operation.
Devloo must repay the money within five years of his release from prison or he will spend another three years behind bars. Ong, who received two eight-year prison sentences to be served concurrently, will be deported to the Philippines on his release.
Devloo was a property developer and owner of Jerway Holdings Ltd. He was one of the pallbearers for Frank Nucci, a high-level cocaine dealer with ties to organized crime who was shot to death in Montreal in 2005. Ong and Devloo were taken into custody at the end of the sentencing hearing.
Three men have been jailed for trying to smuggle half a tonne of cocaine into the UK on a private jet from Colombia. They were stopped at Hampshire's Farnborough Airport with 513 kilos of the drug in 15 suitcases after flying in from Bogota in January. Martin Neil, 49, Italian Alessandro Iembo, 28, and Spaniard Victor Franco-Lorenzo, 40, were found guilty. The three men were jailed for 24 years each.
They took off from Luton on a private jet costing £138,500. When they returned, officials looked past a few dirty clothes in their suitcases to find some 513 blocks of cocaine with a purity of around 79%.
The wholesale value was £15m but the cocaine could be sold for more than £41m on the street, the prosecution said.
Despite the luxury mode of transport, they could have made more than £15m in profit from the trip. The defendants were not the masterminds of the operation.
Lawyers said their clients had been "deceived", believing they were off to Colombia to help with charity work and did not know the suitcases were packed with cocaine.
Guiseppe Bugge, 42, died in a hail of gun fire in Guadalajara, Mexico. Three vehicles pulled up about 9:30 p.m. and between eight and 10 men jumped out and fired at Bugge killing him instantly. Ballistics experts from the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences seized 144 casings of various calibers.
Bugge had been living in a West Vancouver house with an assessed value of $5m. In March, he incorporated a company called G.S. Crypto Currency Ltd.
Police say he was associated with the Hells Angels and involved in drug trafficking.
The news of 1.5 tonnes of cocaine from 2 Quebecers has people talking in Rivière-du-Loup. Martin Lepage is said to be a man who lived large in the community. He and his wife were known to spend months overseas at a time and they bragged about paying cash for their new vehicles. Lepage and Langis Bélanger face 30 years incarceration.
They are detained in the prison of Ducos, Martinique.
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On July 19, French border agents patrolling the waters off of the French Antilles in the Caribbean Sea intercepted a sailboat with a small blue fleur-de-lys.
Unable to board in 'difficult conditions' agents began escorting the sailboat to the nearby port of St-Martin. The boat burst into flames. Two Quebecers bobbed nearby in a life raft.
Police say they set the vessel on fire in an attempt to sink it.
Below decks of the badly charred boat they found 1,506 kilograms of cocaine, worth about $300 million on the Canadian market. The load was probably picked up off the coast of Venezuela.
Two Quebec men, 55-year-old Langis Bélanger and 53-year-old Martin Lepage are in a Martinique prison. They are from the Riviere-du-Loup area, about 200 kilometres northeast of Quebec City. It is said they have ties to the West End Gang and Raymond Desfossés. Desfossés was an influential leader in the West End Gang before he was arrested in September 2004 in Project Calvette, an investigation into cocaine smuggling into Canada.
Aleksey Tsvetkov and Leonid (Lenny) Gershman are on trial in Brooklyn federal court for racketeering, extortion, arson, illegal gambling and a host of related charges. Tsvetkov and Gershman are alleged among other crimes to have set fire to a Coney Island Ave. building with children inside on May 2, 2016.
Leonid (Lenny) Gershman
The government’s star witness, Renat Yusufov, took the stand and fessed up to a life of crime — much of it, he said, in cahoots with Gersham and Tsvetkov. The Russian mobster said the gang pocketed millions of dollars over a 10-year period dealing cocaine in Brooklyn.
Wiretapped phone calls prove Gershman and Tsvetkov sold drugs and used violence to extort money from their victims, among other crimes.
Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, 'El Mencho' was named the most-wanted drug kingpin in North America after Mexican authorities and the U.S. State Department put a combined $6.5m bounty for the leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. The CJNG has proven to be more ruthless and better organized than the Sinaloa cartel in recent years. They function like a paramilitary organization and rule with an iron hand in Jalisco.
In May 2015, El Mencho, now 52, ordered a series of attacks against security forces in Jalisco. An ambush of a police convoy killed 15 officers.
The group blocked highways with buses and trucks and fire bombed gas stations and banks. Cartel members also used rocket-propelled grenades to fire on a military helicopter, killing nine soldiers.
Oseguera is the most powerful figure on the loose, having eluded capture for nearly a decade. The CJNG has launched shows of strength across western Jalisco state by blocking roads with hijacked vehicles every time federal forces close in on its leader. The cartel has earned notoriety for its willingness to confront state forces in open battle.
Prison authorities are investigating the death of a Toronto man who was convicted in a massive drug bust that the RCMP called a “tremendous blow to organized crime in Canada.” Witton Luu, 25, died at the Joyceville medium security prison. He had been there since May 17, after being sentenced to three years and nine months for his role in Project OTremens, a case which targeted high-level members of the Mafia in Canada and New York.
Corrections Canada had no comment, other than to call the death “non-natural.”
Project OTremens resulted in the imprisonment of two sons of murdered mob boss Paolo Violi.
Two drug busts in Anchorage and Juneau netted about 15 pounds of meth. 42-year-old Charles Phillips and his wife Lois were arrested after police found meth and almost $25,000 in cash at their apartment.
Along with much of the meth, cops found a ledger, and a sheet "listing names of Hells Angels prospects throughout the state of Alaska."
The Anchorage HA chapter is one of roughly 444 Hells Angels chapters in 56 countries.
Phillips is on federal probation for drug possession and in 2006 was convicted on state drug charges for manufacturing meth.
In March 2002, he was sentenced to four years in prison for a Colombian-based cocaine smuggling operation.
The abandoned KFC which Ivan Lopez bought in April for $389,000
The tunnel will be sealed with concrete.
Jared Devloo
Martin Lepage
They are detained in the prison of Ducos, Martinique.
Police say they set the vessel on fire in an attempt to sink it. 
Aleksey Tsvetkov 
Leonid (Lenny) Gershman
The Anchorage HA chapter is one of roughly 444 Hells Angels chapters in 56 countries.
