Brutal MS-13 Gang Murders Largely Ignored, Ohio Man Travels to Ukraine, Discovers War is...Hard, $350K "Green Energy" Grant Used to Light Park...That's Closed at Night?! "(The Five for 03/22/22)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
It’s an eventful week, let’s dive into the news.
[one]
An Ohio newspaper chronicled the journey of a local to join the Ukrainian Foreign Legion…only to discover that the man had a kinda-sorta terrorist background with a group that’s hard to define, but definitely want to overthrow the U.S. government.
When Henry Hoeft decided to join the foreign legion in Ukraine, he pitched his local newspaper on the story. The result for the 28-year-old was a PR coup: A glowing front-page profile in the Columbus Dispatch.
The piece described him, appealingly, as “as a former infantryman in the U.S. Army and half-Ukrainian on his father’s side.” And it enabled Hoeft to pose as an important actor on the global stage: “We feel like if we can hold Putin for long enough,” Hoeft told the reporter, “we can possibly stop a world war.”
The only problem?
Hoeft is a member of the “Boogaloo Bois,”
The Boogaloo Bois’ flavor of libertarian, anti-law-enforcement anarchism can be hard to peg on the left-right political spectrum. And as if to heighten the cognitive dissonance, Boogaloos mark themselves flamboyant Hawaiian floral prints. (Hoeft wore a floral covid mask at the statehouse protest.) The movement’s goofy symbols belie dark beliefs. The Southern Poverty Law Center has traced racist origins of the “boogaloo” coinage — noting that the term “is regularly deployed by white nationalists and neo-Nazis who want to see society descend into chaos so that they can come to power and build a new fascist state” — though SPLC cautions that the wider Boogaloo Boy movement is “not exclusively premised on pursuing white supremacist ideas.”
It’s a tough movement to pin down. In 2020, the Boogaloos fought against AND alongside BLM protestors during the summer of unrest, and almost always fight against and harass law enforcement.
This is the classic case of the loudest guy being the biggest coward in real life…but with much higher stakes.
[two]
A member of MS-13, one of the most brutally violent criminal organizations in the world, was convicted of murdering a teenage boy, possibly motivated by a rule requiring bloodshed to gain full membership into the gang.
Eliseo Vaquerano Canas, a/k/a “Peligroso,” 22, a Salvadorian national, was sentenced by U.S. Senior District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf to 43 years in prison and five years of supervised release. Vaquerano will be subject to deportation proceedings upon completion of his sentence. In February 2021, Vaquerano pleaded guilty to conspiracy to conduct enterprise affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity, also known as RICO conspiracy, on behalf of the MS-13 gang. As part of his racketeering activity, Vaquerano participated in the 2018 murder of a teenager, who was murdered with extreme atrocity and cruelty, and with deliberate premeditation, in violation of Massachusetts law
MS-13 is organized into “cliques” or branches operating in local territories. Vaquerano belonged to the “Sykos Locos Salvatrucha” clique of MS-13, which operated in the cities of Lynn, Chelsea, and other parts of Massachusetts. MS-13 has various ranks, with elevation to “homeboy” status generally requiring the commission of a significant act of violence.
Observations:
A. It’s worth noting that 10 years ago, this likely would have been a prominent national story. It’s probable that Donald Trump overstated the threat of violence from immigrants from Central and South America (most murder victims are killed by someone they know, not a stranger), but that doesn’t lessen the seriousness of the terror MS-13 inflicts on the communities where they conduct illegal activities.
B. The fact that MS-13 requires a murder for full membership status….again…should be national news.
C. How is it possible to get out of prison after being convicted of such a brutal, pre-mediated murder? Stabbing someone 32 times means you continue to attack the corpse long after the victim is dead. This is…a special kind of psychosis.
[three]
More than $350,000 from a “green energy” grant in Miami has been used to put solar lights…in a park that closes at sunset.
A totally revamped park on the shores of Biscayne Bay recently reopened to the public. The new amenities include a rebuilt sea wall, a path along the waterfront and dozens of native trees to replace the 69 invasive Australian pines that were chopped down.
But from the view of the Rickenbacker Causeway, the most notable new feature is the 53 new solar-powered light poles that fully illuminate the park after dark.
There’s just one problem: The park still closes at sunset. The public cannot benefit from the new lights.
According to bid documents and cost estimates obtained by WLRN, more than $350,000 was invested in the new “safety lighting” at the public park.
“It’s so that the homeless don’t use it,” suggested Albert Gomez, the co-founder of the Miami Climate Alliance, a group focused on climate change policy. “Police officers like to patrol and not get out of the car and not have to go through the park in the dark with flashlights. They would prefer to have lights and be able to spot the homeless people and go and get them out.”
Uhhh, 350 grand is a heck of a lot of money to spend so the police don’t have to get out of their cars.
I’m pretty sure, if asked, the police department would have been happy to walk the park and put that much money to salaries and equipment.
Or, heck, spend it on free waffles for the city or whatever. Pretty much anything would be less stupid than lighting a park that goes unused at night.
For all the attention put on national corruption, an astounding amount of waste, cronyism and outright theft happens at the local level, and often nobody (including the local media) notices.
This time, the local media noticed…but there’s no evidence anything will change because of it.
[four]
For the most part, mansion “safe rooms” are the stuff of thrillers and horror flicks…but increased crime in the U.S generally and in L.A. specifically has made them a hot commodity in the real estate market in California.
“Our influx of inquiries has increased more than 1,000 percent over the past three months,” says Dean Cryer, vp international operations at Building Consensus/Panic Room Builders, a firm specializing in the building of safe rooms. “It’s gone insane.”
Because of the perceived increase in crime in metropolitan areas and high-profile murders and robberies in high-net-worth neighborhoods like Beverly Hills, “hidden rooms are definitely trending right now,” says Cryer.
In the L.A. area, some houses selling for as low as $4 million or $5 million are being kitted out, particularly spec homes. “I think they are not something that, in an immediate sense, increases value,” says Douglas Elliman real estate agent Greg Holcomb. “But when a buyer is interested in the house anyway, I think it does help [boost interest].”
The changes since 2015, when civil unrest started to escalate, have come gradually enough that stories like this don’t seem…completely…abnormal.
But people with money (at least the kind of money that can buy a $5M+ home in LA) tend to want to spend on status consumer goods—sports cars, jewelry, clothing, purses etc.
The fact that safe rooms are becoming hot, with such a high price tag attached, tells us a lot about the level of fear people in L.A. are currently experiencing.
[five]
It’s quite rare for a commercial jet to crash, but a Boeing went down in China yesterday, and the early findings suggest a “human induced event,” not mechanical issues.
news.com.au reports:
“Even with total loss of power, no aircraft plummets to the ground from 20,000 feet in two minutes with an event at 8,000 feet,” Mr Hansford explained to news.com.au.
“I think aircraft technical failure can be ruled out and it will be an external event … I would get on a Boeing 737-800 in an instant with an Australian carrier, so my suggestion would be it won’t be Boeing or aircraft technical related.”
While it is not yet clear what forced the sudden dip in altitude, Mr Hansford believes there are four likely scenarios that led to the catastrophe.
“It is very unlikely the pilot passed out as the non-flying pilot would have been able to very safely take over the flying and land the aircraft,” he explained.“Likely scenarios include pilot suicide, aircraft mid-air collision with military aircraft (they don’t have transponders like civil aircraft), [flight MU5735] was struck by a missile or an on-board explosion.”
“My tipping is a human-induced event or bought down by rogue missile. Debris looks like MH117 over Ukraine, and the Chinese are providing too much information this time which is uncharacteristic.”
Until the next one,
-sth