Listserve and The Unicorn - Part Six

Was Ira naive to all of these happenings?  Certainly, he was not as well verse
publicly, but there might have been deeper connections that he wanted to avoid for
sheer fear.  Just speculating on this but will certainly be a part of this blog for
sheer interesting factor.

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 Sciolstuff 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."

Breaking: Einhorn Gives Interview After 8 Years of Media Silence

It has been a long time since we heard about the goings on in life of The Unicorn. Ronnie Polaneczky, Philadelphia Daily News Columnist, was tracked down by the 70 year-old and was interviewed for a newspaper piece. Guess what, we also get to see him, sorta, in a 2009 headshot.

We'll hit the comment thread in a little while, lets give it some time to get shaking.

In the meanwhile, I just had a look at this new article. By the lack of quotes it seems to be probable that Ira took Ronnie to task -- and without the aid of any modern day recording devices -- as she was left jotting down a few quotes that she feels equal her hatred for the man. And her words are now reaching out to Philadelphia as if the hatercade has arrived and the information is good because Ira sits rotting! Wow, good luck with that, Mrs. Polaneczky. Somehow, she managed to write the same article we read four hundred and fifty time 10 years ago. A few background details, and two or three updates, personal interjection annnnndddd CUT. That's a take. Hard to argue that he deserves more, but her tone was no different than the courtroom. At least we have come to expect snark from a journalist.

But there is more. A bonus that does include Ira's point and it all starts to make sense now. One article for Ira, and one from the Philadelphia angle. Whew, I feel all grown up now because I can figure such things out on my own! Ronnie wasn't about to let Ira's article be left unprinted, a key bone she throws, and the result is interesting.

From Ira,

SINCE MY ABRUPT return to the Pennsylvania Prison System in 2001, I have had numerous conversations with shocked former citizens who have repeated the same words to me, in different form, again and again: "I never dreamed that people caught up in the judicial system could be treated so unfairly, with such lack of concern for their rights.

Read the rest -
Here
and
Here

Listserve and The Unicorn - Part Five

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.) 

Hippie icon fights murder charge by invoking the stars

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the author of this article, printed in 2002, and then reprinted on Buzzle. I've probably read this one 4 or 5 times over the years so I thought I'd include it here on the All Ira page. The last line is indicative of the general feeling for Ira. It is also one of the articles that has mention of Peter Gabriel. In fact there is even some promise here that Gabriel was still in the mix and could have attended the courtroom proceedings. Alas, he played his show in Philly that week, and turned the other cheek. We can make some assumptions as to why -- maybe he had given Ira some coin to sock away for one of those rainy nights while on the run, or maybe The Unicorn self-worthed Peter in some conversations he didn't want to hear. In any case, there is not more than a peep from Peter about his relationship with Ira Einhorn so mark that as yet another sad ending.

Author not credited

In the Sixties and Seventies, when flower power raged, Ira Einhorn liked to describe himself as a 'planetary enzyme'. It was a suitable term for the former guru who was not even present for his first murder conviction nearly a decade ago.

Tomorrow, the long odyssey of Ira Einhorn nears its conclusion: the infamous New Age fugitive goes on trial again for the 1977 murder of his lover, a pretty Texas heiress named Helen 'Holly' Maddux. This time Einhorn will be present in the flesh and apparently in spirit in a Philadelphia courtroom.

'He's remarkably well, upbeat and looking forward to it,' says his defence counsel William Cannon. So well, in fact, that 62-year-old Einhorn has invited some old friends from his hippie seer heyday to speak to his good character, among them singer Peter Gabriel, actress Ellen Burstyn and Edward Bacon, father of actor Kevin Bacon.

Such is the bizarre world of Ira Einhorn, a man who once hung out with beat heroes and hippie superstars such as Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, organised 'be-in' events, ran for mayor of Philadelphia on a ticket of free love and expanded consciousness, and considered himself too mythic to wash; a man who preferred to be known as 'The Unicorn' because that was the creature that would lead us into the Age of Aquarius.

The trial is unlikely to involve too much free-thinking or proselytising of the benefits of group sex. Einhorn, who was arrested in France in 1997 after a 16-year manhunt and extradited by the French on condition that he would be retried, is facing a charge of murder in the first degree which carries a sentence of life without parole.

Prosecutors say it is an open-and-shut case and do not believe any stars will turn up to revisit their acquaintance with Einhorn or wish to be associated with a man who has already been found guilty once of bludgeoning Maddux to death and stashing her body in a steamer-trunk yards from where he slept in the apartment they had shared.

Eighteen months after the murder, Maddux's mummified corpse was discovered after neighbours had complained of the stench from fluids dripping down the wall. When police made their grim discovery, Einhorn said simply: 'You found what you found.'

However, the long road to justice was only beginning. Einhorn said Maddux had vanished one night after saying she was going to the grocery shop. But even after his arrest, he managed to get respected, if deluded, members of Philadelphia society to speak on his behalf.

He was granted bail for a small sum put up by Barbara Bronfman, former wife of Seagram distilling heir Charles Bronfman. Shortly before his trial was set to begin in 1981, Einhorn disappeared. 'The evidence was so insurmountable, he had no choice but to take off,' says Michael Chitwood, the lead detective in the case. 'There was no way this guy was going to stand trial.'

Einhorn's flight took him first to Ireland where he lived under the name Ben Moore. Philadelphia investigators believe he was supported by wealthy benefactors taken in by his strange charm and ideas of paranormal psychology and mind control during his flight. 'Even if you're a sack of shit who's a planetary enzyme, you've got to eat something,' said one.

One theory has Einhorn seeking support from British rock star Peter Gabriel, a founder of Genesis. But although Gabriel admits meeting Einhorn in the Seventies, and Richard DiBenedetto, who led the manhunt for the Philadelphia district attorney's office, says the pair met in London within the past decade, there is no evidence that Gabriel - who did not apparently know Einhorn was an accused murderer - supplied him with any financial assistance.

Einhorn's lawyer, Richard Cannon, says Einhorn visited Gabriel at the singer's Wiltshire millhouse on several occasions. 'He [Einhorn] thinks Mr Gabriel's testimony could be very helpful,' he says. (Ironically, Gabriel is scheduled to play in Philadelphia on 18 November - in time, perhaps, for a visit to the court. A spokesman for Gabriel said he had not decided one way or the other.)

Einhorn then met up with Anika Flodin, daughter of well-to-do parents in Stockholm. Using the appropriated identity of Eugene Mallon, he moved with her to the secluded village of Champagne-Mouton near Bordeaux. The poet-prophet passed himself off as a writer of mysteries and an anti-nuclear campaigner, and attracted a following of impressionable French hippies who dubbed him Vieux Baba Cool - Old Cool Daddy.

'We were not surprised that even before the murder he was a guru,' recalled a neighbour of Einhorn during his his French exodus. 'He talked about things uncommon, but not extraterrestrial.'

In 1997, the authorities caught up with him after tracing a driver's licence Flodin had applied for in Sweden. But after his arrest, the French authorities refused to repatriate him unless he was granted a new trial - a condition met by a change in the state constitution. When Einhorn came home to face trial two years ago, he seemed to have lost none of the self-importance and self-promotion skills that had served him so well in attracting benefactors. He likened his stay in France to the apartheid-era imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and his situation to that of some 4,000 black men on death row in the US.

Prosecutors say their case against Einhorn is water-tight. 'We have a smoking gun already: we have the victim's body in a chest in his closet,' says assistant district attorney Joel Rosen.

The defence plans to introduce contradictory forensic tests from 1979 that could raise doubt in the minds of jurors and testimony from witnesses who say they saw Maddux alive after the time prosecutors contend she was bludgeoned to death. They also say they have an FBI report that says that - besides her corpse - no evidence of decomposition was found in the trunk or on the floorboards.

'If her body did not decompose in the trunk that upsets the case,' says Cannon. Dr Herbert Fillinger, a forensics expert, is expected to testify that Maddux could have been dead for as little as two months when her body was discovered.

Whatever turns the case may take over its projected six-week duration, the trial will shed light on an era of hippie dreams. How were wealthy and impressionable counter-culture dreamers of Philadelphia, Ireland and France taken in by a man who has been found guilty of beating his girlfriend to death?

One former acolyte, George Keegan, recalls meeting Einhorn before he jumped bail. 'We were walking down the street together. People who once would come up and hug Ira crossed the street and averted their eyes... He looked at me, sad, and said, "I'm not going to be able to be Ira Einhorn now". And I realised he was a selfish, arrogant bastard.'

© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 9/29/2002

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.

Ira Went Beyond the Pale

What do you think when you hear about news of psychic phenomenon? By now it almost seems to be an afterthought because everybody knows there is, at some level or another, a degree to which all people have some psychic abilities. In today's internetter world - psychic ability is commonplace. This may be a result of the actions we are able to take when an event happens. For example, say you predict something that seems insignificant at face value - such as predicting if your wife picked up a that box of mushrooms at the market without having the conversation. She hadn't picked up mushrooms for six months, but you were itching to make a dinner with shrooms and you predicted, in your mind, that she would come home with the portabellos. You called it. You are psychic. Something in your mind said she'd get them and you didn't go to a market a get them because you had "that feeling." In fact, last week you did the same thing when you predicted the actions someone you don't know. It happened and you had a confidence it would happen yet you're not sure what triggered that confidence. OK. So this happens all the time, and if you were never consciously aware of these things happening, you suddenly find yourself wondering how you did that, and you go looking for answers. Next thing you do is submit to a websearch and find there are 2,000,000 links to stories, studies, articles, books and countless peer reviews from all kinds of people around the world. Your notion is confirmed, sort of. There is yet to be that definitive scientific study that confirms or denies that possibility that what is happening is psychic phenomenon. Scientists have a way of confirming such reports until well beyond that "duhh" moment. Such studies carrying a social impact like this gets snuffed out by scientists less likely to make waves are in most cases at the mercy of grant money and other triggers or door stops as it were.

A new study might show that psychic phenomenon is not just a sci-fi joke or trick of mind. So we look back at all the seers who tried to make certain claims and got laughed at, particularly if this issue was part of a court system defense plan. Such was the case with Einhorn. From Levy's book (p. 174), it was Ira's negotiations with the Hunt manufacturing company that found its way to draw negative reactions (later this manifested during the court system process). The Unicorn was paid $10 grand for a study on trending in the industry. Then "The Unicorn did go somewhat beyond the pale, though, in recommending that this machine-tool manufacturer establish venture capital projects to invest in "psychic technologies.""

Nearly 40 years later, psychic studies are going stronger than ever. Scientists have come to somehow make psychic practices not mere hallucinations or other such non-sense as reports continue to be included in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, but they have made it kind of a hum-hum news event. It's everywhere. It's happening right now. Maybe you don't see it, maybe you don't take such mental risks, but there is psychic sideshows happening world-wide -- go look it up on the web.

Listserve and The Unicorn - Part Three

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."