Crime

It’s a scene as old as celluloid: a shadowy figure named Luca Brasi or John Wick or Barry Berkman lurking in the darkness, outfitted with sinister intent and nifty weapons, effortlessly committing a murder for cash, animus or cold political calculations.

Whether they’re called hit men, contract killers or assassins, figures who kill for a living are a staple of Hollywood thrillers — and, by extension, the public imagination.

But experts in law enforcement and international espionage say that murders-for-hire are notoriously difficult to successfully arrange, let alone get away with.

Under the stage name T-Sav, Tyrel Hieu George Mahoney Nguyen drew on his experiences as a gangster to make music.

He may never win a Grammy, but the Surrey man’s lyrics did help earn him two life sentences this week from a B.C. Supreme Court judge who found one of Nguyen’s songs was essentially a thinly-veiled confession to the 2017 murder of gangster Randeep (Randy) Kang.

Just getting his life together too!

Academic historians avoid talking frankly about the twentieth century’s urban crime wave—and the one going on now.

In Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s shimmering portrait of 1980s New York, Sherman McCoy’s father offers his son the following advice: if you want to live in the city, “you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate” yourself from crime and disorder. “The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant,” Wolfe writes. “If you could go breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars?”

On Christmas Eve in Fort Langley, a suburb of Vancouver nestled into a southwest bend in the Fraser River, a group of dads, fed up with a spike in break-ins in their community (and the lack of official response), decided to spend the night before Christmas conducting a citizens’ patrol hoping to spot the thief or thieves.

Virginia Giuffre was paid £12,000 by Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with Prince Andrew, she has claimed in the latest release of documents from a New York court.

The accuser said the convicted paedophile paid her for sex with the Duke of York, and that she and him went to the Tramp nightclub in London together.

The allegations, released to the public for the first time on Tuesday, were made in a 2016 deposition given by Ms Giuffre in a lawsuit she brought against Alan Dershowitz, a legal scholar.

Despite being the most high-profile prisoner in the US, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in federal custody at the Manhattan Correction Center in New York on August 10, 2019.

The financier, awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls, was found in his cell just after 6:30 a.m. having apparently used a length of orange bed sheet tied to the cell’s bunk bed to hang himself.

Media outlets buried the revelation that an accuser of the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had retracted former President Donald Trump from her allegations.

On Monday, multiple media outlets ran reports of Trump having been named in the latest Epstein documents, but failed to note in the lede of their articles that the accuser had actually retracted those allegations in 2019.

A Jeffrey Epstein accuser claimed former President Donald Trump allegedly had “sexual relations” with one of her unnamed friends at the late pedophile’s New York home “on regular occasions,” according to another trove of court documents unsealed Monday.

Sarah Ransome, in a string of emails in 2016, also claimed that she had copies of tapes Epstein had made of some of his high-profile friends — including Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and British business magnate Richard Branson — allegedly having sex with an unnamed woman.

Toronto police search for Mohamed Elkurdi who allegedly sexually assaulted girl, 16, for days

The former president of a northern British Columbia pride organization has been arrested and charged with committing sex crimes against children under 16, according to the B.C. Prosecution Service.

The charges against Sean Gravells, 39, include touching a person under 16 for sexual purposes, sexual interference of a person under 16, possession of child pornography, and importing or distributing child pornography, BCPS spokesperson Dan McLaughlin told CBC News in an emailed statement on Monday.

h/t XC

The owner of the California bakery ransacked last week by a mob of more than 100 looters is heartbroken for his family’s business and angered that nobody has been punished as he slammed rising crime in the state.

Ruben’s Bakery & Mexican Food in Compton was the target of a mass smash-and-grab when looters used a Kia to drive into the storefront during an illegal street takeover on Jan. 2.

Since the supposed suicide death of child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein four years ago, the release of documents detailing his associates have long been anticipated.

The so-called Epstein Files began to be disclosed on Wednesday, with a first batch of papers followed yesterday on Thursday, January 4.