WESTERN ADDITION DRUG PROSECUTIONS HOBBLED BY DEA INFORMANT PROGRAM

Last year, San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong asked for help from
federal authorities to fight drug-fueled violence in the city's
crime-plagued Western Addition.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration responded in June by
deploying its Mobile Enforcement Team - which relied on a paid federal
informant who lived among and reported on drug dealers.

The four-month operation that followed netted arrests of more than two
dozen alleged members of the Chopper City and Knockout Posse (KOP)
street gangs, DEA officials proudly announced last fall.

"Mobile Enforcement Teams were designed to hit hard, fast and
accurately," Javier Pena, the special agent in charge of the agency in
San Francisco, said in a news release at the time. "The results of
this collaborative crackdown speak for themselves."

But now that the first trials of one of the Western Addition
defendants have played out at San Francisco's Hall of Justice, juror
reviews of the touted Mobile Enforcement Team leave plenty to be desired.

The defendant, a 28-year-old alleged gang member named Sala Thorn,
also known as Sly, was acquitted on two counts of felony drug
trafficking over the course of two trials in which the key informant's
credibility was all but demolished.

As if that weren't bad enough for local law enforcement authorities -
they had to watch Thorn, who had previously been acquitted of murder
and robbery, returned to the street. Several other defendants arrested
on evidence provided by the same informant are headed to trial in San
Francisco - and prosecutors are starting to feel the reverberations as
far as Stockton, where the same informant was key to making dozens of
arrests in an operation that ended in July.

"The DEA did not have the checks and balances in place," said one of
two jurors who spoke anonymously to The Chronicle after acquitting
Thorn on a remaining charge last week. Both panelists said they wanted
to maintain the confidentiality the court guaranteed to them upon
being sworn as jurors.

According to Thorn's attorney, the DEA operation in the Western
Addition revolved around a 55-year-old woman from Philadelphia who had
been sent into the Western Addition to get inside the world of the
neighborhood's gang-affiliated drug dealers.

She testified during the trials that she had been recruited in 2002 by
federal authorities because of her record of crack dealing and addiction.

"She said she cleaned up her act and that she has not been an active
addict since the 1990s," Thorn's defense lawyer, Eileen Burke, told
The Chronicle after the jury returned its verdict Wednesday.

But while on the witness stand, the woman gave jurors reason to doubt
her sobriety - and DEA agents proved themselves incapable of knocking
down those doubts.

The informant told jurors she had been paid $115,000 by the DEA over a
four-year period. She said she was brought to the Western Addition to
buy drugs from various gang members over a four-month span until she
disclosed to an agent that someone had left a gun inside her
apartment. Fearing the weapon was going to be used, authorities seized
the gun and ended the operation.

The informant recounted meeting the defendant, Thorn, on the street
and exchanging telephone numbers with him. Later, she testified, she
arranged a meeting with him inside a market - to which she wore a
camera and microphone - and bought 5 grams of crack cocaine for $300
from the defendant.

But all that could be seen for sure on the tape was the defendant
buying the informant an energy drink.

The recording of the encounter, it turned out, had suffered from
almost comical technical problems as the device designed to show the
transaction live to federal agents watching on monitors nearby sent
back mostly static and poor-quality images.

The technology was "completely inept for what they were trying to do,"
said the defense attorney, Burke, noting that a wall or almost any
other obstacle, like a bus, could easily interfere with the
transmission signal.

What proved particularly troubling for the jury was the lack of
oversight of the informant's conduct by the DEA, according to the two
jurors.

Though the informant claimed she hadn't used crack since 2004, she
testified she had allowed crack users to move in with her during her
stint in the Western Addition and had smoked the drug during the
period, but only to appear convincing to the dealers. She said she
never inhaled.

There was no way to prove that assertion, however, as jurors learned
the informant wasn't under constant surveillance by agents and that
the DEA doesn't ask its informants to take drug tests.

"I think she was taking some of the DEA's money, and she was smoking -
she obviously had to get the crack for herself somewhere," defense
attorney Burke said. "It was incredibly pathetic. It's amazing how
inept it was. It was terrible."

The second of the two panelists who spoke to The Chronicle said the
jury found the informant's testimony full of discrepancies. "She was
terrible, to be honest," the juror said.

"She said she smoked (crack) but did not inhale - I think you have to
test somebody like that," the juror added. "They let her get away with
so much. They were so loose with her."

Also problematic was the informant's performance on the stand in the
first of the two trials. She fell asleep seven times. "She had to be
awaked by the D.A., the defense attorney and the court on different
occasions - it was embarrassing," Burke said.

In the second trial, she managed to stay awake but came under strong
attack by Thorn's lawyer. "She allowed crack addicts to move in - she
said she felt sorry for them," Burke said.

And while the crack users were bunking in with the informant, the DEA
agents had no way of knowing what was going on inside the apartment.
"They didn't monitor her house, they had no idea what was going on
there," Burke said.

Jurors, in the end, rejected the informant's testimony, saying she
simply wasn't believable, and they faulted the DEA's investigation as
"shoddy" and its agents as arrogant and negligent in failing to
exercise proper oversight.

"The DEA was very, very sloppy," the second juror said.

DEA officials declined to comment about any of the issues brought up
during the trial.

"A jury has heard the evidence in this case and rendered its
decision," said Casey McEnry, a DEA special agent and spokeswoman for
the agency in San Francisco. "While we are disappointed, we respect
the judicial process and the verdict of the jury."

She added that the DEA's Mobile Enforcement Teams were disbanded this
year, saving the agency $20.6 million annually.

McEnry said the last Mobile Enforcement Team operation was completed
this summer in Stockton.

A top prosecutor in the San Francisco district attorney's office
acknowledged the problems with the case against Thorn but said that
doesn't mean cases against other defendants arrested by the DEA in the
Western Addition have been damaged.

Twelve of the original 19 suspects have pleaded guilty. Following
Thorn's acquittal, that leaves six defendants still facing trial.

"Each of these cases rests on their own facts," Chief Assistant
District Attorney Russ Giuntini said. "It is my understanding that the
video in this case wasn't as good as it may be in others. I'm led to
believe that the jury in this case indicated that had the video been
better, they wouldn't have had a problem. Each case rests on the
facts, and we are prepared to move forward."
As for the other apparent flaws exposed in the trial, "we respect the
decision of the jury - that's their role," Giuntini said. "This was
one case, one jury's view. I think it is too early to make any
characterization about the operation and how viable these cases are.
We will just go try them, and the results will speak for
themselves."

The performance of the star witness from San Francisco is already
being used to undermine the DEA's work in Stockton, where an agency
Mobile Enforcement Team operation ended in July. There, agents snared
51 suspects, including members of the Nortenos and South Side
Stocktone street gangs; $400,000 in drugs, including methamphetamine,
crack cocaine, marijuana, tar heroin; and 19 weapons, including
handguns, shotguns and assault rifles.

A public defender representing one of the Stockton defendants took
notice of the informant's appearance on the witness stand in the first
Thorn trial and has filed a motion seeking to have the Stockton case
dismissed. "DEA had previously used (the informant) in similar
operations in San Francisco," the motion states. "She had done poorly
as a witness while testifying in San Francisco - including appearing
intoxicated, using slurred speech and falling asleep on the witness
stand."

The jurors in San Francisco said it was the DEA that looked worst of
all.

"She did her part - she earned her money," the second juror said of
the informant. "The whole DEA performance was terrible. This is a
government agency, our tax dollars, and this is the best you can come
up with?"

The first juror interviewed said he had trouble even believing the
supervising DEA agent's testimony. "When your agent says one thing and
the facts say another - if this is an example of how things are done -
it's at best disappointing. At worst, the work could be described as
shoddy. You don't expect this from the government."

"It blew my mind," the second juror said. "They paid this woman
$30,000 to go after street peddlers. That's the best they could do?"