Girl Power: You’re Doing It Wrong

Sunday, April 29th, 2012 • Filed under Arson, Assaults

Sadly, marriage isn’t forever anymore. Divorce isn’t forever either (Though I’m not suggesting Kim Kardashian was really that guy’s soulmate. Or anyone’s.). So what’s the solution?

BURN IT ALL. According to Houston Press, a young woman starting by giving her husband a sensual massage, and ended by setting him afire. And not metaphorically. Turns out the oil she had been rubbing him with was actually gasoline, which came in handy when she put one of the romance-inducing candles to his skin. He was rushed to the hospital as their home burned down. Evidence suggests that the attempted murder was premeditated, and our little Chicago wannabe was arrested on charges of arson and aggravated assault.

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Riots Reveal Organized Crime Power in Brazil

Last weekend, Brazilians living in the greater Sao Paulo metropolitan area witnessed one of the country's largest prison riots in the past five years, organized and orchestrated by Sao Paulo's largest criminal faction, the First Capital Command (PCC in Portuguese).

When Sao Paulo state authorities transferred some 756 PCC leaders, the PCC criminal enterprise, led by Willians Herbas Camacho (a.k.a. Marcola), implemented its plan to start riots in dozens of prisons in Sao Paulo and around the country. They took advantage of the unusually lax security environment over the weekend when some 10,000 prisoners were given a day pass to visit families on the outside for Mother's Day, and thousands more civilians entered prisons to visit inmates on the inside.

As one prison after another fell under the control of rioting inmates, the hostage count rocketed into the hundreds. Meanwhile, organized attacks on police stations around Sao Paulo kept security forces busy defending themselves. At the same time, masked gunmen commandeered city buses, ordering them evacuated before burning them to the ground.

The weekend's total included over 250 separate attacks on police stations, stores, and other establishments. There were 115 people killed, including 32 policemen and prison guards and 71 gang members. Another 49 people were injured. Some 215 hostages were taken in 73 prison riots that occurred in prisons across Sao Paulo, Parana, Matto Grosso do Sul, Brasilia, and Bahia, according to Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo. Over 80 public transport buses were burned and one metro station was attacked, leaving over five million people without public transport. On 15 May, as millions of people fled home in the early afternoon, Sao Paulo became a city of gridlock spanning 203 kilometers of roadways.

Over the weekend, as the violence raged on, Brazilian Justice Minister Marcio Thomas Bastos offered the service of 4,000 soldiers, part of a National Force trained to help contain the security problems in Brazilian states. But Sao Paulo Governor Claudio Lembo, filling in for presidential candidate Geraldo Alckmin, refused to accept federal help. Bastos made the trip from Brasilia to Sao Paulo to again offer federal assistance during a close-door meeting on Monday, 15 May. But again it was refused.

By 16 May, as quickly as the violence had started, it ended, and most prisons were back in the control of state authorities, and policemen were no longer the target of random attacks. The Sao Paulo daily newspaper, O Estado de Sao Paulo, reported on 16 May that the state government had reached an agreement with the PCC. Government officials continue to deny that claim, but it is possible such negotiations were a last-resort option for state officials clearly caught off guard by a highly organized criminal network, one many believed had been dismantled years ago.
Brazilian organized crime The PCC began to take shape in 1993, when prisoners incarcerated in Taubate state prison in Sao Paulo organized themselves to fight against deplorable living conditions and more rights within the prison system. Over the past 13 years, this organization has grown into one of the country's most powerful prison criminal networks, controlling activity within dozens of prisons in Sao Paulo and around the country, as well as important sales points and transport routes for drugs and guns flowing into Brazil from source countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia, Colombia, and Suriname.

The PCC became more active outside prisons in 1999, when Rio's top criminal organization - the Red Command (CV in Portuguese) - formed an alliance with PCC members who lived in Heliopolis, a shantytown located in the southeastern zone of Sao Paulo, according to a Rio de Janeiro Federal Police officer who asked to remain anonymous. Through this alliance, the CV sought to shift some of its drug trafficking activities from Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo. In Rio, CV leaders had been constantly harassed by police who exacted an extortion tax for allowing favelas (shantytowns) to be used as drug sales centers and contraband transshipment points. Additionally, the PCC in 1999 was a large criminal organization with more manpower than economic activity. Its alliance with the CV increased earnings for the PCC in Sao Paulo, while opening a new pool of man power for the CV to defend its turf from rival gangs in Rio de Janeiro.

Together, the two gangs control the drug trade in Brazil's two largest cities. They operate gun smuggling routes out of Paraguay and purchase weapons from corrupt policemen and military soldiers in Sao Paulo and Rio. High-level members of these gangs, especially the CV, continue to conduct a weapons-for-cocaine barter with members of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) based in the Colombian Amazon.

As recently as 30 April, three Colombians opened fire on a Brazilian patrol on the Rio Negro, a branch of the Amazon river that begins in an area of the Colombian Amazon reportedly controlled by the FARC. Brazilian authorities claim that the rifles were stamped with the Brazilian military coat of arms. The men were followed to the Colombian city of San Felipe, where their arms were confiscated. Brazilian Federal Police investigators told ISN Security Watch that they believe the arms were part of a cache of weapons to be traded for cocaine that traffickers would transport to Sao Paulo and Rio.

Red Command leader Fernandinho Beira-Mar is considered to have been one of the first Brazilian criminals to trade weapons for cocaine with the FARC. He was arrested by Colombian authorities in April 2001 and immediately extradited to Brazil. Yet the recent incident on the Brazilian-Colombian border in the Amazon indicates that five years later, this criminal exchange program still continues to supply the CV and the PCC with pure, Colombian cocaine.

Brazilian organized crime is just as powerful within the prison system as it is on the outside. And as the battle continues to dismantle these criminal networks, the occasional mega-rebellion reminds Brazilian authorities and civilians that the security sector here has a long way to go before it has any significant control over organized crime. These rebellions also highlight the superior communication networks operated by Brazilian organized crime.
Communication is fundamental When Fernandinho Beira-Mar was transferred from his prison cell in Rio de Janeiro after he orchestrated a prison riot there in September 2002 to mask the assassination of rival gang leaders, authorities found a number of luxury items including silk pajamas. But what surprised them more was the number of abandoned cell phones. Reports from Rio de Janeiro daily, O Globo, claim that Beira-Mar used up to a dozen cell phones to communicate with lieutenants and other subordinates in his black market network of guns and drugs shipments and sales.

In a similar fashion, leaders of the PCC use cell phones to communicate with one another between prisons and between prisoners and gang members on the outside. Both the Civil Police and the Federal Police operate listening posts, which enable security officials to piece together actionable intelligence on plans for rebellions and other gang operations. However, the use of two-way radios has made that task much more difficult.

In both Rio and Sao Paulo, two-way radios are used by criminals to relay messages to other incarcerated gang members and members on the outside. In some cases, one prisoner calls via cell a subordinate on the outside who uses a two-way radio to transmit the message to a third individual who then uses another cell phone to pass along the message to its recipient in another prison, reports O Globo. Each node on the communications chain may use any number of cell phones or two-way radios, making tracking the signals very difficult.

Attempts to block cell phone signals in Rio and Sao Paulo have been ineffective.

In the middle of the Mother's Day weekend riots, requests to shut down cell phone towers used by criminals to relay signals were presented to Brazil's telecommunications regulatory body when Marco Antonio Desgualdo, the head of the Sao Paulo state Civil Police, met with this body, called Anatel, on 15 May. The Folha de Sao Paulo reported that after the meeting Desgualdo announced that authorities would not be able to shut down cell towers without the acquiescence of telecommunications companies.

These same companies - Vivo, Tim, Telefonica, Embratel, and Nextel - complain that shutting down the towers would mean an unacceptable disruption of service for their law-abiding clients. Nothing short of a court order would shut down the towers, a legal instrument that takes too long to obtain.

In some prison systems, cell phone signal blockers are used, but they are quickly rendered obsolete by the rapid pace of technological advancement in cell phone systems.

The battle between Sao Paulo authorities and the cell phone companies to shut down towers in the event of security needs began in February 2001, when PCC members used cell phones to orchestrate simultaneous riots in 29 prisons across Sao Paulo. Security officials failed to win the battle then, too, but no one knew that such decisions five years ago would eventually facilitate the most violent uprising of Brazilian organized crime in years.
Corruption and politics Even as blocking cell signals and other methods to impede communication between criminals evolves into what may become a viable solution, many believe that such time is wasted on treating a problem that is not central to the real reason why the PCC was able to orchestrate such a widespread reign of disorder and rebellion. Corruption and politics, two of the usual suspects behind systemic dysfunction in democracies, are at the center of Brazil's security problems.

Bribes paid to security officials at all levels keep leaders of the PCC and the CV well informed of official planning. When authorities planned to move over 700 of the PCC leaders to a more secure prison environment to avoid what they learned was a planned Mother's Day rebellion, the PCC reacted by launching its rebellion two days early, disrupting the prisoner transport and a host of other activities planned to prevent the rebellion.

Low salaries exacerbate corruption because policemen and some lower-ranking members of the military are more likely to sell weapons from poorly organized stock piles to make ends meet. Over 70 per cent of the weapons used by Brazilian organized crime were made in Brazil. Many of them are sold to Paraguay where they enter the black market before returning to Brazil. Yet a significant amount are sold to criminals directly from stockpiles of seized weapons.

When budgets must be prepared, politics dictate who gets what slice of the pie. From 2004 to 2005, the Brazilian federal government reduced resources for the country's Penitentiary Fund by 37 per cent. This fund oversees the overall improvement and maintenance of Brazil's prison system. Meanwhile, the government of Sao Paulo state diverted from public security spending some US$81.3 million in the last five years. It was a decision in the reduction of security spending at the Sao Paulo state level that was likely made after the 2001 prison riots in that state.

Commenting on the event, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva said it was a demonstration of the power of organized crime in Brazil. His comments underline the fact that Brazilian organized crime is a force that has grown to threaten Brazilian cities as well as the nation. With links to organized crime in Paraguay and Suriname, and a thriving barter system with Colombia's FARC soldiers, the PCC and CV may soon become internationally known as a criminal network that has grown too big for Brazil's security system to handle.

Sam Logan (http://www.samuellogan.com) is an investigative journalist who has reported on security, energy, politics, economics, organized crime, terrorism, and black markets in Latin America since 1999. He is currently completing his work on Nice Guys Die First, a forthcoming non-fiction narrative about organized crime in Brazil.

Crime on Campus: Do Colleges Have Too Much Power?

Penn State students gather at the university to express solidarity with the alleged victims in the Jerry Sandusky case

A lot of big colleges have their own police departments. They are staffed with sworn officers who have the ability to investigate everything from burglaries to murder. Depending on the type of transgression and how it gets reported, some alleged crimes are dealt with in on-campus proceedings and some are passed on to local prosecutors. One of the most troubling aspects of the Penn State scandal is that school officials who were notified that a young boy was allegedly raped in a campus shower in 2002 did not report the incident to local authorities. Their inaction begs the question that even though there are laws in place that stipulate the proper protocol to follow upon hearing reports of sexual abuse, assault and harassment on campus, What's to stop officials at large-scale institutions — many of which operate full-fledged police departments — from sweeping such unpleasantness under the rug?

It's often hard to know how alleged crimes are handled on campus, in part because honor committees and other campus judicial systems have confidential proceedings. One of the few oversight tools the government has is the Clery Act. Named after a Lehigh University student who was raped and strangled by another student in 1986 in her dorm room, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act requires all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial-aid programs to disclose each year the number of alleged criminal offenses, including sexual offenses, that are recorded on campus or in other areas that are under university control, such as remote classrooms and fraternity houses. In addition, schools must also issue timely warnings in cases in which the reported crime represents a threat to the campus community. Last week the Department of Education announced that it was launching Clery Act investigations at two schools: one at Penn State involving allegations that former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky had sexually assaulted boys on campus and the other at Milwaukee's Marquette University for allegedly failing to report in a timely manner allegations that two athletes had sexually assaulted female students. (Read about whether colleges are doing enough to combat sexual violence.)

"If these allegations of sexual abuse are true, then this is a horrible tragedy for those young boys," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement announcing the department's investigation into Penn State. "If it turns out that some people at the school knew of the abuse and did nothing or covered it up, that makes it even worse. Schools and school officials have a legal and moral responsibility to protect children and young people from violence and abuse."

But despite having such responsibility, disclosing campus crime has often been a process fraught with confusion, loopholes, inaction, inconsistencies and, in some cases, negligence and cover-ups. To date, seven colleges and universities have paid Clery Act fines for failure to comply with the law; sometimes the violation stemmed from not having the appropriate institutional structures in place, sometimes from failing to disclose information. The most egregious case to date took place at Eastern Michigan University in 2006 when administrators were found to have covered up the rape and murder of a student, letting her parents think she had died of natural causes. The university was fined $350,000, the largest fine ever paid under the Clery Act. (A lawsuit forced Eastern Michigan to pay the victim's family an additional $2.5 million.)

Going after Penn State and Eastern Michigan for violating reporting requirements in these instances is a bit like going after Al Capone for tax evasion. Where the Clery Act wields the most influence is in how schools handle the much more common transgression of students being sexually assaulted.(Read about fighting school violence.)

Some of the schools that have been investigated for possible Clery Act violations have their own police forces. Others, like Marquette, do not. Because the members of Marquette's public-safety department are not sworn officers, the university had an obligation to report any accusations of sexual assault to a law-enforcement agency, and in the two recent cases involving athletes, the investigations may have been harmed because police did not get the information quickly, according to a statement Milwaukee County district attorney John Chisholm made in May.

The ability schools have to make decisions internally and utilize in-house departments is what allowed a Penn State football player to admit in a campus judicial proceeding in December 2002 to raping a fellow student during the fall semester, but not to have his punishment — a two-semester suspension — kick in until after he played in a January bowl game.

Stories like that are why the Department of Education, which is charged with regulating schools under the Clery Act, says it has stepped up its efforts in the past few years, after facing criticism in the past for not conducting enough reviews and not imposing penalties when violations were found. Under the Obama Administration, the department created a team dedicated to compliance, monitoring and enforcement of the Clery Act. So far this year, six institutions have been found at fault and are facing fines — Oregon State University, Lincoln University in Missouri, the University of Northern Iowa, the University of Vermont, Washington State University and Yale University — which is the same number of institutions that were fined in the first 18 years of the law's existence. Four other institutions are either in the process of being fined or are appealing. "It takes vigilance," Justin Hamilton, spokesman for the Department of Education said. "We can never be in every university all the time, nor do we want to be. We want to trust the schools and believe that they are living up to their obligations, but when they're not, we will act decisively, effectively and fairly." Hamilton says the department now regularly conducts campus visits even on those campuses where no incidents have been reported, closely monitors media reports and has conversations with people on the ground in an effort to be more proactive.

S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security on Campus, a nonprofit dedicated to the prevention of campus crime, said the Administration's efforts have helped. "One of the keys to ensuring that colleges and universities do not keep crimes, including sexual violence, secret is for the Department of Education to continue improving its Clery Act oversight," he said. At the time of the March 2002 incident involving Sandusky and a young boy in a Penn State locker room, only nine schools had ever even been reviewed under the law and only one fine (a modest $15,000) had ever been paid. Now a total of 49 schools have been reviewed, and 26 of them have been reviewed in just the past three years. According to Carter, the majority of the investigations in the past three years were randomly selected, whereas in the past, reviews were generally only conducted in the aftermath of a high-profile incident. Additionally, six-figure fines are now the norm rather than the exception. "The random reviews in tandem with six-figure fines are a strong incentive for institutions to not try and sweep things under the rug," Carter said. Still, he added, "Ultimately, sometimes there's no way to know what's happening on campus unless someone who does know comes forward."

Read about Yale's secret society.

Read about the top 10 crimes of 2010.

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