Cartels eye Houston banks for moving drug profits
By DANE SCHILLER HOUSTON CHRONICLE
June 10, 2009, 10:45PM

Mexico aims to break link from its cops to its crooks

First local police in Monterrey lost their assault rifles after an armed confrontation with federal agents while protesting the arrest of cops for alleged gang ties. Now officers in Mexico’s third-largest city will be stripped of cell phones, the Associated Press reports.

The legislature in Nuevo Leon state, where Monterrey is located, unanimously approved a bill banning city and state police from carrying personal cell phones while on duty in an effort to prevent corrupt officers from communicating with drug gangs.

Lawmakers approved the measure late Tuesday, a day after municipal police in Monterrey pulled guns on masked federal agents during a standoff that sent motorists scrambling for cover — and underscored tensions over a crackdown on drug corruption among lawmen.

Earlier this month, federal forces raided police stations in 18 towns in Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas, and detained 78 officers suspected of working with drug smugglers. (Police officials are detained in Monterrey in the above photo.) The operation came after soldiers found lists of police names in the possession of suspected drug traffickers in May.

State lawmaker Mirthala Castillo said the cell phone ban would take effect later this month.


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Not only is Houston a major center for Mexican cartels’ smuggling drugs and weapons, but banks and financial institutions in the nation’s fourth largest city’s also are targets for gangsters trying to hide millions of dollars in profits, according to a White House report released Wednesday.

Underworld organizations, particularly those aligned with the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, have major bases of operation in Houston and Corpus Christi, continues the report, prepared for the Obama administration by the National Drug Intelligence Center.

There are 201 international drug and money-laundering organizations in a 16-county region that stretches from Kenedy County, in deep South Texas, to just this side of the Louisiana border, according to the report.

The criminal gangs range in size from five players to 1,150, the report continues.

Stan Furce, director of a coalition of state and federal drug fighters in the region, known as the Houston High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, said the city’s large, diverse population and proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border make it ripe.

“I do know that we are more vulnerable,â€