Crime

Jeffrey Epstein’s French modelling agent friend Jean-Luc Brunel, who allegedly procured more than a thousand women and girls for the paedophile financier to sleep with, died today in an alleged prison suicide.

It comes days after Prince Andrew, 62, agreed to settle Virginia Roberts’s lawsuit accusing him of sex abuse after they met through Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Roberts accused Brunel, 74, of procuring more than a thousand women and girls for Epstein to sleep with and he was awaiting trial in France for raping minors.

Former Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kim Potter was sentenced to 24 months and a fine of $1,000 on Friday, Feb. 18 following her conviction in the death of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was fatally shot during a traffic stop.

Potter will serve 16 months in prison and the remaining eight months on supervised release, a sentence far below what the prosecution sought. Judge Regina Chu said this case was “highly unsual”

“This is one of the saddest cases I have had in my 20 years on the bench,” Chu said when delivering the sentence. “Officer Potter made a mistake that ended tragically, but she never intended to hurt anyone.”

A truck stolen from the Peterborough area with more than 2,000 firearms inside has been found in Peel Region.

The truck and trailer was stolen Sunday morning from a Peterborough trucking company.

On Monday morning, Peel Regional Police notified Peterborough cops that they had located the truck cab in the area of Queen St. and Gorway Dr. in Bampton.

It happened at around 3 p.m. at David and Mary Thomson Collegiate, which is near Midland and Lawrence avenues.

Police say that the victim, an 18-year-old male, was pronounced dead on scene after being located with a gunshot wound.

Police say that they believe that the shooting was “targeted” and that there is no risk to public safety. They say that they are treating the entire main floor as a “crime scene” right now.

This will play out in the usual way.

Twenty-eight months after it began in a clandestine shipyard deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the more unlikely criminal voyages of all time came to an end on Tuesday with the seven sentences handed down by a court in north-west Spain.

Agustín Álvarez, a 31-year-old former Spanish amateur boxing champion, was jailed for 11 years for piloting a semi-submersible “narco-submarine” carrying 3,068kg of cocaine worth an estimated €123m (£104m) across the Atlantic. His two crewmates, Ecuadorian cousins Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, received the same sentence, while four Spaniards who conspired with Álvarez to help guide the sub ashore were jailed for between seven and nine years.

Of all the burdens Manhattan has borne this January, the imminent closing of the 24-hour Midtown West Rite Aid hardly qualifies as a tragedy. But the fact that an otherwise-thriving major corporation is giving up on core Manhattan matters for our decaying borough.

The pharmacy, on 8th Avenue and 50th Street, will close Feb. 8. Last week, it was effectively already shuttered, with most of the store cordoned off with gates. Just a small, strange assortment — children’s coloring books jumbled with vitamins — was marooned on front shelves on “clearance.”

In Barry Sherman’s office at Apotex in mid-December 2017, homicide detectives discovered every surface — desk, tables, couches, chairs, even parts of the floor — awash in papers. The brilliant scientist, with a PhD before he was 25, was a visual person — he wanted his tasks front and centre. Among the stacks of generic drug documents and lawsuits, police also found an “autobiography” Barry was writing and a photograph of Honey, Barry and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In one pile, detectives spotted a copy of an airplane ticket Barry had purchased for a Dec. 24 flight to Fort Lauderdale to join Honey for a holiday break. These details and more are contained in court documents recently released following a Toronto Star challenge.

… According to the documents, Clarke had been acting as a mentor to candidates throughout the fall of 2021, and was also a member of the interview panels for officers seeking a promotion to sergeant.

On Nov. 10, Clarke was directed in an email to cease all contact with applicants she’d been mentoring by Nov. 25, according to police.

Despite that directive, Toronto police allege Clarke continued to help a number of applicants, including transmitting photos of the interview questions for the promotional process to six candidates, the documents allege. This provided these officers with “confidential information to advance their position in the process,” the police documents say.

… Clarke is also alleged to have met with one officer, identified only as H.H., in her home on three occasions in December.

HMA

A ‘tide’ of illegal guns flowing across the border from the United States is fuelling gun violence in the city, according to Toronto Police.

An update on the challenge those guns pose came as police announced the arrest of a 13-year-old boy in connection with the city’s eighth murder of the year – a 15-year-old.

In Baltimore, crime-tolerant state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby seems willing to break the law herself.

When sworn in as Baltimore’s state’s attorney seven years ago, Marilyn Mosby was the first of a new wave of progressive prosecutors. She might now be the first to take an early retirement—perhaps to a federal penitentiary.

Last week, the Justice Department indicted Mosby on perjury charges. She allegedly made false statements on key documents while chasing a quick buck in real estate in 2020, avoiding penalties and taxes on withdrawals from her retirement accounts by claiming Covid-related economic hardship but without actually suffering any layoffs or reductions in her $248,000 salary. Then she neglected to mention a federal tax lien while mortgaging two Florida properties, one of which has already sold for a tidy gross profit of $151,000.

Retail crime has been rising throughout the US for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin). The National Retail Federation reported that store losses mounted from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020.

The biggest increase over that period happened not during the pandemic but in 2019, when total losses from shoplifting surged to $61 billion, up from $50 billion the previous year. The COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021 moderated losses, largely because stores were closed or had curtailed operating hours. Now that retailing has resumed, crime has spiked again.

A 41-year-old Detroit man accused of setting fire to his girlfriend, who is pregnant with twins, has bonded out of a Wayne County jail for just $5,000 after posting ten percent of his $50,000 bond, according to a report.

Meanwhile in Toronto – MANDEL: Gun crime and the revolving door of justice