NENO BEST |
Best was bragging about selling guns on the social networking site, when narcotic investigators spotted his posts and passed the information along to an undercover officer, who then became aware of the man behind a multi-state gun smuggling ring, Adeji Omole, 31.
Omole, in turn, unwittingly led the undercover, who remains unidentified, to Earl Campbell, 23, and Walter Walker, 29, both of South Carolina, who were running drugs from the southern United States to New York with a loose band of co-conspirators along the way.
The year long investigation, during which the undercover officer bought hundreds of guns to keep them off of the streets, ended with the NYPD confiscating 254 firearms (including 9 rifles), 36 of which had been reported stolen, and the arrest of nineteen people in a 552-count indictment.
Guns seized in the massive bust announced Monday included a fully automatic MAC-11 pistol with a silencer as large as the gun.Both Mayor Micheal Bloomberg and NYPD police commissioner Ray Kelly politicized the press conference by highlighting that Campbell pointed to the racially charged and controversial ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ laws as the reason why he was afraid to enter Brooklyn with the guns:
“In about five seconds, you get 32 rounds spraying down the street,” a law enforcement source said of the gun.
The seizure also includes two SKS, a semi-automatic Soviet-era rifle. One had a laser-dot sight attached and a suppressor on the front that eliminates flash and smoke to make it harder to tell where the gunman is firing from.
“This SKS will go through a project door, through the next door, through a wall, through the next wall into the next apartment,” the source said.
“That will go through a car, a cop’s armor. That will go through anything we’ve got.”
“I’m in Brownsville,” Kelly quoted Campbell as saying. “We got like, umm, uh, whatchamacallit, stop and frisk.”As previously reported, U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the New York Police Department deliberately violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of New Yorkers with its Stop-and-Frisk policy, and an independent monitor is needed to oversee major changes.
Bloomberg credited the city’s stop-and-frisk laws with taking 8,000 guns off the street.
Scheindlin cited Trayvon’s death in the lengthy opinion last week that infuriated NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who vows to appeal.
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the architect of Stop-and-Frisk — and also on President Barack Obama‘s short list for secretary of Homeland Security — insists that the policy saves lives and the city risks a resurgence in crime if it is no longer in effect.
Kelly also insists that more Black people are stopped because more Black people commit crimes:
“You have to apply a formula of sorts. ‘Do the stops comport with the description given by the victims of perpetrators of violent crime?’ And our stops certainly do,” Kelly said.The investigation is ongoing in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and arrests are still being made.
“Nobody wants to be stopped…we have engaged in a major training evolution for several years, focusing on these issues, to do these stops with courtesy, do them with respect,” he added.
As for the genius who set the wheels in motion for the NYPD’s — and the community’s — victory, Best was only charged with one count of conspiracy.
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