Date: 8/31/2010 2:15:52 PM

Drug Couriers Using Cloned Police Vehicles in Texas

Following reported by the Washington Post: ZAPATA, TEX. - The driver was wearing a deputy's uniform and swore he was a real law officer. But to the Border Patrol agents manning a checkpoint here, something just looked funny about the pickup truck with Webb County sheriff decals. So the border agents called the dispatcher and found that all the sheriff's vehicles were accounted for. When they pulled the driver over, they discovered he was an impostor - with a thousand pounds of marijuana in the cab. With growing boldness, drug gangs and smuggling organizations on both sides of the border are disguising their couriers and assassins in phony uniforms and vehicles, passing them off as mail handlers and oil field workers, or even Mexican soldiers and Texas sheriffs. The traffickers have been caught hauling marijuana along the Texas border in fake versions of a Wal-Mart truck or FedEx van. They've employed sham school buses, dummy dump trucks and bogus ambulances. Law enforcement officials call them "cloners," and they are increasingly the vehicles of choice in conflict zones where the lines between the bad guys and the law are blurred by corruption. "Trust me, whatever you can think of, the smugglers have already thought of, and with the Internet and a decent body shop, it's not too hard to make a clone," said Jose E. Gonzalez, assistant patrol agent in charge of the Zapata sector of the U.S. Border Patrol. In Mexico, cartel commandos wearing black masks zoom through checkpoints in pickup trucks boldly marked with forged POLICIA FEDERAL insignia. Gunmen for the paramilitary Zetas set up fake military checkpoints and carry out hits in carbon copies of army trucks. In one of the boldest incidents, gangsters in a convoy of seven phony police vehicles kidnapped a mayor from his home near Monterrey in northern Mexico this month. The mayor's body, blindfolded and hands bound, was found two days later, on a rural road. The alleged assassins were municipal police wearing federal police uniforms.

Date: 8/23/2010 9:19:44 AM

9 Charged by Federal Prosecutors for Fraudulently Obtaining CDL's

Federal prosecutors have charged a group from eastern Pennsylvania with helping hundreds of people fraudulently obtain commercial driver's licenses. Authorities say the licenses were obtained through the "International Training Academy," a company run by Vitaliy and Tatyana Kroshnev of Richboro, PA. Group members allegedly charged thousands of dollars to help customers get phony residency papers, licenses and other documents, and had state-approved translators provide answers on licensure tests.