DRUG AGENCY INVESTIGATES OWN COVER-UP

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is investigating
itself - saying it wants to know why agents allowed supersnitch Andrew
Chambers to tell lies during 15 years of trial testimony that sent hundreds
of people to prison.

As many as two dozen of the agents who worked with Chambers in St. Louis
and elsewhere are under scrutiny for a possible cover-up. The big question:
Did they know that their star undercover informer was perjuring himself
when they watched him swear again and again in court that he had never been
arrested or convicted?

Agents could face discipline - in the extreme, even criminal prosecution -
according to Richard A. Fiano, the DEA's chief of operations.

Some agents clearly knew Chambers was lying - they rescued him three times
after police arrested him on suspicion of forgery, soliciting an undercover
officer for prostitution and claiming to be a federal agent.

Fiano promises that if mistakes are found, they will be punished. "It can't
be a win-at-all costs (attitude) on this side of the fence," he said in an
interview at DEA headquarters outside Washington.

He and other senior DEA officials insist that they didn't know about
Chambers' well-documented lies until August. But the agency's own records
show that the DEA chief counsel's office knew no later than May of last year.

That is when it sent a memo to field agents, warning that Chambers'
credibility "has been thoroughly impeached." It cited court rulings
critical of Chambers dating to 1993.

The DEA also had to know about Chambers because it fought a two-year court
fight to keep information about him secret.

In June, Dean Steward, then a federal public defender in California, won a
lawsuit forcing the DEA to divulge that it had paid more than $2.2 million
to Chambers - much of it in cash - plus a history of arrests the government
had kept from defense lawyers.

This month, Steward told a federal judge in Washington that the DEA
"continues to stonewall, cover up, and otherwise resist this court's order.
. . . The growing scandal surrounding the use of this informant has clearly
put this agency on the defensive, trying to minimize the impact of their
egregious actions . . ."

Four key false statements

An investigation by the Post-Dispatch found that the DEA has tried to cover
up an agency cover-up of dealings with Chambers. An internal report,
written in February, contains at least four key false statements:

In 1995, a federal judge in Denver dismissed indictments against 10
defendants after finding that Chambers got a percentage of whatever his
investigations turned up, an incentive to lie.

The DEA report denies any such agreement with Chambers. But an internal
document dated November 1995 says the agency indeed agreed to pay Chambers
a percentage of the value of drugs and money agents seized. A DEA agent's
testimony confirmed the arrangement.

The report says the DEA's St. Louis field office was never "officially
notified" that the U.S. attorney's office here was rejecting any
investigations relying on Chambers.

The Post-Dispatch has verified that then-U.S. Attorney Ed Dowd called the
special agent in charge of the DEA's St. Louis office in 1998 and bluntly
told him not to bring any more cases if Chambers was to be a witness. Dowd
recommended that use of Chambers be barred nationwide.

The report denies that Dean Hoag, a career federal prosecutor in St. Louis,
dropped charges against a defendant because of Chambers' lies.

But federal court records substantiate Hoag's statement to a reporter that
he dropped charges against a woman on Oct. 26, 1998; Hoag feared Chambers
had enticed the woman into a drug deal.

Hoag called Chambers "a flimflam man," and said the DEA needed stronger
control of him. Hoag now says he can no longer discuss Chambers.

The report says Chambers lied four times while testifying under oath for
the DEA.

But according to available court records, Chambers lied a lot more than
that. They show he lied in at least 16 trials - and probably many more -
when he told judges and juries that he had never been arrested or
convicted, inflated his educational background and claimed he had paid
taxes on his DEA earnings.

In response to the Post-Dispatch's findings, the DEA said its report on
Chambers was constantly being revised. Fiano and other officials would not
provide a copy of any updated report, but the agency now admits verifying
Chambers' lies in 13 trials.

So far, no outside agency is investigating the DEA's use of Chambers.

Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a confirmation hearing for
acting DEA Administrator Donnie Marshall without raising the question of
what he or his subordinates knew about Chambers.

Government misconduct

In April 1993, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, Calif.,
wrote that "the record clearly demonstrates" that Chambers had perjured
himself repeatedly.

In March 1995, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis reached
the same conclusion, adding a condemnation of what it called the
government's "haphazard approach" to uncovering the truth.

In November 1996, Chambers was again a DEA witness, this time in federal
court in New Orleans. A defense attorney asked how the government could
continue to use someone who had a record of arrests but repeatedly swore he
didn't.

Replied Chambers: "I think I'm about the best . . ."

Much later, after Chambers had became a hot potato, the DEA credited him
with being the most active informer in the agency's history, participating
in nearly 300 investigations leading to 445 arrests.

In March 1997, DEA Special Agent Michael Stanfill testified in a Colorado
state court that Chambers was to have been paid $19,000 for his work in
Minnesota but forfeited $5,000 as punishment for lying in court about his
record.

Still, Chambers continued to testify for the DEA - and to lie. In a recent
case, he lied in Tampa, Fla., about his arrests.

In June, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington noted
Chambers' continued perjury for the DEA. She wrote that the evidence of
extensive government misconduct was "very compelling."

"We didn't know"

None of these or other warnings from judges, defense attorneys or
prosecutors seemed to register at the agency's headquarters, two black
towers in Arlington, Va.

How could the DEA's leaders not know a federal appellate court had labeled
their most active informer a "perjurer"?

The answer, senior DEA operations officials insist, is that only rulings
that overturn convictions come to their attention - and no defendant in a
Chambers case has won an appeal.

"It just would never come to us," said Fiano, the chief of operations.

But if Fiano and his predecessor did not know, lawyers in their chief
counsel's office at headquarters did. On May 20, about three months before
Fiano says he knew, Gregory Mitchell, acting chief of the DEA's domestic
law section, issued a two-page legal memorandum.

"The witness has been thoroughly impeached throughout federal case law, and
the print media," Mitchell wrote. He quoted from three court rulings and
two newspaper articles.

Records show the memo went to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles,
where Chambers was to be a witness, plus eight DEA field offices, including
St. Louis.

The special agents in charge of each of those field offices report to
Fiano, as they did to his predecessor.

Fiano became chief of domestic operations in April 1998 and worldwide
operations in July 1999. He has charge of all 4,500 DEA special agents and
about 4,500 confidential informers, including Chambers.

In August, Fiano said, Terry Parham, the DEA's chief spokesman, alerted him
of allegations of Chambers' lying. Fiano said he immediately "put a hold on
using him."

Actually, DEA records show, the order allowed agents to continue using
Chambers with approval from the special agent in charge at one of the 21
domestic offices.

Fiano said he didn't know if the allegations were true. He said Chambers
may have been involved in ongoing investigations "that we couldn't stop
unless we had firm concrete evidence that he did, in fact, perjure himself
- - which we hadn't at that time."

Not until February, six months later, did the DEA "deactivate" Chambers,
pending the results of its still unfinished internal investigation.

Chambers' suspension came two weeks after the Post-Dispatch published on
Jan. 16 the results of a four-month investigation. U.S. Attorney General
Janet Reno read it, and a few days later Chambers was out.

But not all the way out; a DEA spokesman said Chambers could continue to
work on existing cases.

The scandal has grown since then, as prosecutors in Florida and other
states dropped charges against 14 defendants rather than call Chambers to
testify.

Early in April, Fiano said, the DEA began an investigation to determine
whether Chambers should remain on the payroll and to find out what the
agents knew. The scope includes interviews with prosecutors, he added.

The inquiry began two years after Steward, the public defender from
California, first warned the DEA about Chambers.

"This will never happen again"

The DEA now is distancing itself from its former star, and Fiano says it is
unlikely Chambers will return to work.

The agency says it is adopting new regulations requiring field offices to
keep records of any allegations that an informer lied. Similar regulations
already were on the books but, for a variety of reasons, fell through the
cracks, the DEA says.

Because many informers are criminals, Fiano said his agency has the
toughest restrictions on them of any federal police agency. "You can't live
with them; you can't live without them," he suggested.

Chambers may be unique, Fiano says, providing reliable information about
drug dealers in exchange for money. His ability to make quick deals helps
agents look good, and some reciprocate by treating him as an equal.

Fiano says it has never been proved that Chambers lied about any material
facts - other than about himself. He says he doubts whether agents
intentionally violated any laws to protect him.

"This will never happen again," Fiano said. "If somebody needs their head
slapped or their hand slapped, we will do that. We'll fix it and go on with
business - under the new guidelines."

Case of the disappearing files

Critics, pointing to Chambers' many in-house defenders, are dubious. They
point to the case of the disappearing DEA files on Chambers in California.

In 1988, Ellyn Marcus Lindsay, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles,
told a judge that she had the DEA's file on Chambers and that it included
his arrest records.

But by December 1999, another assistant U.S. attorney, Stephen Wolfe, was
in front of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California explaining
why he had not disclosed the evidence that Chambers had lied.

By law, prosecutors are required to provide full information about their
witnesses, so defense lawyers can use anything negative to raise questions
with jurors about the credibility of the testimony.

Wolfe told the court that he personally had inspected the file and that
there was nothing there. "It's clear they never put anything bad about an
informant into these type of files . . . never," the prosecutor told the
judges.

Other prosecutors across the country may have some explaining to do if it
turns out that agents withheld information from them.

In Tampa, the U.S. attorney's office is being accused of prosecutorial
misconduct by a defense lawyer for failing to disclose evidence of
Chambers' past lies. It's one of a growing number of appeals of Chambers'
cases.

"For somebody to testify falsely, then admit that under oath and be paid
for it - that's wrong," says the defense attorney, Marcia Shein of Atlanta.
"How much are we willing to be in bed with these people?"