Criminals

Guns don't kill people, it's true. Bullets do. "Without ammo, a handgun is only good for pistol-whipping someone," notes Assemblyman Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles). "Ammo is the lifeblood of a handgun." On Sept. 11, the last day of this year's regular legislative session, De Leon narrowly won final passage of a bill to regulate sales of handgun ammunition. The assemblyman has a long list of gang shooting horror stories from his district, which stretches from Hollywood to the Alhambra city line and includes Echo Park, Lincoln Heights and part of East Los Angeles.

Charles Samuel, the parolee accused of killing Lily Burk, was convicted 22 years ago of another violent robbery that bore a striking similarity to last month's abduction and slaying of the high school senior in downtown Los Angeles, according to court records reviewed by The Times. As in the Burk case, Samuel was accused of kidnapping someone -- this time an elderly man -- and driving in the man's car to an ATM, where he demanded that the man withdraw cash.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said Wednesday that he would extradite the first former paramilitary warlord to face U.S. justice after he violated a government peace deal by ordering crimes from his prison cell. Colombia's Supreme Court earlier authorized Carlos Mario Jimenez to be sent to the United States for trial on drug-running and other charges. Under the Colombian peace deal, paramilitary bosses had their U.S.

An influential U.S. senator sent a series of letters Friday seeking additional details about four liver transplants at UCLA Medical Center involving patients who were suspected members or associates of Japanese organized crime groups. "While surgeons do not seek to pass moral judgment on the patients they treat, Americans hope at the very least that foreign criminal figures wait in line along with the rest of us," Sen. Charles E.

Doris Payne never carried a gun. She never smashed a window or broke into a safe to take what she wanted. She just crossed her pantyhosed legs and murmured about the filigree ring under the glass. She wondered aloud about matching earrings. She would promise to return in 45 minutes, and only after Payne wafted away in her flowered dress would the clerk count the rings and come up short. But the decades passed, and the job grew more difficult. Her face became familiar.

Straddling a wooden crate filled with $1 million in cash ransom, a cranky old pirate bellows names from a notebook as his anxious, bleary-eyed minions lean against the stone walls of their cramped hide-out. The grizzled buccaneer, chain-smoking Marlboros as he taps into his calculator, checks the notebook again for outstanding loans or fines before counting out each man's share of the bounty in musty $100 bills paid to release a hijacked Thai ship off the Somali coast.

Internet social networking site MySpace said it had detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, more than four times the figure it had initially reported. The company, owned by media conglomerate News Corp., said in May that it had deleted about 7,000 user profiles that belonged to convicted offenders. MySpace attracts about 60 million unique visitors monthly in the U.S.

Panama's ruling party has nominated a lawmaker who was charged with the murder of a U.S. soldier in the 1990s to head the National Assembly. The Democratic Revolutionary Party's backing for Pedro Miguel Gonzalez means that he is almost certain to win the job in a Sept. 1 vote. Gonzalez, 42, was indicted in the United States on charges that he fatally shot U.S. Army Sgt. Zak Hernandez in June 1992, a day before a visit by President George H.W. Bush.

Struggling to boost it ranks in wartime, the Army has sharply increased the number of recruits who would normally be barred because of criminal misconduct or alcohol and illegal drug problems, again raising concerns that the Army is lowering its standards to make recruiting goals. Last year, almost 1 in 6 Army recruits had a problem in their background that would have disqualified them from military service.

The Los Angeles Police Department lacks the resources to handle a wave of cold-case investigations expected to result from evidence gathered through a new state program that collects DNA from convicted criminals, officials said Monday. Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Kahn told a Los Angeles City Council panel that the LAPD could expect an average of one "hit" each day from a database of DNA being built under Proposition 69, which was approved by voters in 2004.