"DFW now a ‘command and control’ center for Mexican cartels”

Hi Gang:

On Saturday, June 8, 2013 the Star-Telegram published a truly disturbing news report:

“DFW now a ‘command and control’ center for Mexican cartels” (DFW refers to Dallas Fort Worth in Texas).

This is how the report begins:

The slaying in Southlake Town Square of a Mexican attorney with reputed ties to drug cartels was a brazen and well-coordinated assassination that illustrates the increasingly long and lethal reach of the brutal criminal organizations, security experts say.

The flamboyant public hit was unusual because Mexican cartels try to stay off the radar on this side of the border.

But it underlines an ominous trend: Dallas-Fort Worth has become a key “command and control” center for moving drugs and people across the country, top state and federal law enforcement officials confirm.

DFW is more than 400 miles from the Mexico border, but its central location and vast network of interstates and rail lines make it a vital distribution point for drugs.

“When you have these kinds of incidents in your nicer communities, it really resonates and brings home the cartels’ reach,” said Fred Burton, a security analyst with Austin-based Stratfor Global Intelligence who monitors the cartels, their areas of influence and their drug routes.

“There’s a perception that these guys don’t do that kind of stuff here, but in reality they do. They are selective, but if they do want to kill somebody, they’ve been successful in doing it, as evidenced by what happened in Southlake,” he said.

The cartels’ tentacles reach everywhere, Burton said.

“If you are in a large city in America, in all likelihood there is a cartel presence there. No city is untouched anymore,” said Burton, a former counterterrorism agent with the State Department from 1985 to 1999.

Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Mexican cartels “constitute the greatest organized-crime threat,” to the state.

The article is fairly lengthy and worth reading in its entirety.  The bottom line is that no community is safe from the Mexican cartels.

I can also tell you that based on my 30 years of experience with the former INS including my nearly four year assignment as the first INS special agent assigned to the Unified Intelligence Division (UID) of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in New York and my subsequent ten years as a Senior Special Agent assigned to the Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) it is clear that drug related violence is not limited to the border regions of the United States but is an issue of crisis proportions across the United States.

During my stint as the INS representative to the UID I decided to ask for the arrest records of all defendants arrested by the DEA in New York.  This was back in 1989.  In those days there were no spread sheets.  Ask for arrest records and you were provided with a paper arrest report for each and every defendant who was arrested.  It took about two weeks and then I remember I walked into my office which I shared with many other representatives from such agencies as the DEA, FBI, U.S. Customs, the NYPD, New York State Police, British Customs and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and was unable to find my desk!  All around my desk were boxes of arrest reports.  They were on my chair, under my desk and on top of my desk.  As I stood there with my unhinged jaw, a couple of clerks pushed their hand-trucks past me and piled still more boxes of more arrest records on top of those already there!

My colleagues could not contain their laughter!  My boss and others patted me on my back and reminded me about the curse that says, “Be careful what you ask for- you may get it!”  Boy did I get it!

It took me several weeks, working with a hand calculator to compute the numbers.  When I was done I was astonished to find that in New York City, roughly 60% of all defendants arrested by the DEA and the DEA Task Force were identified as being foreign born.  Nationally that statistic was about 30%I tracked those numbers for New York and national arrests for several years and they remained relatively unchanged, year after year.

The first step in problem solving is to acknowledge that a problem exists.

Consider how the words, “Houston we have a problem” got the attention of all of the personnel at Mission Control when Commander Jim Lovell uttered that now historically famous five word phrase into his microphone when his Apollo 13 Service Module suffered a catastrophic explosion.  Had the engineers, scientists, technicians and other personnel on the ground not been alerted to the crisis, Jim Lovell and his two fellow crew mates would not have returned safely to the earth.  Perhaps they would not have returned at all but would have perished in their command module which might have either burned up on encountering the earth’s atmosphere at the wrong entry angle or might have remained in space forever.  They were saved by quickly assessing the seriousness of their plight and acting, with a team of highly educated, skilled and dedicated members the team that comprised the American space program more than 40 years ago.

Today the administration is unwilling to even admit that there is a problem!

Today that infamous “Gang of Eight” and their allies and supporters in the Congress and elsewhere are also unwilling to accept the nature of the threats America and Americans face today.

If ignorance is bliss, these individuals must be among the happiest people on the planet.  On the other hand, if they are not as ignorant as they seem I wonder how they can sleep at night!   

The point of the matter is that while “The Eight Gangsters” are pushing Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation (S.744) through the legislative process in the United States Senate they are engaging in a supposed debate about the need to secure the U.S. / Mexican border.  They are arguing whether or not the border should be made secure before or after Comprehensive Immigration Reform is implemented.

As I said, this is a deceptive debate that reminds me of the televised wrestling matches I used to watch with my parents, as a child growing up in Brooklyn.  These wrestlers threw chairs at each other and did a convincing job os beating each other up while, in reality, the violence was staged.  The battles were simply dramatic theatrics.

While the “Eight Gangsters” conduct their supposed debates about the issue of border security or lack thereof, unknown numbers of illegal aliens and the criminals and likely terrorists among, them stream across the border.

On December 21, 2011 I was a guest on Neil Cavuto’s program on Fox Business to discuss the topic:

“Will Cuts to Border Patrol Hurt U.S. Job Market?”

Neil and I got into the discussion about whether or not Border Patrol arrest statistics are a good way of determining how many illegal aleins are present in the United States.  I told Neil that using Border Patrol arrest statistics to figure out how many aliens are illegally present in the Untied States, is the equivalent of taking attendance by asking people not present to raise their hands!

The metric that truly provides insight into the security of America’s borders- all of America’s borders is the availability of narcotics across the United States.  Heroin and cocaine are grown and processed outside the United States.  Every kilo of those poisons found in the United States were smuggled into the United States.  If the border was truly secure, those poisons would not be available on street corners across our vast country.  That the price of those illegal drugs has not gone up is a clear indicator of border security.

Clearly the border is anything but secure.  What is at least as disturbing is that there is an absolute lack of resources and resolve to enforce the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States.  Once an illegal alien gets past the border or once an alien who has been lawfully admitted into the United States via the inspections process and then violates the terms of his (her) admission, nothing is done to seek to locate, arrest and remove such illegal aliens from the United States unless they have been convicted of committing serious crimes.  This enables illegal aliens including transnational criminals and international terrorists to hide in plain sight and embed themselves in towns and cities across the United States.

By not accepting the dangers posed by these violent criminals, the public safety of towns and cities across America are being endangered and the threat of the violence associated with these gangs is growing greater each year.  By aggressively combatting this growing threat, these pernicious transnational thugs are becoming emboldened to extend their tentacles still further posing an ever increasing threat to the safety and security of people across the United States.

The news report ends with this disturbing passage: