A 50-car train derailment on Sunday, February 5 near the town of East Palestine, Ohio sparked a massive chemical fire, a temporary evacuation order, and ongoing concerns from local residents about air and water quality as they return home. 

The derailment is also the latest thing fueling conspiracy theories on the far right and in the UFO world; many prominent figures in both places are sharing suspicions that the train derailment is being covered up, with help from what one person, the far-right podcaster Stew Peters, called “fake UFOs.” 

“East Palestine, Ohio is undergoing an ecological disaster bc authorities blew up the train derailment cars carrying hazardous chemicals and press are being arrested for trying to tell the story,” Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Sunday afternoon, linking to an apocalyptic video containing footage from East Palestine, paired with ominous music. “Oh but UFO’s! What is going on?” 

What’s happening here is the confluence of two important news stories: the disaster in East Palestine, and the United States shooting down two unidentified objects in the last day, first in Alaska and then over Lake Huron, just a week after a Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the South Carolina coast. Neither situation is exactly unprecedented: spy balloons apparently traveled through U.S. airspace during the Trump administration, although they weren’t detected at the time. And rail workers have begged the general public to pay attention to basic issues of safety and welfare in their industry for years; as Motherboard’s Aaron Gordon wrote earlier this year, those workers warned that conditions in the industry “make the railroads more dangerous not only for themselves but for all Americans who live in the towns and cities these trains pass through.” 

But coincidences are not allowed to happen in the conspiracy-verse, and Greene and other far-right figures are working overtime to figure out what kind of coverup must be taking place. 

The conviction that the objects shot down by the U.S. military are fake and a planned distraction has prevailed from the UFO world to wherever Peters—the mind behind both a brain-numbing documentary claiming that COVID and COVID vaccines are derived from snake venom and an equally brain-numbing but more popular one falsely claiming that COVID vaccines are to blame for a mass uptick in sudden deaths—hangs out and back again. Kerry Cassidy, a filmmaker of sorts who runs a popular conspiratorial website called Project Camelot, shared footage of East Palestine on her Telegram channel, writing, "This is most likely why we were being distracted with UFO talk this weekend.” Erin Elizabeth, a conspiracy theorist who mainly traffics in anti-vaccine and health freedom narratives, also shared footage from East Palestine on Twitter, writing, “Meanwhile, everybody’s worried about these UFOs which turned out to be some balloons. Every last one of them. Just a distraction.” 

“There’s a real-life toxic firebomb, cancer causing gas explosion, mushroom cloud train wreck in Ohio, and it’s crickets from the media,” wrote Peters, the far-right podcaster, on his Telegram channel. “But they sure are all over the pretend UFOs.” 

“The media wants you talking about ‘UFOs,’” wrote far-right activist Jack Posobiec on Telegram, “and doesn’t want you talking about East Palestine and Nordstream,” the latter referring to yet another theory, this one promoted by famed journalist Seymour Hersh, that the U.S. Navy blew up the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea last summer. (This theory was previously promoted by Russian state media. The White House has called Hersh’s claims “utterly false and complete fiction.”) 

In a separate post shared a few minutes later, Posobiec added, “The government and media are pressing the ‘anxiety button over and over on their UFO narrative. They’re using it to prime the public for government action to ‘do something.’ Once you understand this playbook you see it over and over.”  

These theories have grown so pervasive so quickly that they’re already being made into memes. David Avocado Wolfe, a popular New Age figure who also deals in conspiracy theories and bullshit natural health products, shared a cartoon on his Telegram that shows two men talking. “A pandemic is their last attempt for total control,” one man says. “Is that a UFO?” the other responds, pointing to the sky.

Coincidences—two massive news stories happening at the same time, for instance—are the lifeblood of successful conspiracy theories. That’s because our brains long to make meaning and find connections. In his book Suspicious Minds, the academic psychologist and science writer Rob Brotherton writes, “Our brains want to complete patterns, and spotting a coincidence is merely a prelude to learning something useful about the world. When we see some kind of connection between two events, we have potentially unearthed a clue about how things work.” And when we can’t unravel an event that feels significant, the possibilities taunt us, he adds, “until the pattern can be completed, and we can figure out the cause.” 

In this case, pointing out patterns that have no evidence of being real and making connections between unrelated events also has added benefits. It gives believers a sense of control over a chaotic news environment, and it gives conspiracy peddlers news grist for their mill, which constantly requires new controversies and supposed coverups to continue moving forward.

In an unusual twist, the intense suspicion over what’s happening in East Palestine has led to an accidental support for freedom of the press. Several leading conspiracy figures have decried the arrest of Evan Lambert, a NewsNation reporter who was arrested on disorderly conduct and trespassing while doing a live broadcast from a press release held by Ohio Governor Mike Dewine. This, too, has been spun into evidence of a coverup. (Meanwhile, the Ohio attorney general is investigating Lambert’s arrest, and Governor DeWine himself has said that he didn’t authorize it.)

While it is surely never good news when a large number of extremely online people with big followings are trying to spin up fear and suspicion, in this case, it’s leading to a lot of attention paid to an environmental disaster, unambiguous support for a reporter who seems to have been unjustly arrested, and some memes of varying quality. All things considered, things could be—and surely will be again—far, far worse.

Did a book arguing there’s enough evidence to prosecute former President Donald Trump just make it harder to ever charge Trump with a crime?

A lot of seasoned lawyers say it did.

Those critics are taking aim at Mark Pomerantz, the former Special Assistant District Attorney for the Manhattan DA’s office who was brought in to help investigate Trump in 2021, for writing a tell-all about the inner workings of the probe. They say Pomerantz should never have published “People vs. Donald Trump” while the investigation is still underway. 

“The only thing the book can do is damage any future cases that the Manhattan DA might bring against the former president,” David LaBahn, president of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, told VICE news after the book’s release on Tuesday.

Pomerantz quit the office in a huff last year after the newly-elected DA Alvin Bragg refused to green light a criminal case against Trump. The book compares Trump to notorious mobster John Gotti, aka the “Teflon Don,” and recounts delving deep into Trump’s murky finances. 

“We developed evidence convincing us that Donald Trump committed serious crimes,” Pomerantz wrote, before comparing the failure to indict Trump to a plane crash caused by “pilot error.” 

Bragg, however, has fired back, arguing that the case needed more investigation, and quipped: “Mr. Pomerantz’s plane wasn’t ready for takeoff.”  

Bragg’s office is still investigating Trump. He recently began showing evidence to a grand jury about a years-old hush-money case revolving around $130,000 paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels for her silence about an alleged affair with Trump before the 2016 election, according to the New York Times. Bragg says he never closed the probe into Trump’s finances. 

Trump denies all wrongdoing, calls the investigation a politically-driven “witch hunt,” and dismisses Pomerantz as “disgraceful.” But for once, Trump and his MAGA fans aren’t the only ones to take a dim view of a high-profile Trump critic.  

Publishing an insider account in the middle of an investigation is a violation of basic legal standards, said Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor with the Manhattan DA’s office who now focuses on prosecutorial ethics at New York Law School.

“To me it’s just incredibly inappropriate,” Roiphe told VICE News. “There isn’t any justification for it. I can’t even think of one.”  

The book could give Trump’s attorneys fodder to argue that a future prosecution by the Manhattan DA against Trump was selective, in that it unfairly targeted Trump personally instead of applying the law fairly to everyone, according to Andrew Weissmann, who served as a prosecutor on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. 

Weissmann points to a section of the book in which Pomerantz discusses the potential use of a novel legal theory. Pomerantz recounts exploring whether prosecutors could argue that Daniels’ attempt to receive money for her silence was actually extortion. That would have, ironically, made Trump the victim of a crime. But it might also have allowed prosecutors to characterize the secretive payment of $130,000 to Daniels as money laundering, because the transfer could be linked to criminal proceeds. 

Pomerantz eventually backed away from this complicated theory, but Weissmann said discussing the idea out loud makes Pomerantz sound like he considered even wacky ideas just to nail Trump.

“You don’t charge victims of extortion,” Weissmann told MSNBC. “That is just not a great theory to be trotting out there when Donald Trump’s going to claim, ‘Oh, that theory shows they were just trying to just get me at any cost.’” 

The book could end up giving Trump’s lawyers fresh ammunition to counter criminal charges or reverse a conviction on appeal, Weissmann said. 

“As sure as we are sitting here, if there are Manhattan District Attorney charges [Trump], this book would be ‘Exhibit A’ in all sorts of motions that Donald Trump could make,” Weissmann said.  

Pomerantz insists the publication of his book is “legal, ethical, and in the public interest.”  And he rejects the idea that his book could help Trump.

“I don’t think we’ve given the defense any kind of leg up,” he told Rachel Maddow on Monday. 

Pomerantz argues that both the facts and the legal considerations of hush-money case, for example, are already well-known. And he says all the evidence that could be used to prosecute Trump for financial wrongdoing was already laid out in a $250-million lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office assisted the Manhattan DA’s investigation of Trump’s finances. 

James is suing Trump for allegedly inflating the value of his assets to win benefits from banks and financial institutions, and minimizing the value of the same assets to reduce his taxes. Trump is fighting the lawsuit and denies wrongdoing.

“I’m not letting any cats out of the bag,” Pomerantz told Maddow. “Those cats have been running all over the place, literally for years.” 

Still, more than one prosecutors’ association says Pomerantz could face sanctions over his book. That might include disbarment if the New York State Bar Association determines he violated legal ethics, or even criminal prosecution if he is found to have violated grand jury secrecy rules.

LaBahn of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys sent Bragg’s office a letter laying out both of those possibilities in early February.  

“The most likely implication for any lawyer publicly opining about the guilt of a suspect is a formal complaint to the state bar association that he has violated his ethical duties,” the LaBahn wrote to Bragg. “The most likely implication for any lawyer disclosing publicly any materials derived from a grand jury proceeding without a written court order, including witness testimony, is a formal felony criminal charge for violating grand jury secrecy.”

An association of New York prosecutors released a letter on Friday calling Pomerantz’s decision to go public “unfortunate and unprecedented.” 

The letter, written by District Attorneys Association of the State of New York President J. Anthony Jordan says: “By writing and releasing a book in the midst of an ongoing case, the author is upending the norms and ethics of prosecutorial conduct and is potentially in violation of New York criminal law.” 

Ordinary People Are Smuggling Millions for Drug Dealers

Entering Heathrow in October 2020, Tara Hanlon, 30, checked her phone, fixed her hair and prepared to shift towards departures for the next flight out to Dubai. Those watching wouldn’t have noticed anything too unusual about the brunette, except perhaps for the five heavy-looking suitcases she pulled behind her.

Suddenly, before the flight, there was a delay. Customs officials took Hanlon into a side room and began questioning her. She told officers she was going on holiday; she had £50 in cash and her suitcases were simply full of clothes, because it was a girls’ trip and she didn’t know what to wear.

Cash detection dogs, trained to pick up the scent of significant quantities of bank notes either in baggage or carried on a person, had picked up her trail. When officials searched and subsequently arrested her they found the cases were stuffed with vacuum packed bags of cash totalling £1.9m.

Hanlon, who’d recently been furloughed from her job due to the COVID pandemic, had accrued debts. Cross-checking documents at her home address and scouring her phone records, officers discovered she had carried £3.5m for money laundering gangs over three other Dubai trips. Hanlon ultimately pleaded guilty to money laundering offences worth more than £5m.

This one arrest helped unravel the UK’s biggest ever money-laundering group. The £104m “cash courier” money laundering ring, which pulled in a whole collection of otherwise unconnected individuals united by one thing - debts or a need for fast cash - with each being paid £3-8,000 per trip by their criminal network.

In text messages later showed in court, Hanlon told a friend, "Three big ones… with this wage and the next my debts go bye." Other messages on her phone referred to the job as a “perfect life, a few days in the sun and a few at home".

A few weeks after Hanlon’s arrest, Zdenek Kamaryt, 39, was held as he tried to board a flight from Heathrow to Dubai carrying £1.3m in cash. Nicola Esson, 55, from Leeds was arrested the following May - having made the Heathrow to Dubai trip three times between August and September 2020, checking in a total of 19 suitcases containing cash worth £6.4m - a combined weight of almost half a ton in bank notes. 

In court, prosecutor Julian Christopher QC described the cash couriers as “typically young people, attracted by the money”. The investigation is still ongoing with a further 12 suspects charged in September, 2022, including glamour model Jo Emma Larvin, who once dated boxer Joe Calzaghe, alongside her current partner Jonathan Johnson.

Apart from detection, the biggest sweat for the couriers was losing a suitcase. This happened to Muhammed Geyas Ilyas, a 20 year-old cash courier from Slough, when one of his four suitcases went missing in Heathrow in February 2020. After a ten day wait, the mishandled bag was subsequently found. Unfortunately for Ilyas, it was picked up by Border Force officers who discovered £431,000 in hard cash inside. Ilyas subsequently pleaded guilty to carrying £2.5m in total. 

Another suspected courier, a 30-year-old from Leeds, was found hanged at his home in August 2020. He began the courier flights to Dubai after losing his job as an NHS worker. His last Instagram post was him swimming in a pool at a five-star hotel in Dubai. 

The modern view of money laundering typically conjures up tax havens; chains of shell companies that are impossible for governments to unpick, or huge sums transferred in Bitcoin. 

It doesn’t usually conjure up the idea strangers with ordinary jobs humping tonnes of bank notes in suitcases to Dubai. According to Ian Turby, senior investigating officer, at the National Crime Agency (NCA), the group’s cash is suspected to have been washed on behalf of the UK’s thriving illegal drug trade. An almost exclusively cash business, the trade – particularly the county lines network – produces vast amounts of cash that can’t easily be digitised, meaning it has to be physically moved and invested into something else.

"Given the physical appearance of the cash,” which was bundled in elastic bands, “it looks like it was from street deals - we don’t know how the drug gangs got in touch with this network. Because of the prevalence of county lines in the UK and the amount of money involved here, we can assume there’s a large element of that involved,” says Turby.

The network collected cash from “counting houses”, usually rented flats in central London which regularly moved to disguise movement and avoid detection. The wads of bank notes were vacuum-packed and put into suitcases, each containing up to £500,000 and weighing around 40kg. These would be sprayed with filter coffee or air fresheners in an attempt to hide the distinctive smell of cash from detection dogs.

On arrival in Dubai, Nicola Esson, one of the cash couriers later arrested, had been able to declare a total of £6.4m in cash immediately. Whilst the money could be seized if found in the UK, once declared in Dubai it could be assimilated into other legal activities via local money lenders. The money was – according to sources at the NCA – converted into dirhams, and used to buy gold in Africa or cryptocurrency, before being released back to the drug gangs in the UK to be spent as legal tender. 

Dubai is attractive to UK money launderers for several reasons, says Max Heywood, the head of public sector at Elucidate, a financial crime risk quantification platform. It has a cash-intensive, open economy; a high-end luxury real estate market and active trades in gold, precious metals and stones.

In March of this year, the United Arab Emirates - of which Dubai is the most populated city - was placed on a watch list of countries by the global anti-money laundering body Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

“The challenge is not so much the laws but how they are enforced,” says Heywood. “A 2020 FATF assessment found banks in Dubai do not take sufficient measures to deal with high-risk clients. Professional money launderers would know of these banks and intentionally target them. They would also be likely to use [foreign] shell companies to disguise their client’s identity when buying real estate.”

UK gangs are not the only ones moving money through Dubai. In 2010, Wikileaks revealed that Afghanistan’s vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was allowed into Dubai with $52m in cash the previous year, according to a US diplomatic report. In 2021, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani was reported to have fled his country for Dubai in a helicopter with $169m.

Angolan authorities sought to retrieve $1bn from former president’s daughter and Dubai resident Isabel dos Santos, who sent $115m to offshore company in the country, and – in another episode dubbed the “Russian Laundromat” – some $20bn was sent to 150 UAE companies from Russia during 2010 to 2014, despite authorities in three different countries flagging their concerns.

Unregulated transfer businesses help money to disappear in Dubai, says Neil Swift, a partner at Peters & Peters, a law firm specialising inbusiness crime. Swift works with clients from the Middle East and Asia on high-profile and high-value financial crime investigations.

“There is a significant amount of informal exchange business – Money or Value Transfer Services (MVTS) – which is unregulated,” he explains. “The large size and openness of the UAE’s financial sector, the high numbers of foreign nationals resident there, and the consequent range of currencies in use, make it an attractive place to integrate dirty money into the financial system.”

In December 2021, police investigating the smuggling ring swooped on a smart residential address in Belgravia, London. The property belonged to a woman, but the man that police wanted was her partner.

Abdulla Mohammad Ali Bin Beyat Alfalasi, a 47-year-old Emirati national and father of six, ran a Dubai-registered company called Omnivest Gold Trading. Alfalasi had little criminal history, but was a key figure for the network. He had actually made multiple cash trips himself between December 2019 and March 2020.

Post-lockdown, he recruited a wider network of couriers after a chance meeting with British woman, Michelle Clarke, 42, a former worker at Sky TV Digital. She is believed to have helped recruit people to act as couriers for the Omnivest-linked cash mule scheme, including Hanlon and Esson. Clarke is still on the run and wanted by the NCA.

Evidence found against Alfalasi was overwhelming. In searches of his home, computers and three phones, police found pictures of suitcases of cash, invoices; a spreadsheet titled “Abdullah London” which recorded amounts of cash collected and then the value – in dirhams – of the commodities. His phone number and email address were also connected to flight bookings for cash mules.

Critically, for authorities, despite 19,000 pages of evidence served, nowhere did they locate the names of who the money laundering gang were moving cash for. They are believed to be part of a “gang courier service”, co-mingling multiple criminal gangs’ funds, washing the cash and then returning it. But someone, somewhere has a record of exactly which gangs and for how much, says Turby.

“These are absolutely the funds from dozens of criminal gangs in the UK,” he says. “[This laundering process] enables those networks to make upstream payments to cartels. There’s some indication it was used to acquire gold in Africa and we are following that up with Dubai police now.” 

Alfalasi was sentenced to nine years and seven months in prison. Of those sentenced so far, Hanlon received 34 months and Kamaryt 26 months in prison for money-laundering offences. Others named above are still waiting for sentencing. All, that is, except for the major criminal gangs they were washing money for and who still evade detection and justice.