COMPLAINTS ABOUT AGENT DATE TO START OF HIS CAREER

In 1991, shortly after his 22nd birthday, Lee Lucas became an
undercover agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He
quickly built international drug investigations stretching from his
Miami base to the Bahamas, Brazil, Bolivia and beyond.

Over the next five years, in every major case the long-haired
undercover operative and son of a Cleveland cop worked, there were
charges of deceit, perjury, missing drugs and money, questionable
associations with criminal informers and allegations that sting
operations he orchestrated were rife with fraud.

At the time, none of the complaints resulted in any public
disciplinary action, but several individuals who have complained
about his tactics say they were recently questioned by U.S.
Department of Justice officials investigating Mr. Lucas for his work
in a Mansfield, Ohio, drug sting that led to 26 arrests. Twenty-three
of those cases were dismissed or ended in acquittals after a federal
informant who worked with Agent Lucas said he had framed innocent people.

It's an old pattern with Agent Lucas.

It dates to the mid-1990s, when Gary J. McDaniel, president of
Pretext Services Inc., a private investigative firm in North Palm
Beach, Fla., joined a group of defense lawyers and defendants who
complained about Agent Lucas to the DEA, the Justice Department and
members of Congress.

Mr. McDaniel called the cases made by Agent Lucas "a textbook example
of the abuse of power of which appear to be endorsed by senior
management of the DEA."

He recently was interviewed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce
Teitelbaum, the Pittsburgh prosecutor handling a special
investigation of what went wrong in Mansfield.

Complaints about Agent Lucas began shortly after his promotion from a
non-law enforcement "aide" at the DEA. He was involved in a
Bahamas-to-Miami bust of 423 kilograms of cocaine -- a haul valued at
more than $10 million. The case led to a conviction and life sentence
for Peter Hidalgo and several others.

Mr. Hidalgo, who claims he is innocent, and his codefendants asked
for internal investigations of Mr. Lucas when a cooperating witness
said 23 kilograms of the cocaine had disappeared.

They offered sworn statements from cooperating witnesses and
surveillance tapes that documented informers discussing the missing
dope. Yet Agent Lucas was cleared of impropriety in that case as well
as another drug bust where defendants reported that 20 kilograms of
cocaine had disappeared.

In appeals, Mr. Hidalgo and his codefendants claimed Agent Lucas and
his partner also illegally created an aura of fear around their cases
by damaging cars at the crime scene, and then testifying the
vandalism had been done by a Colombian hit team aiming to harm
informers. The government later admitted it hid polygraph tests
showing a key witness against Mr. Hidalgo was lying.

"He's willing to break the law, whatever the cost is, in order to
come away with a conviction," Mr. Hildago said during a telephone
call Friday from the Federal Correctional Institution at Coleman,
Fla. His appeals have been denied.

Agent Lucas worked another high-profile Florida drug case in 1994,
leading to a 27-year sentence for a Miami police officer. The
defendant said prosecutors "knowingly exploited the perjured
testimony of Agent Lucas from the inception of the investigation,
repeatedly misrepresenting the facts."

Agent Lucas was then teamed up with a German criminal and undercover
operative named Helmut Groebe. Despite Mr. Groebe's criminal record
dating to 1981 for various frauds around the world, he was paid more
than $600,000 by the DEA to work with the young agent to build
international drug cases.

The largest was the arrest and extradition of a Bolivian anti-drug
czar after the duo convinced American authorities that 500 audio and
14 videotapes implicated him in a drug conspiracy

As Faustino Rico Toro sat in detention in Miami for five years
awaiting trial, Pretext Services' Mr. McDaniel traveled to Bolivia
for Mr. Rico Toro's attorney. Mr. McDaniel said he found no damning
tapes, no physical evidence of drugs and no hidden assets that could
be tied to his client.

What he did find were four men who said Agent Lucas and his partner
attempted to pay them $20,000 each for testimony.

Federal prosecutors allowed Mr. Rico Torocq to plead guilty to a
minor drug charge and in late 1996, sent him home.