Pubdate: Thu,10 Aug 2000
Source: City Paper (PA)
Copyright: 2000 CP Communications, Inc.
Contact:  123 Chestnut Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19106
Fax: (215) 875-1829
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Website: http://www.citypaper.net/
Author: Noel Weyrich
Section: Cover story

(Part 1 is at http://www.citypaper.net/articles/080300/cs.cover1.shtm)

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.

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.  

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.)  

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."  
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MAP posted-by: John Chase