Justice Department allocates resources to Indian Country to assist FBI with unresolved violent crimes
NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – Amid an increase in unsolved violent crime in Indian Country, the U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up FBI personnel at sites across the country, including New Mexico. 'What it really does, it just kind of force multiplies our resources,' said Special Agent in Charge Raul Bujanda.
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On Tuesday, the Justice Department alerted FBI agencies across the United States that they will send 60 agents, on 90-day temporary duty assignments over a six-month period, to address an influx in violent crime and the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous people on tribal lands.
'So, the investigations don't necessarily change different. Sometimes when you hear we're surging resources, it kind of implies that there's going to be like a big operation. What they actually do is allow us to work on cases that happened yesterday,' continued Bujanda, who leads the FBI Division out of Albuquerque.
Operation Not Forgotten, an initiative that launched in 2023, provides intelligence and victim service support to Indian Country offices. The surge in resources allows field agents to quickly find violent offenders and those who have gone missing.
'It helps us have more resources to be able to work with them, because they are also inundated with things that are happening. We can provide a person or an agent that can be there with them when these crimes are happening,' emphasized Bujanda.
Bujanda said the program has been well-received thus fair, with cooperation from tribal leaders and community members alike, 'It gives more of an opportunity to have more one-on-one conversations with law enforcement community because we're not just chasing the next investigation, but we can also focus on that investigation and have attendance at the community event so that we are having that connection with our community.'
The Justice Department said Indian Country faces persistent levels of crime and victimization.
In New Mexico, the FBI hopes to focus its efforts on the Navajo Nation near Farmington and Gallup, where they see a disproportionate amount of violent crime against women and children.
This is the third deployment under Operation Not Forgotten, which has provided investigative support to more than 500 cases in the past two years. These operations resulted in the recovery of ten child victims, 52 arrests, and 25 indictments or judicial complaints.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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But that had left it with a shortage of affordable housing, and its main commercial corridor was lined with aging, strip-style retail. Cappelletti called his development project Groton 2030. It'd reserve 20% of the 1,925 apartments for lower-income residents, a key selling point to the authority's board, which approved the project in June 2023. Per the plan, Cappelletti would oversee the project himself through a development arm of the housing authority instead of hiring an experienced developer or soliciting bids. One of the housing agency commissioners who signed off on the plan, Joe Greene, soon had regrets. In an interview, Greene said he had reluctantly approved the bond during a last-minute video call but had doubts after asking for details. Cappelletti never presented a real business plan, Greene said, and the town had not received formal notice that one of its agencies was planning a massive bond sale. At odds with the rest of the board, Greene resigned that September. Two years later, he remains mystified by it all. 'I still don't know how you're going to pay off a $750 million bond in a five-year timespan when you don't own the property and when there was no business plan,' he said. 'People were amazed at the amount of money.' With the approval in hand, Cappelletti put the deal in motion. He had the Groton authority pay $25,000 to a New Jersey-based investment banker, according to a check register obtained under a freedom of information request. The authority also hired Connecticut law firm Pullman & Comley as bond counsel and obtained an 'A' rating from Egan-Jones based on a few financial projections it turned & Comley declined to comment. Eric Mandelbaum, general counsel for Egan-Jones, said the firm can't comment on particular transactions but 'stands behind its work and record, which are based on methodologies that are publicly available.' Related Story: A New Ratings Game: 3,000 Deals, 20 Analysts, Lots of Questions The sale bogged down after that. Month after month, its completion kept getting delayed. Then, in May 2024, it all started to unravel on Cappelletti when the Groton commissioners received subpoenas ordering them to travel across the state to provide sworn testimony. Months earlier, a lawsuit had been filed against Cappelletti's Meriden Housing Authority and a subsidiary, Maynard Road Corp., that had defaulted on a $16 million loan. The lender, Titan Capital, subpoenaed the Groton commissioners because Cappelletti had made $629,000 of loan repayments with funds pulled from their agency, not Meriden's. The Meriden agency is now on the hook for about $30 million — to repay the Titan loan with interest as well as $12.5 million owed to Citizens Bank for a project in Bristol, Connecticut. Back in a September 2023 board meeting, the Groton commissioners had asked Capelletti about the cash used to pay off Titan, which was recorded as an expense for the Groton 2030 project. They were assured they'd be reimbursed when the bond deal closed, minutes of the meeting show. But the Meriden lawsuit raised new questions, and when Groton commissioners started digging, they found that companies controlled by Cappelletti had bought properties in Winchester, Connecticut, and Fitchburg, Massachusetts to redevelop. Cappelletti also allegedly forged a resolution to approve $2.7 million of lease agreements for the authority, according to the February lawsuit filed by the Groton agency. 'This case involves the discovery of a massive Ponzi-like fraud,' lawyers for the agency said in a court filing. 'Over the course of at least seven years, Cappelletti accepted millions of dollars in funds from non-commercial lenders or other questionable entities.' 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