Adam Driver hosted Saturday Night Live this week, where he reprised his role as Kylo Ren, trying to understand the workers of Starkiller Base by going undercover. Needless to say, it doesn’t go as expected.

Armie Hammer, an actor who owns a bakery in Texas, has secured the life rights for Edgar Valdez-Villarreal, a former high-school football star from Texas who became a high-ranking member of the Mexican Beltrán-Leyva Cartel, BuzzFeed reports.

Valdez, who calls himself “La Barbie,” plead guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering charges in Atlanta this month. Arrested in 2010, he was the subject of a 2011 Rolling Stone story—oh hey!—to which Legendary Studios owns the rights.

“Owning La Barbie’s life rights was the most important thing to us,” the actor told BuzzFeed News. “We knew that having direct access to him meant access to stories that were never intended to see the light of day.”

The tale that is being told about how the two crossed paths contains more than a few plot holes. From BuzzFeed:

Hammer’s quest to obtain the rights to tell La Barbie’s life story started in 2012 when the Lone Ranger star himself was locked up in Sierra Blanca, Texas, after he was caught at a border checkpoint with three medicinal marijuana cookies and a brownie (the case was later dismissed). His wife, journalist Elizabeth Chambers-Hammer, then called the top lawyer in El Paso, who also just happened to represent La Barbie — [Kent] Schaffer.

“Elizabeth contacted me when Armie was still in jail over a little marijuana charge and she talked to me for the first 20 minutes about getting life rights to Edgar’s story, and then she said, ‘By the way, my husband is in jail. Can you get him out?’” he said.

After three years of meetings with family members and letter writing, a deal was struck. “It was very serendipitous that our paths would cross with Edgar,” Hammer said, “but once we heard more, we knew this was something we had to jump on.” Serendipitous is certainly one word for it. Unbelievable might be another.

Regardless, La Barbie’s story will probably make for good viewing. From Rolling Stone:

Barbie believed in vengeance, and in taking care of his enemies. Over his 15 years in the drug trade, he had managed to alienate the leaders of almost every major cartel in Mexico: the Zetas, the Gulf cartel, even the Sinaloa and Beltrán-Leyva cartels he worked for. “Barbie had enemies galore,” says George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William & Mary and the author of Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State. “He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him.” Yet Barbie remained chillingly detached, unable to see the connection between his personal savagery and the way his own family and friends came to fear him. “Even with all the bad things he’s done, Barbie always thought the world looked on him kindly,” says a law-enforcement source familiar with Barbie. “He’s just one of those blithe-living guys who thinks his life is charmed.”

“There is something about him that is compassionate, which I know is crazy to say about a drug lord,” Chambers-Hammer said.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

“‘Axe has always been at the forefront of culture,’ says [some advertising guy]. ‘With [this extremely empowering new advertising campaign for empowering deodorant] we’re out to liberate guys from pressure and bullshit, and empower them to be the most attractive men they can be—themselves.’”

Kristin Cavallari, author of the forthcoming anatomy textbook Balancing in Heels, has posted a new original article on her app. It’s titled “Body After Baby.” What’s it about? Hard to say—Kristin marked the article as “exclusive,” which means you must pay $2.99 to read it.

(Gawker does not currently pay for Kristin’s app.)

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Michael Bay’s Benghazi fan-fic thriller 13 Hours is on track to make $19 million at the box office this weekend, Variety reports. Nearly half of that—41 percent—will come from theaters in the South, where the movie out-performed other areas by 25 percent.

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Apart from its regional success, this is an underwhelming performance for Bay: The most recent Transformers movie cracked $100 million on its opening weekend. Even Pain & Gain topped $20 million. (Ride Along 2, meanwhile, also debuted this weekend at somewhere around $34 million.)

Much of what has likely inhibited the film’s performance is disagreement not only over the interpretation of the facts on which it is purportedly based but also those facts themselves. The CIA’s Benghazi station chief—now retired, but identified only by his first name, “Bob,” because his cover hasn’t been lifted yet—rejected the film’s portrayal of his actions. “I thought I would regret it if I didn’t,” Bob told the Washington Post. “So much of this information has been wrong.”

An agency spokesman, Ryan Trapani, went even further. “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary,” he told the Post. “It’s a distortion of the events and people who served in Benghazi that night. It’s shameful that, in order to highlight the heroism of some, those responsible for the movie felt the need to denigrate the courage of other Americans who served in harm’s way.”

Rob Moore, vice-chairman of Paramount, the studio that made the $50 million war porn, bemoaned the fact that criticism of the film has become political. “It feels like it was hard for people to buy a ticket if they were more liberal leaning,” Moore said. “It’s sad that this gets turned into a political debate as opposed to a conversation about who did the right thing and who was heroic.”

From Variety:

The film is a departure for Bay, who is best known for overseeing the “Transformers” and “Bad Boys” franchises. Though “American Sniper” became the highest-grossign domestic release of 2014, studios tend to steer clear of politically charged movies such as “13 Hours.” For one thing, they tend not to play as well internationally — a major drawback at a time when foreign ticket sales can comprise nearly 70% of a picture’s gross.

But this was a passion project for Bay and a reward for his role in guiding the “Transformers” films for Paramount. It’s no accident that the studio recently announced Bay will direct the fifth film in the Autobots series.

To position the Transformers movies as somehow less “politically charged” than 13 Hours—after all, they’re both works of fantasy!—is laughable, considering how closely the Department of Defense worked with Bay on those movies (and Pearl Harbor, and Armageddon). Verisimilitude is very important, though.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Tomorrow morning at 10:30 a.m., man who has definitely read the Bible Donald Trump will be speaking at televangelist Jerry Falwell’s own, personal Christian Kingdom: Liberty University. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It’s going to be an absolute disaster. And we can’t wait.

The current president of Liberty U, Jerry Falwell, Jr., is very much dedicated to carrying on his father’s legacy of spreading militarized Christianity by any means necessary. He also said on Fox News last week that “Trump reminds me so much of my father.” Which is actually a pretty fair comparison, although for much more terrifying reasons than Falwell intends.

Either way, we’ll be liveblogging the entire smoldering trash can fire of a convocation speech by the man who recently said, “I am an evangelical. I’m a Christian. I’m a Presbyterian.”

Join us, won’t you?

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

BuzzFeed UK and the BBC have teamed up on an investigation that details major match-fixing evidence in tennis, including by “winners of singles and doubles titles at Grand Slam tournaments.” While the report focuses on 16 players who have ranked in the top 50 with a number matches that had highly suspicious betting patterns, they don’t name any of the suspected cheats, “because without access to phone, bank, or computer records it is not possible to prove a link between the players and the gamblers.” It is worth noting that England has much weaker protections for journalists than the United States, and much stronger libel laws.

Much of the reports concern the investigation into highly suspicious betting patterns in a 2007 match between Nikolay Davydenko and Martín Vassallo Arguello. Both men were eventually cleared by the Association of Tennis Professionals, but the ATP’s 2008 investigation found a number of other suspicious matches, and led to the creation of the Tennis Integrity Unit to investigate corruption within the sport.

But the TIU wasn’t allowed to investigate alleged match-fixing that had occurred before its founding, and according to the leaked documents is an ineffective feeble corruption-fighting force. A number of organizations and individuals in positions to spot suspicious matches relayed their findings to the TIU, but according to the leaked files the TIU repeatedly dropped the ball:

Bookmakers have told BuzzFeed News that, in many cases, when they tried to warn the Tennis Integrity Unit about suspicious matches they got no response. The tennis authorities often did not follow up to request in-depth information – such as the betting history and computer details of the suspicious gamblers – to which only bookmakers have access. Without that information, they say, a thorough investigation would be virtually impossible.

The European Sports Security Association, which collects suspicious betting alerts from bookmakers, has sent the Tennis Integrity Unit warnings from its members about suspicious matches involving 15 of the players whose names have repeatedly been flagged to the authorities. In one case, the integrity unit was sent four alerts about a particular player and warned to take note of his “relentless abuse”.

In addition, the European Sports Security Association alerted the Tennis Integrity Unit to 49 suspicious matches in the first three quarters of last year alone and warned in three successive reports that tennis attracts more dubious betting activity than any other sport.

There is much more to be found in the reports than can be properly summarized, and I highly encourage you to go read them in full.

[BuzzFeed/BBC]

Photo via Getty

E-mail: kevin.draper@deadspin.com | PGP key + fingerprint | DM: @kevinmdraper

In response to a question from CNN’s Jake Tapper about his stated desire to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, Donald Trump suggested that similar policies adopted by the Eisenhower administration were not “shameful” but “very effective.”

In 1954, Eisenhower implemented a law enforcement effort referred to as “Operation Wetback.” From Huffington Post Latino Voices:

The program expelled Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens, including children forced to leave with their undocumented parents.

“Like usual, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Rodolfo Acuña, professor emeritus of Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge, told The Huffington Post. “It’s ridiculous.”

Acuña noted that then-Attorney General Herbert Brownell, one of the pioneers of the ramping up of border security that accompanied “Operation Wetback,” had once suggested that killing people who crossed into the United States illegally might act as a deterrent.

“Brownell said, ‘Just give them some live ammo, let them shoot a few people. Then everyone will be scared and they won’t come across the border,’” Acuña said. “Really humane.”

U.S. authorities transported hundreds of thousands of immigrants deep into the heart of Mexico by train and by boat. (“[A] congressional investigation likened one vessel (where a riot took place on board) to an ‘18th century slave ship’ and a ‘penal hell ship,’” according to historian Mae Ngai.) Many died before even making it home.

Trump has repeatedly invoked Operation Wetback—although not, it would seem, by name—as inspiration for his own. “We’re rounding them up in a very humane way, a very nice way,” he said in September. “Dwight Eisenhower. You don’t get nicer, you don’t get friendlier. They moved 1.5 million people out. We have no choice. We. Have. No. Choice,” he said at the GOP debate in November.

“When they removed some,” Trump said Sunday, “everybody else left. So, it was very effective, in one sense.”

This is not actually true. Kelly Lytle Hernández, a historian at UCLA who has studied the practices of the time, estimated that, during the period of time the Eisenhower administration suggested was Operation Wetback’s most successful, Border Patrol deported “no more than 250,000.”

“Did the campaign end unsanctioned migration across the U.S.-Mexico border and substantially reduce the size of the undocumented population living in the United States?” she asked the Washington Post. “It did not.”

“In fact,” Hernández said, “what was far more effective at reducing the size of the undocumented population was the operation’s parallel but lesser-known campaign to legalize authorized farm workers.”

Anyway. There were about 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the United States in 2014.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

NYPD officer Lukasz Skorzewski filed a $2 million countersuit against a Seattle woman who accused him of sexual assault.

The New York Daily News reports that last year, Skorzewski and his partner Lt. Adam Lamboy, were flown to Seattle to investigate the rape of a 25-year-old victim in Union Square. While in Seattle the two officers, both members of the Special Victims Division, took the victim on a ten-hour long bar crawl.

On July 6, 2013, the cops persuaded the New York nursing student to go back to their hotel. The victim slept in Skorzewski’s bed and he slept on the sofa, she claimed. But around 10 a.m., Skorzewski slid into bed with her at the Embassy Suites in Bellevue, Wash., a Seattle suburb. He groped her for about 30 minutes and tried to rip off her clothes, the woman alleged in a September 2015 lawsuit seeking $3 million. Skorzewski warned her to keep quiet about what happened in the hotel room, her suit alleges.

According to the victim’s lawsuit, Skorzewski allegedly told her, “you’re my favorite victim.” In an interview with the NYDN last year, the victim said that Skorzewski should no longer be a police officer. “I think what he did was bad enough that he shouldn’t be a cop,” she told the paper in January 2015.

Skorzewski is suing the victim for that statement, among others. In the countersuit, he claims that “her words...hurt his relationships, finances, and health.” At the time of the investigation, Skorzewski was married.

NYDN reports:

Skorzewski’s lawyer Peter Brill admits his client was wrong for boozing with a rape victim. Still, he contends the woman’s statements were unfair.

“The problem is that when she gave the interview to the Daily News, she was aware the statements that she made to the Daily News were for public consumption,” Brill said.

“We believe the statements she made to the Daily News are significantly more salacious than the statements she made to the police.

“He’s being made out to be a monster when he made a slight error in judgment,” Brill also said. “He had social dealings with a complainant when he shouldn’t have, but he did not engage in sexual misconduct with her.”

Skorzewski is still a police officer though he was demoted and transferred out of the Special Victims Department. His partner, Lamboy, was suspended for 15 days and also removed from the unit.

In November 2015, an Associated Press investigation found that over a six-year period, nearly 1,000 police officers nationwide had been fired for rape, sexual assault, and other sex crimes.

Image via Shutterstock.

President Obama has signed an emergency declaration for Flint, Michigan—where the water is poison—authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide water, filters, and other supplies for three months, and also providing direct federal funding. FEMA will also coordinate relief efforts.

Speaking on a Netflix-organized panel, before the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, on Sunday, the two directors of Making a Murderer, Moira Demos and Laura Riccardi, revealed that convicted murderer Steven Avery’s request to watch their documentary about his trials and tribulations has been denied

“Steven does not have access to the series,” Riccardi said. “His request was denied.” The directors have spoken to Avery several times by phone since the series premiered. “This story is ongoing,” Demos said. “These cases are open. We are ready to follow these if there are significant developments.”

According to Decider, the directors also responded to recent criticisms leveled against their project. “We don’t consider this advocacy journalism,” Demos said. “It’s a social justice documentary. [Steven] Avery’s case offers a window into the system.”

“We are trying to urge people to think more deeply what the series is about,” Riccardi added, “and making sure our justice system is delivering verdicts we can rely on.”

Image via AP. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

At the Democratic debate on Sunday, Bernie Sanders gave a very bad answer to a question about his gun-control record. After reminding everyone that he has a D-minus voting record grade from the NRA, Sanders said, “This should not be a political issue. What we should be doing is working together.”

Sanders supports closing the gun-show loopholes and is one of a handful of national politicians to link last year’s Charleston church shooting with racism and domestic terrorism. A more generous interpretation of what he said is that, basically, the way forward is so obvious that it should not even be a debate.

A less generous—but equally possible!—interpretation would be that Sanders really is so sympathetic to those who would resist stricter gun laws that he would obfuscate the issue with explicitly political platitudes.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

The Communist Party of the U.S.A. is holding a debate tonight, pitting new nemeses Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders against one another as handsome man Martin O’Malley just sort of stands there and watches. We’re “liveblogging” the whole painful thing with our friends at Jezebel right here so you don’t have to watch.

Photo: Getty

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

A 43-year-old Bangladeshi man, Mujibur Rahman, was attacked while walking his 9-year-old niece home from school in the Bronx on Friday, CBS News reports. Rahman said that his attackers were yelling about ISIS.

The father of three was taken to a nearby hospital with a possible broken rib, cuts on his head, swelling and bruises on his face and arms, after two young men wearing ski masks jumped him. He had just picked his niece up from PS 119.

Police said the suspects yelled “ISIS! ISIS!” as they punched Rahman in the head, the New York Times reports, and kicked him when he fell to the ground.

“I believe as a Muslim they hate us, they hate me, and that’s why,” he told CBS, through a translator.

The suspects did not take anything from Rahman, who was dressed in a shalwar kameez. No arrests have been made. According to the Times, the incident is being investigated by the Hate Crimes Task Force.

Image via Google Maps. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Toward the end of this evening’s uneventful Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton made a very interesting aside about the ongoing struggle between spies, cops, and the contents of your smartphone.

http://gizmodo.com/people-blaming...

The candidates all briefly discussed the question of whether law enforcement and the broader intelligence community should have a secret means of breaking the encryption that protects your privacy online, whether it’s and instant message or an email—a process known as a backdoor. Powerful entities like the FBI insist that encryption backdoors are vitally important when it comes to foiling terrorist plots that would rely on such protected channels, while privacy advocates and corporations like Apple say the privacy of ordinary customers outweighs any danger, and have so far refused to give the government its own set of keys.

But at one point, Clinton remarked that she “was very pleased that leaders of President Obama’s administration went out to Silicon Valley last week and began exactly this conversation about what we can do, consistent with privacy and security,” a reference to a closed-doors meeting at which encryption was reported to be a main topic. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell follows up by saying, as you can see in the video above, that government interests were “flatly turned down” at the meeting. Clinton replies, “that is not what I’ve heard... let me leave it at that.” This suggests that the likes of Facebook and Apple could be considering a compromise on how much they’re willing to protect your privacy, if at all.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

Today at 10:30 a.m., in the year of Lord 2016, Donald John Trump, Sr. will take to the stage at weaponized Christianity training institute Liberty University to give a speech about... something. Presumably Martin Luther King, Jr. will be involved, as will one of Donald Trump’s favorite books, the Bible. And of course, freedom.

It’s going to be a mess, and you can watch the whole thing right along with us here.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Among the revelations in Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s expansive new book on the Koch brothers and the rise of contemporary American conservatism, is that Fred Koch, the billionaire duo’s father, once helped build an oil refinery in Nazi Germany. The New York Times broke that item last week, but left out a key detail from the book: allied forces bombed the refinery during World War II.

According to a formerly classified document obtained by Gawker which corroborates Mayer’s reporting, the U.S. and Royal Air Forces attacked the Hamburg-area facility, known as Europaeische Tanklager und Transport A.G., six times between 1944 and 1945. Koch’s contribution, a so-called “cracking unit” meant for converting crude oil into high-octane fuel, was dismantled after the first round of bombing.

Mayer reveals Fred Koch’s involvement in the refinery in an early section of Dark Money detailing the making of the Koch patriarch’s—and thus the Koch family’s—vast wealth. “Fred Koch’s willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family’s early fortune,” she writes, referencing refineries Fred Koch previously constructed in Joseph Stalin’s U.S.S.R. The implication is clear: the fortune of one of the American right’s most influential families was built in part on work performed under oppressive regimes.

Europaeische Tanklager, or Eurotank, was a converted oil storage facility that sat on the Elbe River, about seven miles northwest of the industrial city of Hamburg. According to Mayer, Eurotank was owned by William Rhodes Davis, an American businessman and Nazi sympathizer, who contracted Koch’s company Koch-Winkler to provide its engineering plans and oversee construction. Construction on the plant began in 1934, about a year after the establishment of the Third Reich, she writes, and its primary client was the German military, to which it sold high-octane gasoline for use in fighter planes and bombers during World War II.

Eurotank was “a key component of the Nazi war machine,” according to Dale Harrington, a Davis biographer whom Mayer quotes in Dark Money. Evidently, the allied forces agreed with that analysis. In September 1945, an expert panel called the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey published a 78-page report on a series of six attacks on Eurotank by the U.S. Air Force and Royal Air Force beginning June 18, 1944, and ending April 10, 1945. The introduction to this formerly confidential document, which was provided to Gawker this week, calls the facility “one of the largest modern oil refineries in Germany,” and estimates that the hundreds of bombs dropped by the allied air forces destroyed 80 percent of Eurotank’s buildings, tankage, and equipment. The attacks also killed one person and injured another, though the casualties “did not affect operations,” the report alleges.

The document also contains about a dozen photos of the damage the refinery sustained during the bombing, which are collected in the gallery above.

After the publication of the Times story about the refinery, Koch Industries CEO David L. Robertson wrote a letter to employees which criticized parts of Mayer’s reporting. Robertson did not attempt to dispute that Winkler-Koch contributed to the building of Eurotank, but alleged that the company was only responsible for the construction of the refinery’s “cracking unit,” not the entire facility. To an extent, the 1945 document seems to prove Robertson right. The Eurotank complex contained two seperate units for processing crude oil into usable fuel: one built by Koch-Winkler and the other by the German company Borsig. (Whether Koch-Winkler was involved in the planning or supervision of construction on the Borsig unit is unclear.)

But the implication that Koch was only responsible for one small cog in a much larger and more complex machine may be misleading. According to the Bombing Survey’s report, the Winkler-Koch unit was rated at a capacity of 360,000 tons of oil per year, while the Borsig unit was rated at just half that amount. Further, Eurotank “contained one of the few thermal cracking units in Germany,” the report reads. It seems likely that this special capability was the work of Fred Koch. In his 2015 book Good Profit, Charles Koch boasts that his father “developed a better thermal cracking process for converting heavy oil to gasoline, one that was less expensive, provided higher yields, and involved less downtime than competitive processes.”

Because Germany did not have enough imported crude oil to make use of all of its refineries, Eurotank did not produce fuel between December 1941 and July 1944. Between that month and bombings in the spring of 1945 that rendered the refinery inoperable, it refined an estimated 114,787 tons of oil.

But the Winkler-Koch unit was taken out before it could be of much use to the war effort. Two bombings in June 1944 damaged the unit, and it was later dismantled for safety reasons. Had Koch’s equipment gone undamaged, it could have more than doubled Eurotank’s production, refining an estimated 250,000 tons of oil between 1944 and 1945. “The capacity of the Winkler-Koch unit can be considered as a potential loss resulting from bombing...When refining capacity became acute and the Winkler-Koch unit was needed, it was not available,” the report reads.

Through its willingness to spend vast amounts of money on extreme libertarian activism, the Koch family has waged a war on the institution of the U.S. government that has lasted decades. Thanks to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, we now know that way back in 1944, it was the government that fired the first shot.

Images via U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. day! This is a wonderful occasion to reflect on the subversive legacy of a man who gave his life to bend the arc of the moral universe faster; it is a day of service, and there’s no public service quite like showing your ass. To wit, here’s Joe Walsh—failed Illinois politician and former congressman who successfully glommed onto the Tea Party after he couldn’t hack it as a moderate—tweeting about how MLK, Jr. would have supported the entirely fake “All Lives Matter” movement.

Uh-huh, say more?

Okay! Jamil Smith has a wonderful piece at the New Republic right now about this wild misappropriation—how “King [is] positioned in holiday specials and commemorations as some kind of racial Santa Claus, and his birthday presented as the one day on our calendar designated for us to indulge in this kind of blind hope for racial justice.”

This blurring of history...has opened the possibility for King to be viewed as some Christ-like savior for black America. Such framing implies that we need a sole leader to guide us, and it helps actual enemies of his goals say that they, too, were with King all the way. It allows those enemies to then insist that unless a black civil rights activist behaves like the King that they’ve conjured in their selective memories, then that activist isn’t truly pro-civil rights.

All the while, Republicans tweet out flowery statements on MLK Day and even insist that King was one of them, ignoring that the GOP is a different party today than it was then and that King would likely oppose their policies fervently. It’s nearly as annoying to see white politicians on the left proclaim their allegiance to King—and sometimes, their presence at one of his marches—as a substitute for substantive racial justice platforms.

King’s employment as a contemporary racial status symbol is both talisman and shield for a more self-interested agenda that serves to either actively regress the reverend’s work or disregard its complexities.

Case in point:

Etc.

No one has ever said All Lives Matter who’s not (at best) misguided and (almost always) a piece of shit. It’s the slogan equivalent of interrupting a funeral to talk about an extremely disturbing dream you had—a dream in which Martin Luther King, Jr. existed and then he was assassinated and then almost a half-century later we still lived in a time when it was possible to say “All Lives Matter” as if you were saying something good. In the above piece, Smith wrote: “As long as King’s radicalism stays missing from our remembrances, it will be easier for people to lay claim to his story—even people who oppose everything King actually stood for.” Easier and easier, indeed.

Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com.

Image via AP

Mexican authorities were already closing in on Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán when a “big order of tacos” confirmed they were looking in the right place, according to a post-mortem published this weekend in the New York Times.

Authorities focused their search on the town of Los Mochis, where El Chapo was ultimately captured, after trailing one of the chief tunnel diggers from the drug lord’s escape out of maximum security. That man led them to a home which was under serious construction, and according to the Times, wiretaps indicated that a VIP, referred to only by the codenames “Grandma” and “Aunt,” was on the way.

Still, despite the mounting evidence, it was the tacos that ultimately led authorities to initiate the raid. Via the Times:

The final bit of evidence was a food order, Mexican officials said.

Just two blocks away, a big order of tacos was picked up after midnight on Jan. 8 by a man driving a white van, like the one believed to be driven by Mr. Guzmán’s associates, witnesses said.

A seemingly unnecessary risk, considering El Chapo reportedly traveled regularly with at least two cooks in his entourage, but then again, let he who hasn’t risked it all for a late-night taco cast the first stone.

Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

At least three Americans were kidnapped by militants in southern Baghdad on Saturday, according to several American and Iraqi news outlets. An unnamed official of the city’s police force confirmed the group’s disappearance to The Washington Post on Sunday evening, but their precise identities, and why exactly they were kidnapped, were initially unclear:

Based on an initial investigation of the abduction, the Americans appear to have been seized by Shiite militiamen after their local Iraqi interpreter invited them to his home in the Dora neighborhood in southern Baghdad, the lieutenant colonel said.

However a subsequent Post report published on Monday morning suggested the kidnapping may have been the result of a raid targeting a brothel in the same building where the Iraqi interpreter resided:

The [unnamed police official] said that the group had been invited to the home of their Iraqi interpreter. But a resident of the apartment building where the Americans were reportedly seized said that they were taken from a second-story apartment that he described as well-known as a brothel. A police major general also said the apartment was a brothel, in a building of eight residents, he said. The resident said the apartment is subject to frequent raids by [the Iran-controlled paramilitary force] Asa’ib ah al-Haq, although typically the men found inside are simply told to leave.

The names of the missing individuals have not yet been released. A spokesman for Baghdad’s Joint Operations told the Post on Sunday that they were Iraqi nationals who had later obtained U.S. citizenship and worked at Baghdad International Airport as contractors; an “Iraqi security official” told CNN, by contrast, that “two of the contractors are dual Iraqi-American citizens and that the third is an American national.”

The Dora neighborhood where the men were reportedly kidnapped has been the site of violent sectarian conflict since the American occupation of Iraq in 2003, including the forced expulsion of non-Sunni Muslims between 2006 and 2007 by extremist Sunni militias.

The alleged kidnappings occurred on the same day that the government of Iran released four Iranian-American prisoners, including The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian, who had been detained by Iran on charges of espionage for 545 days.

Photo credit: Getty Images