Frontierist News

LA Weekly

Cudahy is a strange little city; some say a scary one. In 2003, city leaders fired the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — which had policed Cudahy for 14 years, focusing on gang and drug crime — in favor of a nearby municipal police force that recently erupted over public allegations of police brutality and kickbacks to police and city officials from a towing company.

In Cudahy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has seized almost 20 times more cocaine over the past five years than in Bell, a bordering city of similar size, and the city suffers more crime per capita than small towns nearby. It’s a city with 200 active gang members, where shootings are common though homicide rare — that is, until 11 killings occurred in the wake of the sheriff’s departure in 2003.

Cudahy leaders seem satisfied. Consider the tone-deaf reaction of Cudahy City Manager George Perez in early February, after the news broke on KNBC Channel 4 and in La Opinión, a Spanish-language daily, that the city of Maywood, currently under a $2-million-a-year contract to police Cudahy, was facing a state takeover because the police department — the Maywood-Cudahy Police Department — is so out of control.

“Police problems in Maywood have nothing to do with us,” said Perez. “Our city council is happy, and our citizens are too.”

Tucson Citizen

A man infected with an especially virulent strain of tuberculosis has spent eight months in a hospital jail ward under a court order and may be held until he dies.

Robert Daniels has not been charged with a crime, but the 27-year-old violated the rules of a voluntary quarantine, exposing others to a potentially deadly illness. Maricopa County public health officials got a court order to keep him locked up.

[...]

Daniels, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Russia, contracted “extreme multidrug resistant tuberculosis” while living in Russia, court records show.

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Daniels stopped taking his medication and went unmasked to a restaurant, a convenience market and other stores, court records stated.

Washington Times

Maybe it was the umpteenth coke-dealing anthem or soft-porn music video. Perhaps it was the preening antics that some call reminiscent of Stepin Fetchit.

The turning point is hard to pinpoint. But after 30 years of growing popularity, rap music is struggling with an alarming sales decline and growing criticism from within about the culture’s negative effect on society.

[...]

It’s at least ailing, according to recent statistics: Though music sales are down overall, rap sales slid an alarming 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and for the first time in 12 years no rap album was among the top 10 sellers of the year.

Jerusalem Post

A former mobster has written a tell-all book, for the first time ever exposing the inner workings of an Israeli gang that took over the New York drug trade for a brief period in the eighties.

Ron Gonen, who has spent the past 18 years in the US Witness Protection Program, has teamed up with author Dave Copeland to offer an insider’s glance into a parallel universe of crime, murder and deceit.

[...]

Meeting up with an old friend from Israel - Ran Efraim - Gonen began to buy coke from Efraim in LA and sell it in New York City, grossing about $50,000 a month. His business continued to grow, he found additional suppliers

[...]

As then-District Attorney Rudy Giuliani had taken on the Italian mob, and the Soviet Union had not yet fallen, the New York drug industry was wide open. Apparently, even the criminal underworld abhors a vacuum.

Boston Globe

Leading conservatives yesterday attacked the Republican party as big-government, free-spending coddlers of illegal immigrants and said the country’s conservatives should withhold support from the GOP’s current slate of presidential nominees to force them to the right.