FRONTLINE - SNITCH (part 2 of 3)

NARRATOR: Before Congress enacted the mandatory minimum sentences, Joey
probably would have received probation. The 1986 federal laws, passed at
the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, raised the stakes enormously. At
that time, Eric Sterling was counsel to the chairman of the House
subcommittee on crime and took an active part in formulating these laws.

ERIC STERLING, President, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation: The work that
I was involved in, in enacting these mandatory sentences, is probably the
greatest tragedy of my professional life. These laws came about in an
incredible conjunction between politics and hysteria.

It was 1986. Tip O'Neill comes back from the July 4th district recess, and
everybody's talking about the death of the Boston Celtics pick, Len Bias.
That's all his constituents are talking to him about. And he has the
insight, "Drugs. It's drugs. I can take this issue into the election." He
calls the Democratic leadership together in the House of Representatives
and says, "I want a drug bill. I want it in four weeks."

And it set off kind of a stampede. I mean, everybody started trying to get
out front on the drug issue. And- and these were committees- I mean, every
committee, Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Interior and Insular Affairs. I
mean, not just the Judiciary Committee, Foreign Affairs, Ways and Means,
Agriculture. You know Armed Services. Everybody's got a piece of this out
there sort of, you know, fighting to sort of get their- their face on
television talking about the drug problem.

And when we- these mandatories came in the last couple days before the
Congressional recess, before they were all going to race out of town and,
you know, tell the voters about what they're doing to fight the war on
drugs. No hearings, no consideration by the federal judges, no input from
the Bureau of Prisons. I mean, even DEA didn't testify. I mean, the whole
thing was kind of cobbled together with sort of chewing gum and baling
wire. Numbers are picked out of air. And we see what these consequences are
of that kind of legislating.

NARRATOR: As a consequence of this legislation, Joey would have to spend a
minimum of 10 years in prison unless he agreed to set up his friends. He
didn't want to do it.

JOEY SETTEMBRINO: I didn't want to do 10 years in jail, but I also, you
know, didn't want to- didn't want to give up one of my friends, either. I
was kind of torn. I was stuck in the middle.

NARRATOR: His parents were desperate.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: Of course, the first thing is, is that you'll say to
whomever - and in this particular case it was the agents - "Gee, what can I
do to help my son?" And of course they tell you real quick what you can do.
They say to you, "Well, you know, if you work with the government, the
government will turn around and favorably help you get a reduction."

INTERVIEWER: Meaning?

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: Well, meaning that I would go out and try to set someone
else up to help my son.

NARRATOR: The Settembrino family was surprised to learn that information
about any drug dealers could help reduce Joey's sentence. And if Joey
wouldn't cooperate, someone else could do it for him.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: They say to you, "If you can do this, find people that
have drugs and purchase drugs from them, we'll act favorably in giving your
son a 5k1 reduction." And I said, "Well, why would you do that?" "Well, you
want your son to get reduced, right?" I said, "Yes." "We want convictions,
and that's why we do it."

NARRATOR: Jim Boma, assistant U.S. attorney, confirmed the arrangement in a
letter. Jim Settembrino would try to render cooperation to the government
on behalf of his son. If successful, the government would look favorably on
filing a 5k1 motion on behalf of Joey- in other words, reduce his sentence.
Now in Denver, Colorado, Jim Boma did not feel that it was an unusual
arrangement.

JIM BOMA, Assistant U.S. Attorney: I don't find it logically absurd. I'm
sorry. I just don't find any real flaw in that. I guess the bottom line is
that we're trying to gather information so that we can prosecute narcotics
traffickers. And if someone's willing to try to help us, and also it would
benefit the person being charged, I'm going to more than meet them halfway.

NARRATOR: Jim Settembrino would spend the next few months trying to set up
drug dealers.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: I tried to find people who were dealing in drugs by
finding people who were using drugs, but it was kind of difficult, very,
very difficult. No one would sell to me. Many, many occasions that I tried
to, but they just looked at me like, "You're the wrong type. You don't look
the part. Something's wrong." And I- I never was able to make a single sale
from it.

NARRATOR: Then, unexpectedly, he thought he had a break.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: I met a fellow in New York who had been through this
with his daughter. He says, "I know what they want, and I've got some good
connections." And I says, "And you can help?" And he said, "Yes, but it'll
cost you." "So how much will it cost?" "Well, I'll have to make some calls.
I'll be back with you in a couple of days."

He called back and it was $70,000. At that time, I didn't have $70,000
dollars, but I did have a house, so I mortgaged it.

NARRATOR: The money was paid to an informant who identified a South
American smuggler who was bringing drugs into the country. Jim Settembrino,
accompanied by a DEA agent, would then pretend to buy the drugs.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: We had everything all set up. And then Boma called my
attorney, David Bogenschutz, and David called me from his car phone and
said, "Jim, we got a problem." I said, "What's the problem?" He said,
"Well, the problem is, is that Mr. Boma is unhappy" - that's the prosecutor
was unhappy with my filing. "And I got him on the other line right now."

NARRATOR: The filing was a routine legal appeal for a reduction of sentence
that had to be filed by a certain date, if at all. Jim Boma, the
prosecutor, objected.

JIM BOMA: Basically, people have to pick which horse they want to ride. Do
they want to ride the cooperation horse, or do they want to proceed with
the appeal? If our office has to write an appeal, then that costs the
taxpayers money. So someone gets a choice. Either you cooperate and take
your chances. or you can appeal.

NARRATOR: Mr. Boma then reneged on the deal, stressing that his new
decision was now irreversible. Settembrino was crushed.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: I says, "Well, what's that have to do with our deal? Why
are you taking such offense?" "We got no deal. We got no deal. I'm not
doing it. I'm not helping you. You're not helping me. You shouldn't have
had him file that. We had deals working. Now we got no deal. I don't care
if your son stays in jail for 10 or 20 years. It makes no difference to
me." And he hung up the phone.

NARRATOR: Once they lost the federal prosecutor's good will, there was
nothing else Joey's parents could do for him. They had spent more than
$100,000, and Joey is now serving the 6th of his 10-year mandatory minimum
sentence, which judge himself pronounced "excessive."[www.pbs.org: Further
details on Joey's case]

JOEY SETTEMBRINO: They say that they want to get the big guy, they want to
get the big fish, and that's why they go about getting all these little
fish, because eventually you get the big fish. But what they don't realize
is that when the big fish finally gets caught, he tells on the little fish,
and he's free. And I think that's what makes the system very, very messed up.

KATHLEEN KRIETE: I think that Joe made a mistake. I think that Joe knows he
made a mistake. I don't think anybody's doubted that. But nobody's ever,
that I've ever talked to- and I've talked to over a thousand people, so
this isn't just a mother talking. Nobody's ever said that he should do 10
years for what happened.

NARRATOR: The mandatory minimum sentences were criticized by the
Congressional Sentencing Commission as early as 1991. In this report, the
commission found that all defense lawyers and nearly half of the
prosecutors queried had serious problems with mandatory minimums sentences.
Most of the judges pronounced them "manifestly unjust." Others were less
decisive.

JEFF SESSIONS: The Federal system is a very effective system to prosecute
criminal cases, and it does a good job at it. You can argue whether the
guidelines are too severe or not. I think that's a debatable issue, and I'm
perfectly willing to discuss that. But if the guidelines called for a
certain sentence, I expected my prosecutors to tell the judge the truth and
let the judge sentence.

NARRATOR: But the mandatory minimums, in effect, deprived judges of their
discretion to sentence, and many were critical.

Judge ROBERT W. SWEET: It's a travesty, quite frankly. It's probably the
most important- one of the most important functions a judge has: assess the
defendant, assess the crime, assess the society and try to reach a just
result. I think that's the way the system ought to work, but because of the
mandatory minimums, it doesn't.

NARRATOR: The 1991 report particularly criticized the transfer of power in
courts from judges - who are supposed to be impartial - to prosecutors, who
are not.

JONATHAN TURLEY: A prosecutor builds a case, that case is supposed to be
built on true evidence. But there's always a tendency to fill in gaps, and
those gaps are often filled in with informers. What's remarkable is that
most criminal cases have people with incredibly low levels of credibility,
people who would clearly say most anything to get out of a problem. And we
have a system that's becoming so coercive that even ordinary people may end
up doing the most extraordinary things in order to get out of that system.

PATRICK HALLINAN, Defense Attorney: You know, when you have a war, there's
only one point in a war, and that's to win. So whatever impedes victory,
you throw out and get out of the way. And so this war on drugs has led to
corruption of the American justice system. It's led to a corroding of the
moral fiber of this country. And I don't mean the drugs, I mean the kind of
things where you can call the wife to testify against the husband, when you
can threaten the child to testify against the father. I mean those sort of
things. And yes, this is- this is part of the war on drugs.

NARRATOR: Patrick Hallinan, a well-known criminal defense attorney in San
Francisco, has had his own experience in the war on drugs.

PATRICK HALLINAN: I had a client who had come and seen me several times
over a period of, well, almost 20 years. And every time he got in some
trouble, he'd come and see me and I'd represent him. And then, in the late
'80s, he got in trouble which was big trouble. And he was being
investigated by a United States grand jury out of Reno as the head of and
one of the directors of a major smuggling operation of Thai marijuana.

NARRATOR: The client was Ciro Mancuso, a successful building contractor who
lived in Squaw Valley, Nevada. In the late '80s, he was accused of being
the mastermind of a $140 million marijuana-smuggling ring.

PATRICK HALLINAN: In preparing the case, it became very evident to us that
they were going to convict him. And when that became evident, I said to
Mancuso, I said, "Ciro, you know, they're going to convict you, and the
punishment's going to be awful. We have to make some deal for you." And so
he said, "Go ahead and make it." He never did admit to me that he really
did the things that he was charged with, but he said, "Go ahead and make
the deal."

NARRATOR: Once the deal was made, it was DEA agent Ron Davis and his
partner, Rich Pierce, who debriefed Mancuso and began working with him. He
was more than pleased with the results.

RON DAVIS: One could not ask more from the person who has cooperated. He
was very a credible, very believable individual. He was very articulate and
had very detailed information, and he fulfilled the commitment to the
government and more.

NARRATOR: For four and a half years, Ciro Mancuso worked hard for the
government.

CIRO MANCUSO: I can't think of anything possibly that I could have done for
them that I didn't do. It was implied that if my cooperation went well,
that that was my part of it, and then that their part of it was to go to
the judge and to make sure that I was fairly treated- in other words, that
vast, tremendous consideration would be given to what I had done at time of
sentencing.

NARRATOR: The cooperation went very well. Drugs were seized, and many
arrests were made.

RON DAVIS: As a result of his cooperation, we indicted, I believe, between
another 20 and 25 other defendants. And I believe we seized off another $10
million to $15 million in drug assets.

NARRATOR: Then in August, 1993, with their own cameras rolling, the DEA
made one more bust.

PATRICK HALLINAN: I was working in my library, and I saw these two figures
come out of the kitchen and up the few stairs into the library. And they
had machine guns. And they ordered me on the floor, and I thought, "My God,
they're going to rob the house." And then they stood up, and I saw across
their chest "DEA," and I realized that these were the cops, and I had this
feeling of relief. And then it dawned on me that they weren't there by
accident

NARRATOR: Implicated by Mancuso, Patrick Hallinan was indicted and arrested.

INTERVIEWER: What you were accused of?

PATRICK HALLINAN: Well, I was accused in three separate indictments. Each
one got worse and worse and worse, so that in the first one I was- I was
really accused as being the consiglieri of this marijuana-smuggling ring.
In the last indictment, I was charged under RICO with a racketeering- a
racketeering charge, which would have put me in prison for the rest of my
life. And when you read that indictment, it sounded like I was the capo who
was doing the smuggling and planning the operations and marketing the
goods. It was ludicrous, but deadly. It was very dangerous.

RON DAVIS, Former DEA Agent: No federal prosecutor would have gone forward
on a prosecution against Mr. Hallinan if he did not believe that Mr.
Mancuso was telling the truth. This support of going forward to indict Mr.
Hallinan was agreed at the highest level in the U.S. Attorney's office, all
the way back to main Justice.

NARRATOR: Defense attorneys saw this as a case of a dangerously
overreaching prosecution.

JOHN KEKER, Defense Attorney: The war between prosecutors and defense
lawyers ebbs and flows, but there are some fanatic prosecutors who believe
that people who represent people accused of crime are the same as the
people who are accused of crime. And they do not understand either their
function or criminal defense lawyers' functions, so they think that going
after and intimidating criminal defense lawyers is a good thing for
fighting crime.

NARRATOR: John Keker, one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the
country, represented Patrick Hallinan.

JOHN KEKER: Patrick, after learning the evidence, decided and advised his
client that the best thing was to make an agreement with the government.
Patrick turned him over to the government, and Ciro quickly figured out
that what the government would be most interested in is if he could produce
for them the head of a well-known criminal defense lawyer.

CIRO MANCUSO: I was put under to tremendous pressure to cooperate with the
government, including having a direct threat made - and threats followed up
on - to indict my wife. We had two small children. I was told that my wife
would be indicted. She could very easily get a long prison term, and my
children wouldn't have anybody to raise them.

DAVID FECHHEIMER, Private Investigator: Well, Mancuso was in a terrible
spot. Regardless of whether or not you think he deserved to be in that
spot, from his perspective he was in a tight spot, and he'd been offered a
way to lessen his pain. And the way to lessen his pain was to serve up
Patrick Hallinan.

NARRATOR: Private investigator David Fechheimer was hired to help build the
case for the defense.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you suppose the government wanted Hallinan?

DAVID FECHHEIMER: Patrick was among the most successful defense lawyers of
his generation in northern California. He'd been a thorn in the
government's side. He was rich. He was well known. He had a famous name. He
lived in a fancy house. He was just the kind of trophy that these agents
wanted.

NARRATOR: Patrick Hallinan came from a prominent and controversial family.
His parents, Vivian and Vincent, were known radical activists. Vincent
Hallinan was one of the most famous lawyers on the West Coast. He was a
friend of the left and of labor, and he represented controversial figures
in the political arena. His battles with the government were legendary. In
1952 he ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket. His eldest son,
Patrick, would also become visible and controversial.

JOHN KEKER, Defense Attorney: You could prosecute marijuana dealers all
your life and nobody will have ever heard of you. If you prosecute some
well-known criminal defense lawyer, you'll be famous.

NARRATOR: Patrick Hallinan's trial started on January 26th, 1995, in Reno,
Nevada, and lasted seven weeks. Ciro Mancuso was the star witness.

CIRO MANCUSO: My testimony about Mr. Hallinan was pretty much limited to
obstruction-of-justice-type charges and money laundering.

NARRATOR: Yet he testified that Hallinan was the virtual consigliere of his
cartel, and that he gave his stamp of approval to everything Mancuso did.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: Yes, he did get on the witness stand. And yes, he did say
everything he'd agreed to say about Hallinan, but no one believed him. And
Hallinan was not convicted.

NARRATOR: After seven weeks, it took the jury less than five hours to find
Patrick Hallinan not guilty. Mancuso was blamed for the loss of the case.

CIRO MANCUSO: The prosecution lost. And being on their team, the blame for
that, I believe, was shifted as much as possible to me. And at that point,
the betrayal set in.

RON DAVIS: And then the government did a 180, so to speak, on their
commitment towards Mr. Mancuso, basically holding him accountable for the
loss of that trial. So they successfully did discredit him by calling him a
liar. And as a person who was responsible for that investigation, I was
also expendable.

NARRATOR: Ron Davis chose early retirement. The Justice Department and the
prosecution distanced themselves from the case. Mancuso, who hoped for
probation, got nine years in prison.

CIRO MANCUSO: I believe that had the prosecution won the case and gotten a
conviction against Mr. Hallinan that I would not have come back to prison
at all.

PATRICK HALLINAN: And me, I'd have been in deep trouble. The charges for
which I was- the charges that I was confronting carried a potential life
sentence, a minimum of 19 years. They would have picked me up at that
table, from the table where I was sitting and put me in a jail, and I
wouldn't have gotten out for 19 years.

NARRATOR: Hallinan was exonerated, but he had spent three years of mental
anguish and lost a $1.5 million. As a rule, the government does not take on
rich, powerful lawyers. In fact, they don't take on very many powerful drug
lords, either. In another report issued in 1995, the U.S. Sentencing
Commission found that only 11 percent of federal drug trafficking
defendants were major traffickers. More than half were low-level offenders.

ERIC STERLING, President, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation: Fifteen
thousand federal drug cases a year, the bulk of them mandatory-minimum
cases, most of them minor offenders. Only 10 percent of all the federal
drug cases are high-level traffickers. You know, you wonder, like, who's
asleep at the switch at the Justice Department?

NARRATOR: But the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys must enforce
the laws created by Congress, and Congress wants them tough.

Sen. ORRIN HATCH: In all honesty, I think that when you have people who are
pushing drugs on our kids, and that they are pushing significant amounts of
drugs on our kids or pushing at all, we ought to get as tough as nails on
them. And I don't think that- in many respects, we ought to lock them up
and throw away the keys.

JONATHAN TURLEY, Law Professor, George Washington University: Right now our
population, our jail population, is larger than five of our states. Now,
that is a costly war. We are fast approaching a society not just of
informers, but we are turning into a criminalized society where a
remarkably high number of our population is either in jail or trying to put
the other people in jail.

NARRATOR: How the drug laws affect the life of a community can be seen in
Mobile, Alabama, which has one of the highest federal drug conviction rates
in the country. Take the case of number 33. Clarence Aaron was a
23-year-old student and a promising athlete at Southern University
Louisiana. His home was Mobile. He was the only one of Linda Aaron's three
children who went to college.

LINDA AARON: I've always did domestic work, you know, and I've worked all
my life, but I just couldn't afford to send none of them to college. And
his granddaddy sent him to college, so-

NARRATOR: His father, Martin Clarence Aaron, is a musician and a personal
trainer.

MARTIN AARON: He was the only one that was in college at the time this
occurred. He was- he was trying to get an education, trying to better his
self. The only one in this whole mess that was doing something positive
with the clean- squeaky-clean background was Clarence Aaron. And he is the
fall guy out of this whole mess.

NARRATOR: Clarence Aaron was accused of conspiring with friends to
distribute crack cocaine. He went to trial and was convicted. He was
sentenced to three concurrent life sentences without the possibility of
parole. He started serving his sentence in 1992.

CLARENCE AARON: I just couldn't believe that when the judge told me that-
three life sentences running concurrent. When he said that, I was setting
in my chair, and I was thinking to myself, I say, "Where in the world do I
suppose to start doing three life sentences at? Where am I supposed to
start at, in the middle, at the end part of it, where?" I just couldn't
believe that this was occurring to me. All I'd seen my whole life,
everything that I had strived and stayed out of trouble for all my life, go
down the drain, you know?

LINDA AARON: Honestly, I expected for them to give him probation - I really
did - for the part that he played in this. That's what I was looking for,
at least- at least some years on paper, that's all. Nothing else. Because
when they gave him life without parole, it literally killed me. I didn't
even exist anymore because I couldn't understand it. I said, "How in the
world could these people sit here and just take a young man's life away
like that, 23 years old, try to take his whole life away from him for
something that they know"- and they know, it too. They know they coaxed all
those boys to say what they said. They know that. How can they do that?

NARRATOR: The boys were Clarence's friends from high school and his first
cousin with whom he grew up. The friends were involved in dealing drugs.
Clarence introduced them to people he knew in Baton Rouge who were also
involved in drugs. He drove them from one city to the other, accompanied by
his cousin, and was paid $1,500 for his help.

MARTIN AARON: Traveling with the wrong person, the wrong crowd, he's
guilty. Of being with people going on certain trips, he's guilty. But so
far as the picture that they try to paint him for, he's not guilty. And
he's not- and he don't deserve to be punished as if he's some dope kingpin.
They- the sentencing that they gave him was as if he was a dope kingpin.
This guy didn't even have a brand-new car.

NARRATOR: Dennis Knizley was Clarence's defense lawyer.

DENNIS KNIZLEY, Defense Attorney: Clarence Aaron was one of the worst cases
I've ever had. Clarence tells me that the FBI came to his college classroom
and pulled him out of the classroom and arrested him for possession with
intent to distribute cocaine.

What makes it the worst case I ever had was there was absolutely no cocaine
introduced into evidence. There was no cocaine seen. Nobody- the police had
no cocaine. The FBI had no cocaine. There was no scientific evidence, no
fingerprints, nothing. The entire case was based upon the testimony of what
they call "cooperating individuals."

NARRATOR: The cooperating individuals were Clarence Aaron's friends from
high school and his first cousin. When the friends were finally caught
dealing drugs, they all, including the cousin, turned informant and
testified against Clarence. They all had prior criminal records, and they
were all facing life in prison. Clarence was the only one with no record
and no hard evidence of any sort.

The U.S. attorney's office in downtown Mobile prosecuted the case. J. Don
Foster is the U.S. attorney for the southern district of Alabama.

J. DON FOSTER, U.S. Attorney: Well, do you understand that he arranged for
the purchase of some nine kilograms of cocaine? Can you imagine how much
damage nine kilograms of cocaine, or converted to crack, can do in a
community or in this country? Nine kilograms.

DENNIS KNIZLEY: There was not any cocaine found anywhere, and certainly no
cocaine was never put on any scale to weigh to say, "Okay it was this much
cocaine, which then support this"- simply and totally, the entirety of the
witnesses against him were people who were exchanging their testimony for
their liberty.

(continued in part 3)