Pubdate: Sun, 02 Mar 2014
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Jaxon Van Derbeken
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/corrupt.htm (Corruption - United States)

2 FELONS CRUCIAL IN POLICE CHARGES

FBI Built Case After Couple Said S.F. Narcotics Officers Enlisted 
Them to Sell Pot

It was an incredible claim at the time.

A recovering heroin addict - caught trying to sell more than a pound 
of marijuana in Golden Gate Park - accused San Francisco narcotics 
officers of enlisting her to sell drugs they had seized as evidence.

No one believed Daisy Bram's claims back in 2010. But they are now at 
the heart of a federal indictment of two current officers and a 
former officer on charges including drug conspiracy, theft from a 
government program and civil rights violations.

Bram's accusations are spelled out in the federal indictment, which 
was unsealed Thursday. The officers, who worked out of the 
department's Mission District Station on Valencia Street, stole 
marijuana they had seized as evidence and used two informants to sell 
it on the street, the indictment says. Bram and her husband say they 
were the informants.

Two of the three defendants - Sgt. Ian Furminger, 47, and former 
Officer Reynaldo Vargas, 45 - have pleaded not guilty. The third, 
Officer Edmond Robles, 46, deferred entering a plea last week while 
he arranged for legal representation.

An attorney who spoke on their behalf said Friday that the case was 
the product of dubious accusations from unreliable sources.

How it began

Bram, 33, remains as unlikely a witness as ever - she's serving a 
six-month sentence in Butte County Jail for felony marijuana 
cultivation and sales.

She said that after she began cooperating with federal agents who 
were investigating the San Francisco officers, local authorities 
raided her in-home marijuana growing operation in Butte County. Then 
she moved to Tehama County, and it happened again.

"I really feel totally used," Bram said in an interview from jail 
last week. "This is not the life I wanted."

Her involvement in the biggest San Francisco police scandal in more 
than a decade began in 2008, when she and her husband, Jayme Walsh, 
were both strung out on heroin and living in a single-room-occupancy 
hotel in the Mission.

Walsh, now 34, recalled how he and Bram walked into the Mission 
Station to complain that Bram was being menaced by a drug dealer. The 
narcotics unit investigator who interviewed the couple, Walsh said, was Vargas.

Walsh was a convicted drug felon, and he doubted police would take 
him seriously. But Bram wanted to pursue the matter.

What they didn't know was that Vargas had his own problematic past. 
He almost lost his job because of a 2002 incident in which he slashed 
the face of a cable-car fare evader with the man's broken crack pipe 
as he shouted, "Eat it," according to Police Department records.

Vargas saved his career only by admitting to the incident before the 
Police Commission and accepting a six-month suspension.

Acting as informants

The 2008 interview session ended with the couple agreeing to act as 
police informants, Walsh said. Vargas and other Mission Station 
officers would supply them with money and drugs in exchange for 
information about who was dealing on the street, Walsh said.

The relationship evolved, he said, after UPS officials found several 
pounds of marijuana at a San Francisco shipping center in March 2009.

Vargas and the other two officers indicted last week, Furminger and 
Robles, picked up the evidence. According to the federal indictment, 
Vargas approached two unnamed informants and offered to let them have 
25 percent of the proceeds if they sold some of the seized marijuana.

Walsh and Bram said they were the informants, an assertion that local 
and federal law enforcement sources confirmed.

"The idea of selling drugs came out of the blue," Walsh said.

Separate arrests

But the effort failed miserably: Walsh was promptly arrested trying 
to sell some of the marijuana in Golden Gate Park. He still had 
Furminger's card in his wallet.

Park Station officers called Furminger. "Give him his s-back, and let 
him go," Walsh said he recalled hearing the sergeant say over the phone.

Walsh was freed with no charges and given back the marijuana, law 
enforcement sources said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity 
because grand jury testimony in the case remains sealed.

A few days later, it was Bram's turn to be arrested, also as she 
tried to sell marijuana in the park. She called Vargas from lockup 
and - in a conversation that was secretly recorded - he shushed her 
as she asked him for help, the law enforcement sources said.

She spent five days in jail, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was 
released, court records show.

At this point, the couple decided to move to Iowa. Bram, off heroin 
and trying to get a job, worried that her conviction could be a 
problem. She says she called Furminger in early 2010 to ask for his 
help in clearing her record.

The sergeant was anything but helpful, Bram said. According to her, 
he threatened to hunt the couple down and shoot them "like dogs."

Bram telephoned the city's Office of Citizen Complaints, which 
investigates allegations of officer misconduct, and filed a case. She 
also called the FBI, trying to interest the agency in her complaint 
about drugstealing cops.

"I thought it was a waste of time," Walsh said. "The feds - they 
laughed at her. 'Stealing drugs. Yeah, right.' "

The city agency cleared the officers of stealing seized narcotics, 
but Furminger got a two-day suspension for being abusive during the 
call. It looked like that would be the end of it.

Marijuana raids

But in early 2011, Public Defender Jeff Adachi revealed a series of 
surveillance videos from a single-room-occupancy hotel showing 
Mission and Southern Station narcotics officers taking property that 
was never accounted for. One of the officers implicated was Vargas.

Not long after that, Walsh said, the FBI began calling the home of 
Bram's grandfather in Iowa, looking for the couple. By this time the 
pair had returned to California to raise a family near Oroville in 
Butte County, where they soon encountered more trouble.

In September 2011, a month after the couple say federal investigators 
interviewed them about the revived case against the San Francisco 
officers, authorities in Butte County raided the marijuana-growing 
operation at their home. They say they were growing it for their own 
medicinal use.

A second marijuana raid came in January 2013 at their new home in Red 
Bluff (Tehama County), two days after they were served subpoenas to 
testify before a federal grand jury, the couple say.

Walsh doesn't think the timing was a coincidence. "This is a law 
enforcement campaign to discredit us," he said.

Bram appeared before the grand jury, but Walsh refused to.

The Tehama County charges were eventually dropped. But in Butte 
County, a jury didn't buy Bram's story and convicted her of growing 
marijuana for sale.

She also was found guilty of misdemeanor child endangerment, and 
social services officials barred her from seeing her three young 
children for more than an hour a week. Walsh is awaiting trial on 
similar charges.

The Butte County prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Jeff Greeson, 
says one of the marijuana raids was the result of a routine law 
enforcement screening of possible growing operations, and the other 
grew out of a referral from social service officials.

Greeson said Butte County investigators hadn't known of the federal 
probe in San Francisco before the arrests.

"Officers were surprised when they were told they are cooperating 
with a federal investigation, and their response was, 'Yeah, sure, 
they all are,' " he said.

'Credibility problems'

To Michael Rains, an attorney speaking for the current and former San 
Francisco officers facing charges, there's no reason to put any 
credence in Walsh and Bram's stories.

"They have been arrested and rearrested countless times since they 
provided information about these guys," Rains said. "These informants 
have substantial credibility problems."

Greeson said it had been easy to build a drug case against the 
couple. There were 100 marijuana plants in their house outside 
Oroville, and drug paraphernalia, including needles, was everywhere, 
the prosecutor said.

"That stuff in San Francisco has absolutely no bearing on the charges 
in Butte County," Greeson said. "They have received no special 
treatment - either to their benefit or to their detriment.

"What happened to that couple in San Francisco was awful, and I'm 
looking forward to that case being resolved. But it has nothing to do 
with law enforcement in Butte County."

Bram, 33, is expected to be released in April. She remains convinced 
she's been punished for telling the truth about the San Francisco officers.

"I just think it's really suspect," she said, "that all this is going 
down the way it has."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom