Drug Lords Use ATMs To Launder Dirty Money
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The Wall Street Journal reports that your friendly, neighborhood ATM has become a favorite haunt of those nasty Colombian drug lords.
As it turns out, minions of the drug lords race from ATM to ATM making small cash deposits of $500 to $2,000. On a recent foray through New York City, two minions dumped $111,000 into 112 bank accounts.
Back in sunny Colombia, other minions use their ATM cards to withdraw the same money in pesos. The result is clean, crisp, freshly laundered cash.
"The organization at its height was moving about $2 million a month," Bridget Brennan, Special Narcotics Prosecutor for New York City, told the Journal.
The process by which dirty dollars are turned into pristine pesos is known as "microstructuring," though it's deeply doubtful this is what the drug lords call it.
Microstructuring is a major headache for law enforcement officials, who point out that other criminal organizations and terrorists can use the technique, which has blossomed with the worldwide proliferation of ATMs.
The Anti-Paris Hilton?
The Journal also has its eye on the social scene, and reports that yesterday's debutantes are today's hard-nosed entrepreneurs.
" …there are a growing number of women who are rejecting both the party-girl ways of Paris Hilton and the social-registry strictures of Old Money to join today's entrepreneurial rich. This new breed hates the term 'socialite,' which once meant grace and status but now implies laziness, hedonism and catty social climbing," the newspaper informs us.
Exhibit A for the Journal is Dylan Lauren, the daughter of Ralph Lauren (though any of you expecting to hear that Lauren has turned around a steel mill in a small, destitute Pennsylvania town are doomed to disappointment.)
What Lauren has done is to start a candy store. Well, not just a candy store. Dylan's Candy Bar, the Journal reports, is the "high-end candy company she founded in Manhattan that's rapidly expanding into fashion and 'Candy Couture.'"
"My goal now isn't to become queen of the party circuit," Lauren says. "My goal is to create an empire of candy."
A Little Boy's Tragedy
Newsday writes about the court testimony of 10-year-old New York boy who was shot in the eye during the burglary of the family home.
The gunshot left John Henry Romano partially paralyzed. The boy can no longer play baseball or football.
"I felt real numb," the boy told the court.
John Henry was shot about a year ago in an exchange of gunfire between a tenant in his house and the suspected burglar, Rasheed Watson, of Paterson, N.J. The boy is the star witness at Watson's trial.
John Henry testified that one of three men who entered his house wore gold grills on his teeth. Other witnesses, Newsday reported, identified Watson as the shooter and said he wore gold grills.
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