• President Bryant Powell shared a letter from the Gift of Life expressing appreciation for the $400 donation. Gift of Life-AZ is a nonprofit tax exempt 501(c)(3) organization administered by participating Rotarians and friends for the purpose of providing open-heart surgery to needy children worldwide.
• President Bryant also read a letter from the Boys & Girls Club of the East Valley thanking the club for the donation of $2,083 to the Apache Junction branch. Boys & Girls Club is one of the organizations supported through our weekly speaker donations.
• Julian Easter updated the club about the reduction in the property tax increase supporting Central Arizona College. The Board has reduced the proposed assessment from 45% to 20%. “A lot of people thought that their total property tax was going up 45% - or 20% now... what is going up is the percentage of what CAC receives from the County. CAC currently receives 14% of the property tax collected by the County. That 14% is being increased by 20% – not the entire tax rate.”
• Dana Hawman informed the club that the AJUSD Governing Board was persuaded to try once again for a 15% Maintenance and Operations override, which will have to be approved by voters in November. The grass roots community group Save Our Schools has pledged to take the message to the public in support of the override.
• Bob Homann introduced Rosita Raby, who has applied to the Rotary Vocational Fund of Arizona and was at our club to request sponsorship. The Rotary Vocational Fund of Arizona is meant to help people who have low income better themselves through vocational education. (More info below.)
• Bill Burrows gave us the latest news, including a story about a young man who was charged with “breaking and entering and being domestic” after a female homeowner woke to find him wiping down a countertop and baking a potato in her microwave oven. When told to leave, the man went outside and began raking leaves in the front yard. Another popular story told us about chimpanzees in West Africa becoming inebriated from drinking the fermented sap of palm trees.

Harvey Clark introduced our speaker, Terry Donnelly, Assistant Inspector-In-Charge of the Phoenix Division of the United States Postal Inspection Service. Postal inspectors are empowered to investigate any crime that involves the mail. In the Phoenix Division, which includes New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, the majority of inspectors’ time is spent dealing with narcotics and mail theft.

Most of the drugs being shipped through the mail are coming up from Mexico: about 80% marijuana, then cocaine, methamphetamines, steroids, and others. If it’s illegal to possess, it’s illegal to mail. In Phoenix alone, Terry informed us, “We could easily take out 50-60 packages a day that contain narcotics.” With many of the packages going to other major cities and drug markets within the United States, one of the biggest problems is that mail carriers are being assaulted and often shot, because rival gangs know that a shipment is coming in and try to rip off the box before it gets to the intended recipient. “So, we try to take as much as we can out of the mail here in Arizona, but it isn’t as easy as it looks on TV. We have to get the US Attorney’s Office to approve writing a search warrant and we have to get a federal judge to give us a warrant for the box. So it takes a bit of time, effort, and storage to do that.” The Postal Inspection Service estimates that they are able to intercept between 6% and 8% of the drugs that are sent via mail.

Mail theft is also a big problem in Arizona, although California took over the “lead” as the worst state for mail theft about four or five years ago. Mail theft is also narcotics related as 98% of the people arrested for mail theft are meth addicts. The profile is a white male or female meth amphetamine addict, looking for checks, money orders, and packages containing anything they can sell quickly to pay for more drugs. “We’ve fought it so long and so hard here that we have a lot of the latest, greatest mail receiving technology here in Arizona. We’re doing everything we can to harden the targets.”

The third largest issue for postal inspectors in our area is mail fraud. Mail fraud is perpetrated by white-collar thieves; people who are using the mail to solicit money from others. Many of these operations work out of Jamaica; others are telemarketing scams. Senior citizens are the primary target.