crime

Thieves broke into a home on Feb. 25, 2013 and purloined several paintings, carefully cutting them out of their mounts, leaving the decorative settings to frame the empty wall.

If we hadn’t known about Tortuguero’s crime wave, the village would have seemed perfectly sweet. The alleged risks didn’t stop us, but an aura of danger wafted everywhere. Such is the power of a headline.

Updated with comments from the U.S. Embassy, the Russian ambassador and Chukarev's parents. At 11:45 a.m. Costa Rican authorities escorted a handcuffed Maxim Chukharev on to a United flight 1081 bound for Newark, New Jersey. Chukharev, 27, will face trial in the United States along with four other co-defendants for his alleged role in what's considered largest money laundering scandal in history.

A pair of Costa Ricans said they traveled to Tel Aviv to sell one of their left kidneys for $20,000 to an Israeli business, according to Spanish news outlet El País.

Investors in the U.S. state of Michigan made up the majority of alleged victims in what investigators are describing as multi-million dollar real estate fraud in the central Pacific tourist town of Jacó, reported WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Thursday.

Despite having only 9 percent of the world’s population, Latin America and the Caribbean register more than 30 percent of the world’s homicides, according to a security expert at the World Bank. INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: Explore homicide statistics and their relationship to economic growth across Latin America.

On Tuesday afternoon, Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ) raided the offices of U.S. real estate developer Patrick Vincent Hundley, currently serving two months preventative detention for an alleged $7 million fraud, according to the daily La Nación.

Arthur Budovsky is accused of being the "principal founder" of Liberty Reserve, a Costa Rica-based digital currency service alleged by the U.S. Justice Department to have laundered more than $6 billion for criminals.

The central cantons of Limón and San José top the country’s cantonal crime index, according to the latest report released this week by the Peace Vice Ministry – part of Costa Rica's Justice Ministry – and the Institute for Municipal Development. But the data, a summary of which was released on Tuesday and didn't include some serious crimes like rape and kidnapping, is three years old.

U.S. real estate developer Patrick Vincent Hundley, 45, a major player in the central Pacific town of Jacó, was arrested Monday along with two other suspects on suspicion of committing $7 million in real estate fraud.