The mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus, Ridgefield were among 44 people arrested in early morning raids across New Jersey this morning as federal officials unveiled a long-ranging probe into public corruption and international money laundering, officials said

FBI and IRS rounded up various elected officials and several rabbis across the state in what is being described as one of the biggest investigations of its kind in Jersey’s scandal-plagued history.

The corruption investigation, which has been ongoing for over ten years according to officials, dovetails with a “high-volume international money-laundering conspiracy.” It is said to involve rabbis in the Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn and Deal, New Jersey. It started when money transfers drew the interests of the feds who followed the trail back to small-town Jersey corruption.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and others have been investigating whether Texas billionaire Allen Stanford was involved in laundering drug money for Mexico Gulf cartel, ABC News reported on Wednesday, citing federal authorities.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday charged Stanford and two executives of Stanford Group Co with an $8 billion fraud.

Mexican authorities detained one of Stanford’s private planes as part of the investigation, which has been ongoing since last year, ABC reported citing unnamed officials.

For more than seven months, the nation’s top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states, reportedly because it contains such potentially “alarming information” as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates.

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen “areas of concern”—including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee—may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants.

The almost fanatical zeal with which the FBI pursued King is disclosed in tens of thousands of FBI memos from the 1960s.

The FBI paper trail spells out in detail the government agency’s concerted efforts to derail King’s efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement.

The FBI’s interest in King intensified after the March on Washington in August 1963, when King delivered his “I have a dream speech,” which many historians consider the most important speech of the 20th century. After the speech, an FBI memo called King the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”

Don’t forget this CNN story from 1999

A confidential proposal that Bank of America circulated to members of Congress this month provides a stunning glimpse of how quickly the industry has reversed its laissez-faire disdain for second-guessing by the government — now that it is in trouble.

The proposal warns that up to $739 billion in mortgages are at “moderate to high risk” of defaulting over the next five years and that millions of families could lose their homes.