Cocaine Kingpin Prosecuted In Delaware. Why Delaware?:
Brahmananda Prasad drove a $242,000 Ferrari, the jewel of his fleet of luxury vehicles. He owned a $2.5 million estate tucked into Long Island’s woodlands. He took his family on lavish vacations to St. Maarten, Istanbul, the Mexican Riviera and other exotic destinations.
Prasad, now 65, told everybody he paid for his extravagant lifestyle by being a savvy entrepreneur and wheeler and dealer who over the years owned a jewelry store, truck stop, Manhattan hip-hop club, shipping service and other ventures.
In recent years, Prasad claimed that he even made a killing by trading stocks online and competing in poker and blackjack tournaments.
In reality, though, Prasad’s life as a legitimate, successful businessman ended long ago and he actually lost big bucks at the casinos and while day trading, court records show. Instead, he used his company, Rishi’s Pack and Ship, for one reason alone: running an ultra-lucrative, coast-to-coast drug trafficking operation.
Prasad has admitted in U.S. District Court in Delaware to shipping 117 kilograms, or 257.4 pounds, of cocaine bricks from Los Angeles to New York over eight months ending in February 2024.
Federal prosecutors in Delaware, however, say Prasad’s cocaine empire was much larger, and that over three years he actually trafficked at least 956 kilograms — more than a ton of cocaine.
WHYY News combed through thousands of pages of U.S. District Court documents to piece together how the largest cocaine trafficking case ever prosecuted in Delaware worked, how Prasad was able to shield it from authorities for so long and how investigators — alerted by a bar room boast — unraveled his operation and brought him down.
The investigation that led to Prasad’s downfall began in October 2022 at a Delaware watering hole.
“This whole case actually started with somebody bragging at a bar that they were a big-time cocaine trafficker,” said Hudson, criminal chief at the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office. “And a concerned citizen sitting a few barstools down overheard this and reported it to law enforcement.”
Cris Barrish then takes you further down the rabbit hole. Fascinating stuff.
Rescue crews intensified their search for survivors on Thursday as Venezuelans began to grapple with the scale of the devastation caused by the worst earthquakes to hit the country in nearly six decades.
The Venezuelan government said that at least 164 people had been killed and nearly 1,000 injured in the twin quakes on Wednesday, which struck the country’s populous northern states. The toll was virtually certain to rise as rescuers began to reach the worst-affected areas.
Videos posted on social media show collapsed residential towers in the capital, Caracas, and in the nearby port city of La Guaira, where more than 100 buildings were destroyed, according to the United Nations’ main humanitarian agency. There were growing fears about the toll in nearby shantytowns, where many people live in precarious homes built on hillsides.
The earthquakes are expected to be the worst humanitarian disaster in Venezuela in decades. The hard-hit port of La Guaira is still scarred by devastating landslides in 1999 that are estimated to have killed at least 15,000.
The earthquakes are likely to scramble the complex tussle for power and fortune that has followed Mr. Maduro’s downfall. His former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, took over as president with Washington’s blessing but has faced growing popular discontent — and is resisting calls for new elections.
In the hours after the quakes, Ms. Rodríguez called for national unity and pointed to the promises of international aid received by her government, including from President Trump. Her handling of the disaster, however, will be scrutinized by Venezuelan voters hungry for political change, as well as the emboldened opposition.
Going our on a limb here: FEMA’s not riding to the rescue.
Court Protects Voting Rights–For Now:
A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump’s efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.
Casper rejected the Republican administration’s argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be put in place. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump’s requirements violated the separation of powers.
The Constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” wrote Casper, who was nominated by former Democratic President Barack Obama.
Among other proposed changes, Trump’s order would have required people to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, prevented mail ballots from being counted if they arrive after Election Day, even if they were postmarked by then, and punished states that failed to comply by withholding certain federal grants, including those intended to beef up election security.
Good Riddance To The ‘Kennedy Dynasty’:
It would be unfair to view the results in the nation’s most geographically compact congressional district as a straightforward referendum on the Kennedy family (even if Schlossberg did helpfully include his more famous surname on the ballot). But the results suggest that voters weren’t exactly clamoring for a dynastic reboot, either—his loss is the third successive defeat for a prominent Kennedy in a Democratic primary, after uncle Bobby’s abandoned campaign against then-President Joe Biden, and cousin Joseph Kennedy III’s 2020 defeat to Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. Caroline’s 33-year-old son learned the hard way that the Kennedy brand just doesn’t mean what it used to. His strange campaign only underscores why.
Schlossberg is not the worst kind of Kennedy, by any stretch. He didn’t kill anyone, for instance. He didn’t appease Hitler, grope a waitress, send troops to Vietnam, promote eugenics, or publish a book trampling on the legacy of Reconstruction. If the decline of the WASPs (and their WASP-like Hyannisport cousins) has taught us anything, it’s that there are much worse things in this world than over-educated, well-meaning dilettantes. But you can also perhaps understand why, in this moment of all moments, the Democratic voters of Manhattan weren’t lining up for someone who so closely matched that description.
Again, there are worse things than having a familial sense of responsibility to public service that you don’t quite know what to do with—you could instead have a familiar sense of responsibility to selling cryptocurrency and hotels. As Reeves Wiedeman reported in a deeply illuminating New York magazine story last year, being one of the political Kennedys can be a grind. No one’s sitting around the old compound telling you you should really become a dentist.
But if there’s one thing Tuesday’s results showed, it’s that there’s an urgency in politics right now that makes dynastic inheritance look small. The energy that’s animating Democrats in the city where Schlossberg attended pre-school isn’t nostalgia for the lost Kennedy idyll. Across much of the city, primary voters showed up at the polls to tear down the old way of doing things, newly empowered by their 2025 defeat of Andrew Cuomo, another Kennedy-adjacent scion. Like it or not, they’re motivated by idealism and a desire for something new—ironically, the kind of vibe shift the family once purported to embody.
The last few years ought to have once and for all blown up the myth of Camelot—that it was desirable, that it was ever even real. American politics is haunted by a different sort of Northeastern family, ruled by a calcifying and domineering patriarch, digging its pincers into the national story and flaunting its multi-generational ambitions in the service of a misbegotten golden age. The Kennedys are down to their last and thorniest public servant—a sun-baked, worm-addled, crank incubated in a world of entitlement and unaccountability.
Now all that’s left is the ruins. I’m reminded, like a good Kennedy, of Shelley: Look upon their works and despair.
What do you want to talk about?
Listened to Chris Coons’ speech about the 250th anniversary on WDEL this morning. He characterized the situation in DC as a distracting “squabble”. The correct words are “treason” “traitor” and “collaborator”.
All I can hope is that his kids found better role models in their lives, because he is terrible man with no spine or values.
i have said this for decades – eunice kennedy did more good than any other kennedy combined