August 3–10, 2000

cover story

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. photo: Jay Matsueda

by Noel Weyrich

page 1 | page 2 | page 3

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 BNI 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.

page 1 | page 2 | page 3