The World is a fine Place and worth fighting for, I believe in the latter part. - Ernest Hemmingway, Andrew Kevin Walker

Saturday 3 July 2010

Cops perform freelance undercover operations or "crimes".

Very much a twofer this one with examples of police crimes big and relatively small.

On the big side of things the former head of Interpol (the organisation not the band) has been convicted of accepting bribes from a drug dealer. This was a strictly South African legal case but given interpol is one of the key agencies fighthing the "war on drugs" because a supranational entity is required to fight the drug trade, which by its' very nature is international, one has to wonder if they are also corrupt, drug organisations tend to be very rich after all.

Nonetheless even without such speculation the case leads to some very unpleasant questions for South Africa with facts such as:

Vusi Pikoli, the former chief prosecutor, lost his job for charging Selebi.

and
"And here was someone who was very high, very close to the top, also at the time [very close] to the former president of this country [Thabo Mbeki]."


In a somewhat smaller case a number of Miami Police officers and an FBI agent decided to cut out the middle man and commit crimes themselves. While not specifically abusing their positions they knowingly committed fraud via straw buyers to gain fraudulent mortgages to "flip" houses so their value increased and they made a profit off of their fraudulently acquired properties.

They were in league with a prominent local lawyer, Steven Stoll, a high profile Republican in the area:
Steven Stoll and wife Rebecca are well known in Republican and philanthropic circles in Broward.

Stoll let Republican activists use his mortgage company office to phone bank for Republican candidates, and the Stolls sometimes attended fundraisers, said Bob Wolfe, a Broward Republican activist.

Stoll was one of the lawyers who fought with Broward's canvassing board about the 2000 presidential recount.

So one of the guys who opposed the recount and thus helped Bush steal the 2000 election also committed millions of dollars worth of fraud. Still I suppose it does show Republicans work better with the police.

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