Smuggling

Four members of a Fallbrook family were charged in federal court Monday with operating what investigators called one of the longest-running illegal immigrant smuggling rings. Maria Del Carmen Alvarez, Indalecio Alvarez-Montoya, Juan Alvarez and Patricia Marquez were charged with smuggling immigrants through the San Ysidro border crossing with phony documents and in some cases hiding them in the trunks of vehicles. Prosecutors said the ring had operated since at least 1996. Among the charges are filing false income statements and charging smuggling fees to the immigrants' "sponsors" in the United States.

COLUMBUS, N.M. - From a small hill at a state park here, the border town of Palomas, Mexico, can be made out through the desert haze. It lies four miles to the south, but the corruption that roils Palomas and the rest of Northern Mexico may as well be a block away. Last year, black sedans and hatchbacks loaded with federal agents poured into Columbus, a town of 2,000 people, arresting the mayor, the police chief, a city trustee and nine others. They have all pleaded guilty in a gun-smuggling operation that sold about 100 firearms, mostly assault rifles, to Mexican drug cartels.

A former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was sentenced Friday to a seven-year prison term for conspiring to smuggle illegal immigrants and drugs through inspection lanes at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry. Luis Francisco Alarid, 32, was arrested in May on suspicion of permitting several vehicles filled with illegal immigrants and 11 kilograms of marijuana to enter the country. He admitted in his plea agreement to several similar smuggling attempts from February to May 2008, federal authorities said.

The Transportation Security Administration labeled the drug-smuggling case at Los Angeles International Airport that came to light Wednesday as a "significant" breach in security . If so, there's a bigger problem than just the LAX case. Earlier this month, a former TSA officer admitted his role in a drug-smuggling scandal from 2010 to 2011 on the East Coast. The case is taking place in New Haven , Conn., and others involved have already pleaded guilty. Here's what the Hartford Courant reported on April 17 : "Three Transportation Security Administration officers, two police officers and more than a dozen drug dealers in Florida, New York and Connecticut are charged in the smuggling conspiracy that delivered illegal oxycodone pills from Florida to the Waterbury [Conn.]

Smugglers are flooding the Southern California pet market with disease-ridden puppies from Mexico, prompting law enforcement crackdowns, raising public health concerns and breaking the hearts of owners who watch their dogs die, often within hours of buying them. Animal control officials estimate that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of puppies have died since an underground market, stretching from puppy mills in Mexico to street corners in San Diego and Los Angeles, was uncovered last year.

Sixteen Chinese men and teenage boys were discovered Saturday morning in a cargo container at the Port of Long Beach, immigration authorities said. The men were in "relatively good condition," said Tom Graber, area port director for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS arrested all 16 stowaways, two of whom said they were minors. They are being held at the INS processing center on Terminal Island. The stowaways were found before 11 a.m.

A Haitian man was charged with human smuggling Monday after federal authorities accused him of piloting a boat overloaded with migrants that capsized off Florida's coast, killing at least nine people, including a pregnant woman. Jimmy Metellus, 33, is scheduled to appear in federal court Wednesday on charges of smuggling that caused the death of another person. A conviction could result in the death penalty or life in prison. Metellus, a Haitian citizen with permanent U.S.

Federal authorities have arrested eight people -- and were seeking a ninth -- with ties to the Drew Street clique of the Avenues gang on suspicion of drug trafficking and human smuggling. Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement served search and arrest warrants Wednesday morning and Tuesday night at locations in the Imperial Valley and Los Angeles. One of the sites in the 2800 block of Avenue 34 in northeast Los Angeles was the base of operations for the alleged smuggling ring and served as a "drop house" before illegal immigrants were taken to their final locations, ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said in a statement.

Re "L.A. Bus Firm Investigated in Immigrant Smuggling Scheme," Dec. 11: The Justice Department and the INS are going after the Golden State Transportation bus company. I would like to see them follow the money trail and go after the destination where these illegal aliens were being taken. The companies who hire illegal aliens are behind all this. They are the ones that provide the money for the smuggling and traffic in slave labor. I want to see the Justice Department and the INS go after the real culprits!

Re "Tyson Foods Is Indicted in Immigrant Smuggling," Dec. 20: So much for the notion of illegal immigrants stealing jobs that belong to Americans! Obviously not all U.S. companies are willing to pay the wages American workers would demand. It is good to see the INS go after one of the greedy corporations at the root of this problem and not just the hapless immigrants who come here desperate to feed their families. Sheila Peck Huntington Beach

A private company has agreed to pay millions to install technology in California prisons to block Web searches, text messages and phone calls by inmates using smuggled phones. The deal won't cost taxpayers a dime, state officials insist, because the company, Global Tel Link, also owns the traditional pay phones prisoners can legally use. Company officials are betting that once the contraband cell devices are disabled, demand for pay phones will skyrocket. Like other states, California is battling a plague of phones smuggled to inmates.

Two illegal immigrants were shot to death by camouflaged gunmen northwest of Tucson in an incident evoking a pair of 2007 attacks, Arizona authorities said Wednesday. One of the victims was identified as Gerardo Perez-Ruiz, 39, of Toluca, Mexico. The second man remained unidentified but was thought to be from Guatemala. They were among a group of 20 to 30 people riding in the bed of a Chevy truck on Sunday when men with rifles ambushed them, Pima County Sheriff's Deputy Dawn Barkman said in an interview.

The government of Turkey is asking American museums to return dozens of artifacts that were allegedly looted from the country's archaeological sites, opening a new front in the search for antiquities smuggled out of their original countries through an illicit trade. The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are among the institutions that the Turkish government has contacted, officials say. Turkey believes the antiquities were illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country after the passage of a 1906 law that gave the state ownership of antiquities in the ground.

Craigslist offers an array of opportunities -- but hiring human smugglers isn't legally among them, federal authorities say. They've arrested a Mexican man who allegedly used the site to recruit staff for his Texas-based human-smuggling operation. José Gustavo Diaz-Velasquez , 29, was arrested last week in the border town of Rio Grande City, Texas, after a yearlong federal investigation. Immigration agents began investigating Diaz-Velasquez in August after they discovered nearly a dozen Craigslist posts recruiting drivers for the smuggling operation, U.S. Atty.

Despite intensified counter-narcotics efforts over the last five years, the military's ability to stop drug smuggling into the U.S. from Latin America has declined as planes and ships have been diverted to combat operations around the globe, according to a senior military officer. As a result, the Navy and Coast Guard are stopping one of three suspected seaborne drug shipments headed to American shores, Gen. Douglas Fraser, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, told reporters Wednesday.

Depending on your point of view, "This Is Not a Film" both is and isn't a film. What it is for sure is the only kind of film its co-director Jafar Panahi can make for now. Panahi is not just one of Iran's top filmmakers, he is its most politically outspoken, director of such works as "Offside," "The Circle" and "Crimson Gold" that deal even more directly than the Oscar-winning "A Separation" with the restrictions placed on ordinary life by that...

California authorities announced indictments Wednesday against a distribution cell of the Sinaloa drug cartel that allegedly smuggled large amounts of cocaine and marijuana into Southern California through the border crossing at Calexico. The 16 suspects are accused of transporting the drugs in compartments hidden in vehicles and then storing the contraband at stash houses in the Los Angeles area, authorities said. From there, authorities said, the drugs were distributed to cities across the U.S. and Canada.

Federal wildlife investigators in California and other states say they have cracked an international smuggling ring that trafficked for years in sawed-off rhinoceros horns, which fetch stratospheric prices in Vietnam and China for their supposed cancer-curing powers. More than 150 federal agents and other local enforcement officers raided homes and businesses and made several arrests in a dozen states over the weekend, including three alleged traffickers in Southern California. "By taking out this ring of rhino horn traffickers, we have shut down a major source of black market horn and dealt a serious blow to rhino horn smuggling both in the U.S. and globally," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe.

A jailer with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has been arrested on suspicion of smuggling cocaine into the Men's Central Jail with intent to sell it to inmates, authorities said Tuesday. Remington Orr, 24, who is not a deputy but has worked for the last four years as a custody employee, was arrested late Monday as he was preparing to enter the Men's Central Jail with the drug, said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for Sheriff Lee Baca. "Obviously, if anybody tries to do this they will be caught, arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Whitmore said.