SON TESTIFIES AGAINST FATHER, SAYS PARKER SET UP DRUG DEAL

Twenty-three-year-old William "Chill" Parker told a federal court jury
Friday about a man who helped him arrange a cocaine deal and also allowed
him to hide drug money in his Buffalo home.

The man was a Buffalo police narcotics detective.

The man also was Parker's father, Darnyl Parker.

Clearly nervous and uncomfortable testifying against his father, William
Parker provided some of the most devastating evidence yet in the five-week
trial of the suspended narcotics detective and three co-defendants on
federal corruption charges.

The witness said his father set up a meeting Feb. 25, 2000, with Theodore
Calhoun, a major drug dealer. Neither Parker nor his father knew at the
time that Calhoun was secretly working for the FBI.

The meeting was held in Darnyl Parker's home, where the younger Parker and
his cousin, Reno Sayles, each arranged to buy thousands of dollars worth of
cocaine from Calhoun.

William Parker said his father was at the meeting.

"Where did you meet Calhoun?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul J. Campana asked
the younger Parker.

"My father's house," the witness answered.

"Where were you keeping your (drug) money?" Campana asked.

"In my father's room," William Parker said. "He didn't want me to keep it
in my room."

William Parker also told jurors he got a phone call from his father
sometime after the FBI closed down the undercover operation and arrested
him, Sayles, his father and three other Buffalo police officers in early
March 2000.

" "Keep your mouth closed,' " William Parker said his father told him. "
"Don't say nothin'.' "

Prosecutors believe Darnyl Parker was trying to persuade his son not to
make a deal that would require him to testify as a government witness. That
is exactly what the younger Parker did Friday.

And much of his testimony was confirmed by his cousin, Sayles, who also
testified.

As William Parker testified for 25 minutes, he rarely looked at his father,
who sat at a defense table about 20 feet away.

The younger Parker spoke in a low voice, usually answering questions in two
or three words.

Darnyl Parker looked pained during much of his son's testimony.

The suspended officer's identical twin, Darryl Parker, and their mother,
Mary Blue - William's grandmother - sat in the front row of the courtroom.
They stared intently at the young man on the witness stand.

In the back of the courtroom stood the witness' mother, Lynn Parker,
smiling warmly and nodding encouragement at her son. She occasionally
glared at her ex-husband, Darnyl Parker.

"You can't believe how this is tearing up our family," a relative of Parker
said after the court session. "We all thought Darnyl was an honest cop. To
hear this kind of testimony . . . I can't tell you how sick it makes me feel."

Darryl Parker was angry about his nephew William's testimony as he spoke
outside the courtroom.

"To make a young man like that testify against his own father, it just
shows you how low the FBI will stoop," Darryl Parker said. "It isn't right.
The jury isn't hearing the whole story."

William Parker testified he is a high school dropout who began dealing
small amounts of marijuana when he was "about 17 or 18," and then moved on
to dealing cocaine.

He gave little detail about his relationship with his father, except to say
his father put him in touch with Calhoun in early 2000, after a previous
supplier was no longer able to deliver cocaine to him and Sayles.

Sayles, 28, who has two previous drug felony convictions, testified that
Darnyl Parker had warned him to stop buying cocaine in January 2000 from a
man named "Eddie" because the man was an FBI informant.

"I asked William Parker if he could ask his dad to see if he could find
somebody for us," Sayles testified.

That request, he said, led to the meeting at Darnyl Parker's home. But
Sayles testified that he and William Parker never got their cocaine,
because they were arrested - along with Parker and three other detectives -
March 2.

The names of the other detectives - Robert Hill, David Rodriguez and John
Ferby - never came up during Sayles' or William Parker's testimony. But an
FBI agent, Thomas Doktor, said Hill incriminated himself when he gave a
statement to the FBI shortly after his arrest.

Doktor testified that Hill told him he had received $7,000 cash from the
$36,000 that was stolen from Kevin White, an undercover FBI agent posing as
a drug dealer. Hill also told the agent exactly where the stolen money
could be found, hidden behind some paint cans in a Sloan garage.

"You're not gonna find the money unless I tell you where it is," the FBI
agent quoted Hill as saying. "I got to be a man about it."

Another agent, Frank Runles, testified that the money was found just where
Hill said it would be. Hill's attorney, Michael Blotnik, did not object to
the two agents' testimony.

Buffalo Police Narcotics Lt. Steve Nicosia, a longtime supervisor of the
four accused detectives, said many of the actions of Parker and his
colleagues - such as failing to turn in the $36,000 taken from White - were
out of step with the department's procedures.

As Nicosia was being questioned by Prosecutor Robert C. Moscati, Police
Commissioner Rocco J. Diina and new U.S. Attorney Michael A. Battle entered
the courtroom with Peter Ahearn, special agent in charge of the Buffalo FBI
office, to watch about a half-hour of testimony.

Shortly after they left the courtroom, Nicosia confirmed that the
lieutenant for Parker's night-shift crew had been on sick leave for a long
stretch of 1999. Nicosia testified that the Police Department was reluctant
to pay overtime to bring in a lieutenant to replace the sick man.

"On a routine basis, there was no lieutenant," Nicosia said.

"So who was supervising them?" a surprised Arcara interjected from the bench.

"No one was, your honor," Nicosia answered.