Pubdate: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 Source: Austin American-Statesman (TX) Copyright: 2001 Austin American-Statesman Contact: P. O. Box 670 Austin, Texas 78767 Fax: 512-445-3679 Website: http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/today/ Author: Jonathan Osborne, American-Statesman Staff REVIEW PLANNED FOR POLICE DRUG CASE The U.S. attorney's office will review a mid-1990s investigation of a drug smuggling network that linked several Austin police officers to drug activity, an agency official said Tuesday. Lead investigators have claimed that the Austin Police Department cut the inquiry short by transferring officers to other duties. In addition, three officers filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the City of Austin claiming they were transferred to halt the investigation into police misconduct. The review of documents will be done to determine whether the investigation - -- code-named Mala Sangre (Bad Blood) -- was properly handled, the official said. Also Tuesday, the head of the 1,100-member police union said the department must take seriously a Mala Sangre report in which informants said several Austin police officers had conspired with drug smugglers and used cocaine on the job. "No officer down here wants to work with a cloud of suspicion hanging over the department," said Detective Mike Sheffield, president of the Austin Police Association. "These are very serious allegations. It is hoped that our department would investigate allegations of this nature fully and completely. All officers should be held to the same standard of conduct." The Police Department has denied that officers were reassigned to shut down Mala Sangre, an effort by a task force that included the U.S. attorney's office and the Internal Revenue Service. Austin police provided support staff and officers for surveillance and other investigative tasks. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Marshall, who supervised Mala Sangre, testified in a February 2000 deposition that the Police Department began pulling officers from the task force about the time some officers were implicated in wrongdoing. Marshall has refused to comment about the case. Mala Sangre's lead investigators -- IRS agent Wayne Young and Austin officer Stan Farris -- wrote a "summary of allegations" and a chronology listing possible police misconduct that couldn't be fully investigated without Police Department support, according to a Monday report bythe Austin American-Statesman. Assistant Police Chief Rick Coy said Tuesday that the Police Department did not pull officers from the task force without replacing them and that Farris and Young, not the department, stopped the investigation. "We at no time -- not in March (1997), not in July (1997) -- pulled people," Coy said. "Stan Farris and IRS stopped the investigation before we ever did that. We were replacing people, and IRS did not want us to replace Stan Farris with another officer. We had no intentions of stopping this investigation." Coy produced a July 22, 1997, memo from Farris to police Lt. Don Bredl in which Farris writes that the Austin investigation of officers will be dropped because "placing a new officer (APD) into coordinating the investigation would not be practical or effective as far as successfully completing the investigation." Farris said he wrote the memo to establish on the record that transferring him off the investigation effectively killed it. "The memo says that because the Austin Police Department was transferring me, the resources were being withdrawn, the investigation . . . was being closed," he said. Farris, one of the plaintiffs in the whistle-blower lawsuit, spoke publicly about the case for the first time Tuesday. He said he and other investigators had information that two officers were aiding Austin-based drug dealer Roger Lopez, who was convicted of drug trafficking in 1998 and sentenced to seven years in prison. But, Farris said, a supervisor ordered him to stop investigating in June 1997, a month before he was transferred from the narcotics division, where he had served for 10 1/2 years. "There was enough evidence and information on these two officers for the investigation to continue," Farris said. "Obviously, we didn't have enough to indict. We needed, for the federal conspiracy statute, more of an affirmative link to Roger Lopez or any of the other people doing the smuggling. We were not afforded that opportunity." Coy said Farris was never ordered to stop investigating. The assistant chief also said it was difficult to believe that transferring a handful of officers could shut down a federal investigation. "With Mark Marshall and all of these resources, one or two APD cops kept this entire investigation from being successful," Coy said. "I find that very hard to believe." Robert Pitman, the Austin bureau chief of the U.S. attorney's office, said his office works closely with the Austin Police Department and that many of the cases his office prosecutes result from officers' hard work. "It's important to stress that we have full confidence in the Austin Police Department," Pitman said. Mayor Kirk Watson said he was comfortable with how the department handled the report and with the leadership of Police Chief Stan Knee, who arrived on the job after Mala Sangre had wound down. "Any time allegations are made of that nature, it creates concern, and you want people to get to the bottom of it," Watson said. "I trust that this chief who inherited this has . . . taken a thorough approach." - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D