DECADE-LONG DRUG CASE AT END

Federal Jury Convicts Oakland Man Of Trafficking, Conspiracy Charges

A federal jury in San Francisco this week found an Oakland man guilty of
operating a drug-trafficking organization that investigators once considered
one of the largest in the East Bay.

Pius Ailemen, a 35-year-old Nigerian who had been identified by law
enforcement sources as one of the largest heroin dealers in Oakland, was
found guilty of conspiracy, operating a continuing criminal enterprise and
possession of drugs for sale.

The jury reached its verdict late Monday afternoon after a seven-week trial
that was marked by occasionally rancorous exchanges between U.S. District
Judge Charles Breyer and Ailemen's attorneys, Harold Rosenthal and Mark Bloom.

Neither lawyer was available yesterday, and the U.S. Attorney's office, the
federal agency that prosecuted the case, declined to comment on the verdict.

No date for sentencing Ailemen has been set. He faces a mandatory minimum
20-year prison sentence on the criminal-enterprise charge alone, plus
additional prison terms for the conspiracy and narcotics charges.

The verdict brought to a close a prosecution that has proceeded with
snaillike slowness.

Ailemen was originally arrested on drug charges in the late 1980s, but he
was acquitted. He served a brief prison term for a passport violation but
allegedly went right back into the heroin business on his release from custody.

Investigators tracking a Canadian drug connection traced it back to Ailemen
in the Bay Area and set up an elaborate sting investigation that resulted in
a 43-count federal indictment against Ailemen and 16 alleged associates in 1989.

In 1995, a federal judge dropped the charges because the Justice Department
had seized a substantial amount of cash and a luxury automobile at the time
of Ailemen's arrest, and an appellate court had ruled that prosecuting a
suspect who has been the subject of a forfeiture proceeding violated the
constitutional ban on double jeopardy.

However, the charges were reinstated a year later after the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that asset seizures did not preclude criminal prosecution in
such cases.

Soon after the case began to move forward again, Ailemen's defense attorneys
accused the U.S. attorney's office of prosecutorial misconduct during the
investigation that led to Ailemen's original indictment.

In 1997, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker threw out extensive wiretap
evidence against Ailemen and his associates, ruling that the warrants
prosecutors used to obtain the taps had been based on a pattern of lies by
federal investigators.

Walker determined that Bob Silano, an investigator for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, not only misled the federal judge who granted
the wiretap authorization but also made false statements before a grand jury
and at an evidentiary hearing on the case in U.S. District Court.

The judge identified 17 different "material misrepresentations" federal
agents had used to obtain the taps.

"The government agents engaged in a deliberate attempt to mislead the
court," the judge said in his ruling excluding the wiretap evidence. "Under
these circumstances, the court has no alternative but to suppress the
unlawfully obtained evidence."

Later, the government reindicted Ailemen in a trimmed-down case that charged
him only with conspiracy, operating a criminal enterprise and three counts
of possessing drugs for sale.

It was on those charges that Ailemen was found guilty earlier this week.