$100,000 Reward for Mexican Citizen, Brenda Delgado, Just the 9th Woman Placed on FBI's Most Wanted Fugitive List

The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced the addition of Brenda Delgado to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Delgado is being sought for allegedly orchestrating the murder-for-hire of dentist Dr. Kendra Hatcher in Dallas, Texas.



On September 2, 2015, the victim was found deceased from a gunshot wound in the parking garage of her apartment complex. Based on investigative efforts by the Dallas Police Department, Delgado is suspected of hiring two alleged co-conspirators to facilitate the murder. Both co-conspirators have been arrested and are currently in custody. Delgado is believed to have fled the country shortly after being interviewed by investigators.

Delgado has been charged with capital murder for her alleged crime, and a federal arrest warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution was issued by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas on October 7, 2015. Delgado is a Mexican citizen, born Brenda Berenice Delgado Reynaga, on June 18, 1982. She is described as a Hispanic female, 5’5” tall, 145 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair. She has a butterfly tattoo on the small of her back. Delgado has ties to Mexico, and investigators strongly believe she may currently be residing there.

The search for Delgado is being coordinated by the Dallas FBI’s Violent Crimes Task Force, which is composed of FBI special agents and detectives from the Dallas and Garland Police Departments. Given that Delgado’s alleged crime involved the use of a firearm, she should be considered armed and dangerous.

“The FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives program is one of the most powerful tools we have to apprehend our country’s most dangerous criminals,” said Joseph Campbell, assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Community visibility and awareness of the program brings the eyes and ears of citizens around the world into the effort, which leads to the capture of these criminals.”

Thomas M. Class, Sr., special agent in charge of the FBI’s Dallas Field Office, said, “Brenda Delgado was able to effectively manipulate everyone she involved in her calculated scheme. Although she didn’t pull the trigger herself, she is still responsible for the murder of Dr. Kendra Hatcher, and through international publicity and a significant reward offering, we intend to find her and to bring her to justice.”

Robert Sherwin, deputy chief of the Dallas Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons Division, said, “The evidence against Brenda Delgado has been gathered, the case has been filed by our detectives, a grand jury has indicted her, and a warrant has been issued for her arrest. What is left to do is to bring her to justice and have her answer for this crime that shocked our community. I am thankful to Kendra’s family for their strength and for all of the individuals involved in adding Brenda Delgado to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.”

Delgado is the 506th person and the ninth woman to be placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, which was established in March 1950. Since then, 474 fugitives have been apprehended or located, 156 of them as a result of citizen cooperation.

A reward of up to $100,000 is being offered for any information leading directly to the arrest of Delgado. Individuals with information concerning Delgado should take no action themselves but are asked to call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324). Tips can also be submitted online at https://tips.fbi.gov. For possible sightings outside the United States, please contact the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate. The FBI’s Dallas Field Office can be reached at 972-559-5000. Additional information concerning Delgado, including her wanted poster and the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, can be found by visiting the FBI’s website at https://www.fbi.gov.

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Free Men's Valet Box from Things Remembered!

Free Men's Valet Box, When Engraved with Jewelry Purchase from Things Remembered!

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An Offer We Can't Refuse - the Love/Hate Affair of the Mafia Mystique

The Mafia Mystique, Italian-Americans have love/hate affair with the dark side of their heritage.

Years ago, writing about the legacy of Mario Puzo, I said, "If there is a God and he is indeed Catholic, then Puzo is burning in hell." Before The Godfather was published in 1969, historians of organized crime in the 20th century told us that some major stars of the modern mob had names like Arnold Rothstein, Owney Madden, and Logan and Fred Billingsley. After The Godfather, the only major crime figures who got any attention were the ones whose names ended in vowels.

Thanks to this myth-mongering hack, Frank Sinatra will forever be remembered as the man who, through his fictional counterpart, Johnny Fontaine, crooned I Have But One Heart at his godfather's daughter's wedding. It is now taken for fact that Sinatra owed his comeback and hence his success not to his talent but to the Mafia; apparently they held guns to the heads of people, forcing them to buy all those Sinatra albums.

The provocative and lively An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America, by George De Stefano, a journalist and cultural critic whose work can be most often read in The Nation, has convinced me that I've been too tough on Puzo. The Godfather, the book and the movie, did, after all, succeed in reviving interest in Italian-American culture at a time when it appeared to be fading into the suburban landscape. I can only speak for members of my father's family, who rather enjoyed the attention and even reveled in the idea that they might actually be a bit feared because of their name.

For De Stefano, as for many of our generation, Francis Ford Coppola's film was an epiphany. The gay Baby Boomer son of a Neapolitan auto mechanic and a Sicilian housewife, De Stefano, by the time he was in college, had drifted far from his parents' world: "The Stones' Sticky Fingers was on my stereo and a Black Panther poster adorned my dorm room wall. My identity was radical hippie freak. My ethnic background was just that, background."

An Offer We Can't Refuse invites Italian-Americans of all backgrounds to the family table to discuss the issues of how mob-related movies and television shows have affected the very notion of what their heritage still means in the 21st century.

It's a big table. At the head is Richard Gambino, whose 1974 book Blood of My Blood -- The Dilemma of Italian-Americans was the first serious work of nonfiction written on the subject; sitting in the middle are Gay Talese, Nicholas Gage, and nearly every other prominent, second-generation Italian-American journalist; and fighting for attention down at the end of the table are third-generation would-be personas importante such as Maria Laurino, Maria Russo, Bill Tonelli, and, in the interests of full disclosure, me (I am quoted twice by De Stefano). As you can imagine, it's one heck of a noisy table.

The principal topic of discussion is not so much the Mafia, whose power most experts seem to feel is dwindling, as the Mafia's mystique. But as journalist Anthony Mancini puts it, "It's just too good a myth to abandon."

The best movies and shows about mobsters and their families -- Coppola's Godfather movies, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, The Sopranos, the late, lamented cult TV series Wise Guy -- were never really about the mob anyway; they were always about the vicissitudes of Italian-American family life and the perils of maintaining tradition in the face of assimilation, a metaphor for the American immigrant experience.

As a Russian neighbor of mine put it, "I never really thought The Godfather was about crime. I thought it was about the part where Don Corleone tells Michael he wanted something better for him than he had had."

These shows provide an answer to why the people who gave the world Dante, da Vinci, Boccaccio, Verdi and Rossini have produced so few literary artists in this country. Their grandparents might have come here without being able to write in their own language, much less English, but Coppola, Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Quentin Tarantino and several others have used their experiences to give the world the poetry that their ancestors couldn't. Don Corleone gave Michael something better after all.

But, says De Stefano, "Consider another possibility. Italian-Americans owe their high visibility in American popular culture in large measure to the very gangster image so many deplore. If the mafioso as cultural archetype were to become extinct, might Italian Americans themselves drop off the radar screen?"

In other words, if the Mafia myth peters out, does that mean the end of the Italian-American as a protagonist in our popular culture?

It's a dicey question, but after careful consideration De Stefano answers with a resounding "no." The Mafia myth, he steadfastly maintains, cannot be the last word: "Ethnicity remains a riveting, complicated drama of American life, and popular art that illuminates its workings still is needed. Italian America still has many more stories to tell."

Thanks to Allen Barra

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The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia

The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia, is the untold story of a daring plan by Chicago gangs in the 1990s to create a Spanish Mafia—and why it failed. John M. Hagedorn traces how Chicago Latino gang leaders, following in Al Capone’s footsteps, built a sophisticated organization dedicated to organizing crime and reducing violence. His lively stories of extensive cross-neighborhood gang organization, tales of police/gang corruption, and discovery of covert gang connections to Chicago’s Mafia challenge conventional wisdom and offer lessons for the control of violence today.

The book centers on the secret history of Spanish Growth & Development (SGD)—an organization of Latino gangs founded in 1989 and modeled on the Mafia’s nationwide Commission. It also tells a story within a story of the criminal exploits of the C-Note$, the “minor league” team of the Chicago’s Mafia (called the “Outfit”), which influenced the direction of SGD. Hagedorn’s tale is based on three years of interviews with an Outfit soldier as well as access to SGD’s constitution and other secret documents, which he supplements with interviews of key SGD leaders, court records, and newspaper accounts. The result is a stunning, heretofore unknown history of the grand ambitions of Chicago gang leaders that ultimately led to SGD’s shocking collapse in a pool of blood on the steps of a gang-organized peace conference.

The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia, is a compelling history of the lives and deaths of Chicago gang leaders. At the same time it is a sociological tour de force that warns of the dangers of organized crime while arguing that today’s relative disorganization of gangs presents opportunities for intervention and reductions in violence.

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2017 @USNews Law School Rankings: Highs, Lows And Specialties

The U.S. News & World Report law school rankings are back, catching the attention of students, attorneys and law school administrators throughout the country. This year’s rankings reveal upgrades or downgrades for schools like the University of Michigan, the University of Cincinnati and Brooklyn Law School, as well as tuition and enrollment variations among schools.

None of the three highest ranked schools took top honors in any specialty category, but all three placed in the top ten of at least two specialties categories.

Top Ten 

The rankings reveal few changes to the ranks of the most elite law schools. Yale University remains in the top spot, followed by Harvard University and Stanford University, which share the second spot.

Columbia University and the University of Chicago share the fourth spot, while the University of California, Berkeley, Michigan and the University of Virginia share the eighth spot. (Michigan switched places this year with Duke University, with Michigan moving up from No. 11 to No. 8 and Duke moving down from No. 8 to No. 11).

The remaining top ten law schools are New York University in the No. 6 spot and the University of Pennsylvania in the No. 7 spot.

Top Twenty-Five 

The additional top 25 law schools are: Duke University (No. 11); Northwestern University (No. 12); Cornell University (No. 13); Georgetown University (No. 14); University of Texas, Austin (No. 15); Vanderbilt University (No. 16); University of California, Los Angeles (No. 17); Washington University in St. Louis (No. 18); University of Southern California (No. 19); Boston University (No. 20); University of Iowa (No. 20); Emory University (No. 22); University of Minnesota (No. 22); University of Notre Dame (No. 22); Arizona State University (No. 25); George Washington University (No. 25); and Indiana University, Bloomington (No. 25).

Indiana, Boston University, Michigan, Iowa, Vanderbilt, USC, and Arizona State moved up at least one slot.

Greatest Gains and Losses

Some law schools made significant gains this year, while others suffered losses. Within the top 100 ranked schools, Cincinnati had the most improved ranking, getting bumped up from No. 79 to No. 60.

Other schools that moved up five or more spots are Boston University (up 6 to No. 20); Indiana (up 9 to No. 25); Wake Forest University (up 7 to No. 40); University of California, Hastings (up 9 to No. 50); University of Houston (up 9 to No. 50); University of New Mexico (up 11 to No. 60); University of Oklahoma (up 7 to No. 60); Loyola Marymount University (up 10 to No. 65); Loyola University Chicago (up 6 to No. 72); St. John’s University (up 8 to No. 74); Villanova University (up 13 to No. 74); Louisiana State University, ​Baton Rouge (up 12 to No. 82); Northeastern University (up 5 to No. 82); St. Louis University (up 5 to No. 82); University of New Hampshire School of Law (up 5 to No. 82); and Wayne State University (up 8 to No. 97).

On the flip side, Brooklyn Law School experienced the greatest decline in ranking, getting downgraded from No. 78 to No. 97.

Other schools that moved down five or more spots are the University of Alabama (down 6 to No. 28); University of Washington (down 5 to No. 33); Pepperdine University (down 13 to No. 65); University of Tennessee, Knoxville (down 13 to No. 65); University of Denver (down 5 to No. 72); American University (down 7 to No. 78); University of Nevada, Las Vegas (down 11 to No. 78); Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago-​Kent) (down 8 to No. 86); Pennsylvania State University (Dickinson) (down 15 to No. 86); Pennsylvania State University, University Park (down 15 to No. 86); University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (down 11 to No. 86); Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (down 5 to No. 92); University of Hawaii, Manoa (down 10 to No. 92); Michigan State University (down 6 to No. 100); and SUNY Buffalo Law School (down 13 to No. 100).

Ranking Criteria 

The U.S. News rankings are based on 2015 and 2016 data and calculated according to the weighted average of various measures including peer assessment scores, median LSAT scores, median undergraduate GPAs, acceptance rates, employment rates for graduates, bar passage rates, and library resources.

Enrollment and Cost

The U.S. News rankings also include information on enrollment and tuition. Of the top 50 law schools, the school with the highest enrollment is Harvard, with 1,767 students (followed by Georgetown, with 1,725 students). The school with the lowest enrollment is Washington and Lee University, with 314 students (followed by University of California, Irvine, with 334 students).

When it comes to tuition and fees, the most expensive of the top 50 law schools is Columbia, at $62,700 per year (followed by Cornell University, at $59,900 per year). The least expensive of the top 50 schools (at least for certain students) is Brigham Young University, at $11,970 per year for full time LDS members (followed by University of Georgia, at $19,476 per year for in state students).

Starting Salaries

The median starting private sector salary for 2014 law school graduates from 108 schools was between $50,000 and $74,999. Graduates of 39 schools had a median starting salary of between $75,000 and $100,000, while graduates of 30 schools had a median starting salary of more than $100,000.

For public sector jobs, graduates from 69 schools had a median starting salary of under $50,000, and graduates from 112 schools had a median starting salary of between $50,000 to $74,999.

Specialty Rankings

The following law schools each came in No. 1 for the following specialty areas of law: Georgetown for clinical programs (overall rank No. 14); Seattle University for legal writing (overall rank No. 111); Stetson University for trial advocacy (overall rank No. 103); St. Louis University for health care law (overall rank No. 82); Vermont Law School for environmental law (overall rank No. 132); Ohio State University for dispute resolution (overall rank No. 30); Berkeley for intellectual property law (overall rank No. 8); and NYU for both international law and tax law (overall rank No. 6).

None of the law schools ranked in the top three overall (Yale, Harvard and Stanford) earned the top spot in any specialty ranking. However, Harvard made the top ten for health care law, dispute resolution, international law and tax law. Yale made the top ten for clinical programs and international law, while Stanford made the top ten for clinical programs and intellectual property law.

Conclusions

With the rankings now in, ambitious college students can set their sights on making it into law schools in the coveted top ten. Those who aspire to practice in niche areas like environmental or tax law can hone in on the most appropriate schools for them. Meanwhile, law school administrators at upwardly mobile institutions can celebrate their accomplishments this year while their counterparts at schools heading in the other direction can assess how to reverse course and move up by the time the rankings roll around again next year.

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Watch Bosch, an Amazon Original Series, for Free

Amazon Prime - Bosch - Only on Amazon Prime Instant Video - Start Your Free Trial

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"Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires"

Face it--there seemingly will always be a market for certain books. Just choose to chronicle some facet of the Kennedys, the Nazis or, as Selwyn Raab has opted, the Mafia, and a certain sales threshold is guaranteed. Quality seldom seems an issue. Just serve it up and the buyers will come.

Happily, "Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires" is worth every cent, and for those who haven't gotten into Mafia reading on either the fictional -- as in Mario Puzo-- level or other documentary accounts, this may well be the only book you need to read.

So well written and encompassing is Raab's effort that even at 763 pages, many readers will pine for more. And of course there could be more at some point. As the title suggests, a Mafia resurgence is more than quite possible after the John Gotti era unraveling of the more traditional operations in the 1980s and '90s. The next time, it just might not be so Italian based.

Raab serves up a history of the underworld that is long on coherency and understanding and short on the kind of mind-numbing detail other Mafia historians wander into. He gets right into the notoriously efficient work of Charles (Lucky) Luciano, whose rules of engagement ended a lot of shoot-'em-ups and kept the Mafia pointed at one goal -- ever increasing the amount of money pouring into the organization and individual coffers by corrupting American government and business, not necessarily in that order.

It was Luciano who advocated the organization adopt secretive, low-profile standards for thievery, extortion and other crimes as opposed to the over-the-top "I'm just giving the people what they want" personna that Chicago boss Al Capone advocated. And Raab pulls the thread by luring the reader to all that came after. With a reporter's love of fact and disdain for much of the fictional crap about these dark knights, we follow the organization's operations through its real birth during Prohibition, its World War II profiteering, its '50s heyday as a union corrupter and Las Vegas force and its '80s and '90s stumbling largely attributed to a name now very familiar -- Rudy Giuliani. It was Giuliani's use of RICO (the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act) that did great damage to the Mafia's traditional legal defenses in the 1980s.

While he devotes a few pages to the oft-told stories like the Louis (Lepke) Buchalter case from the '30s and '40s, Raab scores big points for telling modern Mafia tales that are less often told but are just as magnetic as the '30s-era classics. And Raab is a constant critic of the law enforcement and justice system weaknesses for not prosecuting crimes that seemed all too obvious. And back in the beginning of this review, did we mention the Kennedys?

That would propel the reader to the book's Chapter 15, titled "The Ring of Truth." The title comes from the mouth of G. Robert Blakey, an expert on both the John F. Kennedy assassination and the underworld, about utterances from Frank Ragano, a lawyer who had the opportunity to defend Mafia operators Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello and Detroit's own labor racketeer, the still missing Jimmy Hoffa.

Trafficante, Ragano said, confirmed that the Mafia had a hand in the drama of Nov. 22, 1963. The simple theory: Robert Kennedy's vigorous prosecution of racketeering had to be stopped and the best way to do that was by icing the man who appointed him to his job. Yes, there was plenty of bad feeling toward JFK himself, but Raab concludes, "Whether or not they had a part in it, the Mafia had triumphed as a big winner after the assassination."

One other reason to admire Raab's work: He does quite a bit of damage to the fictional image of the Mafia that is the result of Puzo's fiction and movies like "Good Fellas," "Casino" and the most current manifestation, "The Sopranos." Raab quotes organized crime boss Howard Abadinsky as saying, "They are displayed having a twisted sense of honor, 'taking no crap from anyone,' with easy access to women and money. Such displays romanticize organized crime and, as an unintended consequence, serve to perpetuate the phenomenon and create alluring myths about the Mafia."

That's something Raab could never be convicted of.

Reviewed by JOHN SMYNTEK

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