Listserve and The Unicorn - Part Four

The following is an important article that MUST be read.  It is of particular
interest.  Much like how the Gary Condit story got pushed away (for totally
different reasons) this story has implications that have since been primarily
ignored as a result of the big happening that occurred a year later.

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/080300/cs.cover1.shtm

(and in case the link goes/went away... here's the text)

August 3-10, 2000  

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.

Four angry narcotics agents are suing to prove that Uncle Sam is the ultimate pusher
man.  by Noel Weyrich
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
BNI 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.