Drugs boat Brits held - alleged ringleader Raymond John Whelehan, 55, an Irish national, was arrested in a Spanish jail

Drugs boat Brits held - mirror.co.uk: "Seven Britons have been arrested after a raid on a boat sailing to the UK from Spain loaded with cannabis worth £10million.
The catamaran was boarded in the Straits of Gibraltar and 3.2 tonnes of hashish discovered.
Two men and two women were seized by Spanish police on the Costa Del Sol while three men were arrested in Britain after £500,000 in cash was found in house raids.
The alleged ringleader Raymond John Whelehan, 55, an Irish national, was arrested in a Spanish jail where he is already serving a sentence for trafficking."

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Ruben Mitchell, 42, of Stockton, Calif. lost track of more than 41 pounds of cocaine in a misdirected piece of luggage during a Pittsburgh-bound Sout

Federal prosecutors in Pittsburgh have unsealed an indictment charging 22 people who allegedly conspired for 10 years to fly cocaine from California to Pittsburgh, bypassing airport security measures in the process.
The indictment was returned in June but revealed only Wednesday. It charges 16 people from California, four from Pennsylvania, and one each from Maryland and Ohio.

Prosecutors say Timothy White, 40, of Tracy, Calif. was a primary source of the cocaine. Another man, Ruben Mitchell, 42, of Stockton, Calif. lost track of more than 41 pounds of cocaine in a misdirected piece of luggage during a Pittsburgh-bound Southwest Airlines flight last year.
White and Mitchell remain in custody and 15 others have been arrested, though some are free on bond. Five others remain at large.

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Panamanian authorities seized roughly four tons of cocaine at a hideout along the Caribbean coast

Panamanian authorities seized roughly four tons of cocaine at a hideout along the Caribbean coast, 24 hours after confiscating another three tons of that drug, an official spokesperson said Saturday.

This second seizure by the National Aeronaval Service, or Senan, occurred Friday near the mouth of the Belen River, almost 300 kilometers (185 miles) northwest of Panama City and near the site of the first seizure at the mouth of the Concepcion River, the spokesman for that institution, Vladimir Rodriguez, said.

He told Efe that “4,926 packets of cocaine were seized at the mouth of the Belen River (near the port city of) Colon, but there are no detainees.”

Rodriguez said this latest operation was the continuation of another carried out Thursday in the central province of Veraguas, some 300 kilometers northwest of Panama City, that led to the first drug seizure.

Senan and the National Police seized three tons of cocaine Thursday after a chase in which the occupants of a speedboat abandoned the vessel and remain at large, Rodriguez said.

These two operations have resulted in the biggest drug seizures this year in Panama and raised the total amount of narcotics confiscated in 2010 by Panamanian security forces to 79 tons.

“Senan alone has seized 19 tons of drugs with the last quarter of 2010 still to come, and has already exceeded the 17 tons confiscated last year,” Rodriguez said.

The drugs were taken to the Vasco Nuñez de Balboa aeronaval base.

This week’s anti-narcotics operations were launched thanks to an intelligence tip from the Colombian military, which alerted Panamanian authorities to the movements of a suspicious 50-foot launch with four outboard motors, a rifle and a satellite telephone.

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The Associated Press: In Italy mobsters use lotto to launder dirty cash

The Associated Press: In Italy mobsters use lotto to launder dirty cash: "Police say Italian mobsters are buying winning lotto tickets to launder millions of euros (dollars) in cocaine profits.
Carabinieri investigators in southern Calabria said Thursday that an euro8 million winning ticket in the national Superenalotto numbers game was sold in a smokeshop owned by the father-in-law of a suspect jailed in a drug probe.
Police said the 'ndrangheta offered the anonymous holder of the ticket euro8 million or a little less in dirty money. The winner avoided taxes on interest due had the windfall been deposited in a bank. The mobsters got an excuse to open a mega-account.
Italian law requires those making big deposits to prove the funds aren't illegal. Police seized millions of euros worth of assets from the jailed mob suspect."

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'There's nothing we've done that is illegal'

'There's nothing we've done that is illegal': "first and only raid on one of Kahnawake's burgeoning number of cigarette factories, most of which are fiercely defended by the community.
What made the facility different -- and convinced Kahnawake band leaders to sanction the bust -- is that police alleged its owners were working closely with the Hells Angels, their cheap, tax-free cigarettes being pedalled on the streets of Montreal along with the outlaw bike gang's crack cocaine.
It seems like the clearest case yet of the kind of ties between organized crime and contraband tobacco that police repeatedly argue are widespread."

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