DEA OFFICIAL SAYS DRUG PROBE ONGOING; OFFICERS SAY CASE HALTED BY
POLITICAL PRESSURE

WASHINGTON - A DEA official insisted Wednesday that a high-profile
drug investigation of a Houston rap entrepreneur is ongoing, but four
investigators involved in the case told a House panel that political
pressure killed it more than a year ago.

The conflicting testimony came during the first of two days of
hearings in which the House Government Reform Committee is trying to
determine what happened to the Drug Enforcement Administration's
investigation of James A. Prince and his associates at Rap-A-Lot
records.

"We were told that the investigation was being stopped because of
political pressure," testified Ralph G. Chaison, a Houston police
narcotics investigator assigned to the joint DEA-Houston case.

"We get someone to come along with money and can halt an
investigation, and then can have music done behind it bragging of
what they have done. It's a slap in the face," Mr. Chaison said.

Mr. Prince has never been charged and has denied wrongdoing. He could
not be reached Wednesday.

Before the DEA investigation was sidetracked last fall, it netted at
least 10 of his employees and associates and resulted in more than 20
state and federal drug convictions.

Mr. Prince's label released acompact disc in October in which Brad
"Scarface" Jordan openly taunted DEA agents involved in the case and
bragged of being able to ruin their careers. Excerpts from the CD,
including the taunts and threats to kill DEA informants, were played
during Wednesday's hearing.

Houston DEA chief Ernest L. Howard testified that the probe was never
shut down, even though he ordered the suspension of "proactive" work
in the case in August 1999 and e-mailed DEA headquarters in March to
complain that political pressure forced his office to stop the
investigation. coerce

In an e-mail sent three days after Vice President Al Gore made a
campaign stop at a Houston church that was scrutinized during the DEA
probe, Mr. Howard wrote: "Now we bow down to the political pressure
anyway. ... But it is over now."The DEA supervisor said he was
disturbed in part because Mr. Prince was with the vice president
during his visit. "To me, that was him slapping me in the face
saying, 'Here I am. Ha ha. You can't touch me,' " he said.

But he insisted that he never received any pressure to close the
case, and ultimately did nothing after sending the e-mails because
colleagues in Washington calmed him down.

"I was venting. I did not mean I was going to close the case down,"
Mr. Howard testified Wednesday. "It was never closed."

Mr. Howard acknowledged that he had previously told agents to halt
"proactive" work - undercover work, drug buys or even surveillance -
in the Rap-A-Lot case.

He said that order came immediately after the Justice Department sent
the DEA a complaint in which California Democratic congresswoman
Maxine Waters alleged that Mr. Prince was being targeted by "rogue"
DEA agents.

Ms. Waters wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno on Aug. 20, 1999,
saying that Mr. Prince feared for his life at the hands of DEA agents
because they were involved in racial profiling, brutality and other
civil-rights violations against him and his employees.

DEA officials spent a year investigating the allegations before
ruling they were unfounded. The DEA's top internal-affairs
investigators interviewed Mr. Prince in Ms. Waters' office, and the
head of the agency's internal investigations office testified
Wednesday that he briefed Ms. Waters about the internal inquiry in
February on the orders of DEA Administrator Donnie Marshall.

Among documents introduced in Wednesday's hearing was a transcript of
Mr. Prince's interview, on August 24, 1999, an hourlong session in
which Ms. Waters personally questioned Mr. Prince and admonished DEA
investigators when they told Mr. Prince that he appeared to have no
detailed information to support his complaints. Accompanying the
transcript was an 11-page report from a Houston private investigator
hired by one of Mr. Prince's attorneys in June 1999 to try to find
negative information about DEA Agent Jack Schumacher, the lead
investigator in the Rap-A-Lot case.

Ms. Waters did not return telephone calls for comment Wednesday.

Mr. Howard testified Wednesday that he was appalled when he learned
of the allegations. He added that he considered the claims of
wrongdoing and racism by his agents to be baseless, noting that the
case could not be considered racial profiling because he personally
launched it and he is black.

Mr. Prince and two Houston police officers who testified Wednesday
are also black.

Even so, Mr. Howard said he ordered his agents not to conduct any
more active investigation in the case without permission from him or
his chief assistants in Houston after DEA headquarters forwarded Ms.
Waters' complaint. He said he feared the potential controversy and
news media scrutiny that might ensue if they got into an altercation
with Mr. Prince or any of his associates after being accused of such
serious wrongdoing.

"A politician had made an allegation that I was concerned about.
Whether the allegation was true or false, in my view, was
irrelevant," Mr. Howard said. "I was not going to allow my agents and
officers to go out and be ridiculed for doing something right.

"As far as political pressure involving the allegations, if you want
to call that political pressure, it caused us to cut the
investigation back," he said.

At the time, he said, his agents had told him that there were no new
leads to pursue and further progress in the case hinged on efforts to
obtain testimony from two of Mr. Prince's lieutenants who were
already in jail.

But three Houston police officers involved in the case with agent
Schumacher each disputed that.

"We had three informants still plugged in to the Rap-A-Lot gang, if
you will. We were just really getting to the second phase," Agent
Schumacher testified. "It started out as a drug investigation, and
spread out to police corruption, murder."

Added Houston Police Sgt. Bill Stephens, "We definitely had things to
do. We had people in jail. ... We started to break a stranglehold
that Rap-A-Lot had on the 5th Ward in Houston."

Committee Chairman Dan Burton, R-Indiana, became visibly angry
Wednesday as Mr. Howard contradicted his investigators, at one point
warning the DEA official that anyone who lied to Congress would be
referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. Mr. Burton and
other committee Republicans also grew increasingly incredulous as Mr.
Howard insisted that he would have reacted the same way if a private
citizen made similar complaints about one of his agents in a drug
investigation.

"If I'm under DEA investigation ... and my mother writes in?" Rep.
Steven C. Latourette, R-Ind.

"I would remove that investigator from proactive investigation," Mr.
Howard said.

Christopher Shays, R-Conn., pressed even harder:

"You responded by taking your men off the case, and I don't believe
for a minute that you would do that under other circumstances," he
said.

Committee Democrats defended Ms. Waters' actions, and contended that
Republicans were trying unfairly to link the DEA's actions in the
case to the vice president.

But under Democratic questioning, Mr. Schumacher testified that he
had received information that Mr. Prince might have donated more than
$200,000 to Mr. Gore or to the Democratic party.

"I have some confidential informant information," Mr. Schumacher
said. "It has not been corroborated."

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, responded: "Just for the record,
there is no record of any contribution from James Prince of
Rap-A-Lot. ... There's no evidence showing that the vice president
even discussed this case with anybody."

Mr. Howard said his decision to transfer Mr. Schumacher to a desk job
three days after Mr. Gore's visit was prompted not by political
considerations but by concerns from headquarters about Mr.
Schumacher's supervising a law enforcement group while still under
internal investigation.

But Mr. Schumacher said he was told he was transferred because DEA
headquarters wanted him off the Rap-A-Lot case, out of the group that
investigated it and if possible, out of Houston.

"I believe that someone in DEA headquarters called Mr. Howard and
gave him a direct order," he said.