COURTNEY BURGESS TEXTED ME in a panic on the morning of October 21, 2024, stating: “Feds came to my house and tour it up and took all my electronics including my studio equipment.” Despite the horrible grammar, I could sense the panic, and imagined him standing in his home, surrounded by the destruction. Burgess, a music producer who fancied himself a “hit-maker” with three decades of experience in the industry, spent the next several minutes describing how the FBI had confis

IT WAS A MOONLESS NIGHT, three 4×4’s stopped under the cypress canopy. The vehicles’ high-beams hit the swamp and several alligators slithered off the banks into the black waters of the Florida Everglades. Jessica Marie Bell and her female co-conspirators—Aubrey Waldron, Jetta Frake, Jamie Hewitt, and Felisha Leitner—exited the vehicles. They were wearing an array of torn blue jeans, wife-beaters, and cowboy boots. Swamp Witch by Jim Stafford radiated from one of the truck’s

ALL FOUR TIRES OF THE PORSCHE caught air as the vehicle shot out of the building's underground garage. The fire alarm screamed in the distance. The ice lab — located on the top floor of the Sunset Plaza condominium building — was burning. The European supercar hit the asphalt with a thud, Pierre Rausini yanked the steering wheel to the left, and fishtailed onto Sunset Boulevard. The Louis Vuitton duffel bag, containing over half a million dollars in cash, slipped off of the p

THE SLENDER HISPANIC male, veiled in a hooded sweatshirt and dark pants with short black cropped hair, stealthily approached the large beige house—a pistol tucked in the small of his back. It was December 12, 2011, in the city of Arcadia, a wealthy suburban Los Angeles bedroom community, nestled against the San Gabriel foothills. The man slipped around the corner of the three-car-garage, to the single side-door. There he pressed his weight into the door and frame, forcing it

By Matthew B. Cox and Pierre Rausini THE TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD slipped his U.S. Passport to the female agent at the Orlando International Airport Customs desk. From behind the counter the stern woman carefully compared the data on the screen before her to Jacob Diaz’s travel documents. Her eyes bounced between the handsome baby faced young college student—a Mexican-American with the uncharacteristic features of an Anglo—returning from Acapulco and the monitor. When the agent in

By Matthew B. Cox THE AK-47 CRACKED, sending a 7.62 projectile spiraling down the assault rifle’s barrel. It briefly traveled through the air, then plunged into the attractive forty-two-year-old blonde’s chest. The round blew a dime-sized hole in her rib-cage as it spiraled through the woman’s upper-torso and tore out of her back, leaving a silver-dollar size exit wound—hours later, forensic examiners with Broward County would locate the mangled bullet lodged in the baseboard