AGENT REPORTED SNITCH'S LIES, BUT THEY CONTINUED ANYWAY

DEA Report Cites Failure To Communicate In Agency

A federal drug agent was a witness in 1988 to a courtroom confession:
supersnitch Andrew Chambers admitting from the witness stand that he had
lied in court during the previous three years while testifying as a star
government witness.

The drug agent was so concerned about Chambers' revelation, she said, she
left the courtroom at the first break and immediately notified her
supervisor at the Los Angeles field office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration.

In theory, that should have put an end to courtroom lying by a highly paid
and often used government informer.

It didn't.

According to the report of a yearlong investigation by the DEA into its use
of Chambers, he continued to lie in courtrooms in St. Louis and across the
country for more than a decade.

It was not until after the Post-Dispatch published a detailed account of
his activities in January of last year that then-Attorney General Janet
Reno ordered the DEA to suspend Chambers.

A censored version of the subsequent internal DEA investigative report was
obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act.

The report suggests that some agents could have done more to investigate
Chambers' background or to report his lies. The investigation also found
that the DEA had no requirement that agents report wrongdoing to
headquarters so the information could be shared with agents worldwide.

The agency's report absolves itself of any wrongdoing. It says there is no
"substantiated" evidence that any DEA agents or federal prosecutors knew
Chambers was lying when he testified for them, or that DEA's top officials
at headquarters were aware he was committing perjury during nearly his
entire 16-year career as a professional snitch.

The DEA investigation also found that:

* There was a "systemic" failure of communication by midlevel headquarters
officials, some of whom had learned years earlier that Chambers was lying
in courtrooms by testifying he had never been arrested or convicted. The
report found he had indeed been arrested - at least 13 times. He also had
at least one conviction - on a charge of soliciting for prostitution.

* DEA agents in the field need a more foolproof system to report wrongdoing
by their snitches to other agents who might unknowingly use the same liar.

* At least one DEA supervisor in the field should have done more to report
Chambers' courtroom lying.

Whether that supervisor has been disciplined could not be conclusively
confirmed because DEA officials blacked out five of the report's six major
findings. Most of the findings apparently call for better communications
within the agency.

A spokesman for the DEA said he didn't know if all the findings ever would
be made public.

In releasing the 157-page report, the DEA also blacked out the names of
many of the agents who worked with the man they say was the most active
snitch in the agency's history.

Chambers began his career in St. Louis, and the report describes him as
"motivated by money, thrill, camaraderie and a sense of self-righteousness."

He participated in 280 DEA investigations beginning here and in 30 other
cities from 1984 until last year. He's credited with contributing to the
arrests of more than 400 drug suspects, including some of the most
notorious in recent St. Louis history.

He worked with at least 211 DEA agents who paid him hundreds of thousands
of dollars, usually in cash, for turning in suspected drug dealers. Some
357 government officials witnessed those payments, which were approved by
112 DEA supervisors.

The agents loved him; he was so talented, they considered him more a
colleague than a paid informer.

The report says Chambers also apparently worked for the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, the Customs Service, the Secret Service, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Internal Revenue Service, criminal
investigators at the U.S. Postal Service, and many state and local law
agencies.

There is no known investigation into his testimony for those law agencies.

The DEA's report found he testified in court or under oath at least 25
times for the drug agency.

In at least 16 of those cases, he lied about his background to make himself
look more credible to judges and jurors.

The report blames him as well as the failure of government controls:

"Chambers was unique in the world of informants. His cases spanned the
country. Because the cases in which he was involved were in different
cities throughout the United States, he was able to testify falsely in one
place with the agents in another subsequent case not being aware of the
previous false testimony.

"The problem was systemic. There was no effective system in place to
memorialize issues regarding the credibility of an informant, and the (DEA
special agents) who activated Chambers in another office did not know about
his false testimony in a prior case.

"Chambers was able to exploit, either wittingly or unwittingly, that
weakness in the DEA (confidential source) system."

U. City Police Made Introduction

The report of the DEA investigation acknowledges that the government is
obligated to disclose derogatory information about its witnesses to
defendants. Any DEA agent who knowingly violates that legal requirement
could be disciplined.

The report says DEA investigators questioned 100 agents and federal
prosecutors and examined 2,000 documents.

While the DEA acknowledged that various agents and federal prosecutors
learned that Chambers had lied in court, there was no evidence that any
knew he was lying when he testified in their cases.

Their investigation went back to 1984, when Chambers, introduced by a
police officer from University City, went to the DEA office on Forsyth
Boulevard in Clayton to sign up as an informer.

Within a year, he was perjuring himself about his background.

On April 17, 1985, he was on the witness stand at the U.S. Courthouse in
downtown St. Louis, being questioned by Assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Dana.
Chambers testified he had never been charged with any crime by any law
enforcement agency.

At the time, Chambers was awaiting trial on felony charges in Paducah, Ky.,
for second-degree forgery. He also had been charged with posing as a
private investigator and defrauding a jeweler of $1,555.

A DEA agent later persuaded a judge to drop the charges.

Chambers also testified that he had paid income taxes on his DEA earnings.
Years later, he admitted that that too was a lie: For six years, he had
paid no taxes on his DEA money.

On June 9, 1988, Chambers was again testifying for the government, at the
U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. This time, he admitted his previous
lies on the stand and acknowledged another arrest - after, he said, he got
"hot handed" with his wife.

Chambers also added a new lie: this time, claiming he had testified for the
government "more than 100 times."

In the courtroom, listening to Chambers' disclosures, was his DEA case
agent. She had been his government control from 1986 until the early 1990s,
using him as an undercover snitch in about 25 cases.

During that time, she said, none of the agents who worked earlier with
Chambers had told her about his arrest record or his credibility problems.
Her name was blacked out of the DEA report.

The agent said she and the prosecutor left the courtroom, each to report
Chambers' disclosure of false testimony to their respective supervisors.

The report says that the agent's supervisor later was fired by the DEA for
unrelated misconduct. The report of the DEA's investigation says it found
no evidence that the warning about Chambers' lies ever went up the chain of
command of either the DEA or prosecutors in the Justice Department.

Back In St. Louis

Over the years, Chambers' credibility sometimes became an issue in other
federal court cases. In a case in Denver in 1995, a federal judge ordered
prosecutors to collect information from all DEA field offices about
Chambers' background and the amounts the government had paid him.

Prosecutors reacted by dismissing the charges in federal court and refiling
them before a different judge in state court. The information about
Chambers apparently never was collected. The defendants were found guilty;
Chambers moved on to work at other DEA field offices.

In 1998, he was back in St. Louis, helping the DEA investigate Nathan
Williams, described as a violent drug trafficker.

Just before the case went to trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dean Hoag
learned from a federal public defender in California about Chambers'
history. Hoag collected the background information and turned it over to
the judge.

Then he told a local DEA agent that he wouldn't allow Chambers to testify.
According to the DEA report, Hoag also told the agent not to bring him any
more cases in which Chambers was a witness.

Hoag said he sent out a nationwide e-mail to other federal prosecutors
asking if they had had dealings with Chambers. Hoag later told
investigators he got about 20 responses - evenly divided between those who
praised the snitch and those who warned Hoag to be careful.

Hoag also spoke with his immediate supervisor and with Edward Dowd, then
the U.S. attorney here.

Dowd called Joseph Corcoran, special agent in charge of DEA's office in St.
Louis to warn about Chambers. "I don't think he should be used any more,"
the DEA report quotes Dowd. The DEA ignored the warnings and continued to
use Chambers until the attorney general forced his suspension last year.

The DEA blames poor communications and poor record keeping. The agency says
it hasn't even been able to keep track of how much it paid Chambers.

At first, the DEA said Chambers had been paid about $1.6 million. A few
months later, the agency put the amount at more than $2.2 million.

In the report of its recent investigation, the DEA says the real total is
just under $1.9 million.

The agency says Chambers was its most active snitch, but not the highest
paid. DEA won't identify who that is.