Last Cocaine Cowboy is arrested

MIAMI — For 26 years, federal authorities in Miami suspected that the fugitive brother of notorious Cocaine Cowboy Augusto “Willie” Falcon was hiding in Mexico or Colombia.

All these years — or at least since the late 1990s — it turns out Gustavo Falcon, 55, was living with his family about 200 miles from Miami near the state’s theme park capital, Disney World.

Deputy U.S. marshals had been watching Gustavo Falcon’s rental home in Kissimmee, just south of Orlando, in recent days. And on Wednesday, they followed him and his wife as they went on a 40-mile bicycle ride. Eventually, the deputies nabbed him at an intersection in Kissimmee in the afternoon.

Falcon — who had been charged with his older brother, Willie, infamous partner Salvador “Sal” Magluta and several others in 1991 with smuggling tons of cocaine into the United States — was booked into the Orlando County jail.

Gustavo Falcon’s arrest on Wednesday closes the final chapter on the Miami Vice era. “He’s the last of the Cocaine Cowboys,” said Barry Golden, a deputy and spokesman with the U.S. Marshals Service.

Man granted innocence

SYCAMORE, Ill. — Former Sycamore resident Jack McCullough was granted a certificate of innocence Wednesday in connection with the 1957 slaying of a local girl, but the ruling may not have settled questions about perhaps the most enduring crime story in DeKalb County history.

Judge William Brady ruled that Mr. McCullough had presented enough evidence at a hearing to earn the certificate. Mr. McCullough, 77, had been tried and convicted of the crime, but the conviction later was vacated and the charges were dropped. The case remains unsolved.

Marine pleads guilty

QUANTICO,Va.— Standing in his khaki uniform Thursday afternoon, Maj. Mark Thompson faced a judge in a courtroom at Marine Corps Base Quantico and pleaded guilty to charges of making a false statement and of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

The dramatic scene marked the end of a six-year saga for Maj. Thompson that offered a lesson in the consequences of hubris. He had fought for years to prove he was innocent of a crime, having sex with two women while they were students at the Naval Academy, that he knew he had committed.

Also in the nation …

One person is dead and three others were injured after a shooting Thursday on a train at the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority’s West Lake station, officials said. ... A water sample from Lake Michigan near a wastewater spill at a U.S. Steel plant in Indiana contained an elevated level of a potentially carcinogenic chemical but well below federal safety standards. … Muslim civil rights and advocacy groups are calling for Milwaukee police to investigate as a hate crime an attack on a Muslim woman who says a man demanded she remove her hijab and beat her. … German pharmaceutical manufacturer Fresenius Kabi, whose drugs ended up in Nebraska’s lethal injection supply, never intended for state officials to obtain them and tried unsuccessfully to get the corrections department to return them. ... With one stroke of a pen, Gov. Terry Branstad is poised to make Iowa one of the friendliest states for gun owners.