THE ORIGINAL SUSPECTS

Four narcotics detectives who raided a small time pot-and-pills sales
operation last year were arrested Monday on charges that include planting
evidence, taking a prisoner illegally and lying about it in pretrial testimony.

They didn't break the law, lawyers for two of the officers said. None were
locked up, but all four surrendered at Miami-Dade County Police
headquarters, were booked at a branch county jail, and posted bail before
they were let go.

The officers and the charges against them:

Sgt. Jose J. Diaz, 36 -- false imprisonment, perjury in official proceedings
and conspiracy to commit perjury.

Officers Hector J. Llevat, 25, and Andre B. Vaughn, 37 -- both charged with
perjury and conspiracy.

Officer Florencio Boucourt, 31 -- false imprisonment, perjury, conspiracy
and official misconduct.

They are accused of dishonestly conducting a raid on the night of May 22,
1998, on a townhouse at 6621-E SW 116th Pl., in a development called Snapper
Village. The motive is not clear, said Donald Ungurait, spokesman for the
state attorney's office. Cocaine, marijuana and rohypnol -- a sedative
nicknamed "roofies" -- were confiscated in the raid. They also found money
and a pistol. Four men were arrested. Two pleaded guilty. Another was placed
in a program. Charges against the key man, Adrian Ramos, were dropped.

All of them were denounced Monday evening by Boucourt's lawyer, Richard
Sharpstein:

"Detective Boucourt and the others have been dedicated officers for years,
keeping drugs off the street. Now the state attorney has outrageously turned
the tables on them by believing the stories of drug dealers."

Said Doug Hartman, Llevat's lawyer: "There's got to be more to this than we
know."

Evidently so. Defendants often accuse the police of setting them up, but
it's unusual for such accusations to lead to the arrest of the arresting
officers.

Information from lawyer

Adrian Ramos' lawyer, Bill Clay, gave investigators the information that
brought that about. He said that a few months after the raid, when the
detectives submitted to pretrial depositions under oath, he caught them
lying, hinted strongly that he knew it and gave them plenty of chances to
switch.

"I've taken thousands of depositions," Clay said. "I've never invited
someone to the truth as much as I did in these depositions."

According to Ungurait, the state attorney's spokesman, this is what happened
on the night in question:

"These guys are a narcotics unit. Their squad received a tip from a security
guard at the apartment complex that narcotics activity was occurring in an
apartment. They went there and stopped two young ladies who had just come
from the apartment. They confiscated some rohypnol and marijuana from them."

Apartment pointed out

The women pointed out the apartment where they had bought the dope, the
spokesman said: While Llevat stayed outside with them, the other detectives
went to the apartment, knocked on the door and pushed their way in when the
door was opened.

Inside, three tenants and a visitor were detained while the place was
searched. Later they were taken to jail.

Apparently, illegal drugs were legitimately found in the apartment --
cocaine, marijuana and equipment such as scales, according to Boucourt's
lawyer -- but Ungurait said the detectives also planted under a mattress the
drugs they had taken from the women outside. That apparently was done in
order to hold a suspect named Freddie Castro, who couldn't be linked to the
other drugs, the spokesman said.

Outside, he said, Detective Llevat let the two young women go.

Women not mentioned

Their names, not made public Monday, were not mentioned in reports the
detectives filed about the raid and arrests.

Ungurait said Clay, the defense lawyer, eventually discovered discrepancies
in the detectives' descriptions of what happened that night. He told the
state attorney's office and the county police department's professional
compliance bureau, which investigates complaints against officers.

Clay found the discrepancies when he summoned the detectives to depositions
- -- a routine pretrial preparation process. Such sessions are usually
conducted semi-formally out of court, but the oath to tell the truth is the
same one witnesses give during a trial and it is equally enforceable.

Clay said he found out most of the answers before he asked the questions, so
he knew when the truth wasn't being told.

Early in his investigation, he had acquired police radio dispatch tapes on
which the detectives were heard asking for cars to transport six prisoners
- -- the four men in the raided apartment and the two women who were stopped
outside. He thought it peculiar that only the four men were taken away, and
that the women were not mentioned in any police reports written that night.

His client, Ramos, knew one of the women. Clay found her and then the other.

"I interviewed them and they told me what happened," Clay said.

"In the depositions, I was signaling the detectives that I know the truth;
don't BS me. I asked a series of questions and then re-asked them a
different way. The questions were kind of impregnated with the obvious
message: I know the truth. Please tell me the truth. Don't take a risk and
lie. As a citizen and as a defense lawyer, it saddens me to see police
officers get into trouble. I'm sorry to see someone who may have crossed the
line and not told the truth under oath, but that's their responsibility."
e-mail: amarkowitz@herald.com