Pubdate: 23 Dec 2000
Source: High Times (US)
Copyright: 2001 Trans-High Corporation
Contact:  235 Park Ave. S., 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003
Website: http://www.hightimes.com/
Author: Preston Peet, Special to HighWitness News
Note: We are posting this web only item as an exception to policy do to 
reader interest.
Referenced: DEA Defends Methods 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1673/a09.html

DEA AGENT CHILLS CA POT INITIATIVE

'I'm going to call them as I see them, and this guy is a skunk. You can 
quote me on that. He shouldn't be out there. I would think that the DEA 
would find this guy an embarrassment. Because I've been in law enforcement, 
and the guy embarrassed me.' --Investigator for California Attorney General 
Bill Lockyer

"Clinton smoked it!" bragged the Measure G commercials that aired all last 
fall over K-WINE Radio, 94.5 FM in Ukiah, CA: "So did Bush and Gore!"

Unlike closet potheads George Bush or Al Gore, though, Measure G actually 
won the election right there on voting day, November 7, 2000, as a whopping 
majority of Mendocino County voters pulled the lever to legalize marijuana 
there. Or at least to oblige Mendo's sheriff and prosecutors to make pot 
busts their lowest possible enforcement priority, while the county's Board 
of Supervisors are to lobby state and federal governments for "the 
immediate decriminalization of marijuana."

A Hard Line On Pot Enforcement

And it gets better yet, thanks to the California Green Party which pushed 
and largely wrote Measure G. According to a grave impartial analysis of 
this new ordinance by Mendo county counsel Peter Klein, the new law 
"prevents the Board of Supervisors, the Sheriff, the District Attorney, the 
Auditor-Controller and the Treasurer-Tax Collector from spending or 
authorizing the expenditure of public funds or authorizing or approving any 
sort of payment should such expenditures be made for the investigation, 
arrest, or prosecution of any person, or the seizure of any property in any 
single case involving twenty-five [25] or fewer adult flowering female 
marijuana plants, or the equivalent in dried marijuana."

Six out of every ten voters in Mendocino pulled the lever for Measure G, 
due largely to those entertaining "Clinton smoked it!" spots on K-Wine. 
These spots were the creation of Green Party stalwart Dan Hamburg, Ukiah's 
former Congressional representative in Washington (before the Democrats 
disenchanted him.) Legalizing pot by county statute is a largely symbolic 
achievement, Hamburg acknowledges, since the federal government can easily 
intimidate local officials who try to enforce pot laws like Measure G and 
Proposition 215. The most salient concrete value of legislative activism 
like this, he indicates to HT, may be to incite the feds to overstep the 
bounds of legality themselves, in trying desperately to annul such new 
laws. And they've already done that in Mendo.

A Rogue DEA Agent, or a Rogue DEA?

The experience of Radio Station K-WINE in Ukiah, which underwent a tense 
spell of entirely illegal political intimidation out of the federal Drug 
Enforcement Administration while they were running those "Clinton Smoked 
It" spots during the election campaign, probably presages the sort of nasty 
response the feds are already working up for Measure G's enactment next 
month, Dan Hamburg suspects. "What their next move will be is anybody's 
guess," he tells HT, "but I think we catch a whiff of it in seeing this 
character Mark Nelson appear."

It was a rather notorious California-based DEA field agent named Mark 
Nelson [see below] who contacted K-WINE to procure transcripts of those 
Measure G commercials, as reported in the Santa Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT in 
November. Asked why the federal DEA was involving itself with intimidation 
of free political speech in a local election, their San Francisco 
public-information officer, Joceyln Barnes, smoothly responded, 
"Headquarters wanted actual transcripts of the radio ads. That's all I can 
say. It was done at their request." Then she added: "It was just part of a 
routine gathering of information about marijuana ballot-related issues 
across the US."

That was the DEA's story to the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, and they were sticking to 
it until HIGH TIMES started calling with followup questions: like, does 
this mean the DEA now opens a criminal investigative case on every single 
person involved in political efforts to change the marijuana laws? They 
stuck to their initial story very effectively for a while, by neglecting to 
return calls to HT from their San Francisco office for weeks. But then 
after some calls to DEA headquarters in Virginia--the very "headquarters" 
cited by officer Barnes when she spoke to the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, as requesting 
the K- WINE commercial transcripts created by Dan Hamburg--Jocelyn Barnes 
finally started talking on the phone directly to this HT correspondent.

So then, was DEA agent Mark Nelson in fact directed by DEA "headquarters" 
to demand those transcripts from K-WINE? "No, he was not under orders to do 
that," Barnes replied. Bingo!

The DEA Lied? Stop The Presses!

The next HT question to Barnes was why DEA Agent Nelson, if he was 
routinely collecting information about marijuana initiatives around the 
nation in general, chose to contact a privately owned and operated local 
radio station for this information which he could and should have gotten 
from the county Election Supervisor's office. "He didn't want information 
ABOUT the actual measure itself," Barnes somehow found herself saying out 
loud. "He just wanted information about that particular ad. That's all he 
wanted, and that's where he heard it, on the radio, so he called to inquire 
about obtaining it."

"Yes," she next told HT flatly, when asked again if Nelson was working on 
his own initiative, not headquarters', in making this demand for the K-WINE 
transcripts. Then she quickly added that she believed the transcripts had 
been "turned in to the supervisors, and I think they rest with the 
supervisors here, the management." If there was really a supervisor in 
charge of them, though, she wasn't giving any names.

The K-Wine transcripts, Barnes then reassured HT, are "not going to be used 
for anything. If anything they would just be collected and reviewed and 
forwarded to headquarters."

That's DEA national headquarters in Arlington, VA? "Just for informational 
purposes," Barnes was bleating now, "just so they'll know what is going on 
in the field."

So if this demand by Agent Nelson for those transcripts wasn't part of any 
formal DEA investigation of marijuana-related political initiatives in the 
2000 elections, then was it a for particular case he was involved in? "No, 
this had nothing to do with a particular case. He heard the advertisement, 
and I guess he thought it was important."

DEA to HIGH TIMES: Don't Believe All You Read

So, since San Francisco DEA public-information officer Barnes was telling 
HT in December an entirely different story from what she'd told the Santa 
Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT in November, reporter Mark Geniella there was asked 
about the discrepancies. All he knew was what she'd told him: Agent Nelson 
"was just doing what headquarters had requested. They wanted actual 
transcripts of the ads," Geniella confirmed. "I certainly stand by the 
accuracy of my account. This raises the question of what did the DEA want 
with a political ad? Why don't they get the ballot measure?"

Contacted herself, then, about these discrepancies, Joceyln Barnes 
proceeded to speak to the accuracy of the Santa Rosa PRESS- DEMOCRAT. "That 
article has lots of errors in it," she told HT, "so please don't refer to 
it. And that was the problem [originally] with returning your call." It was 
all the fault of the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, that is--even the weasly way HT had to 
pull rank on Barnes to get her to talk to HT in the first place!

When the HT reporter showed every sign of swallowing and being satisfied 
with this explanation, DEA officer Barnes gradually proceeded to speak more 
easily. Asked why DEA field officers would be demanding transcripts of 
political ads for marijuana initiatives, to feed up the chain to their 
superiors somewhere, she had a great explanation now, once she got 
comfortable talking: "As an agency it is important for us to be aware about 
what's going on about the different drug reforms around the country, and 
headquarters may not get that information by not being in that particular 
area where the different reforms are being passed or initiated. So it's 
within the realm of what we do--intelligence, enforcement--it's just part 
of what we do in just keeping our agency informed so that we'll be better 
informed. We don't participate in the political process."

Fornication And Forgery As Investigative Tools

Well, if you're working at a little local radio station in the California 
outback, and a DEA agent starts demanding your marijuana-initiative 
commercial transcripts during election season, you might not be irrational 
to have some qualms about running ads like that in the future. Especially 
if your station's in Northern California, where the spicy and entirely 
supra-constitutional adventures of Drug Enforcement Administration Special 
Agent Mark Nelson have been fodder for news broadcasts for years now. 
Nelson's name was hardly unknown to people at K-WINE Radio in Ukiah, and 
the way he treats people who fall under his investigative purview has 
become legendary in those parts.

Stories about the DEA's Mark Nelson began percolating around Northern 
California during the 1999 trial of John Dalton, a Mendocino mechanic 
busted in 1996 after a five-year investigation by the DEA. Dalton was duly 
convicted of mass pot cultivation in September of '99, largely thanks to 
the suppression by federal judge Susan Ilston of all references to the 
phenomenal activities undertaken by DEA case agent Mark Nelson in the 
course of "investigating" Dalton. San Francisco defense attorneys Tony 
Serra and Shari Greenberger were unable, therefore, to show the jury how 
Nelson had recruited Dalton's wife Victoria as a snitch, and gotten her to 
wear a wire in bed with the guy while they made pillow talk about 
pot-growing. Since the judge prohibited the jury from hearing a word about 
this, Dalton wound up getting 27 years in jail.

A DEA Romance: Blindfolds, Handcuffs, Target Practice

Poor Dalton wasn't the only figure in the case getting screwed by the 
amiable Victoria, either. There was also a 1997 reprimand against Agent 
Dalton, levied out of DEA headquarters for developing an "inappropriate 
relationship with an informant"--earning Nelson a month's unpaid 
suspension--evidently initiated by the informant herself: Mrs. Victoria 
Dalton, going now by her maiden name, Horstman.

This spicy matter was actually called to Judge Illston's attention by the 
prosecutor in the Dalton case, during an evidentiary hearing out of the 
jury's presence, so's it couldn't be sprung on her by surprise by the 
defense. The judge was invited by the feds themselves to examine all 
aspects of allegations of Nelson's patterns of unlawful behavior. Among 
many other extraordinary things, the Assistant US Attorney prosecuting 
Dalton piously stipulated that in September of 1997, Agent Nelson had 
falsified the date on Victoria's fingerprint informant-identity card, 
endeavoring to hide from his superiors an episode in which he'd taken her, 
blindfolded, to a government safe-house, where some unspecified consensual 
activity of a slap-and-tickle nature transpired. (The lucky Victoria was 
ultimately paid $4,800 by the DEA for her exuberant undercover work in the 
case.)

The judge herself was appalled for the record, when she heard about the 
fingerprint-card forgery. "You're telling me your witness committed 
perjury," Judge Illston told the prosecutor. "I'm very concerned about 
this." And then she learned from a friend of Victoria's how Agent Nelson, 
betraying tokens of mounting passion for his comely snitch, began making 
remarks about her husband like, "I will do anything, and I mean anything, 
to get him and send him to prison for the rest of his life!" But since the 
judge was not concerned enough to permit any of this soap-opera turbulence 
to come to the attention of the jury, they convicted the defendant on the 
evidence of DEA Special Agent Mark Nelson (himself married to another, even!)

Only Following Orders, Or Just Getting Laid?

Special Agent Nelson was so determined to put John Dalton away that he 
shamelessly bedazzled poor Victoria with an inflated idea of her place in 
the DEA hierarchy itself, from the looks of things. "We were able to show 
that she was assigned a number," recalls the lead investigator for Tony 
Serra's defense firm at the time, H.B. O'Keady. "She thought she was acting 
as an agent for the DEA, and she underwent firearms training. We claimed it 
was at the direction of the DEA, and the DEA claims they know nothing about 
it."

So the pious disavowal of Mark Nelson's supra-constitutional activities by 
his DEA superiors is nothing novel, as O'Keady--who is now an investigator 
for the office of California Attorney General Bill Lockyer--can illustrate. 
"This woman," he recalls, "had a known history of alcoholism, and Nelson 
plied her with alcohol." Which could certainly explain why DEA headquarters 
wasn't ready to back him up afterward, even if they did--as Nelson 
repeatedly claimed during his DEA internal-investigation hearing--pose 
absolutely no objection to his snitch-handling style at the time of the 
Dalton investigation.

John Wayne Gone All Slimy

Attorney General investigator O'Keady recalls Nelson vividly. "I was a 
police officer for many, many years. I've been an investigator for many 
years. I work for the Attorney General of California now," he says. "I've 
seen it in the police, when a guy gets that John Wayne thing, I Am Above 
The Law. Nelson has a lot of that in him."

Advised that the DEA still had Nelson working in the field for them as late 
as last November 7, O'Keady recalled his famous fingerprint-card forgery in 
the Dalton case: "He put one date on there, when in fact it was the date 
he'd had her up at the safe house, blindfolded. He didn't want anyone to 
know he'd had her up to the house, so he changed the date on that card. And 
they're using this guy as a spokesman to go around to the radio stations? 
That's ripe. That guy's so dirty that--you know what? I'd want to take a 
shower for three days if I shook hands with that guy. I don't know what 
Mark's assignment is now; it ought to be a cell in San Quentin."

Institutional Corruption, or What?

As it invariably happens with DEA falsehood-landslides like this, 
conspiracy theories abound, and some even endeavor to exculpate the DEA 
itself from any prime responsibility in the political intimidation of 
K-WINE Radio in Ukiah. One brainstorm theory posits a lone bureaucrat 
somewhere inside the notorious Intelligence division at the DEA, working on 
his or her own maverick impulse, directing Special Agent Nelson to go and 
terrorize this little Ukiah radio station--and selecting Nelson for the job 
specifically so that afterward, if he claimed he was only following orders 
from above, it could be written off as another falsehood from a DEA field 
agent already notorious for personal misconduct and prevarication. This 
scenario would at least soundproof the DEA as an institution from charges 
of criminally interfering with a free election inside the United States of 
America.

To sound this notion out, national DEA information officer Mike McManus in 
DC was contacted. The question put to McManus was whether San Francisco 
press officer Barnes told the Santa Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT one story in 
November, believing it to be true on the basis of information then 
available to her, and then told a different story in December to HT, on the 
basis of information subsequently handed down to her from McManus' exalted 
office. McManus replied masterfully, with questions only: "Just what is 
this story about? Nelson's background or his picking up transcripts?" 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake