MOBY DEA

Call Me Ishmael. Just Give Me The Damn Audit!

You probably wouldn't understand the psychology of a reporter.

Well, maybe if you think of a fisherman.

His fish story is better if the line snapped the first time, then he hooked
himself in the seat of his pants, then he fell out of the boat, cut his
finger, there was blood, and finally he landed the fish. That proves he's a
hero for having won a contest with one of nature's lower life forms.

So that's why I've had one of the best two-week stretches of my life.

Just superlative. First, when I asked the Dallas Police Department for a
copy of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration's audit of the DPD's
narcotics procedures, they told me it didn't exist.

So next I filed a legal demand for it. The DPD then broke the law by not
answering my request within the 10-day time limit set by state law.

DPD breaks law. I love it. Some time after the legal deadline, the chief's
office faxed me a year-old DPD press release about the DEA report with
several portions "redacted" or removed so I couldn't see them. The main
thing redacted was the part that talked about how the DPD accounts for and
controls the money it pays to informants--a huge issue in the Dallas
fake-drugs scandal and presumably a prime focus of the recently announced
city panel to look into fake drugs. Fake drugs is the scandal in 2001 in
which dozens of innocent Mexican immigrants were imprisoned or deported on
cocaine charges after someone connected with Dallas police planted big bags
of ground-up billiard chalk on them. No one ever tested the stuff to see
that it wasn't cocaine.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in "snitch fees" were channeled through
narcotics detectives to confidential informants. Now no one seems to know
who authorized the payments or who really signed the receipts or where the
money went. A two-year federal probe of fake drugs produced one indictment
of a detective, who was recently acquitted.

Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill two weeks ago set up an
independent prosecutor to consider state criminal charges against
participants in the scandal.

A few days later the city announced its own panel to look at administrative
and procedural issues within the police department to explain why fake
drugs happened. When the announcement was made, city council members told
the panel they especially wanted to know what had happened to all the money
in snitch and buy fees and what issues may exist in the accounting of such
money in the future. Somewhere along in here, Hill reminded me that former
Chief Terrell Bolton had asked the DEA to come in and do an audit of these
very questions a year ago. Hill said the DEA had produced an audit report
and had delivered it to Bolton, but Hill said when he asked to see the
report, Bolton would not release it.

Here was my thinking: If the city launches a probe of standard operating
procedures in the police department regarding fake drugs and can't even
figure out that the DEA just did the same thing, it means they are one of
three things: 1) nuts, 2) stupid or 3) stupid nuts.

Which brings me back to fishing.

I complained to the DPD that a year-old DPD press release with stuff taken
out--especially the stuff about the money--is not a DEA report.

Meanwhile, City Attorney Madeleine Johnson, who has been great about all
this, caught wind of the issue and reviewed it and decided the DEA report
was public and should be released in full. The next day the DPD called me
and told me to come downtown and pick up a document, which turned out to be
the DPD press release with stuff put back in. I wrote a letter to Johnson
complaining that a year-old DPD press release, even with stuff put back in,
is not a DEA report. She called me up and said she had been informed that I
had been provided the "full universe" of the DEA report. "Maybe you have
it, and you don't know that what you have is the document," she said.

The mature fisherman ponders: Is this a bite? A snag? Or an aneurism? I
said please look at what they gave me. She called me back and said she had
looked at the document, and it was not the DEA report.

She said that she would "get to the bottom of this." Eventually she called
me back and said she had her hands on the DEA report, and she told me to
come back downtown and get it.

I went downtown.

She gave me the DEA report.

Tragically, page four, dealing with the money, had apparently "fallen out"
of it, but she said she would find page four for me soon. At this writing,
I do not yet have page four, which is wonderful, because not having it
gives me something to live for. I am confident that page four will turn up
eventually, and when it does, I plan to take it to a taxidermist.

But enough of me and how I have to do my job. The real news here is that
the report, what I have of it, is quite interesting.

The trick is in laying it all out on a table side by side--the press
release with stuff taken out, the press release with stuff back in and the
DEA report minus page four. What emerges is a picture of two things: 1) the
issues found by the DEA, and 2) the issues the DPD has been seeking to keep
out of the public eye.

Follow the money. Even with page four missing, I can see some of what the
DEA was telling the police department about its accounting practices.

In the redacted press release, a section called "Guidelines for Informant
Payments" says only that the DEA recommendation is "protected information."

Not confidential or secret or withheld for police security reasons.

Not exempt or sensitive.

Just "protected," as in protecting their you-know-what. The recommendation
had nothing to do with any inside police information about investigative
techniques. Instead, according to the report when I finally got my hands on
it, the DEA was telling the DPD it needed to establish a firm system of
permissions, sign-offs, authority and audit trails for cash taken out of
the department and handed to street sources. The DEA also tells the DPD in
the report that "the largest single payment to any confidential informant"
should be no more than $20,000. The DEA goes on to say the DPD should adopt
a guideline that says, "The maximum sum paid to any confidential informant
in any calendar year is $20,000." The DEA recommends that the DPD adopt a
formal amendment to its procedures manual stating that only the management
persons authorized to sign off on payments can sign off on those payments:
You can't claim the boss was out of the office, in other words, and then go
shop for another signature or scratch something on the page yourself and
say you can't remember who signed it. Think about this. Think of a
situation where you work, in which there was a cash drawer from which you
could take amounts over $20,000, and the money was basically uncounted.

I can see why the DPD would not want a lot of press scrutiny of its
accounting practices.

In fact, I can see why no one anywhere at City Hall would welcome that
focus. Robert W. Reynolds, a CPA who is basically being hounded out of his
job with the city auditor's department, has talked to me in the past about
the city's habit of not counting its money ("The Emperor's Checkbook,"
November 21, 2002). Reynolds points out that if you put a large pile of
cash in front of people and then demonstrate over time it will not be
counted, it will be stolen.

Count on it.

The DEA report provides other keen insights, especially concerning
corroboration of evidence.

More on that soon.

By the way, I was not the only person pushing for this report, and I may
not have been the most effective in forcing it out. I learned late in the
game that Councilwoman Dr. Elba Garcia had also been looking for it. She
said on the phone: "I remember, Jim, the first time during one of the press
conferences we had, you asked the chief if he had any information about the
DEA that he had not revealed, and his answer was, 'Not that I can think
of.' "And I said, 'Wait a minute.' My brain started clicking at that
point." Garcia, who remembered a briefing to the city council by former
Chief Bolton on the DEA report, asked Acting Chief Randy Hampton to provide
her with a copy. What she got initially was a version with major portions
crossed out--apparently yet another edition that I haven't seen yet. Busy,
busy, busy over there at the cop shop, getting ready for Christmas with the
scissors and the Marks-a-Lots.

Garcia didn't give me a lot of particulars on what happened after that, but
I suspect it was her inquiry that led to City Attorney Johnson's personal
review, not mine.

Whatever it takes. And by the way: I am quite confident at the moment of
this writing that the full DEA report still has not found its way to the
city's fake-drugs panel. Can't tell you why I know that. But the panel will
soon ask for it. So for now, guess what I want for Christmas? You think
it's page four, right? No way. What I want to find under the tree is page
four with certain paragraphs tragically eaten out of it by moths.

Oh, that would make for such a joyous holiday season at my house.

Jingle, jingle!