Pubdate: Tue, 29 May 2001
Source: San Antonio Express-News (TX)
Copyright: 2001 San Antonio Express-News
Contact:  http://www.mysanantonio.com/expressnews/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/384
Author: Maro Robbins, Express-News Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/corrupt.htm (Corruption)

FBI BAITED HOOKS TO LURE COPS

The FBI baited its lures with baking soda in Cleveland and mixed real 
cocaine with powder in Savannah, Ga., and New Orleans.

The cops never knew the difference and, while ingredients varied, the 
results were the same: local law-enforcement officers led away in handcuffs.

Put to the test most recently in San Antonio, the recipe worked yet again, 
federal authorities allege.

This time, agents resorted to flour, then crumbly chunks of drywall, to 
mimic cocaine bricks and, on March 22, they arrested 10 officers.

The accusations potentially add fresh members to a small but growing group 
of law officers snared by undercover FBI stings. Besides Cleveland, 
Savannah and New Orleans, the crooked cop club has chapters in cities such 
as Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington and Jackson, Miss.

In each locale, FBI agents, sometimes working with local internal affairs 
units, said they first received allegations of police misconduct.

Then, going undercover, they posed as drug dealers and worked with 
informants to give local officers opportunities to make fast money 
protecting narcotics shipments or stealing from drug dealers.

The unsuspecting -- if not always innocent -- officers earned first a few 
hundred or thousand dollars, then a heaping dose of disgrace.

"I'm surprised officers do it anymore," said Don Burkhalter, a Mississippi 
federal prosecutor handling cases against three Jackson officers. "Because 
they (the stings) are all variations on the same theme."

So, too, were many of the defenses offered from city to city. Some officers 
claimed entrapment. Some said they didn't know what they were guarding.

But, for all the similarities, officials say no two cases were identical.

Some prosecutors were armed with clear and damning secretly recorded tapes; 
others worked with grainy images and jumbled sounds. As in other cities, 
secret recordings appear a crucial part of the San Antonio case.

One of the few publicly revealed snippets shows a man identified by 
authorities as Sgt. Conrad Fragozo Jr. perusing headlines of USA Today 
moments before foil-wrapped bundles are stacked and counted on a table in a 
motel room.

Some investigations had dramatic flair, as in Cleveland, where undercover 
FBI agents posed as mobsters and staged an elaborate ceremony inducting one 
of their targets, a jail guard, into the Mafia.

At least one sting ended with bloodshed. The Louisiana operation stopped 
after one of its targets, a New Orleans officer, used a tapped phone to 
further a murder plot.

Among the sharpest contrasts between cities -- and even co-defendants -- 
were the consequences. Punishments ranged, like the cases themselves, all 
over the map.

At one extreme, a New Orleans officer was sentenced to death while, at the 
other end of the spectrum, a jury set free a Savannah officer. Most, as is 
typical of criminal cases, ended with plea bargains.

Thus far, one of the San Antonio officers has followed suit. Patrolman 
Lawrence Bustos on May 11 took a plea deal that capped his prison time at 
10 years, while enabling him to hope for far less.

Lawyers for the rest are silent about making any deals or talking about 
going to trial.

'A sting is a sting'

Between 1996 and last year, the FBI took a leading or supporting role in 
508 convictions related to law enforcement corruption, including civilians 
who offered bribes or otherwise were accomplices.

The numbers, however, do not distinguish which cases resulted from 
undercover sting operations. To longtime law officers and prosecutors, 
there is little extraordinary about stings. It is a basic tool that can be 
adapted to investigate drug traffickers, Internet child predators and 
corrupt public servants alike.

"A sting is a sting, whether (you're) doing cops, politicians -- whatever," 
said Al Winters, a Louisiana prosecutor for more than 27 years.

Yet, among stings, the New Orleans case stands out, partly because it ended 
with a death. In addition, as Winters describes it, the investigation also 
had an unusual beginning.

It started with a drug dealer seeking justice. The dealer had no pending 
charges, but came to federal authorities in late 1993 because he was "sick 
of being ripped off by police officers," Winters said.

The dealer named one officer in particular and the investigation began there.

First, the informant recorded Officer Sammie L. Williams Jr. offering him 
protection from police, as well as other dealers.

Before long, the dealer arranged to introduce both Williams and his friend, 
Officer Len E. Davis, to his purported supplier, in reality an undercover 
agent.

At the meeting, everyone -- informant, undercover agent and both officers 
- -- stripped to their underwear to show no one was wearing a wire.

No one was. However, the meeting, all 1 hour and 8 minutes, was captured by 
a hidden camera.

Before long, the FBI had rented a warehouse, then rigged it with cameras. 
Agents posing as drug couriers came and went while Williams, Davis and 
officers they recruited stood guard outside. After awhile, the officers sat 
in a van, also provided -- and bugged -- by agents.

The case ended abruptly after Davis ordered the murder of a woman who had 
filed a brutality complaint against him. Agents eavesdropping on a tapped 
phone line heard -- but did not understand until it was too late -- some 
cryptic comments about the plot.

By then, at least nine police officers were entangled in the sting that 
came to be called "Operation Shattered Shield."

After separate trials, Davis got life in prison, plus five years for the 
drug conspiracy, and a death sentence for the murder.

Williams pleaded guilty to all charges but, after testifying against 
officers in three trials, was rewarded with a prison sentence of two years 
and four months, then was ushered into the federal witness protection program.

Another officer, Larry Smith Jr., the first to plead and offer his 
cooperation, got three years for a crime that, under federal guidelines, 
called for potentially 20 years behind bars.

Two others took their chances in trials.

Both got more than 20 years behind bars, the New Orleans Times-Picayune 
reported.

Most pleaded guilty. Several received prison sentences of about seven years 
after Winters dismissed the initial drug counts and substituted relatively 
minor charges.

Winters said the penalties reflected the case's weaknesses -- low-quality 
recordings -- as well as his notion of fairness.

"My theory of prosecuting is: Everyone can't get 100 years," he said.

And In The Midwest

The Cleveland case came looking for authorities when a sheriff's jailer 
approached an undercover agent working in a strip club.

Michael Joye told the agent, who was posing as a mobster for an organized 
crime investigation, that he and his law-enforcement pals could protect 
illicit Mafia shipments, according to the lawyer who prosecuted the case, 
James R. Wooley.

The offer intrigued the government.

"If the guy can't produce the friends, it's over," Wooley said of the 
initial investigation. "But in our case he produced eight of them."

And they introduced still others until the conspiracy involved 43 
correctional and police officers from various local departments.

The sting started with a truckload of illegal slot machines and quickly 
switched to 25-kilogram shipments of baking soda purported to be cocaine.

But FBI agents grew wary of Joye's violent streak. To make sure nothing 
like the New Orleans murder occurred, agents resolved to tame Joye. Their 
method was as creative as it was controversial.

They staged an elaborate ceremony, anointing Joye with oil and hot wax and 
inducting him into the Mafia, according to the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer. 
They told him as a member, he had to behave. If not, they'd kill him.

The threat worked, but it also left the government vulnerable to complaints 
that agents coerced Joye into continuing the conspiracy. For that reason, 
prosecutors did not charge any of Joye's crimes after the ceremony.

Regardless, the case was labeled unfair by protesters. Officers' relatives 
and supporters picketed and passed out fliers outside the courthouse. They 
cast the investigation as a waste of crime-fighting resources.

But in the end, the tapes were deemed strong, defense lawyers said. 
Everyone pleaded guilty.

Joye got what legal experts consider a generous deal for someone who 
admitted helping protect more than 250 kilograms of cocaine, plus some 
small crack sales on the side. He is serving nine years in prison.

Lesser participants got two to three years, even those whose sentences 
would otherwise have been double under federal guidelines because their 
crimes involved considerable amounts of cocaine.

"We felt it was sort of fundamentally unfair to tag them with all this 
(drug) quantity when the government chose the quantity," said Wooley, now 
in private practice.

Those would be magic words to local defense lawyers if they spilled from 
the mouth of a San Antonio prosecutor.

Together, six of the 10 locally accused officers are alleged to have 
collectively moved 350 kilograms of what they believed was cocaine. Largely 
as a result, they face sentences ranging from 15 years to life in prison, 
if convicted.

Just Say No

Local defense lawyers argue that drug punishments don't fit a corruption 
sting, even one disguised as a drug conspiracy.

There were no drugs, they say. There were only harmless bundles of flour, 
crushed drywall and, in some instances, rubber bricks wrapped in brown paper.

That looms as a key question for sentencing, should more officers plead 
guilty or be convicted. But, first, another question has to be settled: Who 
will go to trial?

Some defense lawyers are talking about preparing entrapment defenses, 
similar to those considered but rarely used successfully against the FBI 
stings in Ohio and Louisiana.

"It's almost impossible for an entrapment defense to work when at some 
point, they (the target) didn't engage in some way of saying, 'No,'" said 
Ronald Goldstock, a law professor who has taught seminars on public 
corruption at New York University and Cornell University.

In San Antonio, the publicly released video sequences suggest the 
undercover agent anticipated the defense and subtly offered some targets 
chances to back out.

He seemed to insert the opportunities almost casually into conversations 
about transporting carloads of cocaine.

"But are you comfortable with it?" he inquired of one. "Did I treat you 
fair?" he asked a second. "Still feel comfortable?" he said to a third.

In those moments at least, they seemed more intent on the bait than on 
turning back.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager