Reuters Crime Beat

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Rolf Glaser zips his motorbike up the twisting alleyways of Vidigal slum, past a bunch of cheerful, gun-packing drug traffickers, and emerges at a cliffside plateau next to some demolished shacks. A scrawny dog barks angrily from a nearby rooftop. This, the German developer says with a straight face, could be Rio de Janeiro's next tourist hotspot. "Can you imagine sitting up here on a terrace with a glass of wine?" he muses, motioning toward the sparkling azure...Read Full Story

NEW YORK (Reuters) - While accused hedge fund swindler Arthur Nadel sits in a Manhattan jail, Burton Wiand is busy seizing control of his assets -- a 453-acre mountainside tract of land in North Carolina, several airplane hangars and a jumble of bank accounts. Wiand, a Florida lawyer, is a court-appointed receiver, a job that has become increasingly in demand in blockbuster fraud cases ranging from the Bernard Madoff scandal to the case against Texas tycoon Allen Stanford. These appointees...Read Full Story

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across Mexico's bloodiest drug war city Tuesday, trying to prevent a collapse in law and order just south of the U.S. border. Sirens blared as the army staged one of its biggest troop build-ups in years in Ciudad Juarez, a desert city across the border from El Paso, Texas, where near-daily clashes between drug gangs and police have terrified residents. Infamous in the 1990s for the unsolved murders of hundreds of...Read Full Story

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Hit men dressed in fake police tactical gear burst into a home in Phoenix, rake it with gunfire and execute a man. Armed kidnappers snatch victims from cars and even a local shopping mall across the Phoenix valley for ransom, turning the sun-baked city into the "kidnap capital" of the United States. Violence of this kind is common in Mexico where drug cartel abductions and executions are a daily feature of a raging drug war that claimed 6,000 lives south of the border last...Read Full Story

BOGOTA 11 (Reuters) - Colombian college teacher Mercedes Diaz has little else in common with mattress maker Henry Moreno, but they both know the bitter sting of investment schemes that promise high returns only to collapse in scandal. Latin America's poor and working class are more often the victims of get-rich-quick scams, but now some of the more well-heeled are feeling similar pain since U.S. bank Stanford crumbled under the weight of massive fraud charges. The region's professionals and...Read Full Story