13-Year-Old Took Part In Four-Hour Gang Rape In U.K.

A young schoolboy was involved in a violent gang rape with six older men which was all filmed on a cellphone, a U.K. court has heard.

An investigation was sparked and police launched a major operation after a 20-year-old woman told police she was raped in a house in Southampton, Hampshire, UK, in January, according to mirror.co.uk.

Earlier in the night the woman had been visiting friends before walking through a subway on her way home, according to The New York Post.  That’s where she met one of the defendants, Mihaita Palie.

The Mirror reports that she went back to the house, where six others were waiting, and was subjected to a horrifying four-hour ordeal, which was filmed on a cellphone.

“In this room were these defendants and they subsequently subjected her to rape and other sexual abuse as described in the indictment,” said prosecutor Simon Foster.

The court was told that the woman managed to make her way to a public phone after the attack and was able to call police.

“She telephoned the police. They came and found her. She told them about the address in which she had spent a few hours,” Foster added.  “The defendants were arrested and she later gave a three-hour account in interview,” he said.

Octavian Militaru, 37, Mihaita Palie, 33, Cosmin Nicut, 20, Radu-Florin Panciuc, 20, Nicolae Ghinea, 21, Ion Matei, 41, and the 13-year-old boy are facing a four-week trial. writes The New York Post.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/boy-13-took-part-four-5858429

http://nypost.com/2015/06/11/13-year-old-took-part-in-filmed-four-hour-gang-rape-prosecutor/

Gang Rapists On Trial

The second of four Pittsfield defendants – Justin A. King – charged with gang raping a University of Massachusetts student is scheduled to start today following a last-minute slate of motions argued in Hampshire Superior Court last week.

Defendant Emmanuel Bile was tried and convicted in March and has begun serving an 8- to 10-year state prison sentence.  Adam T. Liccardi and Caleb Womack are due to be tried in that order after King.

King, 21, Liccardi, 20, Bile, 21, and Caleb Womack, 20, were each charged with raping the student in Pierpont Dormitory on Oct. 13, 2012, according to masslive.com.

The judge in the King rape trial told the lawyers for both sides Friday that she will question the jury. On Friday, Hampshire Superior Court Judge Bertha D. Josephson told defense lawyer Terrence Dunphy and prosecutor Jenifer Suhl that she would conduct a “voir dire” of the jurors as they are seated.

The additional questioning is made possible by an order of the Massachusetts Superior Court handed down in February. The ruling allows lawyers to gather more information from prospective jurors, but judges still have the discretion to question the jurors themselves during the enrolling of a jury, writes masslive.com.

(Updated article)

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/06/primer_on_justin_king_rape_tri.html

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/06/hampshire_superior_court_judge_9.html

What Was The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre?

According to Wikipedia, “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” is the name given to the 1929 Valentine’s Day murder of six mob associates and one mechanic from the North Side Irish gang led by George “Bugs” Moran during the Prohibition Era.   It was the result of a power struggle between the Irish American gang and the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone in order to take control of organized crime in Chicago. 

Former members of the Egan’s Rats gang were also suspected of having played a significant role in the incident, assisting Capone.

Al Capone sought to consolidate control by eliminating his rivals in the illegal trades of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution, according to the History channel.

Moran was one of Capone’s longtime enemies, and the gang members were shot to death by several men dressed as policemen. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as it was known, was never officially linked to Capone, but he was generally considered to have been responsible for the murders, according to The History Channel.

Over the years, Capone consolidated control over most of Chicago’s crime rackets by ruthlessly gunning down his rivals. In 1924, authorities counted some 16 gang-related murders; in 1929, it reached a high of 64 murders that year. Federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had much less jurisdiction than they have today, and did not include Chicago’s gang-related activity.

Moran ran his bootlegging operations out of a garage on the North Side of Chicago. On February 14th, the seven members of Moran’s operation were gunned down while standing lined up, facing the wall of the garage.

Some 70 rounds of ammunition were fired. When police officers from Chicago’s 36th District arrived, they found one gang member, Frank Gusenberg, barely alive. In the few minutes before he died, they pressed him to reveal what had happened, but Gusenberg wouldn’t talk.

Police could find only a few eyewitnesses, but eventually concluded that gunmen dressed as police officers had entered the garage and pretended to be arresting the men.

Though Moran and others immediately blamed the massacre on Capone’s gang, the famous gangster himself claimed to have been at his home in Florida at the time. No one was ever brought to trial for the murders.

Capone went to prison due to income tax evasion. The U.S. Treasury Department later launched an investigation of Capone for income tax evasion. Through forensic accounting, Special Agent Frank Wilson and other members of the Intelligence Unit of the Internal Revenue Service were able to put together a case, and in June 1931 Capone was indicted for evasion of federal income tax. Convicted that October after an internationally publicized trial, Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison, first in Atlanta and later at Alcatraz.

Mexicans Protest Killings

The mayor of Iguala, Mexico, and his wife are accused of asking drug gangs to help police prevent students from disrupting a public event held by the wife. Around September 26th, 43 students were kidnapped and killed.

The protesting students were from a teacher’s college in Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City.

Gang suspects have confessed to slaughtering 43 missing students and dumping their charred remains in a river.

In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Mexico City and those of the southwestern state of Guerrero where the students were abducted to decry the government’s handling of the case.

(Video: Michael Brooks / Majority Report.)