June 15 Update: Russian 'Dupes' Convicted in Starmer Attack; Crypto, Telegram & 'Disposable" Agents Israeli InfoWar Firm Targets Mamdani, LFI in Smear Campaign; Why did the FBI Protect a Dirty Baltimore Cop; LAPD's 'Gang Cop' Cop Gangs

Pape Thiaw, the head coach of African Champions Senegal, is searched by airport security upon landing in North Carolina.

In keeping with time-honored tradition, the World Cup has rocked up on the shores of North America. While Canada and Mexico (a two-time prior host of the global footballing extravaganza) have rolled out the red carpet, the Idiot Reich that currently runs the United States decided to collude with the Bond villain that runs FIFA and merge a nakedly-racist regime's vitriol towards nonwhites (see supporter visa problems for Senegalese, Ivorian, Uzbek, Iranian etc supporters) with Gianni Infantino's ludicrous ticket prices and rapacious greed that is wringing thousands of dollars (at least) from individual supporters traveling to support their countries. Couple that with the humiliations inflicted upon the players from Iran and Senegal, to name a few, and it's easy to see why the Beautiful Game is struggling to overcome the chaos that has come to define public life in the United States during Trump's senescent second term.

I'm not going to talk about the Redneck extravaganza on the White House lawn this weekend. Instead, it's far more pleasant to see the good side of this country in the form of the Scottish invasion of Fenway Park on Sunday night, where they gave a first-class lesson in collective joy and revelry in a manner never seen before in an American baseball stadium

In between sessions mining files I copied (legally) from the Parisian police archives for Imperial Feedback, I knocked out a couple projects since the last update on here, most notably one for WIRED about the arch-conservative Manhattan Institute's efforts to criminalize protest as "civil terrorism" in Utah (successful) and Arizona (still with the state legislature). The Manhattan Institute is a more 'genteel' version of the Heritage Foundation (Project 2025 incubator), but no less noxious. I've got a project in the works on MI for later this year for anyone interested in the world of right-wing policy formation.

For paid subscribers, I translated former Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino's long interview with a far-right French website during his recent sojourn to a Neo-Fascist 'remigration' conference in Portugal earlier this month. Bovino, best known for leading the lethal immigration surges into Democrat-run cities throughout the first year of the Trump regime, is a rising figure on the far right and is the subject of a speculative campaign to draft him for a presidential run in 2028. For those of you who aren't paid subscribers, please consider supporting Bleeding Edge - I'm able to go off on tangents and build material for my larger projects in no small part because of the freedom and financial support this website provides. Plus it's fun.

Lastly, I went back on TrueAnon to dissect the recent massacre at a San Diego mosque perpetrated by two teenage Atomwaffen fanboys. They were the latest iteration of a perverse updating of the 'Columbine effect' where youth who have been radicalized (by others or themselves) online in the kaleidoscope of refracted, truncated Neo-Nazism, modern eugenics, Satanism and social media-driven fan culture seek to emulate Fascist mass killers of the past like Brenton Tarrant, Anders Breivik, Robert Bowers or Dylann Roof. This episode is unlocked, and unpacks many of the themes we did not get to in last fall's TrueAnon episode on 764 and the Com. Listen below.

Alright, that's enough. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-On Monday, two young men were found guilty in a London courtroom of firebombing two homes that belonged to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer as well as a Toyota SUV he'd recently sold. A lengthy investigation by my friend Daniel De Simone and his colleagues at BBC Panorama published within hours of the verdict revealed the perpetrators had been recruited online and directed by Evgeny Lyukshin, a young Russian diplomat with extensive training in disinformation and espionage. The BBC investigation also uncovered Lyukshin's role in recruiting British residents to carry out graffiti and arson campaigns for ostensibly anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim purposes. The Russian also set up far-right social media accounts promoted by Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson that were set up following the 2024 riots in Stockport. The BBC's reporting puts Lyukshin at the center of an effort to destabilize the United Kingdom by exploiting and inflaming tensions over migration. Sound familiar to American audiences?

-In that vein, France's anti-disinformation agency Viginum reported last week that the Israeli firm BlackCore has actively worked to subvert municipal elections in France, Scotland, and .....New York City within the past year. Last month, Viginum implicated the same Israeli company in attempts to smear candidates from the left-wing, pro-Palestinian La France Insoumise party, with Scottish Prime Minister John Swinney also targeted (Swinney has called the genocide in Gaza "a man-made catastrophe). Israeli officials have not responded to official inquiries by French authorities about BlackCore's activities, while Viginum's report also turned up evidence of similar interference in Angola and Togo. While it is not confirmed that Mayor Zohran Mamdani was the target of the company's disinformation operations during New York City's 2025 mayoral elections, I'd be remiss in not pointing out that no outlet in New York City has picked this story up. Make you wonder.

-Building on the theme of weaponized dupes, the Financial Times conducted an excellent investigation earlier this month into the growing practice of intelligence services seeking out 'one-time' agents to conduct acts of sabotage and espionage. The Russian and Iranian intelligence services in particular have made use of Telegram and cryptocurrencies to employ listless or radicalized teenagers to commit arson, signals intelligence intercepts, sabotaging power infrastructure, and other acts designed to sow confusion and mayhem. There's a similar story, from Der Spiegel (use the 'translate' function on your web browser) about Russian intelligence services using this method to employ young people from the 'Com' extortion and grooming network for similar purposes.

-Justin Fenton, a longtime criminal justice reporter in Baltimore, has an eye-popping story for the Baltimore Banner that makes abundantly clear the consequences of not taking a hard line with police corruption. In 2014, FBI agents in Baltimore caught Alexi Correa, a city cop, discussing his involvement in selling cocaine with a federal informant. This conversation was recorded on a wire, and Fenton obtained a copy. Instead of reporting Correa to BPD and holding him criminally accountable, the FBI withheld this information. Correa then went on to work for Baltimore PD's internal affairs unit himself, where he participated in the investigation of Freddie Gray's 2015 'rough ride' killing that touched off riots and resulted in federal oversight of BPD. After the recording came to the attention of BPD commanders in 2021, they launched a lengthy probe against Correa, which resulted in his resignation last December. The Bureau's role in protecting the dirty cop remains murky. Watch this space.

-Cop gangs have been a problem within the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department for almost fifty years, to the degree that former Sheriff Lee Baca and his #2 Paul Tanaka were federally prosecuted and convicted for covering up jailhouse brutality by one such clique in the early 2010s. The Los Angeles Police Department has its own sordid version of this history, colored by the notorious 'CRASH' anti-gang units that spawned the Rampart scandal, over a decade of federal oversight, and the masterpiece that is Denzel Washington's character of Alonzo Harris in Training Day. The re-emergence of LAPD's cop gangs within the department's own Gang Enforcement Details (the successor unit to CRASH) that conduct illegal vehicle stops and searches in their quest to take guns off the street by any means necessary is a clear warning that the agency did not stamp out the lawless internal culture that gave rise to Rampart. One to watch.

FILM - Some films would work just as well as a cartoon series as a full-length feature without losing dramatic thrust or aesthetics. The 1984 punk classic Repo Man hits all the right notes, from the geographic range that takes in the Mojave Desert and the blacktop jungle of the San Fernando Valley to that indelible early '80s scene which spawned TSOL, Black Flag, the Descendants and so many more bands that solidified a completely unique SoCal sound.

Also worth catching Harry Dean Stanton a few years off his show-stealing turn in Escape from New York, and Emilio Esetevez's last role before he became forever associated with the Brat Pack and overshadowed by the train wreck that is his brother, Charlie Sheen. There are elements of horror, science-fiction, and classic youth-in-rebellion films in Repo Man that seem like they'd clash - but it all comes off brilliantly.

BOOK - Not content with authoring the definitive account of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Twentieth Century, veteran journalist Tim Weiner closed the circuit last year with the publishing of The Mission (2025), his deeply reported account of the CIA's post-9/11 history. Covering arguably the most damaging and fractious period in the CIA's...checkered existence, Weiner goes for the throat with his accounts of the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" fiction that precipitated the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, the often-cartoonish and inept struggle to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, its grievous misreading of Vladimir Putin's imperial ambitions and critical interference in the 2016 elections, and the long tail of the torture program and its impact on the United States and the rule of law.

The last chapters are predictably devoted to the Trump regime's first iteration and will almost certainly need updating given Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and current director John Ratcliffe's current machinations, the overthrow of the Venezuelan government earlier this year and the idiotic war on Iran. However, The Mission is useful and illuminating reading, written in a style that is perfectly suited for the beach.

MUSIC - In the spirit of Repo Man and since I've already thrown Black Flag your way in a previous edition of Bleeding Edge, I'll leave you all with a more modern iteration of Southern California hardcore: Los Angeles outfit No Cops For Miles. I can't quite remember when or how I got turned onto them - probably sometime in the early 2010s when I'd go back and forth from Oakland to LA for reporting and to hang out at backyard shows. They're fast, loud, and pretty melodic - not quite the West Coast answer to NYC's Leftover Crack, but similar enoug hto draw the comparison. I'd love to see em live.