POLICE CORRUPTION TRIAL OPENS

Narcotics Officers Face 300 Charges

LOUISVILLE - Former detective Mark Watson was a grunt on the front lines of
the war on drugs, his attorney said.

Watson bent the rules, but he wasn't alone and it went to the greater good,
the attorney said Tuesday as the police corruption trial began for Watson
and another former officer.

Watson and Christie Richardson, former narcotics detectives, face 300
charges including burglary, bribery and forgery.

The two former partners, who resigned as Jefferson County officers last
year, are accused of creating bogus search warrants with photocopied
judges' signatures, obtaining warrants through the use of fraudulent
affidavits, and obtaining payments for informants who say they never got
the money.

Several informants also have accused the former detectives of entering
their homes using falsified warrants and either stealing money or planting
drugs.

"Right up to when they were accused of these crimes, they were considered
the star players of metro narcotics," prosecutor Jon Dyar, an assistant
commonwealth's attorney, told the jury. "Their statistics were inflated by
corruption of staggering proportions."

But defense attorney Mary Sharp said Watson, a 7-year veteran of the
narcotics squad, is the scapegoat of a sloppy department where paperwork
was frequently lost or misfiled.

"The heat was turned up on metro narcotics procedures," Sharp said.
"Somebody had to be the scapegoat."

Richardson, meanwhile, was described by her attorney as a victim of the
trust she placed in Watson, a highly decorated narcotics veteran with a
golden reputation as an officer who got things done.

"You need to look at what did he do and what, if anything, did she do,"
Richardson's attorney, Steve Schroering, said in his opening statement.
"They're two different people."

From January 2001 to February 2002, the period covered by the detectives'
indictments, the average metro narcotics officer made 55 arrests,
Schroering said. In that period, Watson made 124 and Richardson 52, he said.

The average number of cases an officer worked in those 13 months was 45.
Richardson worked 48 in that time and Watson 171, Schroering said.

Schroering said that Richardson, who transferred to the combined
city-county metro narcotics unit in 1998 after four years with the
Jefferson County police, was trained by Watson and unaware of many of his
alleged scams.

"In 1998, he was super cop," Schroering said. "Nobody had any reason not to
trust Mark Watson. That trust is what has destroyed her career and ruined
her life."

The first chink in Watson's armor appeared in fall 2000, when a shooting
victim was found with a drug trafficking citation signed by Watson.

According to testimony Tuesday from Capt. Jeff Sherrard, a former
supervisor with metro narcotics unit who helped investigate Watson and
Richardson, the charge was dismissed because Watson never appeared in court.

Further investigation showed that "an inordinate amount" of Watson's cases
had been dismissed because he failed to show in court, but that he still
put in for court pay, Sherrard said.

Sherrard then checked Watson's 90 most recent arrests prior to the original
trafficking citation. Thirteen of the defendants weren't in the court
system, Sherrard said.

"It looked to me like the names were just out of the blue," he said.

During the 13 months in question, about 55 defendants names' did not appear
in the court records, Sherrard said.

Watson was suspended in January 2002 and two months later, charges were
filed against both Watson and Richardson, resulting in the dismissal of
charges and vacating of verdicts from about 30 cases the detectives had
worked on in the past.

"At some point in his career, he began to cut corners and he got away with
it," Schroering said. "Then he cut some more and got away with it again.
Then one morning he woke up and he was a criminal."

Sharp said the seemingly fake names on the arrest citations were a method
Watson freely acknowledges using. Watson would pressure a small-time user
or dealer for names of larger traffickers and "fill in this citation with
whatever name you give me. It was a bigger payoff to get bigger drug dealers.

"He thought it was a perfectly acceptable method for doing his job," Sharp
said.

The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks. Much of the prosecution's
case is based on testimony from confidential informants.

Sharp asked the jury to question the motives and credibility of the
confidential informants.

"They live on the fringes of the criminally active community," she said.