DEA INFORMER'S TRAIL OF LIES CONTORTS DRUG CASE IN LOS ANGELES

LOS ANGELES - In one of the strongest attacks yet on use of paid informers,
a defense attorney here accuses federal prosecutors and drug agents of
lying and ignoring 16 years of cross-country perjury by supersnitch Andrew
Chambers of St. Louis.

Lawyer John Martin has documented those abuses in 250 pages of court papers
he filed in U.S. District Court. He is asking a judge to find "governmental
abuse" - and to send a message that the courts won't tolerate it.

Martin claims that misconduct by prosecutors and the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration represents "a troubling pattern of complacency and
complicity that has stained judicial proceedings across the country." He
also wants dismissal of charges against his client, a drug dealer with five
convictions.

The U.S. attorney's office here has responded - in sealed court records -
that the government did fail to tell a judge and grand jury of Chambers'
long history of lying under oath about his record of arrests and
convictions. But the prosecutors say the failure - like the failure in
dozens of earlier cases - was "unintentional."

Prosecutors are asking the judge to overlook it. Instead of freeing the
suspect, they replaced the first indictment with another. The difference:
This time they acknowledge that their star witness, Chambers, has a history
of lying.

Martin still wants the charges dropped. "They are saying they can cure 16
years of active lying and perjury by saying, 'Oh, you caught us and now
we'll make it right,'" he complained.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lizabeth A. Rhodes has said she has a strong case
despite the admissions.

However it turns out, the case is sure to have an impact over the long run
on how the DEA uses paid informers. The agency has said it has as many
informers as drug agents: about 4,500 each.

Most snitches are criminals trying to reduce their sentences or get charges
dropped. Some do it for the reward, often paid in cash.

Chambers is easily the most celebrated snitch in DEA history.

Beginning in St. Louis in 1984, he worked hundreds of DEA cases, and
collected more than $2.2 million in payments.

Last January, the Post-Dispatch disclosed Chambers' long history of
successful testimony, coupled with his cross-country record of lying about
his own background. Attorney General Janet Reno quickly ordered him suspended.

Soon after, the DEA said it began a yearlong investigation of how Chambers
got away with lying for so long. Chambers has worked with dozens of agents
and prosecutors from the Midwest to both coasts, and the investigation was
supposed to determine what they knew about his lies - and when they knew it.

Last spring, Richard Fiano, then chief of operations for the DEA, said
during an extensive interview in Washington that the allegations raised
troubling questions about the relationship of agents to paid snitches.

Fiano said he would tolerate no wrongdoing and promised to make public the
invesigaton's results.

Since then, Fiano has been replaced and assigned to Italy. The agency has
refused to discuss the results of the investigation, and for weeks has
refused to answer questions about it. In the meantime, Reno's term has
expired and a new attorney general is waiting to be confirmed: John Ashcroft.

A tale of two snitches

Chambers isn't the only snitch in this story. He and the man he accuses may
be the oddest of odd couples - one informer accusing another.

Dave Daly, 38, is a wiry, street-smart guy from south Los Angeles who was
working as an informer for the Los Angeles police when he met Chambers at a
carwash in 1997. Chambers later accused Daly of accepting about $500 to
help set up a PCP deal.

Daly has been jailed for three years, awaiting trial, as one defense
attorney and then a second wrestled to get information about his accuser.

At first, the government wouldn't even identify Chambers. All agents or
prosecutors revealed to a grand jury and judge was that they had an
informer who was "reliable," as an agent testified under oath.

Daly's first attorney never learned the identity. Martin, the second, might
never have found out the full background except for Dean Steward. Steward,
a federal public defender in Orange County, Calif., tracked Chambers'
movements across the country and cataloged his testimony for three years.

The DEA has maintained that Chambers only lied about himself, never about
drug deals he witnessed. Steward repeatedly asked the DEA to investigate
Chambers, but the agency mostly ignored him.

Chambers has not yet made an appearance in the Los Angeles case; he could
not be located for comment.

Chambers, 43, grew up in University City and played football at the old
Mercy High School. When he couldn't qualify as a drug agent, he signed up
as free-lance snitch. His DEA handlers soon found he had an uncanny ability
to sniff out and trap drug dealers.

To bolster his credibility with jurors, he testified that he had no arrest
record, and was simply a guy who hated drugs and what they did to innocent
people.

The DEA recently conceded that Chambers has been arrested at least 13 times
and that agents had interceded several times to get charges dropped,
including one of impersonating a DEA agent.

Martin found that the true number of arrests was 17 - all but one before
Daly was arrested in 1997.

In other words, the government had to know.

Martin wrote in his motion to dismiss charges against Daly:

"Chambers has perjured himself about numerous things: his arrest record;
his income (including from DEA for his work as an informant); his payment
of taxes and his filing of (and failure to file) tax returns; how many
times he has testified; his education; and even about where he was from.

"He has claimed to actually be a DEA agent. He has admitted under oath to
having lied repeatedly to DEA agents. The DEA was aware of many of these
instances of misconduct at the time they occurred and, with prosecutors
across the country, continued to either allow him to defraud courts or make
similar representations themselves to courts about his reliability."

Martin and Steward noted a pattern: whenever a defense lawyer was able to
track down Chambers' record, the DEA and prosecutors would back off. They
would offer to make a deal - or more recently, they dropped charges entirely.

But most defense attorneys never got that far.

At least three times before Chambers became famous last year, federal
judges called him a liar. Each time, prosecutors and agents said they had
been misled and had known nothing.

Not all officials denied knowing about Chambers. In a few cases, including
one in St. Louis, federal prosecutors refused to work with him. Ed Dowd, a
former U.S. attorney in St. Louis, warned the DEA in 1998 not to have
anything more to do with Chambers.

The DEA later said the warning hadn't been strong enough to be considered
anything more than a recommendation.

In the Daly case, the U.S. attorney's office finally conceded recently that
it was "at fault" for failing to disclose Chambers' history. But
prosecutors said the failure was "not intentional" and argued that neither
they nor the case against Daly should suffer.

What happens next will be for U.S. District Court Judge Christina A. Synder
to decide. She set Daly's trial for March 20. If, convicted, Daly must go
to prison for life.

"And Andrew Chambers, who lied his way across the country for 16 years and
got $2 million, he's still testifying," Martin notes ruefully.