NEW YORK — As the spiritual adviser to Brooklyn drug dealers, Mercedes Osario allegedly was paid to warn if police were in their future.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors claim her mystical powers failed. Miserably.<\/p>\n
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes on Tuesday announced a 133-count indictment against 15 people, including Osario and members of a drug crew that used its own fleet of cars to make cocaine deliveries to regular customers. <\/p>\n
Osario, 53, was charged with misdemeanor weapons possession, which carries a maximum one-year prison term. A woman answering the phone at her home on Tuesday said, “She doesn’t know anything about this,” but she declined further comment.<\/p>\n
Authorities portrayed Osario as a practitioner of the Afro-Caribbean Santeria faith and “business adviser” to the gang. Santeria blends African spiritual beliefs with Roman Catholic traditions.<\/p>\n
Osario was put on the gang payroll “to foresee the future,” said chief gang prosecutor Deanna Rodriguez.<\/p>\n
The crew, Rodriguez said, would inquire, “We’re going to do this drug transaction. Is it the right time?” Maybe with a reference from her former gang she could get a job as John Kerry’s “religion outreach director.” After all Kerry’s recent addition of Maria Vanderslice in this job is not much different. Christopher at Catholic Kerry Watch<\/a> has the details on Maria Vanderslice<\/a> and maybe she is what Democrats might consider as religious outreach.<\/p>\n Ultimately, I can’t separate my Christianity from my values or my values from my politics. For me, being engaged in politics is an expression of my deepest held religious beliefs — it is about actualizing a collective commitment to protect the integrity of God’s creation, it’s about meeting the needs of the “least of these,” and about our nation being a generous and trustworthy leader in the world. There are certainly positions taken by leading Democrats with which many Christians won’t agree — and many Christians are appalled by what they see as the exploitation of religion for political gain on the part of the Republican Party. <\/p>\n “it is about actualizing a collective commitment to protect the integrity of God’s creation.” I just love progressive-ecological-mumbo-jumbo-speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW YORK — As the spiritual adviser to Brooklyn drug dealers, Mercedes Osario allegedly was paid to warn if police were in their future. Prosecutors claim her mystical powers failed.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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