-from wboy.com-

By Sarah Kapis

Taylor County authorities seized drugs, paraphernalia and a large amount of cash in roadside bust

GRAFTON - A Petersburg man is behind bars after police say they found methamphetamine and over $20,000 in his car

Police got a call claiming a man was sitting in a car on the side of Route 50 East with his hand hanging out of the window Thursday afternoon.

When officers approached the green Nissan Maxima, a Taylor County Sheriff’s Deputy noticed a pipe and what appeared to be a bag of crystal meth on the floor.

After searching the vehicle, members of the Tygart Valley Drug and Violent Crimes Unit seized the drugs and $21,000 in cash.

Jeffrey Butler, 35, of Petersburg was arrested and taken to jail. He is being charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.

Taylor County Sheriff Robert Beltner said he believes Butler is part of a larger drug trafficking ring. The case is still under investigation.

-from kxmb.com-

Four people face charges after a drug-related investigation in McClusky prompted by a report of stolen diesel fuel.

Authorities say the investigation Wednesday also included a search for a Bismarck man who fled handcuffed from a police vehicle.

Authorities say 26-year-old Benji Weyrauch was eventually found sleeping in a bedroom of a home, still in handcuffs.

He faces several charges, including escape.

The most serious charges were filed against 49-year-old Mike Delvo of McClusky.
He faces several methamphetamine-related charges, as well as possession of marijuana.

-from kten.com-

The Grayson County Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit recenly busted a meth lab in Denison. The lab was located in the 14-hundred block of Bullock Street.

Deputies arrived at the home and smelled a strong odor of cat and dog feces and urine. Deputies say the odor was so strong, it covered the smell of several types of chemicals inside the home that are used to make methamphetamine.

There were approximately nine dogs and 25 cats living in the home. Deputies even found one cat that was dead on a bed, covered with a towel. Deputies spent six hours at the home, and recovered numerous chemicals, glassware, glass meth pipes, and pseudo-ephedrine packets.

53 year-old Ellen Hollenbeck was arrested.

Grayson County narcotics deputies also recovered several pounds of marijuna growing at a home in Denison, on Trail Road. The suspect at the residence, admitted to growing marijuana, and showed deputies a large garden where three large marijuana plants were growing.

Inside the home, deputies found two large marijuana plants, approximately five feet tall and five feet wide hanging from the ceiling.

The suspect was not arrested at the scene due to medical complications, but a warrant for his arrest will be issued at a later date.

-from news10now.com-

Special agents in Clinton County have made a $1.3 million drug bust. Customs agents working with border patrol and state police busted two Quebec residents Wednesday night as they tried to cross Lake Champlain into Vermont.

During a search of the vehicles, they found more than 28 pounds of cocaine inside. The two men, in their early 20s, are charged with possession and intent to sell cocaine.

Officials said the men wanted to cross into Vermont before taking the drugs to Canada.

-from theglobeandmail.com-

Buffalo (AP) — Three Canadians were arrested after U.S. federal agents seized about 27 kilograms of ecstasy, 515 kilograms of marijuana and about 13 kilograms of cocaine in a pair of arrests this week.

The bags of ecstasy tablets and marijuana were found Thursday when Terrence Helstern, 51, of Barrie, Ont., tried to cross the Peace Bridge into Buffalo, N.Y., with a commercial shipment of steel plating, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman. Mr. Helstern was charged with importing drugs.

At Rouses Point in northern New York, agents on Wednesday seized cocaine headed to Canada after stopping two cars trying to cross the Lake Champlain Bridge into Vermont. David Legault, 22, and Etienne Matuszewski, 21, both of Montreal, were charged with cocaine possession.

-from ksat.com-

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — State and federal authorities raided three homes on the west side for drugs, cash, weapons and property Friday.

The busts were the culmination of a four-month investigation that led to 13 federal indictments.So far, eight people have been arrested in the Buena Vista area, indicted on charges of distributing crack cocaine. One of those arrested was an 82-year-old woman who owned the three homes.

Officials said they seized drugs, cash, weapons and several vehicles.

Police are still searching for five people indicted on drug charges.Federal agents said that during the course of their investigation they saw between 50 and 70 drug transactions a day.Officials hope they can make the charges stick this time, as they had been to the homes before with little result.Residents hoped this would be the start of a fight to keep crime off their streets.

-from cnn.com-

WASHINGTON (AP) — Law enforcement agents broke up a Colombian money-laundering ring Wednesday, arresting 26 people in three countries and seizing more than $16.5 million in cash and drugs, drug enforcement officials said.

Arrests were made in Bogota and Cali, Colombia; New York, New Jersey, Florida and London, England, according to Drug Enforcement Administration officials. They requested anonymity because they were speaking in advance of the formal announcement later in New York.

More than $10 million in alleged drug profits and more than $6.5 million in cocaine, heroin and marijuana were seized in the operation conducted by DEA, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service, New York city and state police and Suffolk County, New York, police.

The officials said the investigation targeted Colombian criminal organizations that laundered millions of dollars worth of illegal drug-smuggling profits through the sophisticated black market peso exchange, an illegal currency exchange system.

All transactions in this exchange are verbal, with no paper trail. It uses peso transactions in Colombia and dollar transactions in the United States with no visible connection between them. These attributes make this black market very hard for agents to detect and for that reason has become one of the primary methods that Colombian drug traffickers use to launder their illegal profits.

In the exchange, one or more “peso brokers” serve as middlemen between narcotics traffickers who control huge amounts of illegal drug profits in the United States and Colombian business people seeking to purchase cheap U.S. dollars outside the highly regulated Colombian banking system.

The process involves three steps:

First, the drug smugglers sell their U.S. drug profits to peso brokers in Colombia in exchange for Colombian pesos. Second, the peso brokers use criminals in the United States to collect the drug money and deposit it in U.S. banks. Finally, the peso brokers sell the drug dollars at less than the official exchange rate to executives of Colombian businesses who want to purchase goods abroad for import to Colombia.

In one scheme, the officials said, a peso broker in Colombia arranged to launder illegal drug money located in New York. He arranged for other defendants to collect the cash and turn it over to another defendant who used it to buy used truck parts from a scrap yard he controlled in Lindenhurst, New Jersey. The parts were shipped to Venezuela and Colombia and resold for pesos, the officials said.

U.S. agents obtained seizure warrants for bank accounts throughout the United States that they said had been used to aid the laundering. Colombian agents conducted 24 searches in Bogota and Cali.

The defendants include people from every level of the operations — peso brokers in Colombia, their criminal confederates in the United States and Colombian business people who knowingly acquired the cheap drug dollars to buy imports, the officials said.

-from cnn.com-

NEW YORK (CNN) — The rapper known as Fabolous, whose legal name is John Jackson, was arraigned Wednesday on multiple weapons charges, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

The 28-year-old hit maker was shot in the thigh as he left hip-hop impresario Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’ restaurant Justin’s at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday.

The rapper’s entourage, Kevin Bass, 18; Percell German, 23; and Rascharm Davis, 29 — all of Brooklyn, New York — apparently helped the injured Jackson into a 2005 Dodge Magnum.

Police said the car ran a red light, and officers who pulled the men over discovered two loaded guns inside. Both weapons were unlicensed, Sgt. Mike Wysokowski told The Associated Press.

All four men were arrested and charged with criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of a defaced firearm, police said.

The rapper was in police custody Tuesday after being treated at Bellevue Hospital. Police are searching for the shooter.

Manhattan district attorney spokesperson Barbara Thompson said Jackson’s next court appearance is Friday, October 20.

A Brooklyn native, Jackson is known for his hits “Breathe” and “Can’t Deny it.” He has worked with respected hip-hop producers such as Scott Scorch, the Neptunes and Just Blaze.

Pop audiences will recognize him from his rap interlude on Jennifer Lopez’s 2005 dance single “Get Right.”

Calls made to Jackson’s record label, Def Jam Records, were not returned. Jackson is the latest of many rappers who have been shot or involved in gunfights.

Deshaun Holton, the rapper known as Proof and a member of the hip-hop group D12 associated with Eminem, was shot to death in April in Detroit.

In May, the New York Post reported that a gunfight broke out at a Queens barbeque at which G-Unit rapper Lloyd Banks — affiliated with rapper 50 Cent — was eating. An 18-year-old bystander was hit in the neck, his family told the newspaper.

The same month, a rapper named Jamal “Gravy” Woolard was shot outside New York City’s hip-hip radio station Hot 97.

In February 2005, 50 Cent and rapper The Game got into an argument that erupted in gunfire outside the station.

In 2001, a member of another rapper’s entourage was shot in the back outside Hot 97. The incident led to rapper L’il Kim serving jail time — which came to an end with her release earlier this year — for lying to authorities about the shooting.