Every week at the end of production we typically and humbly thank all those who put their life, heart, and love into the final product of what is now the twenty-one-year-old Las Vegas Tribune. We thank each and every one of those individuals who put their soul into the product that we all consider “our newspaper” because it is a work of love.However, this week is extra exceptional and the articles that so generously were given to us prove that the Las Vegas Tribune was born to fight corruption and political abuse because some of us were victims of that very same corruption that for twenty-one years we have tried to expose.
It is no secret that the police department in our city is one of the most corrupt departments that ever existed, damaging the men and women who enlisted to serve to the best of their abilities.
This week we see a man in pain exposing everyone that is a traitor to the community and to his sisters and brothers in uniform and we want to thank him for that.
For twenty-one years we have put our hearts and souls into defending the Constitution and the laws of our community.
Reading those four articles that appear in this week’s edition of our newspaper we have no choice but to remember our dear friend and loyal supporter of our work, the late Gordon Martines, who, through the pages of this newspaper, exposed, week after week, the criminal behavior of those who shared a desk with him in the homicide bureau of his beloved Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
Through Martines’s articles, we learned how a group of officers assigned to the narcotics bureau gave up a snitch that gave them many arrests and perhaps commendations causing that snitch to be killed by drug-dealers who had befriended the same narcotics unit they were supposed to be running from.
Ironically, Martines’s immediate supervisor, Tom Melton, who made his life miserable, was proven to be a criminal himself by defrauding seniors in our community, embarrassing the department with his actions.
Is has always been our belief that those wearing the badge and the uniform and yet who still betray the oath of honor they swore to protect and serve will sooner or later pay the price.
Gordon Martines was the only police detective to file criminal charges against the sheriff and others while still wearing the badge and the gun issued by the department.
Doug Poppa deserves to be commended for his brave actions despite whatever his reasons were for speaking out; in one of the articles that appear in this week’s issue, he asked the same question we have been asking for many years, “Where is the media” of Las Vegas?
The media in Las Vegas is not allowed to “dig” too much; we have many good reporters, but they are not allowed to exercise their qualifications because their boss is in bed with the same people they want to expose.
Detective Matt Huggins Jr. took out three kilos of cocaine from the police vault for training purposes with the K-9s and forgot to return it to the police vault before he went to sleep.
Later he reported to his superiors that the three kilos were “stolen” from his car when his car was vandalized by criminals despite the fact that everyone knew whose car it was and who he was.
During a whole year, the Las Vegas Tribune was asking the Public Information Office for the result of the investigation for the theft of the three kilos of cocaine and always got the same answer, “The investigation is not finished; we will let you know”; but the investigation never ended and a few months later, his brother, a former Nye County Sheriff’s Department employee, bought an eighteen-wheeler that cost lots of money.
Steve Huggins also defrauded the Nye County Sheriff’s Department when he had an accident in Utah while visiting his family and later claimed that he suffered the accident while on duty.
Yes, Doug Poppa is right; the law enforcement in Nevada is corrupt and perhaps with his help we can try to clean our own swamp little by little.
We are very proud of our labor of love; we are very proud to be allowed to reprint the articles published by the Baltimore
Post-Examiner and we are very proud of the work we are doing without begging for money from the same people we may have to expose in the near future.
Thank you all for your efforts and participation in cleaning up our local swamp.
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