Since the early 1970's when he brought information to the Pennsylvania State Attorney General showing CIA complicity on a massive scale in the illegal drug trade, now a fugitive, Ira Einhorn has been trying to expose this CIA-mafia drugtrade 50year ongoing alliance that other researchers now believe accounts for 80-90% of the illegal drugs coming into the US totaling $200-250 billion per year in laundered profits multiplied in offshore banking low interest loans to Wall Street businesses to fuel mergers and profits with low cost capital while funding to a large extent both Democratic and Republican party candidates who have been corrupted by this money and complicit in this CIA drug trade to the highest levels including Clinton and Bush. Now in France under temporary protection of the French government, Einhorn has consistently maintained he was framed for the 1979 murder of his ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux ("The Unicorn Killer" TV psychodrama series) to silence his effective activism on social and environmental justice issues, on covert development of advanced electromagnetic weaponry, mind control, and other secret military systems possibly connected to reverse engineering of US and other governments' acquisition of crashed UFO's, etc. http://www.cseti.com Recently President Clinton himself has contacted the French government pushing for Einhorn's extradition to face his life sentence meted out after an unconstitutional in-absentia trial authorized by special Pennsylvania legislation. Spearheading the extradition campaign assisted by the rabid Philly tabloid writers, Philly DA Lynne Abrahams fraudulently claims Einhorn will receive a new trial, which she knows is patently unconstitutional also, in order to bait the French government to acquiesce to Einhorn's extradition. http://www.egroups.com/group/ira-einhorn Below is second of two-part series, front page current articles in a Philadelphia newspaper detailing corruption in Philly District Attorney's office associated with the CIA drug trade. Is it any wonder the protestors in Philly are receiving such harsh treatment by the police and DA's office which apparently, along with the Feds, in a move unprecedented in America are treating the protestors as terrorists? What are the government officials affraid that the demonstrators might bring to public attention if they succeed? It is a long article so I have introduced it with a few excerpts. This information should be brought out at the upcoming Aug14-17 LA Shadow Convention http://www.shadowconventions.com (which it won't be for reasons the reader can determine) and at the Aug9-12 LA Peoples Convention http://www.peoplesconvention.com (where it will be brought out by Michael Ruppert, former LAPD police officer speaking there as editor of From The Wilderness newsletter http://www.copvcia.com and http://www.suppressedwriters.com which have the proof) Starting with the last two paragraphs/sentences of earlier issue of the Philadelphia City Paper locally known as the "Inky" from part one cover story, http://www.citypaper.net/articles/072700/cs.cover4.shtml "Why did [Philly DA] Lynne Abraham's office in essence hand out 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards to dozens of Dominicans with prior drug-dealing convictions? "And why did Al Gore show up at a fundraiser attended by PRD members under investigation by the DEA for money laundering and narco-trafficking?" Now excerpts from the below last week's cover story overshadowed by the Shadow and Republican Conventions: [see my conclusions/evaluations/suggestions at end] --------- "The trouble started, they say, when they told the CIA to go pound sand." -------- "CIA Agent Lawrence was adamant about getting this information as he was agitated when BNI personnel refused the request." McLaughlin added that he and his crew "feared for the life of the informant and his family if this information was revealed because if the informant disappeared there would be no problem for the Clinton administration." --------- "The CIA people cautioned them that any move to confiscate Pena Gomez's drug money would have to be cleared with the U.S. State Department first, with the DEA as an intermediary." --------- "...only the CIA and the Clinton-Gore State Department would have had both the influence and the authority..." --------- "It is an outrageous allegation, that the CIA and the State Department were so intent on protecting the Dominican drug traffickers in the PRD that they used the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office to destroy the careers of four Pennsylvania narcotics agents". --------- "...the District Attorney and the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia independently chose to take all of the pending BNI cases and, as the cops might say, "shit-can" them. It was a unique, scorched-earth approach that was also, the BNI agents claim, the only prosecutorial measure that would ensure a quick and permanent demise for BNI's investigation of Dominican narco-politics." --------- "The scandal hit at a time when the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office was already in a state of general turmoil. The elected AG, Ernie Preate, had gone to prison for campaign finance corruption. " --------- "In October 1996, prominent members of Dominican drug trafficking organizations - people assigned special DEA identity numbers - attended a fundraiser for the New York Democratic Party at an Upper West Side tavern. "The guest of honor that night was Vice President Al Gore." --------- http://www.citypaper.net/articles/080300/cs.cover1.shtm August 3-10, 2000 cover story The Dominican Connection, Part Two: Shafted They can't go home again: The Bastard Squad's former place of employment, BNI headquarters at 7801 Essington Ave. photo: Jay Matsueda Four angry narcotics agents are suing to prove that Uncle Sam is the ultimate pusher man. by Noel Weyrich page 1 | page 2 | page 3 CLARIFICATION In the first part of "The Dominican Connection," the name of Edward Eggles was inadvertently omitted, due to a court clerical error, from the list of B NI agents suing the State Attorney General's and U.S. Attorney's Office in a 1997 federal civil rights complaint. The trouble started, they say, when they told the CIA to go pound sand. For five months, the four Philadelphia-based agents from the state Bureau of Narcotics Investigations and Drug Control (BNI) had doggedly followed a trail of dollars and drugs that led from the squalid street-corner crack markets in North Philadelphia all the way to the campaign coffers of a leading presidential candidate in the Dominican Republic. As detailed in last week's City Paper ("The Dominican Connection, Part I"), informants had told narcotics agents in late 1995 that Dr. Jose Francisco Pena Gomez was bankrolling his Dominican presidential campaign with narco-profits earned on the streets of Philadelphia and other East Coast cities. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration had confirmed that Pena Gomez had been linked to narcotics traffickers in his home country, but nothing had been proven. In late March of 1996, the four agents - John "Sparky" McLaughlin, Dennis McKeefery, Charlie Micewski and Edward Eggles - were working closely with the DEA's New York office, which had its own Pena Gomez investigation under way. Together they planned to track the flow of drug money and seize the candidate's presumably ill-gotten gains during his next fundraising swing through New York City. It promised to be a headline-making bust, one that would help cement BNI's reputation among the cream of Philadelphia's crime-fighting crop. That's when CIA agent David Lawrence showed up at the bureau's Philadelphia headquarters, a nondescript building near the airport, with a few specific demands of the agents. He would leave empty-handed and angry. As recounted in a diary kept by Sparky McLaughlin, the BNI agents had previously given Lawrence and other CIA agents copies of audiotapes made by an informant who had infiltrated Philadelphia chapter meetings of the Dominican Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). The tapes recorded numerous comments linking drug sales to Pena Gomez's campaign finance efforts. Now the CIA wanted more. Lawrence wanted the informant's name and his Dominican province of origin. He did not say why. McLaughlin wrote in his diary, "CIA Agent Lawrence was adamant about getting this information as he was agitated when BNI personnel refused the request." McLaughlin added that he and his crew "feared for the life of the informant and his family if this information was revealed because if the informant disappeared there would be no problem for the Clinton administration." For months, Lawrence and other CIA agents based here and elsewhere had warned McLaughlin and his colleagues that Pena Gomez was the favored presidential candidate of the Clinton administration. The CIA people cautioned them that any move to confiscate Pena Gomez's drug money would have to be cleared with the U.S. State Department first, with the DEA as an intermediary. Now, in what would prove to be their last meeting with David Lawrence, the CIA agent was leaving in a huff. Two days later, with Pena Gomez making the fundraising rounds in New York, McLaughlin, Micewski, McCaffery and Eggles headed up the Turnpike, intent on seizing Pena Gomez's money. During their second night there, however, the operation was aborted by the DEA. With no jurisdiction in New York, the BNI agents stepped back while Pena Gomez left for home with an estimated $500,000 in U.S. currency in his bags. And then, two weeks later, prosecutors in Philadelphia unilaterally stopped taking BNI cases, claiming that some or all of the agents had been involved in questionable drug arrests. Once the news hit the papers, McLaughlin, McKeefery, Micewski and Eggles were all but washed up as drug agents. And although they've never been convicted of a crime or even disciplined internally for misconduct, their credibility as witnesses has been permanently compromised. This story, gleaned from thousands of pages of public court filings, McLaughlin's diary and official documents, details a clash of competing conspiracy theories. On the one hand, the Pennsylvania BNI agents claim in a federal lawsuit that only the CIA and the Clinton-Gore State Department would have had both the influence and the authority to stop the Pena Gomez investigation cold while killing the agents' careers in the process. On the other hand, Philadelphia's two chief criminal prosecutors insist that they took the unusual step of setting free dozens of accused and convicted drug defendants - in some cases sending dangerous felons back to the streets even after they'd pled guilty - because they feared the BNI agents might be colluding to fabricate details in arrest reports and provide false testimony in court. On April 29, 1996, Mike Lutz sent off a four-page memo to his superiors at BNI. A soft-spoken career cop, Lutz was a BNI supervisor who oversaw the work done by McLaughlin, McKeefery, Micewski and Eggles (soon to become known as the Bastard Squad). Lutz's memo is an amazing specimen of bureaucratic polemic, an angry, indignant litany of complaints mixed with bitter and sarcastic swipes at Philadelphia's legal and political establishment. "The accusations made against this office are not even factual, they are allegations!" Lutz wrote. "Despite this, we are ostracized from the entire Law Enforcement Community in Philadelphia. It is unfair and unjust." Just a few weeks earlier, with almost no warning, the bureau had been told that Philadelphia's prosecutors no longer wanted anything to do with BNI-related cases. On April 10 and 11, in separate meetings, representatives of the Philadelphia District Attorney and the U.S. Attorney had told officials from the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office that they would never again handle arrests by McLaughlin and his crew. Every pending criminal case requiring court testimony from McLaughlin and McKeefery in particular would be withdrawn from prosecution, or "nol-prossed." Some of these cases had been previously approved for prosecution and many of the arrests had been made with the close cooperation of other state and federal agencies. Convicted felons, some of them dangerous criminals caught with firearms, would go free as a result. Cops who can't get their arrests prosecuted aren't cops for very long. Just like that, the crime-fighting careers of McLaughlin, Micewski, McKeefery and Eggles were over. Feeling like heroes just a few weeks earlier, they became known thereafter as the Bastard Squad - an Army term for a misfit unit detached from its battalion. As if by fiat, the move by the prosecutors was tantamount to locking up the BNI's Essington Avenue office and turning out the lights. State officials would later gripe that the prosecutors, to justify this drastic decision, had offered only vague suspicions of wrongdoing on the part of BNI agents. Eric Noonan, a deputy attorney general who submitted an internal case study of BNI's files, wrote that "despite repeated contact with representatives of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the DA's Office, no one was able to provide any specifics other than a general 'gut feeling' of discomfort." A search through the court records and depositions made available to City Paper reveals perhaps three specific instances in which prosecutors suggested BNI agents might have falsified search warrants and arrest reports. That's only three out of approximately 500 cases that the agents worked on. Nonetheless, in his response memo, Mike Lutz agreed that any such misconduct charges certainly required investigation. But he expressed disbelief that none of BNI's arrests would be prosecuted in the meantime. "No matter what, our agency should not be precluded from arresting drug dealers. while the investigation is going on," Lutz continued, pointing out that BNI was among the very few law enforcement agencies in Philadelphia that had never been tainted by criminal corruption indictments. "To close our doors is extreme and ridiculous." The believability of law enforcement officers on the witness stand is particularly important in narcotics cases. Unlike rape or robbery cases, in which victims are the key witnesses, drug cases are often a contest between the cops' testimony and the defendant's. The typical defense strategy in such cases is to pull apart the police account of the arrest, and sometimes those efforts succeed. Every day, then, prosecutors put cops on the witness stand who, in the past, may have had some testimony or an arrest report thrown out over questions of accuracy, proper procedure or truthfulness. But the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office never resorts to dropping cases en masse unless their law enforcement witnesses have themselves been charged with crimes. For officers with clean records to have all their cases dumped is not only rare - it may well be unprecedented. Donald Bailey, a Harrisburg lawyer and former Congressman who represents McLaughlin and the others, swears he can find no example of anything like it, anywhere in America. "It smacks of political sabotage," wrote Lutz, who suggested that the District Attorney and the U.S. Attorney were Democrats out to embarrass the Republican-controlled Attorney General's Office. But the lawsuit Bailey would later file advanced a more far-reaching theory: "[W]hen the plaintiffs were reticent to provide federal agencies with certain sources in the PRD, they were suddenly ostraci[z]ed and became the targets of vicious unfounded attacks on their [credibility] and career by the federal government (with the marionetted support of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office and the Attorney General of Pennsylvania.)" It sounds far-fetched, and the defendants tend to regard the suit with derision and contempt. Michael P. Stiles, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, has denounced the charges in a deposition as "preposterous" and "offensive." His attorney, Mary Catherine Fry, dismisses the allegations as "a fairy tale," while Kevin Harley, a spokesman for state Attorney General Michael Fisher, similarly deems them "rather bizarre." The Philadelphia DA's office has offered no comment. But, as Don Bailey has said in depositions of defendants in this suit, he believes his clients have been victimized by either a "cover-up" or by an effort to intimidate them, because he has never seen prosecutors behave this way before. The problem is this: If the prosecutors were convinced that BNI's search and seizure practices were improper, they would have faced only two possibilities - that the BNI agents were operating either carelessly or criminally. The men were either bending the rules or breaking the law. They needed either disciplinary action - or handcuffs and leg irons. Under the first supposition, the prosecutors should have alerted the Attorney General's internal affairs office in Harrisburg. On the other hand, if indeed the prosecutors suspected McLaughlin and McKeefery of running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution with a squad of crooked cops, then they arguably had a sworn duty to take their misgivings to the FBI. Better than anyone, prosecutors know that the surest way to lock up rogue cops is to keep them working the streets until the FBI catches them red-handed. But the prosecutors did neither. Instead, Stiles and Arnold Gordon, Philadelphia's first assistant district attorney, simply pulled the plug on all of BNI's investigations by announcing their refusal to prosecute any new arrests by McLaughlin and his crew. According to Stiles, the two offices arrived at these decisions independently. "Plaintiffs also allege," says the lawsuit, "that in furtherance of the unlawful policy of protecting the large-scale distributors of illegal narcotics to largely captive center city populations, the defendants have utilized the offices of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the FBI to pursue an oppressive threatening investigation of the plaintiffs in an effort to destroy their credibility." It is an outrageous allegation, that the CIA and the State Department were so intent on protecting the Dominican drug traffickers in the PRD that they used the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office to destroy the careers of four Pennsylvania narcotics agents. http://www.citypaper.net/articles/080300/cs.cover2.shtml But it's also fair to ask why, when faced with two tried-and-true options for addressing their worries about BNI's credibility, the District Attorney and the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia independently chose to take all of the pending BNI cases and, as the cops might say, "shit-can" them. It was a unique, scorched-earth approach that was also, the BNI agents claim, the only prosecutorial measure that would ensure a quick and permanent demise for BNI's investigation of Dominican narco-politics. Neither Stiles nor Gordon would comment for this story. Both, however, have given accounts of their actions under oath, either through sworn depositions or in criminal hearings. Arnold Gordon, however, had a history of being dissatisfied with certain BNI cases, one that pre-dated the bureau's problems with the CIA and Pena Gomez. Gordon had complained about BNI arrests to Attorney General officials on at least two occasions in early 1995, raising questions about the facts concerning a total of eight separate cases. In April of 1995, McLaughlin's diary records that Gordon had asked for disciplinary charges against McKeefery, alleging he had admitted in open court to searching two drug houses without a warrant. The subsequent internal investigation cleared McKeefery. Then, in May 1995, Gordon sent a letter to the then-acting Attorney General, requesting a review of seven cases that prosecutors for both his office and the U.S. Attorney's office found troubling. Five of the cases directly involved McLaughlin, McKeefery, Micewski and Eggles. In one case, Eggles and McLaughlin had arrested a man caught running with a kilo of cocaine, and the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case expressed fears that the arrest had been too simple and, therefore, not credible. Another case had been thrown out because the judge found no probable cause for searching a property where drugs were found. Although the May 1995 letter would later be used by defense attorneys as evidence that the BNI agents lacked credibility, Gordon has never invoked the cases mentioned in that letter as a reason for his April 1996 decision to nol-pros every case involving McLaughlin and McKeefery. At a preliminary hearing in November 1996, after he agreed to drop 53 BNI-related cases, Gordon explained to a judge "the reason for nol-prossing these fifty-three cases was because Officer McLaughlin did something which one could characterize as lying in a search warrant.. We chose not [to put McLaughlin on the stand] solely because of what had occurred with regard to that one search warrant." A month later, before a different judge, Gordon claimed he was only using "his best prosecutorial judgment" in deciding to drop all of McLaughlin's and McKeefery's cases. "Although I've taken this action, I may be wrong and they may be right. In other words, I don't know that those officers lied in a search warrant. In fact, I may be unfairly stigmatizing them, by the action I've taken in these cases." In February 1995, just a few months before Gordon's first complaint against McKeefery, a federal grand jury had indicted five Philadelphia police officers, charging them with planting drugs on defendants and stealing from them. Less then a month later, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office started dropping charges against people convicted on the five officers' testimony. The 39th District scandal, which ended up freeing more than 100 defendants, was supremely embarrassing to the District Attorney's Office. Then, in the spring of 1996, just weeks before Gordon announced his decision to stop taking BNI cases, the five police officers were all convicted and received prison sentences up to 13 years. News of the district attorney's dumping of BNI cases broke on KYW-TV Channel 3 on April 23, 1996, followed by a front-page Inquirer story the day after. Both reports, as well as follow-up news accounts, were quick to draw lines of similarities between BNI and the 39th District scandal. It was an unfair comparison, which became increasingly obvious as the months went by, since the BNI agents had never been charged with anything. Just the week before, five rogue police officers from North Philadelphia's 39th District had been given sentences of up to 13 years for offenses that included framing suspects, beating them and extorting money from them. More than 100 cases involving the five officers had already been overturned - but only after they had been indicted and charged with crimes. Reporters focusing on the similarities of the tossed-out cases could just as easily have pointed out the district attorney's sudden interest in not prosecuting cases of officers who hadn't been charged with anything. Instead, the newspapers quoted unnamed law enforcement sources as stating that the joint city-FBI corruption probe that caught the 39th District police was now expanding to include the Bureau of Narcotics Investigation. By May 16, the head of BNI's Philadelphia office was replaced and McLaughlin, Micewski, McKeefery and Eggles were all reassigned to desk jobs. In late June, the State Senate's Judiciary Committee rushed to Philadelphia for hearings that had promised to examine why so many drug arrests by a state agency were being nullified by federal and local prosecutors. However, by the scheduled date, June 21, it had already been well established that the FBI was looking into BNI's Philadelphia office. The prosecutors and the Attorney General's Office begged off on attending the hearings, stating they were duty-bound not to discuss matters under criminal investigation. Rather than shed light on the decisions of the District Attorney and the U.S. Attorney, the hearing became a one-sided affair in which defense attorneys complained vocally about the persistent problem of police "corruption," lumping together BNI's problems with the criminal behavior of the 39th District cops. At the hearing, Miguel Torres gave teary-eyed testimony accusing McLaughlin of beating him and stealing cash. He did not, however, accuse McLaughlin of planting drugs on him. State Sen. Vince Fumo grabbed that day's headlines by imploring Torres to sue the state for McLaughlin's alleged conduct. He was quoted as saying, "I hope you hit us for at least a couple million bucks." (Years later, Torres would sue, but he would never get his day in court. Appeals courts denied he had grounds for a false arrest complaint and just this year the Supreme Court refused to hear his final appeal. McLaughlin had long since passed a polygraph test clearing him of Torres' charges.) Meanwhile, in the Dominican Republic, Jose Francisco Pena Gomez won the first round of elections on May 21. News reports considered him the leading candidate for the final runoff election on July 1. Two very different kinds of lawyers represent narcotics defendants in the Philadelphia justice system. Defendants with no money get public defenders assigned to them by the courts. On the other hand, defendants who can afford to pay for a defense hire counsel from among a small coterie of experienced local criminal lawyers. Among Dominican drug defendants, one of the top attorneys of choice is Guy Sciolla. Guy Sciolla doesn't do TV ads. He has a tiny one-line entry in the Yellow Pages. If you've never heard of him, then you're probably not the type of person who'll ever need him. Years ago Sciolla was on the other side of the fence, as a prosecutor in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. Back then he counted among his colleagues in the homicide unit the very two prosecutors who would shut down the BNI crew - Michael P. Stiles and Arnold Gordon. The Philadelphia legal community is a very small place. In the weeks and months before Stiles and Gordon decided to stop taking BNI cases, Guy Sciolla was working up a motion to spring a former BNI arrestee from federal prison. Miguel Tapia had been caught by McLaughlin and Eggles with a brick of cocaine in his car. Tapia had been set up by one of BNI's informants, who told the agents to wait for Tapia to make a delivery at a corner store at Fourth and Annsbury Streets. Tapia drove up in an Oldsmobile, parked and entered, where McLaughlin was waiting for him. Eggles later testified that he, meanwhile, recovered a brick of cocaine from the floor of the car, after spotting it peeking out from under a newspaper. Tapia was arrested on the spot, though it would be some hours before it was revealed he had lied about his identity and that his real name was Anci Liriano. Eggles was able to seize the cocaine without a warrant under the "plain view" provisions of search and seizure law, which allows police to take action when they see something they can "reasonably suspect" is a controlled substance. The informant's tip was critical to the legality of the arrest since it provided the reasonable suspicion needed to look inside the car. A jury found Tapia/Liriano guilty and a judge gave him a 63-month federal prison sentence. Sciolla's legal brief on behalf of Tapia was filed just two weeks after news of the BNI scandal hit the papers. It made no claim that Tapia/Liriano was innocent of anything. It did not allege that the agents had planted the cocaine in his car. If anything, Sciolla's Tapia brief is a somewhat unique court document in that it drips with innuendo and sarcasm. It backhandedly doubted Eggles' credibility by claiming that a series of past BNI arrest reports, few of which even involved Eggles, displayed "remarkable and repeated fact patterns." It went on to question the very existence of BNI's confidential informant. Years later, in a sworn deposition, U.S. Attorney Michael Stiles would recall the Tapia case as one of the main reasons he determined the entire Bureau of Narcotics Investigation was unfit for future federal prosecutions. In recounting the facts of the Tapia case, Stiles' version was similar to Sciolla's, in which doubt was cast on whether McLaughlin and Eggles' informant had ever existed and little connection was found between Tapia and the Oldsmobile. But other investigative agencies, including the DEA, had long ago confirmed they were using the same individual as an informant, and a civilian witness in the store had testified for the prosecution that Tapia tried to throw away the keys to the car. (Tapia was set free in July 1996. Seven months later, Delaware State Police records show he was stopped for speeding on I-95 and that $31,000 was found hidden in his car's false-bottomed gas tank. The car and the money were seized, but Tapia was let go.) http://www.citypaper.net/articles/080300/cs.cover3.shtml As the summer of 1996 wore on, Philadelphia's small community of criminal defense attorneys smelled blood in the water when it came to getting old BNI cases overturned. In a frenzy of filings, one motion followed another in rapid succession, each requesting that a past conviction be thrown out and a prisoner released because the individual's arrest had been tainted by the mere presence of BNI personnel at the scene. When the District Attorney's Office did not contest the motions, the convicts went free. Before it was all over, by McLaughlin's estimation, 85 defendants had been let go, people from whom BNI had confiscated a total of $1.2 million worth of heroin, crack and cocaine, not to mention dozens of illegal firearms and motor vehicles. Another attorney who has frequently handled drug cases, Louis Savino, showed remarkable candor about the situation when he told the Inquirer, "It made my job easier. I don't know about the general public. They're just letting people skate.. These are allegations of significant amounts of drugs." Most other defense attorneys were more sanctimonious, making public claims about their clients' innocence, even when their court motions merely claimed they had been caught improperly. The scandal hit at a time when the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office was already in a state of general turmoil. The elected AG, Ernie Preate, had gone to prison for campaign finance corruption. The acting AG, Thomas Corbett, was a lame duck, a mere seat warmer who would be replaced in early 1997 by the winner of the November 1996 election. Nonetheless, soon after the prosecutors started dumping BNI cases, Corbett appointed his deputy attorney general Eric Noonan to review the cases and file a report on fixing the problems with the Philadelphia BNI office. Noonan's report was never made public, but a draft has been obtained by City Paper. In it, Noonan's exasperation is evident as he lays out the inability of the prosecutors to articulate just what they found so offensive about McLaughlin and his crew. This is where he accused the prosecutors of failing to provide any specifics beyond "a general 'gut feeling' of discomfort" with BNI cases. As best as Noonan could tell, the prosecutors had three very general criticisms of the arrests made by McLaughlin, Micewski, McKeefery and Eggles: The BNI agents often entered houses without warrants, they reported seeing drugs in plain view with a frequency that defied credibility and the "recurring fact patterns" in their cases, as claimed by Guy Sciolla, raised suspicions that they were making stuff up. As head of the Drug Strike Force Legal Services section, Noonan was already well versed in search and seizure law. After reviewing hundreds of BNI files, however, he concluded that while the bureau could sharpen up some of its procedures, he could find nothing about its work that was improper or not credible. For one thing, law officers can enter a house without a warrant if they reasonably suspect contraband may be in danger of being destroyed. The allowable procedure is to "secure" the property first and then request a warrant to actually search the building. Noonan found BNI agents had always given their explicit reasons for such "prior entries" in their search warrant requests, and had never tried to conceal them. To test the credibility of the "plain view" arrests that the prosecutors complained about, Noonan took a tour of the Dominican-controlled drug corners where the BNI agents had done so much of their work. "During slightly more than an hour of driving through the various neighborhoods, our vehicle was approached no fewer than three times by street corner dealers who readily displayed various types of drugs to the driver." Noonan witnessed five other drug transactions, some within view of uniformed police officers who "had very little impact on these street dealers' temerity.. [B]ased on the foregoing, it appears their recurring ability for such plain view observations is quite believable." Finally, on the matter of Sciolla's "recurring fact patterns," Noonan wrote that he found no such patterns that were "incredible due to their frequency." Forced to state the obvious, Noonan wrote that some recurring patterns are "not unforeseeable" with drug arrests, given the organized and routine nature of narcotics dealing and trafficking. Although Noonan's report made some suggestions about how BNI agents and supervisors could improve their reporting methods, he found nothing that would warrant the treatment that McLaughlin, Micewski, McKeefery and Eggles received at the hands of the prosecutors. The report, completed in July 1996, would have given Philadelphia's BNI crew some much-needed moral support, but no portion of it was ever made public. Instead, acting AG Tom Corbett continued to make occasional disparaging remarks about the agents, perhaps attempting to put the bureau's past behind it. McLaughlin, Micewski, McKeefery and Eggles were pulled from the streets for good, and a new supervisor was assigned. On May 17, 1996, with the four agents no longer permitted to make arrests, the District Attorney's Office announced it would start handling BNI cases once again. On July 1, 1996, Dr. Jose Francisco Pena Gomez lost the runoff election for the Dominican presidency. But he and his Dominican Revolutionary Party didn' t have to worry about drug investigations any more. Soon after Pena Gomez's fundraising visit to New York several months earlier, the DEA had shut down its investigation. And Pena Gomez's supporters kept active in politics. In October 1996, prominent members of Dominican drug trafficking organizations - people assigned special DEA identity numbers - attended a fundraiser for the New York Democratic Party at an Upper West Side tavern. The guest of honor that night was Vice President Al Gore. In the fall of 1997, when they filed their federal civil rights lawsuit, the careers of McLaughlin, McKeefery, Micewski and Eggles were mere shadows of what they had been 18 months earlier. For more than a year McLaughlin had been reassigned to a desk job, while McKeefery worked in the motor pool, signing out vehicles. Micewski was reassigned to do paperwork in a BNI office in northeastern Pennsylvania, while Eggles took an extended leave, eventually deciding to retire. All were still officially under investigation by the FBI. In September, a Housing Authority police officer named Harry Fernandez called McLaughlin to tell him he had FBI troubles of his own. Fernandez had worked frequently with McLaughlin's BNI crew on drug investigations in the past. Now he was facing federal charges for lying about a search he did on a car in 1994. He had recovered more than three pounds of cocaine in what was said to be the largest street bust in city history, but he had falsified some details in the search and some fellow housing officers had given him up. Fernandez told McLaughlin that the FBI was offering him immunity in exchange for information about the BNI. But it wasn't until Fernandez's 1998 trial, when he got a transcript of Fernandez's Sept. 23, 1997 FBI interview, that McLaughlin could see just how badly they wanted to nail the Bastard Squad. FBI: Look, let's cut the shit. You know those guys at BNI are dirty. They planted drugs on people[,] stole their money. We want you to tell us about that. Fernandez: I'll tell you whatever I know, but if you're looking for illegal shit that those guys did. I do not know anything about it. FBI: Why do you keep protecting these guys? Fernandez: I'm not protecting them but if I don't know anything illegal about them how can I say anything? FBI: This is your only way out. Do you understand that anything you say here can't be used against you[?] No matter what illegal thing you did and tell us we can't use it against you. That's a hell of a break. Fernandez: I would tell you if I know. I'd give up anybody in order to benefit me. But unless you want me to lie I don't know anything. Fernandez was eventually acquitted of three of the four charges against him. He received a two-and-a-half-year sentence for lying to a federal officer. The lawsuit filed on October 17, 1997, with all four Bastard Squad members as plaintiffs, listed 16 co-defendants including Stiles, Gordon, a State Department assistant secretary, three CIA employees, two FBI detectives, five members of the Attorney General's chain of command, two New York drug traffickers and, finally, the candidate himself, Pena Gomez. Pena Gomez has since died, and several other defendants, including Arnold Gordon, have successfully sought to be dropped from the case via a summary judgment. Gordon was covered by prosecutorial immunity, which forbids people from suing prosecutors for their legal decisions. Stiles, however, has had his summary judgment request denied by a judge, partly because there is some evidence he encouraged the Attorney General's Office to order all the Bastard Squad members removed from the Essington Avenue office. In 1998, Donald Bailey filed a second lawsuit on behalf of McLaughlin, McKeefery and Micewski, alleging that Attorney General officials had responded to the first lawsuit by retaliating with "harsh, uncompromising employment and travel burdens, all in order to punish the plaintiffs for using the civil rights laws to protect their rights and redress their grievances." (Eggles, having retired, was not a plaintiff in the second lawsuit.) Not until October 1998 did Stiles inform the Attorney General's Office that the FBI investigation of the Bastard Squad would not result in any indictments. He finally made the announcement that the FBI investigation was complete in February 1999, nearly three years after it started. Although the number of convicted felons set free in the BNI scandal rivals that of the 39th District scandal, there remain some serious differences between the two affairs. In the 39th, the city eventually paid out $3.5 million in settlements to falsely arrested defendants. By contrast, none of the civil cases filed against the Bastard Squad was settled, and none ever made it to trial. Each was thrown out by an appellate judge, including one who noted tartly that "Plaintiff does not dispute the basic facts. that he was driving an automobile which contained over 2,000 vials of crack cocaine." And yet, just two weeks ago, another repeat offender drug dealer, one who was serving four to seven years in state prison, was granted a new trial simply because the arresting officer was Sparky McLaughlin. The District Attorney's Office immediately moved to nol-pros, and the man, who is still awaiting trial on two unrelated assault charges, went free. McLaughlin, Micewski, McKeefery and Eggles remain possibly the only unindicted law officers anywhere to be essentially blackballed by the prosecutors they were obliged to work with. But they are no longer the only cops to have their investigative careers interrupted or destroyed under strange circumstances involving Dominican drug traffickers and their pricey private lawyers. One highly effective Philadelphia Police narcotics squad was suddenly shut down and pulled off the streets in 1997. They were told death threats had been made against them. Only later did they learn the FBI was investigating them because lawyers for Dominican drug dealers were complaining the squad was making unconstitutional searches. After three years, the FBI had nothing to show for their trouble. But the narcotics squad, which had been arresting an average of 30 dealers a week, was dismantled. Some have filed formal grievances against the police department for unfairly reassigning them to desk jobs. Two other cases in New York City follow a similar pattern in which successful teams of narcotics agents have been pulled from duty after drug lawyers made allegations of misconduct that inevitably proved groundless. Could it be that the attorneys for Dominican drug traffickers have hit upon a reliable method of undermining the entire justice system by simply driving a wedge of suspicion between the cops and the prosecutors (two cultures which are prone to mutual mistrust in even the best of circumstances)? Way back in April 1996, that's exactly what BNI supervisor Mike Lutz thought had happened to McLaughlin, McKeefery, Micewski and Eggles. That eloquent memorandum defending the men who would soon become the Bastard Squad contained this very well-reasoned paragraph: "Is it not our agency alone that is making a consistent pattern of arrests, confiscating large amounts of drugs, money, cars and guns in these areas? How best to defeat the efforts of the Law Enforcement Agency that is wreaking havoc against this organized drug ring[?] Put the spotlight on them. Put them in retreat. Initiate an investigation. Make false and unfounded allegations. It will stop them in their tracks. And it did. "The scheme worked, [the Dominican drug traffickers and their lawyers] paralyzed an entire Law Enforcement Agency and at the same time ruined [its] credibility. How in God's name could their broad brush associate us. with the 39th District scandal? They did." --------------end forwarded article------------------ The only policy that will enable this corruption and skullduggery to be resolved is by a "Truth Commission Amnesty" program analogous to what happened in South Africa after the end of apartheid where instead of prosecuting as war criminals the perpetrators of apartheid genocidal policies, those who accepted corrected ethic, renouced their previous actions, and agreed to work together for the good of the nation -- these people were pardoned and were able to apply their positions of power and influence towards creating a better nation in the future. In America, not only should the nonviolent victims of the drug war now imprisoned be pardoned, but also the murderous corrupt perpetrators of the bogus drug war must also be given the chance to change the errors of their ways and acknowledge the truth of their misdeeds and reapply their talents and skills to solving today's global social and environmental problems before it is too late to save all life on Earth from otherwise impending destruction not only from accelerated climate change and the dangers of nuclear conflagration but from the increasing ozone layer depletion that 1988 Project Earth climate modeling predictions deemed on-target as of 1997 say will destroy all the oceanic phytoplankton (over half of Earth's oxygen supply) by solar irradiation by the year 2008. http://www.projectearth.com To solve this emergency we must quickly move away from fossil fuel power towards the suppressed and available new-energy ("free-energy") technologies such as cold fusion, LENR, ZPE, rotating magnetic systems, oscillating magnetic systems, etc etc, that can provide power without fuel by mechanisms demonstrated but yet to be fully understood due to corporate media and government scientific suppression. We need a New Manhattan Project, but an open public one, to quickly implement this new energy economy as per Science and Technology in Society and Public Policy list posts at url below. Very important we also need to revive on a global emergency scale level the USDA 1941-45 Hemp for Victory program to grow this most useful and bioefficient plant everywhere possible on Earth as soon as possible for its economic value and its superior bioefficiency per acre for biofuels applications to replace fossil fuels, to save the forests and heal the atmosphere reducing carbon dioxide and reoxygenating it to enable the ozone layer made from atmospheric oxygen to be replenished in time. This is an essential Global Emergency Alert Response. David Crockett Williams, C.L.U. Tehachapi, CA 661-822-3309 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chartered Life Underwriter Activist, Scientist, Promoter Global Peace Walk 2000 http://www.globalpeacenow.org Updates-Voicemail 415-267-1877 General Agency Services http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/genagency.html The Legal Revolution -- Justice for All LEGAL RESOURCE CENTER -- Free legal content: FAQ, audio guides, legal forms, discussion boards; Optional low-cost national legal protection http://www.prepaidlegal.com/go/dcwilliams Home-based income: Business plan also minimizes wage income taxes using a Tax Relief System http://www.thetaxpeople.net Capital Hills New-Energy Research Center, Tehachapi CA http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/chrc.html Science & Technology in Society & Public Policy http://www.egroups.com/group/dcwilliams The Vision of Paradise on Earth http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/vision.html Global Emergency Alert Response http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000 --------------------------------------------------------------------<e|- <FONT COLOR="#000099">Free Conference Calling with Firetalk! 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