Grim Sleeper suspect stayed below LAPD's radar

Records show Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was arrested for theft and violent crimes, and although he served time, it was never as much as probation officers recommended.

By Jack Leonard and Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times

July 10, 2010

A backyard mechanic identified by police this week as the Grim Sleeper serial killer had a lengthy criminal history stretching over four decades but was never sent to prison despite calls by law enforcement officials for tough sentences, according to Los Angeles County court records released Friday.

Probation reports show that Lonnie David Franklin Jr. repeatedly cycled through the county's justice system years before he was charged this week with killing 10 women in South Los Angeles.

Franklin was arrested at least 15 times for car theft, burglary, receiving stolen property, assaults, firearms possession and other crimes, the records show. In most cases, he avoided prosecution or was sent to jail and placed on probation even as law enforcement officers called him a serious criminal and urged prison terms.

Franklin allegedly killed seven women between 1985 and 1988, when his crimes seemed to abruptly stop, authorities say. The slayings resumed with three more between 2002 and 2007, police said.

In 2003, Los Angeles probation officers wrote that Franklin — then 50 — had admitted spending three decades as an active criminal and was back to his old ways when he was caught driving a luxury SUV stolen from the Glendale Galleria.

"If at this age the defendant is still engaging in criminal activities … the community can best be served by imposing the maximum time possible in state prison," one probation officer wrote.

Franklin faced up to three years in prison after pleading no contest to receiving stolen property. As part of a plea agreement with prosecutors, however, he was sentenced to jail for 270 days.

Once he entered jail, Franklin again benefited from Los Angeles' overburdened justice system. Sheriff's officials were releasing inmates early to ease overcrowding in the county's jails. Franklin was released in May 2003, more than four months early, according to jail data obtained by The Times.

Two months later, when he should still have been behind bars, Franklin allegedly killed again. In July 2003, a crossing guard in the Westmont area of the city stumbled across the lifeless body of Valerie McCorvey . The 35-year-old had suffered trauma to her neck, police said.

Franklin was only recently identified as a suspect in the case when a "familial search" of state DNA records indicated that a convicted felon was probably related to the killer. Franklin is the felon's father.

Franklin's attorney, Deputy Public Defender Regina A. Laughney, declined to comment, saying she had yet to review all of the evidence in the case.

Despite his numerous contacts with police, Franklin, now 57, was never entered into the state's DNA database because his crimes were never considered serious enough. In 2004, voters approved a measure that required DNA be taken from every person convicted of a felony, but Franklin's last conviction was a year earlier.

LAPD Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who heads the LAPD task force investigating the killings, said he was not surprised by Franklin's criminal record. Serial killers, he said, often turn out to have relatively low-level arrests that did not raise police suspicions.

"He's a classic of what we've seen in the past," Kilcoyne said. "He's danced to the raindrops for a long time without getting wet."

Franklin's crimes, he said, did not involve the type of violence against women that would have drawn police interest at the time.

Probation reports offer more details about the man who neighbors said was known for helping the elderly with car trouble but also spoke about his visits to prostitutes.

Franklin told one probation officer that he graduated with a certification in welding after attending Los Angeles Trade Technical Community College for two years. He said he served in the U.S. Army from 1970 to 1976, earning an honorable discharge, records show.

Franklin was first arrested at the age of 16 on suspicion of car theft. He was arrested twice more as a juvenile, once for car theft and once for stealing property from a car, and was placed on probation, the reports said.

Police picked him up four more times between 1971 and 1984 on suspicion of theft, burglary and carrying a loaded firearm. The arrests resulted in only one misdemeanor conviction — for possessing a concealed weapon in 1974.

He was sentenced to 10 days in jail, according to court records.

During the height of the Grim Sleeper's killings, between 1985 and 1988, Franklin avoided police attention. But the next year, he was arrested twice and was convicted of possessing burglary tools.

He was placed on probation.

Franklin found himself in regular trouble with the law during the 1990s, earning convictions for assault, battery and receiving stolen property.

In 1993, Los Angeles police officers caught him working on a stolen car in his backyard and found another stolen vehicle and several parts of more vehicles, including four engines, records said.

A probation report cited the lead police investigator as recommending that Franklin go to prison, describing him as "a major participant involved in auto theft" and saying he was suspected in the theft of at least 30 vehicles in a three-month period.

Nevertheless, the probation officer noted that Franklin had not been convicted of a felony until then and recommended he be sent to jail and placed on probation.

Franklin was sentenced to 365 days in jail.

Franklin's criminal history has helped investigators piece together a picture of his movements, showing that he remained in Los Angeles even when the Grim Sleeper's killings appeared to stop.

"It gives us some indication that he was at least in the neighborhood … during our dry spell," Kilcoyne said, "which gives us more interest in rebuilding his life over the last 25 years in case there are more [victims] out there."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-grim-sleeper-record-20100710,0,2937796,print.story

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The Grim Sleeper and DNA: There's much to be concerned about

Even if DNA evidence proves crucial to cracking to case of a serial killer, the use of such evidence is outpacing laws regulating it.

By Elizabeth Joh

July 10, 2010

DNA evidence was undeniably the key to the arrest and charging of Lonnie David Franklin Jr., believed to be the Grim Sleeper responsible for a string of slayings in Los Angeles between 1985 and 2007. Many will cite this use of DNA evidence in a high-profile serial murder case as one more reason to increase reliance on this important investigative tool. But in fact it's precisely at a moment like this when an investigative triumph can blind us to the dangers of expanding genetic surveillance.

There were actually three different uses of DNA evidence in the Grim Sleeper investigation that we should be concerned about. They all turn basic assumptions about our criminal justice system on their heads. The first is the use of familial DNA searches. Most of the time, investigators search state DNA databases to find a complete match linking a particular person's DNA profile to crime scene evidence. Familial matches are different. A "hit" in the database establishes definitively that the person in the database is not the wanted suspect, but suggests that it is one of his or her relatives.

Why is this problematic? Keep in mind that in usual police "searches," there must be individualized probable cause for suspicion, as required by the 4th Amendment. With familial searches, the only reason the police identify their suspect is because he is genetically related to someone in a DNA database. If that sounds like guilt by association, it is. Why should the mere inclusion of one of your family members in a DNA database mean that you might be a target of an investigation one day?

The second investigative technique used in the Grim Sleeper investigation was the use of "abandoned" or "discarded" DNA. We all leave DNA on used coffee cups, smoked cigarettes and many other items on a daily basis. After the police turned their focus to Franklin, undercover police followed him until he left some of his DNA on a piece of pizza as well as silverware and a glass after a meal out.

Few rules govern the circumstances in which police can collect this involuntarily shed DNA. Police typically defend the practice by saying it produces results. Of course, when successful matches are found, the unrestrained collection of abandoned DNA sounds defensible. But what about all of the hunches that police might like to pursue in this way? Have we all silently consented to giving up our discarded DNA to the police?

The third use of DNA in the investigation is unlikely to receive much fanfare; it wasn't successful. Yet it is equally dangerous to civil liberties. Two years ago, LAPD vice officers arrested a number of suspected johns not as part of a crackdown on prostitution but rather for the purpose of collecting their DNA. (Many of the Grim Sleeper's victims were prostitutes.) Such a technique is known as a DNA dragnet. As of January 2009, Proposition 69 allows the state to collect DNA not just from those convicted of felonies but also from all people who have simply been arrested on suspicion of committing felonies. Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown's formal approval of familial searches is still limited to searching profiles of convicted felons in special cases, but it's not hard to imagine an expansion to all cases regardless of severity, and to arrestee profiles as well.

There's no doubt that DNA evidence gives the police an important tool. Without it, the Grim Sleeper case would probably be yet another unsolved case. The trouble is that we are rushing forward with these uses of DNA evidence with little consideration of the ever-increasing scope of genetic surveillance over our citizens. Many states that have not formalized their policies in these areas have taken note of what the police did in this case. What matters isn't just that this particular fish was caught; it's the ever-widening net over us.

Elizabeth Joh, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law, has written widely about DNA evidence, undercover policing and police privatization.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-joh-dna-20100710,0,4118591,print.story

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From the New York Times

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White House Envisioned Spy Case Swap Even Before Arrests

This article was reported by Peter Baker , Charlie Savage and Benjamin Weiser and written by Mr. Baker.

WASHINGTON — On a Friday afternoon in mid-June, President Obama sat down with advisers in the Oval Office and learned that the F.B.I. planned to round up the largest ring of Russian sleeper agents since the cold war. After discussion about what the agents had done, the conversation turned to the fallout: what to do after the arrests?

In that moment was born a back-to-the-future plan that would play out four weeks later, a prisoner exchange with surreal and even cinematic overtones as Russian and American airplanes met on a sunny tarmac in the heart of Europe on Friday to trade agents and spies much as had been done during a more hostile era.

From the first time the president was told about the case on June 11 — 16 days before the Russian agents were actually arrested — a swap emerged as an option that could resolve a potentially volatile situation without undercutting Mr. Obama's effort to rebuild Russian-American relations. The Russian spy ring would be broken, the Americans would secure the release of four Russian prisoners and both sides could then put the episode behind them.

Administration officials said Friday that the arrests were not made for the purpose of making a deal and that no decision about a swap was made until after the agents were in custody. But they described a fast-moving sequence of events after the arrests in which both sides scrambled to reach an agreement, even to the point of Russian officials' offering money and other benefits to encourage one of their sleeper agents to consider the deal.

The officials described the episode as perhaps the most serious test yet of the new relationship, as well as a sign of its enduring complexity.

By Friday afternoon, the 10 Russian sleeper agents arrested in American cities and suburbs were flown back to Moscow, while four men released from Russian prisons were taken from the transfer point in Vienna to London. Two of them, Igor V. Sutyagin and Sergei Skripal, got off there, and the remaining two, Aleksandr Zaporozhsky and Gennadi Vasilenko, flew on to Dulles International Airport just outside Washington. The children of the sleeper agents all left with their parents or were preparing to join them, officials said.

The lawyer for one of the freed Russians called it “a historic moment” that she had long suspected would come. “It has to do with the relations between the two countries, and with political games going on at the top,” said the lawyer, Maria A. Veselova, who represented Mr. Zaporozhsky, a former Russian intelligence agent. “It is always connected with these chess games.”

The games have been played for years, and this one was no exception. The F.B.I. had been monitoring the Russian sleeper agents as far back as a decade, and along with the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, gave the first detailed briefing to the White House in February, American officials said.

By late May and early June, counterespionage officials grew concerned that several of the agents were planning to leave the country this summer and concluded that they would have to arrest them.

At the Southern District of New York, prosecutors pulled out files on the case and completed a 37-page complaint, describing the agents' activities, the sophisticated intelligence technology they used, and the F.B.I.'s extensive and long-term surveillance in unusual detail. A version of the document sat for years in a classified safe in New York, updated and rewritten by Michael Farbiarz, the lead prosecutor, as new evidence was developed, ready to be used whenever necessary.

“The value of a complaint like that is that you show immediately that you've got them dead to rights,” said David S. Kris, assistant attorney general for national security. “It showed the defendants and the Russians that we've got the goods. We're not bluffing here. We've had you under investigation for quite a while. We've been in your houses, we've done surveillance and we have got plenty. That obviously helps things move quickly.”

Before they moved on the arrests, though, they had to tell the president. Mr. Obama was preparing to host the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev , at the White House on June 24, so any arrests were bound to be politically explosive. The president's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, led the June 11 Oval Office briefing, at which officials described who the agents were, what would be in the complaint and what they would be charged with.

“There was a full discussion about what was going to happen on the day after,” said one senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Mr. Obama then had a meeting on the case with his National Security Council on June 18, just six days before Mr. Medvedev's visit.

The visit went off without any discussion of the case, White House officials said, but three days later, the F.B.I. arrested 10 agents, a sweep that made headlines as a relic of the cold war. The administration moved quickly to keep the arrests from provoking the traditional volley of angry denunciations and retaliations, contacting Moscow to indicate the depth of the evidence and its willingness to resolve the situation.

Russian officials responded by removing an initial statement calling the charges “baseless” from the Foreign Ministry Web site and issuing a new one acknowledging that some of those arrested were Russian citizens. American officials were struck by the tempered remarks by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin , a former K.G.B. colonel, during a meeting with former President Bill Clinton .

Led by Mr. Brennan, the White House held daily 7:30 a.m. teleconferences with various agencies and quickly agreed to a swap. Officials came up with a list of four Russians who had been convicted of illegal contacts with the West and whom they wanted freed: Mr. Zaporozhsky and two other former Russian intelligence officers, Mr. Skripal and Mr. Vasilenko, as well as an arms control researcher, Mr. Sutyagin.

It helped that after years of American surveillance there was little indication that the Russian agents had actually done any serious damage. Even the Justice Department did not complain about a deal because spy cases are often handled this way.

The C.I.A. was assigned to make the approach to the S.V.R., the Russian foreign intelligence agency, on June 30, less than three days after the arrests, according to an administration official. The same day, Under Secretary of State William J. Burns met with the Russian ambassador, Sergei I. Kislyak, and discussed the spy case.

The Russians considered the swap for two days and then agreed to negotiate. Leon E. Panetta , the C.I.A. director, negotiated the details with his S.V.R. counterpart, Mikhail Y. Fradkov , in three phone calls, sealing the deal on July 3. As part of the deal, Moscow agreed there would be no retaliatory action against Americans living in Russia .

Nikita V. Petrov, a historian of Russian security services, said Moscow agreed to the deal “to save face” after the embarrassment of the arrests. The episode showed the contemporary Russian intelligence service's weakness, he said. “This was anachronistic Soviet methods.” And Russia could say American interest in the four imprisoned Russians confirmed their convictions.

But there was still the matter of convincing the prisoners who were to be exchanged. Mr. Sutyagin, for one, had long maintained his innocence and was reluctant to sign the confession that the Russian government required for his release. Even after he did, he said he was not guilty.

Likewise, the Russian agents in the United States had been trained not to admit they were spies or even Russians. But that facade soon crumbled after the Russian government acknowledged their citizenship. Soon afterward, the Russian Consulate requested meetings with them.

Not all of them were eager to make a deal, particularly those with children. Vicky Peláez, a journalist in New York, was promised that she could go to her native Peru or anywhere else in the world and would be given free housing and a monthly $2,000 stipend for life. She signed on, the last to do so, just hours before the court hearing on Thursday that completed the deal.

“Her biggest concerns were: ‘What's going to happen to me? What are my children's lives going to be like? Are they going to be able to come see me?' ” said her lawyer, John M. Rodriguez. He said the Russian promises helped to “cushion the circumstances,” but were not what induced her to accept the deal.

Hours later, she and the others were whisked to La Guardia Airport and flown aboard a chartered Vision Airlines jet to Vienna. Within minutes of each other, about 11:15 a.m. local time, first the Russian plane and then the American plane landed. The prisoners switched planes and the Russian jet took off at 12:38 p.m. The American plane was in the air less than 10 minutes later.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/europe/10russia.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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Intrigue and Ambiguity in Cases of 4 Russians Sent to West in Spy Swap

WASHINGTON — When Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, one of four Russians delivered to the West in this week's spy swap , landed at Dulles International Airport on Friday to join his family in the United States, it was only the latest unexpected twist in a classic story of espionage and deception.

For several years in the 1990s, Mr. Zaporozhsky, a colonel in Russian intelligence who became deputy chief of the American Department, was secretly working for the C.I.A. , one of the highest-ranking American moles in history, Russian prosecutors say.

After surprising his colleagues by retiring suddenly in 1997, he moved with his wife and three children to the United States and went into business. But in 2001, confident that his C.I.A. link was unsuspected, Mr. Zaporozhsky was lured back to Moscow by his former colleagues for what they promised would be a festive K.G.B. anniversary party. He was arrested at the airport, convicted of espionage and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

On Friday, Mr. Zaporozhsky was flown to Vienna and then to the Washington area for the 10-for-4 spy exchange that promises to bring to a swift conclusion the saga of the Russian spy ring exposed by the F.B.I. early last week.

His Moscow lawyer, Maria A. Veselova, said Friday that she “did not find any proof of his guilt” in her review. But circumstantial evidence suggests that he may well have provided valuable information to the United States and was well rewarded for doing so. One account by a Russian security official published in January in the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta claimed that Mr. Zaporozhsky, who it said was code-named The Scythian by his C.I.A. contacts, was given an estimated $2 million in house purchases and other benefits by the Americans.

Another of the four, Sergei V. Skripal, also seems to fit the classic cold war model, though without quite the roller-coaster intrigue of the Zaporozhsky case. A retired colonel in Russia 's military intelligence service, Mr. Skripal was convicted in 2006 of having passed classified information to British intelligence, MI6, for a decade, in return for $100,000 wired to a bank account in Spain.

But there is at least a little post-Communist ambiguity surrounding the two other men in the swap. Gennadi Vasilenko, a former K.G.B. major, was arrested in 1998 for contacts with a C.I.A officer but soon released, only to be arrested again in 2005 and imprisoned not for spying, but for illegal trafficking in weapons and explosives.

And Igor V. Sutyagin , working at a Moscow think tank, did contract research for a British company that may or may not have been a front for Western intelligence. He has maintained his innocence, and human rights activists have defended him.

While all four men signed written confessions to espionage as a condition for their release — and then were immediately pardoned — some of the cases show how the definition of spying has grown murkier since relations have warmed between the United States and Russia. For an arms-control researcher like Mr. Sutyagin to supply information to a British company would have been unacceptable to the Kremlin in the 1970s. In more recent years, boundaries have not been so clear.

But American officials demanded precisely these four Russians as soon as talks about a swap began and valued them enough to make the lopsided trade. That suggests indebtedness on the side of the United States, said David Wise , a Washington author and veteran chronicler of espionage. “We obviously feel some obligation to them,” Mr. Wise said in an interview on Friday. “You don't leave your men behind on the battlefield.”

The American willingness to quickly release 10 Russian agents operating inside the United States, after huge expenditures of money and manpower on a decade of surveillance, would have been hard to imagine a few decades ago. The stakes for American security seem far lower today, said Steven Aftergood , who studies government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Now it seems more comical than anything else,” he said.

But the case was never funny from the point of view of the 10 Russians who faced prison sentences here — and certainly not for the four Russians serving time in grim Russian prison camps.

Yelena P. Lebedeva-Romanova, a lawyer for the 59-year-old Mr. Skripal, said his release was especially welcome because he had diabetes and she worried about his health in the prison camp in the central Russian republic of Mordovia, where he was serving his sentence.

The relationship of Mr. Vasilenko, once a top-ranked Soviet volleyball player, with a particular C.I.A. officer, Jack Platt, has been well documented over the years. Mr. Platt has said in interviews that he tried repeatedly to recruit Mr. Vasilenko, who worked for the K.G.B. in Washington and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, but was rebuffed.

But in 1988, the K.G.B. learned of the contacts between the men, and Mr. Vasilenko was arrested in Havana and imprisoned in Russia for about six months before the espionage case against him fell apart. Years later, Mr. Vasilenko and Mr. Platt, both retired from their intelligence agencies, went into the private security and investigation business together.

But in 2005, when he was 64, Mr. Vasilenko, then providing security to a Moscow television channel, was rearrested and charged after a search of his home allegedly found pistols and TNT. He was convicted and remained imprisoned until his release for the exchange.

According to Maryland property records, Mr. Zaporozhsky still owns the house on a cul-de-sac in Cockeysville, north of Baltimore, where he lived until 2001 with his wife, Galina, and their three children. No one answered a knock at the door on Friday morning, and one son, Pavel Zaporozhsky, declined to comment by telephone.

Aleksandr Zaporozhsky might not want to risk another trip back to Russia. But he and the other three men who flew west on Friday are free to return when they wish, said Nikolai Kovalyov, a deputy in the State Duma and former director of the F.S.B., the successor to the domestic security operations of the K.G.B.

“There is no formal prohibition on this from the Russian side,” Mr. Kovalyov told RIA-Novosti on Friday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/europe/10spies.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in ‘Silent Raids'

BREWSTER, Wash. — The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies' records for illegal immigrant workers.

While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers, the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.

Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted audits of employee files at more than 2,900 companies. The agency has levied a record $3 million in civil fines so far this year on businesses that hired unauthorized immigrants, according to official figures. Thousands of those workers have been fired, immigrant groups estimate.

Employers say the audits reach more companies than the work-site roundups of the administration of President George W. Bush . The audits force businesses to fire every suspected illegal immigrant on the payroll— not just those who happened to be on duty at the time of a raid — and make it much harder to hire other unauthorized workers as replacements. Auditing is “a far more effective enforcement tool,” said Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, which includes many worried fruit growers.

Immigration inspectors who pored over the records of one of those growers, Gebbers Farms, found evidence that more than 500 of its workers, mostly immigrants from Mexico, were in the country illegally. In December, Gebbers Farms, based in this Washington orchard town, fired the workers.

“Instead of hundreds of agents going after one company, now one agent can go after hundreds of companies,” said Mark K. Reed, president of Border Management Strategies, a consulting firm in Tucson that advises companies across the country on immigration law. “And there is no drama, no trauma, no families being torn apart, no handcuffs.”

President Obama , in a speech last week, explained a two-step immigration policy. He promised tough enforcement against illegal immigration, in workplaces and at the border, saying it would prepare the way for a legislative overhaul to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. White House officials say the enforcement is under way, but they acknowledge the overhaul is unlikely to happen this year.

In another shift, the immigration agency has moved away from bringing criminal charges against immigrant workers who lack legal status but have otherwise clean records.

Republican lawmakers say Mr. Obama is talking tough, but in practice is lightening up.

“Even if discovered, illegal aliens are allowed to walk free and seek employment elsewhere” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “This lax approach is particularly troubling,” he said, “at a time when so many American citizens are struggling to find jobs.”

Employers say the Obama administration is leaving them short of labor for some low-wage work, conducting silent raids but offering no new legal immigrant laborers in occupations, like farm work, that Americans continue to shun despite the recession . Federal labor officials estimate that more than 60 percent of farm workers in the United States are illegal immigrants.

John Morton, the head of the immigration agency, known as ICE, said the goal of the audits is to create “a culture of compliance” among employers, so that verifying new hires would be as routine as paying taxes. ICE leaves it up to employers to fire workers whose documents cannot be validated. But an employer who fails to do so risks prosecution.

ICE is looking primarily for “egregious employers” who commit both labor abuses and immigration violations, Mr. Morton said, and the agency is ramping up penalties against them.

In April, Michel Malecot, the chef of a popular bakery in San Diego, was indicted on 12 criminal counts of harboring illegal immigrants. The government is seeking to seize his bakery. He has pleaded not guilty. In Maryland, the owner of two restaurants, George Anagnostou, pleaded guilty last month to criminal charges of harboring at least 24 illegal immigrants. He agreed to forfeit more than $734,000.

But the firings at Gebbers Farms shocked this village of orchard laborers (population 2,100) by the Columbia River among sere brown foothills in eastern Washington. Six months after the firings, the silence still prevails, with both the company and the illegal immigrants reluctant to discuss them.

Farm worker advocates said the family-owned company, one of the biggest apple growers in the country, did not fit Mr. Morton's description of an exploiter.

“The general reputation for Gebbers Farms was that they were doing right by their employees,” said Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

The Gebbers packing house is the center of this company town, amid more than 5,000 acres of well-tended orchards, where the lingua franca is Spanish. Officials said public school enrollment is more than 90 percent Hispanic.

Throughout last year, ICE auditors examined forms known as I-9's, which all new hires in the country must fill out. ICE then advised Gebbers Farms of Social Security and immigration numbers that did not check out with federal databases.

Just before Christmas, managers summoned the workers in groups. In often emotional exchanges, managers immediately fired those without valid documents.

“No comment,” said Jay Johnson, a lawyer for Gebbers Farms, expressing the company's only statement.

Many workers lived in houses they rented from the company; they were given three months to move out. In Brewster, truck payments stopped, televisions were returned, mobile homes were sold, mortgages defaulted.

Many immigrants purchased new false documents and went looking for jobs in more distant orchards, former Gebbers Farms workers said. But the word is out among growers in the region to avoid hiring immigrants from the company because ICE knows they are unauthorized.

“Many people are still crying because this is really hard,” said M. García, 41, a former Gebbers packing house worker who has been out of a job since January.

There was no wave of deportations and few families left on their own for Mexico. “They are saying, what's going to happen to their kids?” said Mario Camacho, an administrator in the Brewster school district. “To those kids, this is their country.”

After the firings, Gebbers Farms advertised hundreds of jobs for orchard workers. But there were few takers in the state.

“Show me one American —just one — climbing a picker's ladder,” said María Cervantes, 33, a former Gebbers Farms worker from Mexico who gave her name because she was recently approved as a legal immigrant.

After completing a federally mandated local labor search, Gebbers Farms applied to the federal guest worker program to import about 1,200 legal temporary workers — most from Mexico. The guest workers, who can stay for up to six months, also included about 300 from Jamaica.

“They are bringing people from outside,” Ms. Cervantes said, perplexed. “What will happen to those of us who are already here?”

Immigrant advocates said they are surprised and frustrated with Mr. Obama, after seeing an increase in enforcement activity since he took office. “It would be easier to fight if it was a big raid,” said Pramila Jayapal, executive director of OneAmerica, a group in Seattle. “But this is happening everywhere and often.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/us/10enforce.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Korean War Panel Finds U.S. Attacks on Civilians

SEOUL, South Korea — A commission charged with investigating wartime atrocities has found that American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War.

But in a flurry of rulings made in the past few days, the commission decided not to seek compensation or criminal charges in about 130 of the cases either for lack of evidence or because it found that the killings were militarily justified.

The findings, which have not been formally announced and will end the commission's work, appear to reflect the desire of the conservative government of President Lee Myung-bak to wrap up the inquiry and to avoid antagonizing the United States.

The commission will recommend that South Korea start negotiations with Washington to seek compensation for the victims in the remaining eight cases, the president of the commission said Friday.

In the other 130 cases, the commission could not find evidence of illegality by the American military or it determined that the deaths resulted from “military necessity,” said Lee Young-jo, president of the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“They were more like cases of negligence than of liability or war crimes,” said Mr. Lee, whose commission wrapped up its four-year-old investigation on June 30. “For such a low level of unlawfulness, I don't think any government negotiations with the United States for compensation are necessary.”

In Washington, the State Department praised the commission's work. “We welcome the efforts of the Republic of Korea Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate abuses of human rights and efforts to correct any possible inaccuracy in the historical record,” said Mark C. Toner, a State Department spokesman.

The commission's conclusions were not greeted so warmly, however, by the families of the victims.

“Our government is cowering before the big U.S. government,” said Lee Chang-geun, 77, whose parents were among an estimated 300 South Korean soldiers, railway officials, students and other civilians killed on July 11, 1950, when American aircraft bombed the train station in Iri, a southern town many miles behind the front line.

Two weeks earlier, on June 25, the North Korean Army invaded the South, starting the war. The United States fought alongside South Korea in an intervention that left more than 36,000 American soldiers dead and has sown both gratitude and pain among South Koreans ever since.

“I want to ask the Americans: Is it O.K. to bomb civilians by mistake?” Mr. Lee said. “I want to ask: Just because their military came to help South Korea, is it O.K. to kill South Korean civilians and keep mum about it?”

An outgrowth of South Korea's democratization, the commission began its work in late 2005 under the auspices of the liberal government of President Roh Moo-hyun , delving into a dark chapter of South Korean history, discussions of which were taboo under the country's past military governments.

It has confirmed that during the first chaotic weeks of the war, when North Korean troops barreled down the peninsula, the South's military and police rounded up thousands of suspected leftists — historians say as many as 200,000 — and executed them to prevent them from aiding the invading forces.

The investigators also disclosed that North Korean troops and southern leftists massacred South Korean rightists. Suspicions spawned by the ensuing revenge killings still divide South Korea.

The commission was handicapped from its inception by political battles between liberals and conservatives. One of the most contentious issues of all was how to deal with wartime killings by American forces.

The eight mass killings that the commission determined as unlawful and eligible for compensation by Washington were all investigated by commissioners appointed under Mr. Roh's government.

Citing witness accounts and declassified American documents, the commission found that American pilots, warned about potential North Korean infiltrators, indiscriminately attacked refugee groups, hitting them with machine-gun fire, missiles and napalm.

An estimated 855 refugees were killed, including 200 crammed inside a cave and suffocated by fires set off by air attacks; 100 huddled on a beach and shelled by an American ship; and 35 attacked by American aircraft in Kyongju, a town behind the lines in the south.

The commission — which had no power to force testimony, indict or offer reparations — said the attacks violated international conventions on war and asked the Korean government to seek compensation from Washington. It also asked the government to enact laws to compensate victims of the killings by South Korean authorities.

The government has yet to respond to those requests, and victims fear that it is unlikely to, with a conservative pro-American president in power in Seoul.

In December, the government began replacing liberal commissioners whose terms had ended with conservatives. The commission has since dismissed victims' calls for extending its work.

“They have so far uncovered just a tip of the iceberg,” said Oh Won-rok, 70, who said his father was killed without trial by the South Korean police in July 1950. “So many victims did not come forward, out of fear. The current conservative government wants to keep it all buried.” Mr. Oh leads a national association of 80 survivors' groups.

Mr. Lee, who became president of the commission last December, said that since he took over, the panel had shifted the criteria for faulting American wartime actions. It gave more consideration to “military necessity,” the difficult situations the troops faced during the war and the need for testimony from American veterans.

The panel gave up hopes of seeking help from Washington in acquiring such testimony when President George W. Bush was in office, said Kim Dong-choon, a former liberal commissioner.

Between the old and current panel, “there was a fundamental difference over how to view the U.S. intervention in the Korean War,” Mr. Kim said. “It's sad that this work could not be finished by those who had fought for the investigations but is coming to an end under those who had doubts about them.”

The United States has investigated the deaths of refugees only at the South Korean village of No Gun Ri in July 1950, acknowledging killings there in 2001 but rejecting survivors' demands for an apology and compensation.

Since 1999, journalists and historians have uncovered many declassified American military documents showing that the military had adopted a policy of shooting refugees approaching its lines — and American pilots were often directed to strafe refugee columns — all to guard against infiltrators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/asia/10comission.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Help for Damaged Warriors

For too long, scores of thousands of veterans afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder have been denied proper treatment and much-needed help. While routinely hailed as heroes in home-front salutes, only about half of the more than 150,000 men and women diagnosed with P.T.S.D. — suffering flashbacks, emotional numbness and other debilitating symptoms — have been approved for disability claims by the veterans department.

The Obama administration has announced new regulations that will eliminate one of the main bureaucratic roadblocks to adequate treatment: the requirement that they document in painstaking, often impossible searches such events as a specific bomb blast or firefight to prove their disability. Claimants will now have to just show that they served in a war zone in a job consistent with the events underlying their symptoms.

Veterans' groups point out that these rules have been particularly unfair to veterans, many of them women, who did not serve in official combat roles but still saw traumatic duty.

By some estimates, of the more than two million service members deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, one out of five veterans suffer P.T.S.D. The changes would also apply to Vietnam veterans.

Concerns have been expressed about the cost — an estimated $5 billion over seven years, with heightened health care and monthly support ranging from a few hundred dollars to $2,000. The plight of damaged veterans is a debt that must be paid in full.

The veterans department will review all cases, promising vigilance to discourage fraudulent claims. The new approach will be no simple task for an agency struggling with backlogs of veterans' claims. Final determinations will be made by the department's own psychological experts. They will have to be mindful that the ultimate goal is to treat symptoms and guide veterans closer to normal life, not sidetrack them into permanent dependency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/opinion/10sat3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the White House

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Weekly Address: President Obama Announces Changes to Help Veterans with PTSD Receive the Benefits They Need

WASHINGTON – In this week's address, President Barack Obama announced that on Monday the Department of Veterans Affairs, led by Secretary Shinseki, will begin to make it easier for veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to receive the benefits they need.  For many years, veterans with PTSD have been stymied in receiving benefits by requirements they produce evidence proving a specific event caused the PTSD.  Streamlining this process will help not just the veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, but generations of veterans who have served and sacrificed for the country.

It's a step that proves America will always be here for our veterans, just as they've been there for us.  We won't let them down.  We take care of our own.  And as long as I'm Commander-in-Chief, that's what we're going to keep doing.  Thank you.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/weekly-address-president-obama-announces-changes-help-veterans-with-ptsd-receive-be

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From the FBI

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PROTECT YOUR COMPUTER Don't be Scared by 'Scareware' 07/09/10 We've all seen them—pop-up messages telling you your computer is infected with a virus. To get rid of it, all you have to do is order the antivirus software being advertised. Before you click, though, know this: few Internet security companies use ads to tell you about a virus on your computer. Most of these pop-ups are scams, and it's one of the fastest-growing types of Internet fraud today.

These scams have a name . They're called “scareware” because they try to frighten you into purchasing fake antivirus software with a seemingly genuine security warning. But if you do try to buy this program, it will either do nothing…or it could compromise your computer by installing malicious software onto your system. And in some instances, you don't even have to click on the pop-up box…the software downloads automatically.

Cyber criminals often use notorious botnets—networks of compromised computers under their control—to push out their software. They'll also masquerade as legitimate Internet security companies and buy ads on other websites—called “malvertising”—but when consumers click on the ads to purchase the products, they are redirected to websites controlled by the bad guys.
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How to Spot a Potential Scareware Infection Windows Update fails to run Other legitimate security applications won't update Certain website, especially Internet security sites, won't load

Many of these criminals operate outside the U.S., making investigations difficult and complex for the FBI and its partners . But we've had successes—just this past May, for example, three people were charged in Illinois in connection with a scheme that caused Internet users in more than 60 countries, including the U.S., to buy more than $100 million worth of bogus scareware software. Two of the defendants, including an American, are accused of running an overseas company that claimed to sell antivirus and computer performance/repair software over the Internet. A third man operated the company's Cincinnati call center, which was responsible for technical and billing support to its customers (but in reality deflected complaints from consumers who realized the software didn't work). According to the indictment, proceeds from the sales of the software (which was typically purchased by credit card) were deposited into bank accounts controlled by the defendants and others throughout the world and then quickly transferred to accounts in Europe. In addition to the consumers victimized by the scam, a number of legitimate companies tricked into selling ad space on their websites for the bogus software were allegedly defrauded of about $85,000 in unpaid fees.  Don't let it happen to you. Here are a few words of advice on scareware.

How to spot a scareware scam :

• Does the pop-up use “non-clickable” icons? To build authenticity into their software, scareware will show a list of reputable icons—like those of software companies or security publications. However, the user can't click through to the sites to see the actual reviews or recommendations.
• Is the pop-up ad hard to close? Scareware pop-ups employ aggressive techniques and will not close easily after clicking the “close” or “X” button.
• Have you heard of the software before? Cyber criminals use easy-to-remember names like Virus Shield, Antivirus, or VirusRemover.

How to protect yourself from scareware : Make sure your computer is fully protected by legitimate, up-to-date antivirus software.

If you think you've been victimized by scareware : File a complaint with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center .

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/july10/scareware_070910.html

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From the DEA

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DEA Investigations End With 158 Individuals Indicted for Drug Trafficking in Puerto Rico

Biggest Federal Law Enforcement Operation Ever Conducted in this U.S. Territory
Forfeiture allegations for approximately $263 million

JUL 09 -- SAN JUAN, PR – On July 7, 2010, a federal grand jury indicted one hundred and fifty-eight (158) individuals as a result of an investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD,). The announcement was made today by Javier F. Pena, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA Caribbean Division and United States Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, Rosa Emilia Rodríguez Vélez. The defendants are charged in three different indictments with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute heroin, crack, cocaine and marijuana, and conspiracy to possess firearms during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime.

The drug trafficking organizations were operating in the Kennedy, Del Carmen, Candelaria, Colombus Landing and Roosevelt Public Housing Projects in the municipality of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. More than 500 agents from DEA and PRPD are executing these arrest warrants today in what has been the biggest federal law enforcement operation ever conducted in the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, a U.S. Territory in the Lesser Antilles.

The 158 co-conspirators operated in many roles, in order to further the goals of their conspiracies, which included leaders, drug suppliers, supervisors, drug point owners, enforcers, runners, sellers, and facilitators. Most of these co-conspirators would hold more than one role within the conspiracies.

“This DEA massive operation rid the west coast of Puerto Rico of the most hard core and violent traffickers terrorizing this part of the Island” Said Javier F. Pena, Special Agent in Charge of the DEA Caribbean Division “The people of Puerto Rico will be celebrating the XXI Central American and Caribbean Games in a week. More than 300,000 visitors from all over the island as well as many nations from the Caribbean and Central American region will come to Puerto Rico's west coast for this international sports event. DEA efforts will help guarantee a safe environment for all to enjoy these games”

“Today's DEA operation is the biggest drug trafficking arrest-operation taken place in the District of Puerto Rico. It is part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCEDTF) and our ongoing efforts to continue to fight drug trafficking in Puerto Rico,” said U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodríguez Vélez. “We will not rest until every town is safe again, and all our citizens can live in peace.”

The case was investigated by the DEA and PRPD, and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Olga Castellón and Special Assistant United States Attorney Alberto López Rocafort.

If convicted, the defendants face a minimum of ten (10) years imprisonment and a maximum of life imprisonment, with fines of up to $4 million. Criminal indictments are only charges and not evidence of guilt. A defendant is presumed to be innocent until and unless proven guilty. 

http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/2010/carib070910.html

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