Tucson Military Recruiters Ran Cocaine
December 18th, 2006Via: Arizona Daily Star:
A Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson.
Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools.
They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.
Together, these dozen or so recruiters formed the nucleus of one of the FBI’s biggest public corruption cases, the sting known as Operation Lively Green, which unfolded in Southern Arizona from 2002-2004 and was made public last year.
Many of the drug-running recruiters remained on the job, with continued access to local schools, for months — and often, years — after FBI agents secretly filmed them counting cash next to stacks of cocaine bricks, the Arizona Daily Star found in a months-long probe of court records and military employment data.
Some were still recruiting three years after they first were caught on camera running drugs in uniform. Most have pleaded guilty and are to be sentenced in March. Some honorably retired from the military.
Must read book: Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (Paperback)
by Gary Webb
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Alliance-Contras-Cocaine-Explosion/dp/1888363932
How exactly did you think Oliver North funded the contras in Nicaragua after congress cut off funding? Fox news? ha ha!
It is hard to read this book and watch Gary Webb make an amazing discovery, research and report on it and get destroyed.
Anyone remember how the British empire financed itself? Can you say opium war?
And both colonialism and mercantilism, of course. Something we now practice on our own people, rather than just those “backward” indigenous types.