Teen Sex Ring Busted
Over the weekend, an FBI sweep code-named “Operation Cross Country,” nabbed 50 pimps and 45 minors they were exploiting. The sweep targeted 27 major cities that included Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Boston, Anchorage, Cleveland, Birmingham and Miami. The minors taken into custody range in age from 13 to 17. According to the investigators the sex rings that exploit the children are sophisticated organizations and many of them reach across state lines.

U.S. Invaded by Subs?
The United States is being invaded by submarines from Colombia. No, they’re not nuclear subs, and the small South American nation has not declared war against America. These submarines – also known as “coffins,” “tombs” and “narco-subs” – are sleek, semi-submersibles built in the jungles of Colombia for the sole purpose of transporting a mega-ton payload of cocaine to U.S. shores. They are designed to cruise just below the water line, their glass-domed cockpit barely providing the drug-running skipper a glimpse of his surroundings. In addition to the pilot, three or four other crewmen cram into the slender vessel. And they had better eat before they leave and hold it when they gotta go. There’s no bathroom, no galley and no air-conditioning in the cramped space, where diesel engines are pumping all around them. And it’s not like the trip is a short one; the mini-subs take the tortuous journey up Colombia’s Pacific Coast to Central America or Mexico to unload their illegal cargo. Each fiberglass vessel is capable of carrying 8 tons of cocaine. “The intent is to be as low-profile, and to make it as difficult for us to find, as possible,” Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, the officer who commands the U.S. Coast Guard’s Joint Interagency Task Force South, told Reuters News. The news agency reports that an estimated 60 to 75 of the vessels are built in clandestine jungle shipyards in northwest Colombia every year. “That makes the fleet big enough to handle almost all of Colombia’s annual exports of cocaine, estimated by United Nations monitors to total about 600 metric tons a year,” according to Reuters.
 

 Former Atlanta running back Jamal Anderson was jailed Sunday after a police officer allegedly found him snorting coke in the men’s room of a suburban Atlanta bar. Police say that a patron at the Peachtree Tavern in Buckhead told an off-duty officer that there was some illegal drug activity going on in the bathroom at about 3 a.m. When the officer responded, he found Anderson, 36, and another man, 20-year-old Mark Daniel Hudson, in the same bathroom stall sniffing powder cocaine off the toilet tank, according to police spokesman Otis Redmond. Get more details here.

Black Mafia member gets 20 years. One of the key players in the notorious street drug gang known as the Black Mafia Family has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for cocaine conspiracy. Fleming Daniels of Roswell, Ga., was also fined $10,000 for his role in the gang, the focus of federal prosecution in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Louisville, Ky., Orlando, Fla., and elsewhere. The 35-year-old Daniels is the first of 16 defendants indicted in Atlanta to go to trial. Eleven entered guilty pleas. Three others are in custody and one is a fugitive. Prosecutors painted a picture of the Black Family Mafia as a societal nuisance. They said that Roswell and his cohorts moved hundreds of kilos of coke into Atlanta, Detroit, and other cities between 2002 and 2003. Daniels alone was responsible for at least 50 kilos, worth more than $1 million, they said.

Ex-NFL player gets knocked by feds.

Former Broncos running back Travis Henry is in federal custody after allegedly attempting to make a drug deal in Montana. Henry, who was released by Denver in June after coach Mike Shanahan questioned his commitment, faces a hearing next week on charges that he and James Mack met with an undercover informant, allegedly planning to buy cocaine, the DEA says. Both men are being held on suspicion and conspiracy charges after agents alleged that the pair had plans to distribute the drug. The informant first agreed to cooperate with the government last month, according to affidavits, when he was stopped in Montana in a vehicle carrying six pounds of weed and three kilos of cocaine. He told authorities he was to be paid $5,000 for delivering the drugs allegedly supplied by Henry and Mack, with another $63,600 in proceeds being returned to Henry. The informant allegedly cooperated with Drug Enforcement agents, in exchange for leniency in his own case, leading to Henry’s and Mack’s arrests.