The sentence was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein; Acting Special Agent in Charge Phil Phillips of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Acting Commissioner Anthony Barksdale of the Baltimore City Police Department; and Baltimore City State’s Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein.

According to evidence presented at the four-day trial, on December 19, 2010, Thomas and an accomplice robbed Nephew’s Pizza Store in Baltimore at gunpoint. Thomas pointed a handgun at the employees as he entered the store and demanded money. His accomplice took approximately $500 from a pizza delivery driver.

Thomas forced the owner and three employees into a small office in the back of the store and onto their knees. The owner gave Thomas $50 from his pocket. Thomas demanded the owner’s wallet. Finding no money inside the wallet, Thomas threw the wallet to the ground. Thomas placed the loaded gun against the owner’s head, threatening to “blow” his “head off.” The owner and the other store employees fought Thomas, and, during the struggle, the owner was able to take the gun away. The defendant’s accomplice fled the scene.

Two store employees called 911. The owner and the store employees were finally able to subdue Thomas in the front of the store. Baltimore City Police officers arrived and arrested Thomas.

Thomas had previously been convicted of a felony and was prohibited from possessing a gun.

Kyndra Leann Howell, 22, Jeremiah Christian Johnson, 29, and Zachary Demond Gantt, 17, are charged with kidnapping.

Last Sunday, Patel told clerk Andrew Williams at the Exxon station that he’d be back in a couple of hours, but never returned, according to investigators.

The break in the case came when the owner of a home Howell rents spotted Patel on surveillance video taken at the home.

News 4 has learned that the video shows Howell and Patel going into the home on Jerry Drive.

Several others are seen going in and out of the house, but Patel is never seen leaving the home.

The video also shows a car pull up behind the home.

Investigators said Monday that they learned Patel was held against his will for a short time in the residence in the Homeland Park Community.

Howell, Johnson, Gantt are being held at the Anderson County Detention Center pending a bond hearing.

Neil H. MacBride, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Michael F.A. Morehart, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Richmond Field Office, made the announcement after the plea was accepted by United States District Judge Henry E. Hudson.

Korey Reynolds was charged with transporting a minor across state lines for purposes of prostitution in a criminal complaint on June 12, 2012. Reynolds faces a minimum term of 10 years in prison and a maximum penalty of life in prison when he is sentenced on October 2, 2012.

In a statement of facts filed with his plea agreement, Reynolds admitted that in May 2012 he transported three females, including a 13-year-old girl, from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Richmond, Virginia, with the intention that the females engage in prostitution while in Virginia. Reynolds and the two other females met the juvenile in Miami, Florida, and encouraged her to come to Charlotte, where they were living. The juvenile traveled to Charlotte sometime in February or March and engaged in prostitution while in Charlotte, providing the majority of her earnings to Reynolds. In May 2012, the juvenile and the other females traveled with Reynolds to Virginia, where they continued engaging in acts of prostitution and continued providing their earnings to Reynolds.

Over the past few years the U.S. Marshals Service and El Dorado County Sheriffs joined forces to locate Senatore. Recently leads were developed that Senatore may have been living in Staten Island, New York. The U.S. Marshals in the Eastern District of New York Sex Offender Investigation Branch were contacted to attempt to locate Senatore. Investigators just missed Senatore by a month but were able to generate new leads of his whereabouts. The search intensified and multiple agencies and resources were utilized to catch up to Senatore. Today during surveillance in New Jersey, U.S. Marshals and Task Force Officers spotted Senatore getting into a van and leaving a residence they then made contact and confirmed the person to be Senatore. He was taken into custody without incident. Senatore will be extradited back to El Dorado County where he will face his charges of Forcible Lewd Acts on a child.

This case was part of Project Guardian an initiative led by the U.S. Marshals Service which involve high value targets. These cases are often extremely complex and involve extremely heinous acts against children.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: “The conviction of Min Su Cho closes a chapter in the prosecution of those responsible for a vast, international sex trafficking ring that exploited countless women. This guilty verdict also sends a clear message to others engaging in similar conduct that they will be punished.”

According to the superseding indictment and the evidence presented at trial: A network of brothels in the Koreatown section of Manhattan masqueraded as massage parlors and used various brokers and taxi drivers to provide a steady supply of women to engage in prostitution. CHO was a broker who supplied prostitutes from New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Korea to these brothels, which were operated by other defendants in the case. Brokers like CHO received anywhere from $200 to $500 each from both the brothel owners and the prostitutes for facilitating connections between them.

CHO faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. Her sentencing is scheduled for December 15, 2011. Fifteen other defendants previously pled guilty to their involvement in the scheme, including various brothel owners, taxi drivers, and brokers. One of those 15 defendants and an additional 16th defendant in this case also pled guilty to narcotics distribution charges.

Robertson was indicted on May 22, 2008.

According to testimony and evidence presented at trial, Robertson was a member of “Tampa Blood and Honour,” a hate group whose members espoused the belief that white persons of Aryan descent were the superior race. Tampa Blood and Honour members considered the homeless to be an inferior class, regardless of race. “Bum rolling” was a term used by Tampa Blood and Honour members to describe the activity of targeting and committing acts of violence against homeless persons.

Specifically, in the early morning hours of September 13, 1998, Robertson and three other members of Tampa Blood and Honour, Kenneth Hoover, Charles Marovskis, and Cory Hulse, murdered two homeless men, Alfred Williams and Richard Arseneau. Mr. Williams was murdered in downtown Tampa, under the Crosstown Expressway, in the vicinity of Meridian Street. Robertson and the other Tampa Blood and Honour members severely beat Mr. Williams with, among other things, a tire-iron. According to the medical examiner, the cause of Mr. Williams’ death was blunt force trauma to the head.

Mr. Arseneau was murdered in Tampa near the intersection of Interstate 275 and Fletcher Avenue. The murder occurred in a wooded lot located east of 320 East Fletcher Avenue. Robertson, along with the same three other Tampa Blood and Honour members who participated in the murder of Mr. Williams, also beat Mr. Arseneau to death. As a result of the beating, Mr. Arseneau sustained massive head injuries, at least some of which were caused by a hatchet. According to the medical examiner, the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

Co-defendants, Hoover, Marovskis, and Hulse previously pleaded guilty to both counts of murder in aid of racketeering and are awaiting sentencing.

The Task Force received information around noon today that Robinson may be at his father’s house in Pace. Members from the Task Force from Santa Rosa and Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Offices, the State Attorney’s Office, Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Patrol Deputies from Santa Rosa County then converged on the home on the 5000 Block of Todd Street. The Task Force was unable to determine if Robinson was in fact inside the house. During their investigation they also learned that Robinson like to spend a lot of time in the woods behind the home. While trying to determine if Robinson was inside, Task Force members also began concentrating their focus on the woods. Around 4 p.m. Robinson did emerge from those woods and was immediately spotted by officers first and arrested him without any incident. No weapon was found on or near Robinson.

“Every day, federal agents conduct investigations of serious criminal conduct that threatens the safety of our community. Agents depend upon the honesty of the people they interview to make sure that they can act quickly and appropriately in preventing criminal behavior—especially in cases like this one, where the defendant was planning a murder-for-hire scheme. Cases like this demonstrate why it is a criminal offense to intentionally lie to agents conducting their investigations,” said United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates.

Cherokee County Sheriff Roger Garrison said, “We are pleased with the outcome of this investigation and with the subsequent guilty plea by this defendant today in federal court. We appreciate the assistance from the FBI and federal prosecutors in this matter.”

According to United States Attorney Yates, the charges, and other publicly available information: In April of this year, the FBI and Cherokee County authorities learned that an individual who turned out to be ACOSTA was searching for someone to help him with a murder-for-hire scheme. ACOSTA had been tasked by a local butcher to “eliminate” a competitor by having the competitor killed. ACOSTA discussed his need to find a “hit man” with a friend who subsequently reported the plan to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office. This cooperating individual was directed to record any additional conversations he had with ACOSTA on this topic.

After several other conversations between ACOSTA and the cooperating official, the sheriff’s office and the FBI directed the cooperating individual to inform ACOSTA that he had found a potential hit man. This would-be killer was in fact an undercover officer. ACOSTA spoke with this officer several times, to include one face-to-face meeting in early June. At this in-person meeting, ACOSTA explained that the unnamed target was trying to steal some of his employer’s butcher business and needed to be shot and killed. The two agreed on a contract price of $5,000, with $3,000 to be paid up front.

After the in-person meeting, ACOSTA became harder to reach and eventually stopped returning the undercover officer’s calls. The FBI confronted ACOSTA, who denied any knowledge of a murder-for-hire scheme, denied having met the undercover officer, and denied having agreed to pay the officer $5,000.

After he was arrested on state false statement charges, ACOSTA, through counsel, asked to meet with the FBI again to discuss his case. At this meeting, ACOSTA admitted that he had lied to the FBI agents the first time around, and that he did in fact seek to hire the undercover officer to kill the alleged meat market rival. ACOSTA remained adamant that he never learned the name of the intended victim, as the scheme collapsed before his employer had informed him of the target’s identity. Today in court, ACOSTA admitted lying to the agent, and told the court he had been working at a food outlet in Woodstock at the time of the incident. The investigation is ongoing.

ACOSTA was arrested on the present federal false statement charges on June 21, 2011. His sentencing is scheduled for December 14, 2011, at 11 a.m. He faces up to five years in prison for his false statements to the agents and officers. He is also subject to deportation. In determining the actual sentence, the court will consider the United States Sentencing Guidelines, which are not binding, but provide appropriate sentencing ranges for most offenders.

How it all started. In late 2010, the FBI—through our legal attaché office in Beijing—received information from Chinese officials about their investigation of a large-scale child pornography website housed on U.S. servers. And one of their main suspects, a Chinese-born man, was living in New York. So our New York office opened an investigation under our Innocent Images National Initiative and instituted an undercover operation.

The investigation. While the main webpage advertised the various categories of pornographic pictures that were available, our undercover agents—with the help of an FBI Chinese language specialist—discovered that in order to actually view, post, or download the pornography, you had to pay a membership fee ($25 quarterly, $50 annually, and $100 for a “lifetime” membership). The website conveniently accepted all payment types—credit cards, wire and bank transfers, online payments, and even cash that could be mailed to what turned out to be a money transfer office in New York. After becoming “members,” the agents saw hundreds of disturbing pictures and videos of children of all different nationalities engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Through our investigative efforts, we were able to determine that the site—and its related online payment system—resided on the servers of a web hosting company in Dallas and that the subscriber of the website domain lived in Flushing. We also traced two e-mail accounts—one featured on the site and the other affiliated with the website domain—back to the same individual. Through billing information, we learned that the man had made about $20,000 per month from his subscribers. We believe he had been operating the site since at least 2007.

After the arrest, we identified 17 additional Chinese-language child pornography websites he allegedly maintained and operated. We also seized two servers in Dallas where those sites were hosted. All 18 websites have been shut down.