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Raúl Castro charged with murdering four Americans; DOJ unseal Chinese shipping cartel indictment with Operation Midnight in Paris; ex-prosecutor caught hiding Smith report in a bundt cake; more.
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: Trump’s quiet global war on corruption: Raúl Castro is finally indicted for the 1996 murder of four Americans —thirty years overdue— and Acting AG Blanche says he expects Castro to show up in the United States “by his own will or another way”; the DOJ unseals a stunning indictment against the Chinese cartel that secretly engineered the entire “supply chain crisis,” nabbing one executive mid-flight in Operation Midnight in Paris; back home, a former Jack Smith prosecutor gets charged for sneaking the sealed report to her Gmail disguised as “Bundt_cake_recipe.pdf” (a sister file went out as “Chocolate_cake_recipe.pdf” — I am sensing a theme); and Trump signs a new executive order quietly turning off the $62.5-billion remittance spigot funding Mexico, the cartels, and apparently the Chinese communists too. Tick, tock!
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I think we should call this Trump’s unannounced global war on corruption. In the same week that Spain’s former prime minister was indicted by Spanish officials —based on information helpfully supplied by US agencies— a second former president has now been indicted. The New York Times reported, “Justice Dept. Charges Raúl Castro as Trump Escalates Pressure Campaign Against Cuba.”
He might look like somebody’s harmless, 94-year-old grandpa, but Raúl Castro is a murderous thug whose blood-drenched hands would have made Lady Macbeth spontaneously combust.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a superseding indictment charging Castro and five co-defendants for their roles in the 1996 shootdown of two unarmed civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue —a Miami-based humanitarian group that flew across the Florida Straits searching for Cuban refugees in distress— over international waters. Four Americans were killed: Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales.
They were flying a humanitarian mission. Cuba shot them out of the sky with Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets. Castro was Cuba’s Defense Minister at the time and, according to the indictment, oversaw the entire chain of command that ordered the attack. The charges include conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder. If convicted, Castro faces the death penalty.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made the announcement in Miami — not in Washington, D.C., but in Miami, at the Freedom Tower, the building where generations of Cubans fleeing communism were processed when they arrived in America. On Cuba’s independence day. The symbolism was neither subtle nor accidental.
Blanche’s statement was exactly right: “For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens. President Trump and this Justice Department are committed to restoring a simple principle: if you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.”
🔥 Now, here’s the buried lede that the corporate media is trying to bury. This indictment has been a long time coming— and the reason it didn’t happen sooner is a story of political cowardice stretching across three decades and multiple administrations. The Times, to its credit, admitted it plainly: “former federal prosecutors familiar with the case said that past administrations did not have the political will to file charges against such a high-ranking member of an adversarial government.”
Guy Lewis, a federal prosecutor who worked the case back in the 1990s, put it even more bluntly: “Raúl was definitely one who slipped through the noose. The crime is notorious. Three U.S. citizens and one legal permanent resident were killed in a premeditated orchestrated murder. That should never be forgotten.”
So. For 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans — people who were flying humanitarian missions — were told, in effect, that their loved ones’ killers were too politically inconvenient to prosecute. The Clinton administration, which had been quietly trying to warm relations with Cuba, looked the other way. Subsequent administrations followed suit. The victims’ families kept asking. The answer was always some version of not now, it’s too complicated.
Trump said: not anymore.
🔥 Let’s zoom out. This story is bigger than Cuba, and bigger than one indictment. Consider what has happened in just the past few months. The Trump DOJ captured Venezuela’s cartel-boss-slash-communist dictator Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York to stand trial. Spain’s leftist former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was indicted— with information helpfully supplied by U.S. agencies. And now Raúl Castro.
Three former heads of state. No armies deployed. No wars declared. Just indictments and the credible threat of what comes next.
The Times noted that Blanche “sidestepped questions about whether the indictment was a prelude to U.S. military action,” drawing comparisons to “how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Maduro to swoop into Caracas and capture him.” (Blanche didn’t “sidestep” anything. He deferred military questions to the military. Good grief, Times.) But Blanche did say he expected Castro to “eventually show up in the United States, whether ‘by his own will or another way.’”
By his own will or another way. That is a sentence keeping Castro from getting his beauty sleep (which he badly needs, by the way. Just saying).
🔥 Here is the big-picture context trad-media seems unable to connect. What is actually happening —without announcement, without fanfare, without a single press conference calling it what it is— is nothing less than a global war on corruption. And it may be the most consequential anti-corruption campaign in world history.
Think about what it actually takes to pull this off. Last September, Filipino columnist Rigoberto Tiglao wrote a piece identifying the single most important factor in any successful anti-corruption reform. His conclusion was: you need a strong political leader with enormous political will and an outsider’s reputation untainted by the existing corrupt system.
Alice, we might be all the way down the rabbit hole, because that description fits Trump almost perfectly. And here is the irony that history will not let us ignore: the Democrats’ decision to indict Trump —several times, using novel legal theories, in what even many legal scholars called a weaponization of the DOJ— may have given him the perfect cover to do exactly this. He did it himself. To foreigners watching, it proves the DOJ holds allleaders to the same standard.
You cannot credibly accuse the United States of political targeting when the sitting president was himself indicted by the same Department of Justice.
The creaky old model of international accountability was mainly symbolic: indict foreign warlords who will never be arrested, hang their faces on “most wanted” posters in embassy lobbies, and call it a day. The new model is different. Indict. Use the indictment as leverage. Use the leverage to extract concessions, force regime change, or simply wait for the right moment to make an arrest.
It’s the ultimate bloodless decapitation strike — and it’s being deployed across an entire hemisphere.
🔥 Successful anti-corruption periods are vanishingly rare in world history. Singapore in the 1960s. Hong Kong in the 1970s. Estonia and Georgia after the Soviet collapse. A handful of others. The list is short, and it has never included a country with the global reach of the United States military and the DOJ.
Until now, possibly.
Marlene Alejandre-Triana, whose father Armando Alejandre Jr. was one of the four men killed in 1996, called the charges “long overdue.” She called Castro “one of the main architects of the crime.” Her father, she said, only wanted to bring freedom to his Cuban homeland.
Thirty years later, the United States government is reminding criminals and dictators what happens when you target American citizens. Who needs armies when you have lawfare weaponized against international ne’er-do-wells?
Trump’s global cleanup operation might, in hindsight, be considered the biggest, broadest anti-corruption reform in worldhistory. It quite possibly is a unique, one-of-a-kind event in all of human history.
👮♂️ In the same vein, here’s another under-reported story that deserves much more attention than it’s getting. On Tuesday, local ABC affiliate KATV-7 reported, “DOJ reveals indictment of Chinese defendants for alleged antitrust violations amid COVID.”
Remember the “supply chain crisis?” Remember when you couldn’t get a refrigerator, a new car, or a couch, and the corporate media told you it was just the mysterious, inexplicable chaos of a global pandemic? Well. It turns out it wasn’t entirely mysterious, and it wasn’t entirely inexplicable. According to a federal indictment unsealed this week, a significant chunk of it was engineered on purpose by a Chinese cartel.
This time, the Department of Justice connected the dots.
The DOJ has charged seven Chinese executives and four of the world’s largest shipping container manufacturers —Singamas, CIMC, Dong Fang, and CXIC— with a criminal antitrust conspiracy. These four companies, together, manufacture approximately 95% of all standard dry shipping containers on Planet Earth. Not 40%. Not 60%. Ninety-five percent. When you control 95% of the world’s supply of the metal boxes that carry virtually everything across every ocean, you have what lawyers call “market power” and what the rest of us call “a chokehold on civilization.”
According to the DOJ’s press release, the conspiracy began in November, 2019 —just on the brink of the pandemic— when executives from CIMC, Dong Fang, CXIC, and a co-conspirator company met at CIMC’s headquarters in Shenzhen and agreed to restrict how many containers they would all manufacture. They deliberately created an artificial shortage.
Thus, from 2019 to 2021, the price of a standard shipping container more than doubled. One defendant’s profits jumped from a loss of $110 million in 2019 to a gain of $180 million in 2021. Another defendant’s profits jumped nearly 100-fold— from about $20 million in 2019 to about $1.75 billion in 2021.
While Americans waited months for appliances, furniture, and car parts, and while small businesses paid extortionate freight rates to ship their goods, these Chinese executives were counting up their billions.
The allegations are wild. To make sure none of the cartel members cheated and secretly produced more containers than agreed, the conspirators installed 87 video surveillance cameras on all 49 dry container production lines across their mutual facilities. They were literally watching each other’s factories to enforce their criminal price-fixing scheme. I did not make that up. It’s right in the indictment.
In other words, they built a little surveillance state inside their own cartel to keep each other honest about being dishonest. Thanks for filming all the evidence for us, guys!
The DOJ said the total value of commerce affected by this conspiracy exceeds, by early estimates, $35 billion. Acting Assistant Attorney General Omeed A. Assefi called it “a milestone in international cartel enforcement.” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward was more blunt: “Cheaters never prosper. This Department of Justice is ensuring that when American pocketbooks are pilfered, accountability will follow.”
Now here’s where the story gets genuinely cinematic. In October 2025, a federal grand jury in the Northern District of California secretly indicted all seven executives and four companies. The indictment was sealed —kept completely secret— while law enforcement patiently waited for the perfect time and opportunity.
Assefi explained at Tuesday’s press conference: “The indictment sat under seal as we waited for justice, and sure enough, justice was secured on April 14, 2026. On that night, defendant Vick Ma, a globe-trotting Chinese executive, attempted to fly from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Hong Kong, where he was intercepted by a group of law enforcement officials as part of Operation Midnight in Paris.”
Operation Midnight in Paris. I love this country.
Vick Nam Hing Ma, 54, Marketing Director of Singamas, thought he was catching a flight home. Instead, he was just caught. He is now pending extradition to the United States. The other six executive co-defendants remain at large— presumably now intensely aware that the DOJ has a habit of waiting quietly with a sealed indictment until you try to board a plane.
This is the Long Game archetype, in its purest form. The DOJ didn’t rush. They built the case, secured the grand jury indictment, kept it secret for months, and then waited for the right moment— now, in the runup to midterms. It’s patient, methodical, and effective— exactly the kind of law enforcement the American people have been longing for.
The broader picture offers important context. While the SBA, HHS, and Medicare are racing after domestic Covid fraud —and there is lots of it— the DOJ is chasing it all over the world. The Covid pandemic was not just a public health disaster. It was also a massive criminal opportunity that bad actors —foreign and domestic— exploited at Americans’ expense. The Trump DOJ appears to be working through the list, one sealed indictment at a time.
Another tantalizing question is worth considering: how many other secret indictments are sitting out there, right now, waiting for someone to try to board a plane?
Tick, tock!
👮♂️ Although this week’s theme has clearly been taking down corrupt foreign leaders and things like Chinese container cartels, there’s been action here at home, too. Yesterday, the AP reported, “Ex-prosecutor charged with sending to herself copy of Smith report on Trump classified files probe.”
You’ll recall Biden’s Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, who led the two big federal criminal cases against President Trump: one for leading an alleged “January 6 Insurrection,” and another for keeping “classified documents” which included the infamous Mar-a-Lago raid.
This investigation was presented to the American public as the most important legal proceeding since the trial of whoever invented those clamshell plastic packages that you can only open with a welding torch.
Smith’s reign of terror ended abruptly when, in a remarkable concurring opinion, and unrelated to that case, SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas explained at some not insubstantial length that Mr. Smith had been illegally appointed. That gave Southern District Judge Aileen Cannon cover to dismiss both cases and declare Smith had no authority. Buh bye.
But, in a prosecutorial temper-trantrum, Smith prepared a “special report” that rounded up all the ‘findings’ from both cases and got ready to release it on his way out to create maximum chaos and defamatory destruction. Judge Cannon properly ordered it sealed, since Smith never had authority to begin with, and trashing Trump is not a legitimate function of a special prosecutor, even an illegal one.
Enter one of the Smith team’s lawyers, Carmen Lineberger, 62, pictured above. She’s the former managing assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida office. (After she left DOJ, she became the CLE coordinator for the National Black Prosecutors Foundation, which is basically a secretarial position.) According to her indictment, after Judge Cannon ordered Smith’s ‘gotcha’ report locked down and sealed, Carmen emailed a copy to her personal Gmail account, renaming the file to ‘Bundt_cake_recipe.pdf.’
Investigators also found that Carmen had emailed a batch of other classified materials from the case to herself, titling those ‘Chocolate_cake_recipe.pdf.’
I am starting to sense a theme here. If Ms. Lineberger had stayed at the Justice Department a little longer, we might have seen the nuclear launch codes smuggled out as “Aunt_Marthas_Snickerdoodles.docx” and the identities of all our undercover CIA operatives disguised as “Gluten_Free_Muffins.xlsx”.
Let us pause for a moment to appreciate the sheer, breathtaking genius of this cunning espionage technique. Imagine the FBI’s cyber-security agents, diligently scanning outgoing emails for stolen government secrets. They notice a massive file being sent from a prosecutor’s government computer to her personal Gmail account.
AGENT 1: “Hold on, Bob. We have a suspicious file transfer. Could this be the sealed Jack Smith report on the President?”
AGENT 2: “Let me check the file name. No, it says ‘Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf’.”
AGENT 1: “Oh, thank goodness. For a second there, I thought we had a major national security breach. But it’s just a recipe for a delicious, ring-shaped dessert. Carry on.”
Carmen now faces multiple charges, including theft of government property, destruction or falsification of records, concealment or removal of public records, and defamation of delicious desserts. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison for falsifying records in a federal investigation, up to three years for concealing or removing public records, and up to one year on each count of theft of government property and falsifying comestibles.
Needless to say, it’s critically important to send a strong message when government employees steal classified documents, defy court orders, and create cookbooks unto themselves. But one wonders. Who knows what other delicious treats Carmen might offer to avoid spending the rest of her life in prison because of her TDS recipe?
In other words, is this the beginning of the rollup of the Jack Smith Gang? Is Jack Smith cooked by a bundt cake recipe?
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On Tuesday, President Trump signed a sweeping new executive order targeting the financial lifeblood of the open borders industry: remittances. Yesterday, Time magazine reported the news with the predictably breathless headline, “Trump Moves to Tighten Banking Access for Non-Citizens.”
Let’s connect some dots. For years, we’ve been told that illegal immigration is just about people seeking a better life. But what the corporate media rarely mentions is the staggering scale of the money flowing out of the United States. According to the Bank of Mexico, in 2024 alone, migrants in the U.S. sent over $62.5 billion back to Mexico. That is roughly 3.5% of Mexico’s entire Gross Domestic Product.
It’s a giant whirlpool sucking dollars out of the U.S. economy and surfacing them in Central and South American countries, where those governments heavily tax them. In other words, Latin American governments are directly subsidized by billions of dollars flowing from their citizens who are illegally in the U.S. and sending money back home.
But it gets worse. Remittances don’t just fund foreign governments. They also fund terrorism and crime. Publicly available evidence shows ‘transnational criminal organizations’ are exploiting remittance networks to launder vast sums of drug proceeds. Cartels use these networks to wash the money they make from fentanyl and sex trafficking. And in turn, these criminal networks also fund Chinese communists.
On Tuesday, President Trump signed a new executive order titled “Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System,” that requires banks to treat customers’ immigration status as a factor in evaluating potential financial risk. “The move could make it more difficult for non-citizens, especially undocumented immigrants, to access financial services,” Time breathlessly explained, “even for legitimate reasons.”
This is a classic Leverage Play archetype. The Trump administration isn’t just deporting people; they are dismantling the underlying financial incentive structure that makes illegal immigration profitable in the first place. By tightening banking access and scrutinizing remittances, the administration is slowly turning off the money spigot.
When you can’t easily wire money home, and you can’t easily get a bank account or a credit card, the economic calculus of sneaking into the United States changes dramatically. Sooner or later, the ‘undocumented’ folks might start to get the idea. It’s time to go home.
Have a terrific Thursday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow, with even more essential news and delicious caffeinated commentary.
Rose Rambles... 