THIS MOLE'S STILL FOR HIRE

During a four-month sting operation, capped with a late-June sweep timed to
coincide with a well-publicized Meth Summit, the Yamhill County Interagency
Narcotics Team employed a career informant trailing a criminal record and a
well-documented history of entrapment, the News-Register has learned.

Repeating a pitch polished over 32 years of paid informant work in Oregon,
Washington and California, the 51-year-old Portlander dangled hope of
high-paying construction and landscaping work. Those tactics stirred such
controversy in the early 1980s that even the attorney general felt moved to
condemn them, but he seems to have flown below the public radar ever since.

Following his script, investigation shows, undercover operative Marc "The
Mole" Caven suggested it would help applicants' prospects if they could
hook him up with a bit of methamphetamine or marijuana. And at least 46 of
them succumbed to the pitch, landing them berths in the Yamhill County Jail.

The suspects include a 22-year-old McMinnville youth who finally came up
with less than half an ounce of marijuana after reportedly being hounded by
Caven on a daily basis for weeks. Pumping gas, the lure of construction
work at $10.50 an hour got the better of him.

Now facing the Class A felony charge of delivery, pegging him as a dealer,
he fears he will never get the financial aid to follow through on college
plans. He said he's feeling "like my life is over."

A 19-year-old Amity youth was so excited about the job promised to him that
he carried Caven's phony business card everywhere he went, called his big
brother in California with the news and laid plans to buy some sturdy work
boots. He's also facing a felony charge - one sharing Class A status with
murder, rape and kidnapping.

If Caven ever ventured outside the paid informant field, it was not as a
hiring officer with Evergreen Construction and Landscaping, as billed on
the business cards he passed out under the name John King, investigation
shows. In fact, Evergreen and King are both merely figments of Caven's
apparently fertile imagination.

But the would-be job applicants, solicited by Caven on the street, didn't
discover that until local law enforcement officers, working in tandem with
YCINT, scooped them up. The well-orchestrated sweep played out just as the
county's June 23-24 Meth Summit was making local headlines from the
McMinnville Community Center.

Defense lawyers quickly cried entrapment, which has helped derail at least
33 of Caven's previous cases and generated at least seven claims for damages.

Furious over Caven's tactics, the defense lawyers have demanded District
Attorney Brad Berry drop the entire roster of cases. So far, he has refused.

Sheriff's Lt. Jim Carelle leads the interagency YCINT narcotics squad. He
reports to a board on which Berry sits with McMinnville Police Chief Wayne
McFarlin, Sheriff Jack Crabtree and Newberg Police Chief Robert Tardiff,
with McFarlin serving as chair.

Carelle said Caven was recommended by another agency and performed as
advertised. The veteran detective said he would give the informant a good
recommendation in turn if approached by another agency.

"He produced and he produced really well," Carelle said. "The cases he has
provided were good cases. The district attorney's office took them to grand
jury."

Berry and Carelle declined to reveal terms of Caven's local contract.
However, he apparently likes to be paid on a day-rate rather than
commission basis.

Asked if he supported Caven's job-ploy tactics, Berry declined comment.
"We're prohibited by our ethics rules from discussing investigations on
pending cases or witnesses on a particular case," he said.

McFarlin echoed that, saying, "I'm not going to comment about YCINT
operations." But he made it clear the board ultimately makes the calls on
YCINT tactics, not Carelle acting on his own.

"We make a collective decision on what practices our narcotics team
employs," he said. "We commit a lot of time to see that our team has the
best resources, the best training, the best equipment and the best oversight."

McFarlin also expressed strong support for Carelle's interagency narcotics
squad.

"YCINT is a good team that uses professional standards and operating
practices," he said. He said none of its decisions are made off the cuff.

Law enforcement records first show Caven surfacing as a paid informant for
Oregon law enforcement agencies in 1973 and first pitching his employment
sting ploy to them in 1981.

In the interim, they show him being charged three times with larceny or
theft, three times with unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and once with
contempt of court. But that didn't seem to dim his employment prospects
with police agencies.

Caven, known as "The Mole" since at least 1981, came up with the idea of
holding himself out as John King, foreman with Evergreen Construction and
Landscaping. And law enforcement agencies in at least seven Oregon
counties, four Washington counties and two California counties, eager to
answer citizen calls to crack down on illegal drug use, liked it well
enough to contract for Caven's services.

When Caven's cases came to court, however, defense lawyers inevitably
raised entrapment and ethics issues. As a result, prosecutors were forced
to drop employment-sting cases in at least three Oregon counties in the
spring of 1982 - Umatilla, Douglas and Wasco.

The uproar even reached the attorney general's office, eliciting this
response from Dave Frohnmayer, who went on to run for governor, then assume
the University of Oregon presidency:

"You question the reliability of Marc C. Caven. It is fair to say at least
three Oregon district attorneys agree with you. It's doubtful that a police
agency in Oregon would now use the services of Mr. Caven under any
circumstances."

But that was then and this is now. When Caven came under defense fire
Friday in Yamhill County Circuit Court, Berry, a former Newberg defense
lawyer, said that what happened in cases brought 23 years ago is irrelevant
to current cases - at least with respect to release of Caven's address and
employment terms, sought by defense lawyers.

A dozen local attorneys and more than 40 defendants disagree. They are
demanding the cases be tossed.

"In 25 years of law, this is the clearest case of entrapment I've ever
seen," said Newberg defense lawyer Griff Healy. "Frankly, I've known Mr.
Berry for 20 years, and I consider him a friend. But somebody made a mistake."

Healy is representing 22-year-old Robert McMillan. The McMinnville native
had a spotless record before being scooped up in the June sweep and being
charged with the Class A felony of delivery of a controlled substance -
less than half an ounce of marijuana.

According to an affidavit Healy filed on his client's behalf last week in
circuit court, McMillan was approached at the Amity Chevron station where
he was pumping gas for minimum wage.

Caven asked him if he was interested in a better-paying job, offered him a
business card and application form, and then asked him to score a little
weed, the affidavit alleges.

The next day, Caven began calling McMillan and pressing him about the
marijuana. Over the following weeks, Caven hounded McMillan, calling him at
least once a day and most days more than once.

"There came a point during the weeks of persistent phone calls where it
became clear to me that, if I wanted to get the job, I would have to find
marijuana for Caven," McMillan said in the affidavit.

So he did. But only because he really wanted the job, he said.

He said Caven kept calling afterward, but only to demand drugs, never to
offer him a job with Evergreen Construction and Landscaping.

"Caven now demanded that I find him larger quantities of marijuana," he
said in the affidavit. "It was now clear to me that he was not following
through on the job with Evergreen and I told him 'No' and asked him to stop
calling me."

Interviewed Saturday in Healy's office in Newberg, McMillan bowed his head
as he told his story in the company of his dad. Healy said it was the first
time in 25 years he had allowed a client with pending charges to talk to
the media.

"I'm feeling in shock, like my life is over," McMillan said. "I'm afraid of
what's going to happen. I want to buy a house, get a good job, work five
days a week and live my life."

His chin quivered. He brushed tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.

"I'm at a point where I want to start applying myself and start a career,"
he said. "I'm a hardworking citizen. I have a good family background. I'm
not one to do this kind of thing."

"We support our law enforcement, and we support our community, but this is
wrong," said his father, Pete, a lifelong McMinnville resident working at
Freelin-Wade. "When I heard what had happened, the first thing I thought
was, 'I can't believe this isn't entrapment.'

"He would have never done anything like that. I know my kid."

Like many young people, McMillan was taking a break between high school and
college, trying to identify a career path. That choice will all depend now
on whether he ends up with a felony drug conviction, preventing him from
taking out federally guaranteed school loans, hurting his chances of
getting other college help and limiting his employment prospects.

But he has a seasoned defense attorney on his side - one who believes
passionately in the cause he's taking on. "The job of law enforcement is to
catch criminals, not create them," his lawyer said, making his point
emphatically.

Healy plans a defense echoing that mounted more than 20 years ago in a
Caven drug case taken to the state Court of Appeals in neighboring
Washington. In that case, defense counsel argued, "The sting abridged his
right to due process, because the scheme did not uncover criminal activity
but instead instigated and created it."

That case began with Jack Pleasant, an unemployed construction worker with
no history of drug involvement, answering a recruiting call from Evergreen
Construction and Landscaping in the fall of 1981. When he turned in his
application, Caven wrote "possible employment" on the cover, then asked
Pleasant if he could score some pot.

Pleasant was one of 17 Tacoma residents swept up in like circumstances that
fall.

He argued entrapment at trial, but lost. He argued entrapment again on
appeal, but lost again.

"Though law enforcement techniques employed in Pleasant's particular case
may be personally abhorrent, our guardianship of constitutional principles
is not measured by personal distaste," the appellate justices said in their
decision.

Two of the elements they cited, however, were Pleasant's quick agreement
and his knowledge of the street price of marijuana. So Healy is hoping for
better in McMillan's case.

Local attorney Greg Perez-Selsky is taking the same tack with another
client caught up in the June sweep - a 19-year-old from Amity. Perez-Selsky
allowed him to share sensitive personal information with the News-Register,
in the presence of his mother, on condition he not be named in the story.

The young man maintained a straight-A record through middle school, then
fell victim to depression and has been battling it ever since, his mother said.

He made it through three years of high school, but the effects of
continuing depression and the medicine he took for it eventually forced him
to give it up.

His mother said his condition worsened to the point where "he couldn't
work, he couldn't drive." So she took a leave from her job and cared for
him at home.

His doctor told him frequent walks would help. And they did - so much so he
began talking about looking for a job again.

On one such walk in May, "The Mole" pulled up in a white sedan, asked him
if he was interested in some high-paying work, and handed him a business
card and application form. He said his name was John King.

"He told me he was new in town and asked if I needed a job," the young man
said. "I was really excited about it.

"Then he asked me if I could do him a favor. I thought it would really help
me get the job, so I called a friend."

Excited about the work coming his way, he carried the Evergreen business
card with him everywhere. He told his family that King was a foreman
looking for locals to help with a construction job, and he was paying
$10.50 an hour.

The Amity youth boasted to his dad, who's in construction, that he would be
making more to start than the old man had. He called his brother in
California to relay the good news. He laid plans to buy some work boots,
knowing he would be needing some sturdy ones.

"I was still waiting the day the cops arrested me," he said. "I thought he
was a friendly guy. I thought he was a foreman."

But the man he knew as King was actually a professional drug informant. So
instead of looking ahead to the start of a Class A job, he's now looking
ahead to the start of a Class A felony trial on a charge of delivery of a
controlled substance.

He'd been thinking of giving school another go, and perhaps going on to
college. But if convicted, he would never be eligible for federally backed
loans for college, and would also be closed out of a lot of other types of aid.

In that respect, the young Amity man follows in a lot of footsteps.

According to a 1982 cover story in Portland's Willamette Week, Caven got
his start turning in high school classmates for money. That was back in
1973, when he would have been a junior.

Between 1973 and 1981, he found paying drug informant work for law
enforcement agencies in Seattle, Olympia and Portland.

He had a series of theft and unauthorized use arrests during those years.
It didn't seem to dim his prospects much, but something else did - a
growing perception that he was unreliable.

Willamette Week said he failed to show up for one Clackamas County trial.
And while he showed up for others, he kept having to admit in court that he
had kept no notes or records.

If that weren't bad enough, he remembered faces well, but his recollection
of events often proved hazy, the newspaper reported. It said he was not
good on details.

A recent appearance in Yamhill County Circuit Court suggests that might
still be a problem 23 years later. Caven was able to recall a person by
sight, but not specify when and where they had met.

The breakthrough for "The Mole" came when he developed his employment ploy
in 1981.

Two counties in Washington quickly took him up on a proposal built around
the new approach. And it worked wonders in developing cases in which
charges could be brought.

In Chelan County, 25 people were arrested after delivering small quantities
of street drugs to Caven. In Yakima, 30 people were arrested.

Two suspects mounted entrapment defenses at trial, and a jury acquitted one
of them. But the rest all signed off on plea agreements, so law enforcement
viewed the Caven sting as a decided success.

Between October 1981 and January 1982, Caven swept through three Oregon
counties - Douglas, Wasco and Umatilla - working his employment sting out
of motel rooms.

But this time, it didn't go as planned.

Furious citizen opposition developed over Caven's tactics. When a
television station discovered and detailed his criminal history, the uproar
reached the tipping point and charges were dismissed in all three counties.

It was this foray that led to the subsequent Willamette Week expose, a
lengthy and detailed piece authored by Paul Richert-Boe.

The saga began in Southern Oregon's Douglas County, where "The Mole" found
paying work with both the sheriff's office and Sutherlin Police Department,
producing 15 arrests.

Heading north to Wasco County, he first approached The Dalles Police
Department, but it wasn't biting.

"He gave us some references, and we checked them," recalled then-officer
Jay Waterbury, who has since become chief of police. "But based on what we
learned, we decided not to become involved."

Waterbury said, "I'm surprised he's still around. You don't want to get
involved with someone like that."

Undeterred, Caven walked across the street to the Wasco County Sheriff's
Office. And there he found work.

For several days in early November 1981, Caven ran his sting out of The
Portage Inn, according to newspaper archives in The Dalles.

With a severe recession sending unemployment soaring, more than 100 eager
jobseekers answered the call, the newspaper reported. He was so successful
with his cover, the paper said, that the local employment office actually
began referring clients.

Sharon Ellis, a single mother of five, was one of the employment office
referrals. Then working two full-time jobs at $3.75 per hour, she had just
finished a welding class and saw skilled trade work in her future.

She jumped at the chance to make $9 an hour working for Evergreen
Construction, even though it meant making a minor-league drug buy for
Caven. But she ended up getting busted instead, along with five others.

In January, Caven moved on east to Umatilla County.

By then, citizen groups had sprung up in The Dalles and Sutherlin to
protest his sting operation. But Hermiston police contracted with Caven
anyway, and he developed up a dozen suspects for them in a week.

Investigation shows the crowning blow came when a Roseburg TV station
discovered Caven's rap sheet and publicized it in a Feb. 15 news report.

Caven was convicted of theft in 1974, at the age of 20. He picked up two
more theft convictions in 1976 and violated his probation on them three
times in three years.

He was convicted of stealing cars in 1977 and 1978. He was also convicted
of an unrelated theft charge in 1978.

These days, all of this is readily available through the Oregon Judicial
Information Network. And all law enforcement agencies enjoy computerized
access.

The day after the TV news report aired, Douglas County District Attorney
Bill Lasswell dismissed 14 cases developed by Caven.

Lasswell told reporters Caven would not make a credible witness, given his
criminal record. And while he felt Caven's operation stopped short of
legally impermissible entrapment, he said a jury would likely be
sympathetic toward unemployed workers in a slumping economy.

Lasswell had the Oregon State Police administer a polygraph exam to one of
the suspects. It showed he was being truthful when he said he bought drugs
for Caven because he needed a job.

Now meting out justice from the Douglas County bench, the then-prosecutor
said his staff could better serve the community by focusing on more
pressing matters on an overcrowded docket.

Over in Umatilla County, District Attorney Fred Bennett dismissed his cases
when Caven failed to show for trial that same spring.

"This guy, from my standpoint, is not going to be an effective witness,"
Bennett told the East Oregonian newspaper, archives from 1982 show. And he
said, "We feel this lack of cooperation is not going to be a temporary
problem."

Bennett also is serving as a judge these days. He holds a circuit court
seat in Lincoln County.

In Wasco County, District Attorney Bernard Smith dismissed both the cases
still pending and the cases in which defendants had already pleaded guilty.

"It was a real brouhaha," Smith said in a phone interview conducted last
week. "Law enforcement claimed they didn't know what was going on. When
they talked to me, it really blew up."

The former DA, now serving on the Wasco County Circuit Court bench,
recalled, "This was when The Dalles was in serious economic troubles. The
aluminum plant had been shut down. There were a lot of unhappy people.

"Half the community was complaining about what law enforcement had done. I
didn't know what we had gotten ourselves into."

By then, "The Mole" had already set off for California. Smith said Caven's
next venture "stunk up" a county in the Napa Valley, so he was surprised to
hear Caven was back on the job.

"In my mind," the judge said, "it's inappropriate to offer jobs in exchange
for drugs. Unsavory stuff.

"Doesn't strike me as the ethical approach. If that's what he's doing, it
wouldn't pass muster here."

Sandee Burbank, a leader in Mothers against Misuse and Abuse, spearheaded
the Wasco County protest back in 1982.

As she recalls it, six people charged with delivering drugs in her county
later filed individual lawsuits in U.S. District County, all reached
settlements. She said 11 jobseekers who hadn't fallen for the scam filed a
separate joint action of their own and settled out for court for $1,000 apiece.

The citizen uproar eventually reached the ears of Frohnmayer at the
Attorney General's Office in Salem. In a letter published in The Dalles
Weekly Reminder, the attorney general said:

"All Oregon residents are feeling acutely the effects of economic hardship.
We recognize that in those circumstances the temptation to engage in
wrongdoing may become very strong... It is doubtful whether any police
agency in Oregon would now use the services of Mr. Caven under any
circumstances."

During his early years in the informant business, Caven was hungry for
media attention. But these days, he's decidedly less so.

Tracked to a tin-sided singlewide trailer he shares with his dog in
Northeast Portland, he opened the door only wide enough to expose one eye,
a balding scalp, scraggly strands of hair hanging down to his shoulders,
sunken cheeks and an graying, unkempt beard.

He looks nothing like the man who once graced the cover of Portland's
Willamette Week, boasting, "I can handle myself. I never hit anyone who
might hurt me, just little people."

Over recent years, defense lawyers say they are aware of occasional
informant work Caven has done in Multnomah, Washington, Tillamook and
Lincoln counties.

If so, he's been maintaining a low profile. And he apparently wants to keep
it that way, as he declined to be interviewed for this article.