Whack-a-mole: Expert in cartel cult of death trains Arizona officers

Santa Muerte!? Saint Death. Those Mexican moles are really weird. It isn't clear to us how trying to understand their mentality will help eliminate them. 

Expert in cartel violence and cults trains Valley officers: "At the invitation of U.S. Marshal for Arizona David Gonzales, Robert Almonte, an expert on narcotics cases tied to religion, led a training class Thursday for 350 officers throughout Maricopa County and northern Arizona at the Mesa Public Safety Training Center.

Almonte, who retired as deputy chief of the El Paso Police Department and now serves as the U.S. Marshal for the Western District of Texas, travels the country to teach law enforcement officers about looking for indicators of underlying criminal activity through cases he has experienced and helping to identify religious “saints” or icons that might be found at crime scenes where Mexican drug cartels have a presence....

Almonte said, “They use prayer, icons or candles as a tool to facilitate criminal activity such as for drugs, human smuggling and weapons. Officers frequently run into these icons and items of their spiritual underworld and they don’t know what they’re dealing with. We want to make officers aware of these indicators of criminal activity so they can know what to look for that also can lead to other avenues in an investigation.”..

Gonzales believes there will be more drug cartel-related violence north of the border. “Whoever says that Mexican drug cartel violence hasn’t reached the United States is in denial,” Gonzales has said. “This training is advantageous and will provide officers a foundation in knowing what to look for in these kind of cases.”"