Roberto Flores scans the menu. Pan Roasted Veal Chop $40 Smoked Chicken & Rock Shrimp Pasta $26 Flores checks the money in his pocket again. 14 OZ. New York Steak $33 Coffee Rubbed Filet Of Beef $38 Flores looks down the table. It's filled with educators -- superintendents in pinstripes and administrators in business attire at an education conference. None seem fazed by the prices. Back in the day -- back when he was doing wrong -- Flores would have bought dinner for everyone at the table. He would have pulled up in a limo, flashed hundreds around the table. The suits' eyes would have been on him. [continues 3304 words]
Six law enforcement agencies serving Kane, DuPage and Will counties are among 28 agencies that will share in $5.3 million in federal funding earmarked to fight the production, distribution and use of methamphetamine and other illegal narcotics. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who announced the funding last week, also said a new database developed by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority will help plug gaps in the national information network tracking the rampant methamphetamine problem. Funding from the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the Justice Assistance Grant will help 28 state law enforcement agencies in 66 Illinois counties, according to a statement from Blagojevich's office. [continues 167 words]
Pushing Awareness: County Wants To Nip Drug Scourge Before It Can Get A Foothold YORKVILLE -- When anecdotal reports about methamphetamine use started showing up in Kendall County, Janet Stutz was among the people who wanted to find out more information. With a group of local legislators and law-enforcement officials, Stutz, the principal at Bednarcik Junior High in the Oswego School District, organized meetings to educate themselves about the highly addictive stimulant which often is manufactured in dangerous home laboratories. At those meetings, Stutz was stunned to see a map of where meth labs were being uncovered. Usually thought of as a downstate, rural phenomenon, the map was a beeline toward Kendall County. [continues 320 words]
AURORA -- On the dry-erase board in Jennifer Auclair's fifth-grade class, next to the posters of arithmetic values and punctuation rules, police officer Dan Donka scribbled a chart of all the gangs in Aurora. "Gangs belong to either the Folk or People nations," he said to the Allen Elementary School students, as he labeled the diagram on the board. "Kind of like how in baseball there's the American and National League." Then, he listed the names of all the gangs in Aurora before giving the wide-eyed kids a quick rundown of the colors and symbols used by each gang, their tactics, racial breakdown and whether they're "a bunch of sissies" or not. [continues 726 words]
