Nation roundup for June 6
Fla. widow, 84, claims $590M Powerball jackpot
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — An 84-year-old Florida widow who bought her Powerball ticket after another customer let her get ahead in line came forward Wednesday to claim the biggest undivided lottery jackpot in history: $590 million.
Gloria C. MacKenzie, a retiree from Maine and a mother of four who lives in a modest, tin-roof house in Zephyrhills, where the lone winning ticket in the May 18 drawing was sold, took her prize in a lump sum of just over $370 million. After federal taxes, she is getting about $270 million, lottery officials said.
She did not speak to a crowd of reporters outside lottery headquarters, leaving quickly in a silver Ford Focus with her son and family friends. She was accompanied at the lottery offices by two unidentified attorneys.
MacKenzie bought the winning ticket at a Publix supermarket in the town of about 13,300 people 30 miles northeast of Tampa. It is best known for the bottled spring water that bears its name — and now, for one of the biggest lottery winners of all time.
The $590 million was the second-largest lottery jackpot in history, behind a $656 million Mega Millions prize in March 2012, but that sum was split, with three winning tickets.
In a statement read by lottery officials, MacKenzie said she purchased the ticket after another buyer “was kind enough to let me go ahead in line.” MacKenzie let the lottery computers generate the numbers at random. She said she also bought four other tickets for the drawing.
“We are grateful with this blessing of winning the Florida Lottery Powerball jackpot,” the statement said. “We hope that everyone would give us the opportunity to maintain our privacy for our family’s benefit.”
The winner had 60 days to claim the prize. Lottery spokesman David Bishop said MacKenzie, her lawyers and her financial adviser spent about two hours going through the necessary paperwork.
“They had clearly been preparing for this. They took all this time to get everything in order,” Bishop said.
Minutes after the announcement, a dozen reporters in Zephyrhills were camped outside MacKenzie’s gray duplex, which backs up to a dirt alley and is across from a cow pasture.
Neighbors were surprised by her good fortune.
“She didn’t say anything about it. She’s so quiet and secluded. She’s usually in the house,” said James Hill. “I’m very happy for her. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. She was always pleasant and smiling.”
Another neighbor, Don Cecil, joked, “I hope she gets a better place to live.”
MacKenzie’s neighbors offered few details about her life. They said she mostly kept to herself, but they saw her take short walks along the street and exchanged pleasantries with her.
Her house, situated among mostly mobile homes and pre-fabricated houses, has a chain-link fence with a sheet-metal roof and an old TV antenna.
MacKenzie retired to Zephyrhills more than a decade ago from rural Maine with her husband, Ralph, who died in 2005.
Back in her hometown of East Millinocket, Maine, relatives and friends were surprised to hear of her good fortune.
Robert MacKenzie, Ralph’s brother, said the couple met just after World War II after Ralph got out of the Navy. He went to work in the town’s paper mill, laboring as a technician for almost four decades.
He said the couple raised four children in East Millinocket, a town of under 2,000 people in northern Maine. A daughter and son still live in East Millinocket, another son lives in Florida and another daughter lives out of state, possibly in Massachusetts, he said.
Robert MacKenzie said he didn’t know his sister-in-law had won until a reporter called him.
“Holy mackerel,” he said when told of her winnings. He added: “It hasn’t soaked in, but I’m happy for her. That would be great because she’s a widow and she can have a nice home now.”
One of the MacKenzies’ daughters, Melinda “Mindy” MacKenzie, a high school teacher, still lives in the family home in East Millinocket in a quiet middle-class neighborhood of white clapboard houses.
Ralph MacKenzie enjoyed snowmobiling, hunting and fishing, said Andrew Hopkins, a retired high school teacher and assistant principal who taught some of the MacKenzie children.
“They were good people. That’s about all I can tell you,” said Hopkins, who lives across the street.
SF, NY officials to meet over cellphone thefts
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Top law enforcement officials from San Francisco and New York plan to meet with some of the nation’s largest smartphone makers next week to help thwart the rise in cellphone thefts and robberies.
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Wednesday that their meeting scheduled to take place in New York City on June 13 will be dubbed a “Smartphone Summit.”
Gascon and Schneiderman said they plan to meet with representatives from Apple Inc., Google Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. and urge them to create new technology to permanently and quickly disable stolen smartphones, making them worthless to thieves.
In San Francisco, where more than half all robberies involve a cellphone, Gascon has called on the companies to create new technology such as a “kill switch” to render phones useless. His office cites a 27-year old tourist who suffered severe knife wounds to his face and throat two weeks ago after being robbed by two men over his iPhone.
In New York, Schneiderman said there was a 40 percent spike in cellphone thefts last year. Authorities there have coined the thefts of the popular iPhone and other Apple-related products as “Apple-picking.”
“With 1.6 million Americans falling victim to smartphone theft in 2012, this has become a national epidemic,” Gascón said in a statement. “Unlike other types of crimes, smartphone theft can be eradicated with a simple technological solution.”
Nearly 175 million cellphones — mostly smartphones — have been sold in the U.S. in the past year and account for $69 billion in sales, according to IDC, a Massachusetts-based research firm.
And now almost one 1 of 3 robberies nationwide involves the theft of a mobile phone, reports the Federal Communications Commission, which is coordinating formation this fall of a highly anticipated national database system to track cellphones reported stolen.
Schneiderman said a recent study found that lost and stolen cellphones cost consumers over $30 billion, last year.
“The theft of handheld devices is the fastest-growing street crime, and increasingly, incidents are turning violent,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “It’s time for manufacturers to be as innovative in solving this problem as they have been in designing devices that have reshaped how we live.”
Late last month, Gascon — in a letter to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a coalition of police chiefs from across the country — urged them to press for kill switches.
“Despite the growing threat to public safety, cell-phone manufacturers and carriers continue to look the other way,” Gascón wrote. “It’s time that corporations take social responsibility and do their part to end the victimization of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
In response, the police chiefs association followed suit and sent a letter on Monday to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. While commending the FCC and the CTIA wireless provider trade association on the national stolen phone database, they suggested that kill switch technology is “the only effective way” to go.
“By rendering phones completely useless, an FCC mandate for kill-switch technology will drastically reduce this major crime problem,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, president of the chiefs’ association wrote.
US targets leaders of violent street gang
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government on Wednesday designated six leaders of the violent street gang MS-13 as international criminals, stepping up a crackdown on the sprawling U.S. and Central American gang’s finances.
The Treasury Department in October designated MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, as an international criminal organization. The Obama administration said that makes the gang subject to penalties by the Office of Foreign Assets Control and gives the U.S. an opportunity to hinder MS-13’s ability to funnel money to its leaders in El Salvador or launder criminal proceeds through otherwise legitimate businesses.
Adding the names of six of the gang’s purported leaders allows the U.S. to target their bank accounts individually.
The men added to the transnational criminal organization designation are: Moris Alexander Bercian Manchon, 28; Jose Misael Cisneros Rodriguez, 37; Marvin Geovanny Monterrosa-Larios, 39; Moises Humberto Rivera-Luna, 44; Saul Antonio Turcios Angel, 35; and Borromeo Enrique Henriquez Solorzano, 34.
All are from El Salvador. Turcios, Rivera-Luna and Monterrosa-Larios have been indicted in the United States on criminal charges. Rivera-Luna and Monterrosa-Larios are jailed in El Salvador and Turcios’ whereabouts are unknown. Federal court records do not list attorneys of any of the three men.
Henriquez is believed to be the head of the gang’s operations in El Salvador, despite being jailed in the Central American country.
The six men could not immediately be located by The Associated Press for comment.
Adam Szubin, who is the head of OFAC, said federal authorities are moving to freeze any assets the men may have in the United States, whether it be bank accounts or real property. While at least four of the six gang leaders are believed to be in prison in El Salvador, authorities believe they are still actively directing MS-13 operations and profiting from crimes including human and drug smuggling, racketeering, extortion and kidnapping.
Waldemar Rodriguez, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deputy assistant director for transnational crime and public safety, said financial penalties are part of a broader effort to halt the gang’s activities in the U.S. Since 2006, about 4,200 MS-13 members have been arrested “yet international criminal activities continue.”
“MS-13 is a rising public threat,” Rodriguez said. “We must take them on where ever they are.”
The gang was founded more than two decades ago by immigrants flee El Salvador’s civil war. Taking lessons from the brutal conflict to the streets of Los Angeles, its founders built a reputation as one of the most ruthless and sophisticated street gangs, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jason Shatarsky.
MS-13 has a strong presence in Southern California, the District of Columbia and northern Virginia, all areas with substantial Salvadoran populations, and as many 10,000 members in 46 states. The gang is also allied with several of Mexico’s warring drug cartels.
Shatarsky has said MS-13 members target residents and business owners for extortion, among other crimes. The gang is active throughout Central America and in parts of Mexico, too. Authorities in Europe have reported evidence of MS-13 expanding operations there.
Numerous killings in the U.S. have been attributed to the gang, including the 2003 slaying a pregnant Virginia teenager who had become an informant. Brenda Paz, 17, was stabbed to death and her body was left along the banks of the Shenandoah River.
Gang members have been linked to the 2007 execution style shooting deaths of three friends in a schoolyard in Newark, N.J. One victim was slashed with a machete before being shot. Six people have been charged in the case.
Allegations of sex, drugs roil Baltimore jail
BALTIMORE (AP) — Inmates often complain of idleness, but Tavon White apparently had no trouble keeping busy behind bars.
Investigators say the man nicknamed “Bulldog” impregnated four female corrections officers at the Baltimore jail while running a sophisticated criminal organization that smuggled in drugs and cell phones and employed guards as gang associates. A federal indictment charging White and two-dozen others in a contraband-smuggling conspiracy has offered an embarrassing glimpse into a jail where inmates stand accused of controlling the very officers hired to guard them.
Effects of the scandal have been widely felt, and state lawmakers plan to hold a hearing Thursday to discuss problems at the state-run jail.
The state prisons director has moved his office into the jail to offer closer oversight, the jail’s security director has been dismissed and top administrators there have undergone polygraph tests to determine what they knew about the criminal activity. Gov. Martin O’Malley, a potential Democratic presidential contender in 2016, announced a task force last week to fight corruption at the jail but has also been criticized by Republican lawmakers about the detention center’s conditions.
The indictment alleges widespread dysfunction at the Baltimore City Detention Center, a downtown jail that holds thousands of defendants awaiting trial or serving short sentences.
It accuses female corrections officers of sneaking in drugs and cellphones — sometimes in their shoes or in food — to incarcerated members of the Black Guerilla Family, a gang formed in California’s San Quentin prison in the 1960s. The inmates in turn distributed the drugs to fellow detainees and used the contraband phones to arrange sexual encounters, spread the word about impending cell searches and conduct gang-related business with members on the streets, prosecutors say. They used reloadable, pre-paid debit cards to pay for their purchases, launder funds and transfer proceeds to gang members on the outside, the indictment alleges.
“There are impacts on the outside world of this activity that’s going on in the inside,” Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. Attorney for Maryland, said in an interview. “There’s crime going on outside the jail as a result of people inside continuing to engage in gang activity.”
Prosecutors say the man at the center was White, a 36-year-old with a long rap sheet who was being held on an attempted murder charge. He ascended to a gang leadership position — acquiring the title of “Bushman” — soon after arriving several years ago, investigators say. He impregnated four female guards, one twice. Two had his name tattooed on their bodies.
“This is my jail, you understand that,” White told a friend in a January call recorded by investigators, court papers allege. “I make every final call in this jail, everything come to me. Before a (expletive) hit a (expletive) in the mouth, guess what they do, they gotta run it through me. I tell them whether it’s a go ahead and they can do it or whether they hold back.”
White’s lawyer declined to comment on the allegations. The defendants face charges including money laundering conspiracy and drug possession or distribution.
At least some of the jail guards seem to have reveled in their sexual relationships, acquiring money and status as high-level gang associates.
Inmates posted graffiti on the wall listing corrections officers they said were willing to trade sex for money. Internal gang documents recovered by investigators reveal that members were instructed to target guards with insecurities and low self-esteem, authorities say.
“I love money. I love it. I swear to God. Where there’s a will there’s a way. You hear me? I got to get it. So I had to figure out how I was going to come at you,” one female corrections officer is recorded as telling White.
Corrections department spokesman Rick Binetti said that although the indictment “reads like a Hollywood script,” the number of correctional officers implicated represents a small fraction of the workforce. He said the department proactively requested the investigation to help root out corruption and has made progress in efforts to seize contraband cellphones and disrupt gangs.
“This is a question of integrity here,” Binetti said. “Ninety-nine percent of our (correctional officers) understand that this isn’t kosher activity.”
The defendants appear to have exploited the vulnerabilities of a jail culture that cycles detainees in and out, lacks the more defined structure of federal prisons and draws underpaid, sometimes apathetic, staff into an inherently challenging environment, said gang expert Jorja Leap, a social welfare professor at UCLA.
“You’ve got chaos, violence, a porous environment and law enforcement who doesn’t want to be there,” she said.
Another jail scandal took place in New Orleans, where 14 inmates were indicted last month in connection with videos showing them with drugs, beer and flashing a loaded gun behind bars. The images prompted the mayor to call for federal oversight for the facility.
The allegations in Maryland have stirred responses from the highest levels of state government.
“The indictment that came down makes us look like a third-world nation,” said Republican Del. Michael Smigiel, who recently toured the jail and called it a “kennel for humans.”
“It’s in such poor shape,” he added. “I’m not a bleeding heart — people who do crimes should be willing to do the time — but you have people down there who have never stood trial yet, and they’re in subhuman conditions.”
Republican lawmakers have suggested that O’Malley is too focused on national politics at the expense of local problems like the jail. The governor, who has called the allegations ugly and shocking, has called for reforms in the hiring and screening of corrections officers and has also formed a task force to focus on inmates’ access to drugs, cellphones and fraternization with corrections officers.
The department says all jail staff is in the process of being interviewed and workers will undergo polygraph tests if needed, and officers from other facilities are being rotated in to work shifts at the jail. State officials are also discussing expanding the use of technology to be able to block cellphone calls from inside the jail.
“I think jail management — not just in Baltimore, but nationally — has probably not caught up with technology,” Rosenstein said. “Because the existence of technology has really changed that dynamic, where somebody gets one smart phone in the facility, you’ve completely lost the ability to cut people off from the outside world because they can use that phone for all the things we use phones for in the outside world.”
Still, it’s hard to know how much impact any one reform can make.
“I think there’s something no one wants to accept, which is that there are some criminals and gang members — and in particular gang leaders — who are very smart people,” Leap said. “Those who get into leadership positions are extremely intelligent people that, had they been in another time and place, would have been MBAs and CEOs of major corporations.”
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