Drug Trafficking

Expert: Aryan Brotherhood of Texas are "Dumb Ol' White Boys" Who Wouldn't Kill a D.A.

When I spoke to Terry Pelz late yesterday afternoon, he sounded hoarse and exhausted. "I'm just about talked out," he said. Pelz is a former prison warden at the Darrington Unit who now runs a criminal justice consulting firm in Missouri City, about 20 miles southwest of Houston. He's been in high ... More >>

Mexican Drug Cartels Are Now Smuggling Drugs Across the Texas Border in Toxic Waste

The Mexican cartels, never ones to rest on their ingenuity, are always coming up with new and inventive ways to smuggle large quantities of drugs into the United States. Take the drug cannon, modeled on the T-shirt launching devices used at NBA games, or the brilliant drive-a-Jeep-over-a-border-fenc ... More >>

How Dallas Attorney Patrick Robert Simon Launders Money For Drug Traffickers, And How He Got Caught Doing It

In the fall of 2009, attorney Patrick Robert Simon was approached by a man who needed some financial planning advice. The man was making a healthy living, by trafficking illegal drugs, but was prepping for an extended stay in prison, for trafficking illegal drugs. Call it an occupational hazard. Th ... More >>

Your Little Friend Is Back

Sam Hurd's Cousin, Who May Have Inadvertently Tipped Feds to Former Cowboy's Drug Dealing, Arrested in San Antonio

The federal government has already accused Sam Hurd, a Dallas Cowboys receiver until a year ago, of being caught with a kilo of cocaine while trying to buy a lot more in an attempt drug-dealing network. Because a man's got to live, right? How can a guy feed his family on a $5.15 million, three-year ... More >>

Former Cowboy Kurt Vollers Is Going to Prison For More Than Two Years For Selling Pot

​It's been close to two years since former Dallas Cowboy Kurt Vollers pleaded guilty to his role in a pot-distribution "conspiracy" run from 2006 till '08 out of an apartment on N. MacArthur Boulevard, and more than a year since John Newton, the leader of the so-called Newton Drug Trafficking Orga ... More >>

Feds Announce (Another) Local Meth Bust Involving Members of La Familia Drug Cartel

​In October of 2009, James Capra, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Dallas Division, invited media to a press conference so he could show off the massive haul from a long-in-the-works bust involving the Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia: 220 pounds of methamphetamine, 4.5 kil ... More >>

Dallas Federal Grand Jury Indicts Sam Hurd, Co-Conspirator For Cocaine Distribution

​Seems like only three weeks ago Sam Hurd was just another former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys who was on his road to journeyman status, which, in his case, ran through Soldier Field. Then it was revealed: Even before his acquisition by the Chicago Bears, the San Antonio native fancied him ... More >>

Cartels and conquistadors -- who are worse?

According to Feds' Complaint, Sam Hurd's Drug Bust in Chicago Started With Deal in Dallas

​No doubt you've heard by now that former Dallas Cowboy Sam Hurd's in federal custody, having been popped by authorities in Chicago last night for trying to buy "five to 10 kilograms of cocaine, at $25,000 per kilogram, and 1,000 pounds of marijuana, at $450 per pound, per week for distribution in ... More >>

Thirteen Locals, Who Feds Say Are Linked to Los Zetas Cartel, Indicted For Coke Trafficking

​Stories linking Los Zetas -- a drug cartel consisting of, among others, former Mexican Army commandos -- with North Texas have been around for years. Take this story, from three years ago, connecting a Collin County deputy constable with a cousin said to be working for the cartel. In March, The N ... More >>

The War on Film

Drug Trafficking, the Missing Piece in The Dallas Morning News's Texas Jobs Puzzle

Piles of cash and nowhere to launder it? That's what Texas is for, hombre.​In Sunday's Dallas Morning News, reporter Brendan Case took a stab at explaining what, besides the state's generally business-friendly policies, has helped Texas produce such a relative bounty of jobs of late. The state ... More >>

According to the Feds, the (Repetitive) Life and (Precarious) Times of a Coke Kingpin in Dallas

An alleged coke trafficker used this Knox-Henderson-area apartment as his stash house.​If, by any chance, you spent the first few months of this year blowing lines in the bathroom of various clubs around town, there's a decent chance the source of your cocaine was Christian "Cri Cri" Ocana, wh ... More >>

FedEx is the Way to Go and Other Shipping Lessons From the Big North Texas Drug Bust

Don't trust him. He might be a drug mule.​Late yesterday, our local feds got to brag up a good half-decade's worth of sleuthing when they announced charges against more than a dozen people in connection with a multi-state cocaine- and heroin-trafficking syndicate based in Forth Worth. The acc ... More >>

Following Arrests, Feds Outline Vast Cocaine, Heroin Ring Operating Out of Dallas, Fort Worth

​The U.S. Attorney's Office sends word: Federal authorities have rounded up dozens suspected of trafficking heroin and cocaine from Dallas to Atlanta to Baltimore to Philadelphia to Nashville and all points in between. Those arrested yesterday come from all over, including Dallas and Fort Worth an ... More >>

Meet A Real Ace

Head of Pot Distribution "Conspiracy" That Included Ex-Cowboy Gets 24 Years in Prison

University of Notre DameBob Davie, then coach at Notre Dame, with a freshman Kurt Vollers back in '97 ​In April 2009, John Patrick Newton was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents for growing, storing and selling marijuana out of an apartment on N. MacArthur Boulevard inIrving. Said t ... More >>

Pinalcchio: Renowned Forensics Experts Say a Pinal County Deputy's High-Profile Tale About Getting Shot After Encountering Drug Smugglers Doesn't Add Up

Unlike refugees from other troubled countries, only a fraction of Mexicans seeking U.S. asylum are accepted- no matter how horrible their wounds or their stories.

Access Denied

Dallas Gang Leader, Drug Dealer and Apparent Exotic Animal Lover Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy

We're thinking the kiddos at Pinkston High School weren't having a tough time getting high last year. (The markers are streets where drug houses were located.)​Tyrone Weatherall, the 35-year-old leader of the "West Side Gator Boys," pleaded guilty today to one count of conspiracy to possess wi ... More >>

Illegal Immigrants, Desperate To Find Work In The U.S., Risk Kidnapping, Rape and Murder From Those Smuggling Them Across the Border

The Killer of His Daughter's Mother: A Cunning American Boy Becomes a Mexican Cartel Soldier and East L.A. Executioner

Cowboy Down: Murdered Southern Arizona Rancher Rob Krentz's Family Talk About His Life and Death

For Those Living in Ground Zero for Drug Trafficking Along the U.S.-Mexico Border, the Illegal Immigration Crisis is Personal

Badlands

Six Months After La Familia Bust, Dallas Boss Pleads Guilty to Meth Trafficking

Kimberly ThorpeSome of the drugs and money seized by law-enforcement officials in the fall of 2009​We were there in October of last year, when the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the I.R.S., the U.S. Secret Service and Texas Air National Guard -- and every other law-enforcing acronym -- ... More >>

When the DEA Busted Up La Familia, They Hauled In Plenty of Guns, Drugs and Dough

Photos by Kimberly Thorpe​You're looking at 220 pounds of methamphetamine, 4.5 kilos of cocaine and $660,000 in cash; there was also quite the assortment of machine guns hauled in. The whole stash was seized in North Texas yesterday from more than 80 members of a violent Mexican drug cartel known ... More >>

After Four Years as U.S. Attorney, Richard Roper Has Left the Balcony

First he leaves At the Movies; now, he's no longer the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas. As of tomorrow, Richard Roper's back in the private sector, working for Thompson & Knight, after four years spent as U.S. Attorney. Course, this was inevitable: Barack Obama will pick a new p ... More >>

"West Texas Puro Tango Blast" -- Not As Much Fun As It Sounds

Only a few days ago, The Dallas Morning News ran a piece about Texas' Tango Blast gang, which was formed within the confines of the state's penitentiaries and "could change the Dallas landscape because it rejects old notions of prison gang exclusivity and lifelong commitments," wrote Tanya Eiserer. ... More >>

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money (And Drugs, Lots of Drugs)

Dallas-Based Texas Syndicate Leader Gets Life in Prison

CD/DVD Pirates Taken Down In Cowtown

A Dallas Coke Smuggler's Blues

Smack in the Middle of Northwest Dallas

Feds Indict 14 Texas Syndicate Members For Murder -- and Much, Much More -- in North Texas

A Trafficking Jam

You Know Who Likes the President's Immigration Reform Plan? Nobody, That's Who.

House of Death

A dozen men were tortured, killed and buried in a small house in Juarez. Three years later, the U.S. government is still trying to cover up what happened.

Prison Gang Members Heading Back to Prison

Sticks and Stones

Chief Kunkle has to fight crime with the tools the council will give him

The Girl Who Played Dead

The untold story of the 1990 bathtub shooting

Heavy Traffic

Border drug lords get rich while attorney Mike Barclay gets worn out defending the poor smugglers

A mighty roar

Los Tigres del Norte have become legends by singing the immigrant's song

Busted

Julio Mercado is Dallas' brand-new DEA boss, and he's inherited kilos of trouble. His city is about to be declared a drug disaster zone, but all his narcs seem to care about is snitching on each other.

Bad Company

Drugs from Bolivia. Cash to Panama. Arms to Nicaragua. Bo Abbott says the CIA called - and he delivered.