No presidential pardon for him
Hal Turner, a self proclaimed “white nationalist,” white supremacist, blogger and radio host who was arrested this summer for encouraging his listeners to take up arms against three judges, found himself in deeper trouble when federal prosecutors alleged that he may have also made threats against President Barack Obama.
The threats were revealed in court papers unsealed in Brooklyn Federal Court last week.
In them, prosecutors allege that the Secret Service was investigating him for “talking about assassinating President Obama.”
That’s not a big leap for Turner, who is currently charged with encouraging his listeners to take up arms against three judges in Chicago’s United States Court of Appeals who upheld ordinances banning handguns there.
Turner allegedly wrote on his blog that the judges deserved to be killed. He also put the photos of the judges on his web site, claiming that “their blood will replenish the tree of liberty.”
Because of the incendiary nature of the charges, Turner’s case was ordered to be held in a different venue: Brooklyn.
Turner’s attorney, who attests that Turner’s conservative and racist bluster was part of the man’s cover as an FBI informant, said that his client was never arrested on charges that he had made threats against Barack Obama.
In fact, in a weird way that fact proves the FBI defense, he said, suggesting that the federal government had issued a letter protecting Turner from being prosecuted for making incendiary comments about public officials.
His attorney had not produced any documentation to that fact as this paper went to press.
Clinton Hill crackdown
Twelve would-be drug dealers were indicted earlier this week for turning parts of Clinton Hill into scenes from the HBO cop drama, “The Wire.”
During a press conference on Tuesday, Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes said that the suspects dealt crack and marijuana throughout the neighborhood in public view on the streets, in residential apartment buildings and local businesses. The arrests were made after several successful undercover drug buys were performed. Some of the buys were videotaped.
The investigation into the arrests, which was dubbed “Operation Grand Slam,” was the result of several local community complaints that spurred a joint investigation with the DA’s office and the NYPD.
Sugar mommy sentenced
A woman who managed her family’s sex trafficking ring was sentenced to 121 months in prison last week.
Federal prosecutors said that Consuelo Correto Valencia, 61, will be spending the next decade behind bars for her participation in the operation in which young Mexican women were taken away from their native land and brought to New York and forced into prostitution.
From 1991 through 2004, Carreto Valencia reportedly “managed” her family’s sex trafficking operation based in Tenancingo, Tlaxcala, Mexico.
Officials said that she and her sons, Josue Flores Carreto and Gerardo Flores Carreto, and others allegedly recruited young, uneducated women and girls from impoverished areas of Mexico and “used or approved of a combination of deception, fraud, threats, and physical violence – including rape and coerced abortion – to force them to prostitute themselves in brothels throughout the New York City metropolitan area, including Queens and Brooklyn.”
Carreto Valencia and her family made hundreds of thousands of dollars in prostitution profits, while the women who had been separated from their families in Mexico received next to nothing, prosecutors said.
The 61-year-old was extradited from Mexico to Brooklyn Federal court in January, 2007 after the sex trafficking ring was exposed.
As part of her plea deal, she confessed to receiving wire transfers of money from New York while living in Mexico, knowing full well where the money came from.
In April 2006, Josue Flores Carreto, Gerardo Flores Carreto, and co-defendant Daniel Perez Alonso were sentenced to terms of imprisonment of 50, 50, and 25 years, respectively, following their guilty pleas in April 2005.
“It is unconscionable in this day and age that there are persons who would hold other human beings in conditions of servitude and force them into lives of prostitution in order to line their own pockets,” stated United States Attorney Benton J. Campbell. “As this case demonstrates, sex traffickers operating from abroad should be on notice that they will find no refuge from reach of United States law enforcement.”
