From CBS-11 News, with thanks to RSH:
Det. Campbell and his wife go to these extraordinary lengths because they and their children have been marked for assassination. A ruthless criminal crime family he spent years investigating and helped break up in 2003 wants them dead. Federal authorities confirm that the Palestinian gang known as the “Ghali crime family,” which ran one of the nation’s most prolific retail theft rings from Fort Worth, has hatched what one top official called a “credible” plot from behind bars. The plot targets Campbell, his family, and Campbell’s longtime partner in the investigations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Scott Springer….
It was not the gang’s first contract murder plot that federal authorities uncovered. The first murder plot by the Ghali organization targeted Agent Springer and the federal prosecutor on the case, Joe Revesz. Court transcripts show that an effort by the jailed family leader Mohammad Ghali to hire Crip gang members to arrange the hits for $500 was discovered in October 2003 as he was awaiting trial and most of his associates were in jail. The plot was effectively foiled with audio surveillance and jailhouse informants before it could progress much beyond the planning stages. That and a subsequent attempt by Ghali to bribe customs agents by giving them a free SUV was cited in February by a federal judge as grounds to stack years more prison time on the crime family’s convicted leader, Mohammad Ghali….
Agent Springer, an investigator with the Dallas-based office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to comment about the second assassination plot against him. In courtroom testimony about the first murder plot against him, Agent Springer testified that Ghali had told a jailhouse informant “that he would like to stand before our families and us and peel our skin off with a razor.”
Agent Springer’s boss, ICE Special Agent in Charge Ken Cates, spoke of the unusual persistance of the Palestinian gang’s continued plotting from behind bars.
“There does continue to be credible threats against our agents and against the detective that were involved and in fact we continue to conduct investigations, both in the immigration arena, as well as in the customs law arena…directly related to the continuing threats,” Cates told CBS-11 last month….
The story begins nine years ago, when Det. Campbell and Agent Springer formed a special joint federal operation to investigate a North Texas-based infant formula theft ring that generated untold millions in ill-gotten gains. In the mid-1990s, a criminal gang of Palestinians and Egyptians was running a large network of thieves who would steal infant formula from retail shelves. They would sell it, for pennies on the dollar, to convenience store operators who were part of the organization. The merchandise would be repackaged and sold back to legitimate retailers and wholesalers. Large retail chains across Texas and elsewhere around the nation complained that similar theft rings run by Middle Eastern immigrants were costing them tens of millions of dollars in losses, but law enforcement seemed unable to do much.
But by 2000, the efforts by Campbell and Springer paid off in North Texas. The gang was dismantled in a series of raids and federal convictions that would later be overturned on various technicalities by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Remnants of the original gang led by Palestinian immigrant Mohammad Ghali and members of his family meanwhile moved in to fill the void. Immediately after the attacks of 9-11, informants called the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and other law enforcement agencies to allege that the Ghali crime family had built the illegal business back up. They allegedly were shipping millions in illegal proceeds to the Middle East to help finance terrorist groups.