Man Gets 15 Years After Selling Fake Drugs

ST. CHARLES, Ill. - A Chicago man has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for selling fake drugs while armed with a handgun. Alvin Perry, 32, was convicted in March on one count of armed violence and one count of unlawful distribution of a look-alike substance.

The Kane County State's Attorney's Office said Perry sold 100 tablets of fake ecstasy to undercover Aurora police. The tablets were later identified as baby aspirin.

Perry was sentenced Thursday. He has been in Kane County Jail since his arrest in February 2006.

Codefendants 22-year-old Termaine Hughes and 23-year-old Shevonne Allen, both of Bellwood, pleaded guilty to unlawful distribution of a look-alike substance and were sentenced to 24 months probation.

WMAQ-TV
April 27, 2007

Federal Agents Bust Fake ID Ring

Federal authorities today announced charges against 22 people in what they described as a massive fraudulent ID ring run out of a Little Village shopping plaza.

In announcing the charges, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald said the ring's alleged leader also ordered the murder of a rival and was conspiring to commit more violent acts.

In all, 12 of those charged were in custody and 10 were fugitives, including four in Mexico, Fitzgerald said.

Most of the arrests were made in a raid Tuesday afternoon on the Little Village Discount Mall, where agents toting rifles and dressed in bulletproof vests stopped about 150 shoppers and workers.

While the raid angered many in the largely Hispanic community on Chicago's Southwest Side, Fitzgerald defended the timing and level of force used.

"We're certainly going to enforce the law against people who conspire to kill people in order to protect their organization," Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald said authorities had to catch the suspects in the act and where they operated. He said the raid had "nothing to do" with the debate over immigration or disrupting a rally planned for next month.

"These are serious matters," Fitzgerald said. "I want to make clear that there is a great debate going on in our country about the immigration situation; this case is not about that debate. Whatever your views are … you do not let people masquerade as people who they are not."

Fitzgerald said the organization spans from Chicago to other U.S. cities and to Mexico. The Chicago operation was based in the Little Village market, and was responsible for producing about 50 to 100 fraudulent documents each day, he said.

Fitzgerald said the ring was "engaged long-term in producing high-quality fraudulent IDs" including green cards, social security cards, and driver's licenses from various states. The operation brought in from $2 million to $3 million annually, according to Fitzgerald.

The alleged leader of the Chicago organization, Julio Leija-Sanchez, 31, was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, according to Fitzgerald. Authorities allege Sanchez ordered the murder of a rival in Mexico and was plotting the deaths of others who he believed had stolen equipment from his operation.

Fitzgerald said federal agents obtained a warrant earlier this year to wiretap two cell phones. The wiretaps yielded recordings of calls between Sanchez and another defendant who was in Mexico and had just carried out a murder, Fitzgerald said.

He said agents recorded a "very detailed conversation in which the person who did the killing" described firing 15 shots at the victim, and that he knew he had shot him in the liver because he "bled black blood," Fitzgerald said.

Neighborhood residents reacted strongly to Tuesday's raid, with many seeing the action as an attempt to intimidate people in advance of a planned May 1 march to Daley Plaza in protest of recent federal raids nationwide.

"They're trying to scare us," said Juan Luis Martinez, 22, a Little Village resident, predicting the action would pull more people into the streets next Tuesday. "It won't work."

Some residents acknowledged that fake documents were being produced in the community, attributing it to the desperation some illegal immigrants have to find work.

But the manner in which the action was taken—in daylight as parents walked children home from school—inflamed the community.

Baltazar Enriquez, 27, was at the mall to buy shoes after leaving his construction job when about 60 agents stormed in and shut down all the stores, he said. The agents, carrying pictures of suspects, lined up people against a wall and checked to see whether they had anyone they were looking for, Enriquez said.

But when asked about the tactics at today's news conference, Fitzgerald said it was the only way to catch the suspects in the act. He bristled when one reporter asked why authorities didn't arrest the suspects in their homes.

"You're assuming we know where everyone lives, and that's a big assumption when you're dealing with people who make fraudulent identification," Fitzgerald said.



By Jason Meisner and Antonio Olivo
Tribune staff reporters

CTA Chief Kruesi Steps Down

Chicago Transit Authority President Frank Kruesi is retiring, City Hall announced today.

Immediately after his landslide election to a sixth term in April, Daley had denied that Kruesi would be leaving his administration.

Kruesi has taken the brunt of rising public dissatisfaction with deteriorating CTA service. He has been a longtime political confidant of Daley, who appointed Kruesi as his transit czar 10 years ago to turn around the troubled transit agency.

Most recently, Kruesi has been preparing another doomsday plan of service cuts and possible fare increases that would kick in midyear if the legislature and the governor fail to provide a state bailout of transit. Daley has kept his distance from the boiling issue.

In addition, CTA employee retirement funds may run out this year.

During the recent mayoral campaign, Dorothy Brown, one of two mayoral challengers, criticized Daley for pushing "glamour projects" such as the CTA superstation at Block 37 instead of focusing CTA management on providing commuters with relief from overcrowded trains and buses.

Kruesi joined the CTA in late 1997. For the four years before that he served as an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Transportation.

By Gary Washburn

Massacre at Virginia Tech

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- A gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history Monday, cutting down his victims in two attacks two hours apart before the university could grasp what was happening and warn students.

The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, bringing the death toll to 33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy, perhaps forever.

Investigators gave no motive for the attack. The gunman's name was not immediately released, and it was not known if he was a student.

"Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions," Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said. "The university is shocked and indeed horrified."

But he was also faced with difficult questions about the university's handling of the emergency and whether it did enough to warn students and protect them after the first burst of gunfire. Some students bitterly complained they got no warning from the university until an e-mail that arrived more than two hours after the first shots rang out.

Wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition, the killer opened fire about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coed dormitory, then stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus. Some of the doors at Norris Hall were found chained from the inside, apparently by the gunman.

Two people died in a dorm room, and 31 others were killed in Norris Hall, including the gunman, who put a bullet in his head. At least 15 people were hurt, some seriously. Students jumped from windows in panic.

Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior, said he was in a 9:05 a.m. mechanics class when he and classmates heard a thunderous sound from the classroom next door -- "what sounded like an enormous hammer."

Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks for hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204, he said.

"I must've been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last," said Calhoun, of Waynesboro, Va. He landed in a bush and ran.

Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but that he believed they survived. Just before he climbed out the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at the professor, who had stayed behind, perhaps to block the door.

The instructor was killed, he said.

At an evening news conference, Police Chief Wendell Flinchum refused to dismiss the possibility that a co-conspirator or second shooter was involved. He said police had interviewed a male who was a "person of interest" in the dorm shooting who knew one of the victims, but he declined to give details.

"I'm not saying there's a gunman on the loose," Flinchum said. Ballistics tests will help explain what happened, he said.

Sheree Mixell, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the evidence was being moved to the agency's national lab in Annandale. At least one firearm was turned over, she said.

Mixell would not comment on what types of weapons were used or whether the gunman was a student.

Young people and faculty members carried out some of the wounded themselves, without waiting for ambulances to arrive. Many found themselves trapped behind chained and padlocked doors. SWAT team members with helmets, flak jackets and assault rifles swarmed over the campus. A student used his cell-phone camera to record the sound of bullets echoing through a stone building.

Trey Perkins, who was sitting in a German class in Norris Hall, told The Washington Post that the gunman barged into the room at about 9:50 a.m. and opened fire for about a minute and a half, squeezing off about 30 shots.

The gunman first shot the professor in the head and then fired on the students, Perkins said. The gunman was about 19 years old and had a "very serious but very calm look on his face," he said.

"Everyone hit the floor at that moment," said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Va., a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. "And the shots seemed like it lasted forever."

A 911 call for the first shooting came in at 7:15 a.m. EDT. Campus and Blacksburg police responded and found a female student and a male resident adviser, later identified as Clark, dead in a fourth-floor room at the West Ambler Johnston dormitory. The building was locked down and witnesses there led police to believe that the shooting was domestic in nature and that the shooter had left.

Flinchum said that while interviewing a "person of interest" off campus, police received another 911 call at 9:45 a.m. EDT about the shooting in Norris Hall. Flinchum said the man they were interviewing off campus was not in custody, but remained a person of interest in the earlier shooting.

He said ballistics tests on the bullets found at the scenes of the two shootings would help determine whether the shooter that killed himself was responsible for all the killings.

At the dorm where the initial shooting occurred, rumors were flying among the student residents. Several said they were told an Asian student somehow got inside the building after 7 a.m. and went up the stairs to a dorm room on the fourth floor, apparently looking for his girlfriend.

Some students said they heard popping sounds, and later found that a popular male resident adviser, Clark, 22, of Martinez, Ga., had been killed along with a female student who the students said was a roommate of the woman the man was looking for.

Police did not confirm any of the students' accounts of the shooting.

Late Monday, outside a campus building where friends and family members awaited word on the identities of the victims, Greg Bringhurst, 18, was pacing nervously. He said his dorm hall adviser, a sophomore, was missing. She would've been in class in Norris Hall at the time of the shooting.

Bringhurst said neither her parents nor her friends had heard from her.

"It's not like her," he said. "We're all getting really worried. Her parents are now on the way from New York."

Sophomore Olivia Folmar said she and her fellow students, still with little definitive information about the shooting, couldn't escape the anxiety of finding out who actually died in Norris Hall.

"Everybody is afraid to see who is on that list," she said. "More than likely, we will know somebody or know somebody of somebody who has been killed."

The carnage at Virginia Tech now supplants a 1991 killing spree in Killeen, Texas, as the country's deadliest shooting rampage. In that incident, a man drove his truck into a Luby's cafeteria and shot 23 people to death before killing himself.

Monday's carnage also marked the deadliest campus shooting in the country since 1966, when Charles Whitman opened fire on students at the University of Texas at Austin from a clock tower on campus, killing 16 people before he was shot to death by police.

President Bush, through a spokesman, offered prayers to the victims and the people of Virginia.

Classes at Virginia Tech were canceled through Tuesday and grief counselors and priests were made available to students, faculty and families.

This was the second time in less than a year that the Virginia Tech campus was closed because of a shooting.

Last August, the opening day of classes was canceled when an escaped jail inmate allegedly killed a hospital guard off campus and fled onto the university. A sheriff's deputy involved in the manhunt was killed just off campus. The accused gunman, William Morva, faces capital murder charges.

By E.A. Torriero, Jodi S. Cohen and Rex W. Huppke
Tribune staff reporters

Illinois Open Road

For those who still don't have I-PASS I suggest to get one because it is a smarter choice in order to avoid being stuck in traffic.

More info go here

True Story About USPS Service

From an office manager friend of mine:

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I have just returned from the Post Office where I was trying to mail a large envelope for my office to Canada.

For those of you who do not know, if you mail anything other than a standard business envelope outside the USA you have to fill out a form and bring that and the item to be mailed to the post office.

I weighed it on my mail machine and dutifully wrote down the weight 5.1 oz.(that's ounces for some on my overseas readers)

The following conversation occurred.

Post office employee: You wrote down the weight wrong.

Me: What do you mean?

POE: It's heavier than you wrote. It weighs five point ten and you wrote five point one.

Me: That is the same thing.

POE: No it's not. Five point ten is heavier than five point one.

Me: But that's the same thing.

POE: Then why does my machine say five point ten and you wrote down five point one.

Then my head exploded.

**Chicago was recently discovered to have the worst mail service in the nation.