The margins in the illicit cigarette trade are relatively low. Tobacco is legal, for one, eliminating the risk-based premium that comes with trading in illegal drugs, and there’s a lot of competition, which puts downward pressure on retail prices. But there is a margin, enough of one to attract entrepreneurial…
Update: Never mind. An appeals court overturned Gilmore’s decision. Original post: There have been two significant developments since the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state doesn’t have to say where it got the pentobarbital it will use to kill death row inmates Tommy Lynn Sells and Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas…
Meet Kris Gentz, 59-year-old Princeton resident, 14-year veteran of Plano ISD, and, according to the feds, a compulsive gambler and prolific thief. Federal prosecutors, along with the FBI and Plano police, announced this morning that Gentz has pleaded guilty to embezzling some $2.5 million from the district, most of which…
Your average U.S. truck driver in the makes something like $.30 or $.40 cents per mile. It’s enough to make a living but not much else. Swap the 18-wheeler full of widgets for one full of Mexican marijuana, and the job becomes way, way more lucrative. Reliable data are tough…
The last time the Texas Department of Criminal Justice secured a cache of pentobarbital, the drug it uses to execute prisoners, the Houston-area compounding pharmacy that supplied it had second thoughts. “[I]t was my belief that this information would be kept on the ‘down low,’ and that it was unlikely…
The speed limit on Irving’s East Pioneer Drive is 30 mph. Crystal Zuniga, 30, was going two or three times that — somewhere between 60 and 100 mph as she ferried an SUV full of kids past Gilbert Elementary on Saturday evening. Zuniga, police say, was drunk, her blood alcohol…
Highland Park police seem to have a pretty strong case that they were justified in shooting David Hartman last summer. Granted, they should have done a more thorough search of his cargo pants, which contained a gun, and made sure he couldn’t slip his handcuffs over his legs and reach…
The first Highland Park police officers to fatally shoot a suspect on duty are now also the first Highland Park police officers to be cleared of criminal wrongdoing for shooting a suspect while on duty. Town Public Safety Director Chris Vinson made the announcement at a Thursday afternoon press conference…
You might have heard the news yesterday: Quinton Ross, the former Kimball and SMU basketball standout-cum-NBA journeyman, was found murdered, his body found stuffed in a plastic trash bag and buried in a shallow grave in Queens. It was certainly news to Ross when he woke up Monday morning at…
The first three months of 2014 have been exceptionally peaceful ones in Dallas. Robberies have dropped by 15 percent compared with the same period last year. Aggravated assaults are down 12 percent, murders a whopping 30 percent. There are still nine months to go, but the city is on pace…
Well, here’s an even better argument to strap dash-cams on all cops. Dallas Police Department officer Rene Villanueva had claimed in November that a drunken-driving suspect tried to punch him. But footage from the police car showed that it was the officer who was doing all the punching. Chief David…
It was a domestic violence call that first brought Dallas Police Department officers to the 4300 block of Crozier avenue on Thursday night. A witness who lived nearby said he saw a man “beating the shit” out of his girlfriend. The witness, later identified by family members as Rubin Brown,…
A teacher at Kennedale High School was washing his hands when a camera suddenly fell from the underside of the sink and landed on the ground. He handed it to Kennedale Vice Principal Jeff Krieger, who promptly turned it over to the cops. The cops found the camera contained footage…
Back in January, when we did very hard math in an effort to identify which cities write the most traffic tickets, Dallas was well off the leader board, writing far fewer tickets per capita than most big suburbs. Now, a bonus, courtesy of WFAA: Whatever traffic tickets police have written…
Shortly after a Dallas Police Department officer shot an unarmed teen last summer, there was a fairly simple explanation. The officers “responded to a burglary in progress,” police said. They found 19-year-old Gerardo Pinedo Jr. inside the house and ordered him to come outside and lie on the ground. He…
The 6900 block of Hemlock Avenue would have been dark at 9:30 Tuesday night. There are no street lights, just whatever light spills over from the adjacent apartment buildings. It would have been hard to see a couple of kids playing in the grass on the side of the road,…
Leroy Nelson, it’s fair to assume, has never owned a “remote aircraft landing marker.” Or a “seismographic probe.” Or a “chemical pipeline examiner,” which sounds like it would be a person but actually appears to be a made-up piece of equipment. Nelson, though, is not the type to let bourgeois…
Two years ago, no one had a clue what Erika Perdue had on her computer. Not her intellectual-property lawyer husband. Not her University Park neighbors. Her neon green Camaro with the “My Syn” license plates certainly raised some eyebrows, but no one suspected she was into child porn. Then, in…
Dallas’ St. Patrick’s Day parade and party on Greenville Avenue this weekend was, for all the drinking and debauchery, generally peaceful. According to the final tally Dallas PD sent out on Saturday evening, police arrested seven people for public intoxication and one for DWI, handed out 125 parking tickets, and…
Members of the Tri Delta sorority never technically own the diamond-studded star-and-crescent pins they are given upon initiation. They are merely caretakers, required to return the badges to the national organization upon their death, unless the executive board grants a special exception. That explains how Delta Delta Delta’s Arlington headquarters…
It took more than a year and two special sessions to do it, but last July, the Texas legislature finally provided a constitutional option for punishing teen murderers. In Texas, 17-year-olds are treated as adults for purposes of criminal law, which previously meant that those convicted of capital murder were…
The underground sex economy in Dallas, you probably won’t be surprised to know, is thriving. Not thriving quite like the local trade in drugs ($191 million per year) or guns ($171 million), but it’s substantial, pulling in an estimated $98.9 million per year. That’s at least the figure reached in…
