FBI BAITED HOOKS TO LURE COPS

The FBI baited its lures with baking soda in Cleveland and mixed real
cocaine with powder in Savannah, Ga., and New Orleans.

The cops never knew the difference and, while ingredients varied, the
results were the same: local law-enforcement officers led away in handcuffs.

Put to the test most recently in San Antonio, the recipe worked yet again,
federal authorities allege.

This time, agents resorted to flour, then crumbly chunks of drywall, to
mimic cocaine bricks and, on March 22, they arrested 10 officers.

The accusations potentially add fresh members to a small but growing group
of law officers snared by undercover FBI stings. Besides Cleveland,
Savannah and New Orleans, the crooked cop club has chapters in cities such
as Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington and Jackson, Miss.

In each locale, FBI agents, sometimes working with local internal affairs
units, said they first received allegations of police misconduct.

Then, going undercover, they posed as drug dealers and worked with
informants to give local officers opportunities to make fast money
protecting narcotics shipments or stealing from drug dealers.

The unsuspecting -- if not always innocent -- officers earned first a few
hundred or thousand dollars, then a heaping dose of disgrace.

"I'm surprised officers do it anymore," said Don Burkhalter, a Mississippi
federal prosecutor handling cases against three Jackson officers. "Because
they (the stings) are all variations on the same theme."

So, too, were many of the defenses offered from city to city. Some officers
claimed entrapment. Some said they didn't know what they were guarding.

But, for all the similarities, officials say no two cases were identical.

Some prosecutors were armed with clear and damning secretly recorded tapes;
others worked with grainy images and jumbled sounds. As in other cities,
secret recordings appear a crucial part of the San Antonio case.

One of the few publicly revealed snippets shows a man identified by
authorities as Sgt. Conrad Fragozo Jr. perusing headlines of USA Today
moments before foil-wrapped bundles are stacked and counted on a table in a
motel room.

Some investigations had dramatic flair, as in Cleveland, where undercover
FBI agents posed as mobsters and staged an elaborate ceremony inducting one
of their targets, a jail guard, into the Mafia.

At least one sting ended with bloodshed. The Louisiana operation stopped
after one of its targets, a New Orleans officer, used a tapped phone to
further a murder plot.

Among the sharpest contrasts between cities -- and even co-defendants --
were the consequences. Punishments ranged, like the cases themselves, all
over the map.

At one extreme, a New Orleans officer was sentenced to death while, at the
other end of the spectrum, a jury set free a Savannah officer. Most, as is
typical of criminal cases, ended with plea bargains.

Thus far, one of the San Antonio officers has followed suit. Patrolman
Lawrence Bustos on May 11 took a plea deal that capped his prison time at
10 years, while enabling him to hope for far less.

Lawyers for the rest are silent about making any deals or talking about
going to trial.

'A sting is a sting'

Between 1996 and last year, the FBI took a leading or supporting role in
508 convictions related to law enforcement corruption, including civilians
who offered bribes or otherwise were accomplices.

The numbers, however, do not distinguish which cases resulted from
undercover sting operations. To longtime law officers and prosecutors,
there is little extraordinary about stings. It is a basic tool that can be
adapted to investigate drug traffickers, Internet child predators and
corrupt public servants alike.

"A sting is a sting, whether (you're) doing cops, politicians -- whatever,"
said Al Winters, a Louisiana prosecutor for more than 27 years.

Yet, among stings, the New Orleans case stands out, partly because it ended
with a death. In addition, as Winters describes it, the investigation also
had an unusual beginning.

It started with a drug dealer seeking justice. The dealer had no pending
charges, but came to federal authorities in late 1993 because he was "sick
of being ripped off by police officers," Winters said.

The dealer named one officer in particular and the investigation began there.

First, the informant recorded Officer Sammie L. Williams Jr. offering him
protection from police, as well as other dealers.

Before long, the dealer arranged to introduce both Williams and his friend,
Officer Len E. Davis, to his purported supplier, in reality an undercover
agent.

At the meeting, everyone -- informant, undercover agent and both officers
- -- stripped to their underwear to show no one was wearing a wire.

No one was. However, the meeting, all 1 hour and 8 minutes, was captured by
a hidden camera.

Before long, the FBI had rented a warehouse, then rigged it with cameras.
Agents posing as drug couriers came and went while Williams, Davis and
officers they recruited stood guard outside. After awhile, the officers sat
in a van, also provided -- and bugged -- by agents.

The case ended abruptly after Davis ordered the murder of a woman who had
filed a brutality complaint against him. Agents eavesdropping on a tapped
phone line heard -- but did not understand until it was too late -- some
cryptic comments about the plot.

By then, at least nine police officers were entangled in the sting that
came to be called "Operation Shattered Shield."

After separate trials, Davis got life in prison, plus five years for the
drug conspiracy, and a death sentence for the murder.

Williams pleaded guilty to all charges but, after testifying against
officers in three trials, was rewarded with a prison sentence of two years
and four months, then was ushered into the federal witness protection program.

Another officer, Larry Smith Jr., the first to plead and offer his
cooperation, got three years for a crime that, under federal guidelines,
called for potentially 20 years behind bars.

Two others took their chances in trials.

Both got more than 20 years behind bars, the New Orleans Times-Picayune
reported.

Most pleaded guilty. Several received prison sentences of about seven years
after Winters dismissed the initial drug counts and substituted relatively
minor charges.

Winters said the penalties reflected the case's weaknesses -- low-quality
recordings -- as well as his notion of fairness.

"My theory of prosecuting is: Everyone can't get 100 years," he said.

And In The Midwest

The Cleveland case came looking for authorities when a sheriff's jailer
approached an undercover agent working in a strip club.

Michael Joye told the agent, who was posing as a mobster for an organized
crime investigation, that he and his law-enforcement pals could protect
illicit Mafia shipments, according to the lawyer who prosecuted the case,
James R. Wooley.

The offer intrigued the government.

"If the guy can't produce the friends, it's over," Wooley said of the
initial investigation. "But in our case he produced eight of them."

And they introduced still others until the conspiracy involved 43
correctional and police officers from various local departments.

The sting started with a truckload of illegal slot machines and quickly
switched to 25-kilogram shipments of baking soda purported to be cocaine.

But FBI agents grew wary of Joye's violent streak. To make sure nothing
like the New Orleans murder occurred, agents resolved to tame Joye. Their
method was as creative as it was controversial.

They staged an elaborate ceremony, anointing Joye with oil and hot wax and
inducting him into the Mafia, according to the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.
They told him as a member, he had to behave. If not, they'd kill him.

The threat worked, but it also left the government vulnerable to complaints
that agents coerced Joye into continuing the conspiracy. For that reason,
prosecutors did not charge any of Joye's crimes after the ceremony.

Regardless, the case was labeled unfair by protesters. Officers' relatives
and supporters picketed and passed out fliers outside the courthouse. They
cast the investigation as a waste of crime-fighting resources.

But in the end, the tapes were deemed strong, defense lawyers said.
Everyone pleaded guilty.

Joye got what legal experts consider a generous deal for someone who
admitted helping protect more than 250 kilograms of cocaine, plus some
small crack sales on the side. He is serving nine years in prison.

Lesser participants got two to three years, even those whose sentences
would otherwise have been double under federal guidelines because their
crimes involved considerable amounts of cocaine.

"We felt it was sort of fundamentally unfair to tag them with all this
(drug) quantity when the government chose the quantity," said Wooley, now
in private practice.

Those would be magic words to local defense lawyers if they spilled from
the mouth of a San Antonio prosecutor.

Together, six of the 10 locally accused officers are alleged to have
collectively moved 350 kilograms of what they believed was cocaine. Largely
as a result, they face sentences ranging from 15 years to life in prison,
if convicted.

Just Say No

Local defense lawyers argue that drug punishments don't fit a corruption
sting, even one disguised as a drug conspiracy.

There were no drugs, they say. There were only harmless bundles of flour,
crushed drywall and, in some instances, rubber bricks wrapped in brown paper.

That looms as a key question for sentencing, should more officers plead
guilty or be convicted. But, first, another question has to be settled: Who
will go to trial?

Some defense lawyers are talking about preparing entrapment defenses,
similar to those considered but rarely used successfully against the FBI
stings in Ohio and Louisiana.

"It's almost impossible for an entrapment defense to work when at some
point, they (the target) didn't engage in some way of saying, 'No,'" said
Ronald Goldstock, a law professor who has taught seminars on public
corruption at New York University and Cornell University.

In San Antonio, the publicly released video sequences suggest the
undercover agent anticipated the defense and subtly offered some targets
chances to back out.

He seemed to insert the opportunities almost casually into conversations
about transporting carloads of cocaine.

"But are you comfortable with it?" he inquired of one. "Did I treat you
fair?" he asked a second. "Still feel comfortable?" he said to a third.

In those moments at least, they seemed more intent on the bait than on
turning back.