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."