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Ex-spy has price on head, ache in heart

Baruch Vega's cellphone hardly rings these days.

It's not like 10 years ago, when the Colombian photographer of models was an intermediary between the Drug Enforcement Administration and powerful drug traffickers, and his phone rang off the hook with calls from federal prosecutors and attorneys in South Florida while he discussed poses with European models at his Miami Beach penthouse.

Now Vega, 61, seems to be tired of living on the razor's edge. He wants to put behind him the world that in 2000 took him to jail in the United States on charges of obstruction of justice and money laundering. The charges were later dropped.

Federal agent faces prison for tipping off traffickers

Members of a drug-trafficking organization in Mexico got access to confidential information about U.S. anti-drug agencies thanks to a veteran immigration agent, according to court filings, and bragged about it while dining at a Weston restaurant.

Richard Padilla Cramer, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who had been assigned to Guadalajara, Mexico, pleaded guilty last week in Miami federal court to obstruction of justice. Padilla will be sentenced Feb. 18, and faces up to 20 years in prison.

He was accused of conspiring to help two Mexican nationals elude capture on drug and money-laundering charges. The two men are presumed members of the network that received database reports from the computer systems of both ICE and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Massive sweep shatters drug gangs

The John Does got an identity Thursday. Police took the mask off the fearsome Liberty City gang, unveiling federal drug, gun and money-laundering charges that could send 15 accused street gangsters to prison for life.

Among the accusations: five murders, including that of Cynthia Brown, a government witness killed in 1997 two days before her scheduled testimony against Corey Smith, the reputed leader of the John Does.

U.S. Attorney Thomas Scott said the John Doe charges - announced with a second indictment against the rival Cloud Nine drug gang - reflect a sophisticated 15-month law enforcement effort to "take back the streets from drug dealers" by using wiretaps, surveillance and multiagency shoe leather.

Cocaine kingpin sentenced to 45 years

Once a feared Colombian cocaine kingpin, Diego León Montoya Sánchez repeatedly apologized to a federal judge in Miami on Wednesday for his life of trafficking, greed and murder before he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Montoya Sánchez, who appeared on the FBI's most wanted list alongside Osama bin Laden before his arrest in Colombia last year, admitted again and again that he had made bad choices in his early life following the death of his father in 1975.

``I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing I could ever to repair the great harm I have caused,'' said the one-time leader of the powerful North Valley cartel, which exported 1.2 million pounds of cocaine worth $10 billion to the United States over the previous two decades.

AP IMPACT: Drug cartels co-opt rehab for recruits

Mexico's powerful cartels have taken to running drug rehabilitation centers, turning recovering addicts into hit men and smugglers and giving some an ultimatum: Work for us or we'll kill you.

Two of the country's six major drug cartels are known to have used treatment facilities to further their trade, top Mexican law enforcement officials told The Associated Press in exclusive interviews.

Here, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 41 people have been killed in mass shootings at rehab clinics over the past year and a half - massacres prompted not only by recruitment efforts within the clinics, but also by more common reasons like failure to pay for drugs or betrayal of a dealer.