Series Grew out of ‘Protected Witness’

Hundreds of times during the past 10 years, federal agents and prosecutors have pursued justice by breaking the law. They lied, hid evidence, distorted facts, engaged in cover-ups, paid for perjury and set up innocent people in a relentless effort to win The 'Win at All Costs' team: indictments, guilty pleas and Investigative reporter Bill Moushey, convictions, a two-year Post- right, and Bob Martinson, local news Gazette investigation found. editor. Rarely were these federal officials punished for their misconduct. Rarely did they admit their conduct was wrong. New laws and court rulings that encourage federal law enforcement officers to press the boundaries of their power while providing few safeguards against abuse fueled their actions. Victims of this misconduct sometimes lost their jobs, assets and even families. Some remain in prison because prosecutors withheld favorable evidence or allowed fabricated testimony. Some criminals walk free as a reward for conspiring with the government in its effort to deny others their rights. Series grew out of ‘Protected Witness’ This series of stories examining federal law enforcement officials’ misconduct grew from another investigative series that Post-Gazette reporter Bill Moushey completed in 1996. That probe into the federal witness protection program exposed a secretive bureaucracy that too often rewarded violent criminals with money and freedom, only to watch as they committed violent crimes again. Titled "Protected Witness," it led to a congressional investigation, won the prestigious National Press Club’s Freedom of Information Award and was named a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. While reporting Protected Witness, Moushey uncovered more than 100 cases in which defendants, lawyers and witnesses questioned the motives and actions of federal agents and prosecutors. He expanded his research, contacting families, academics, advocates and congressmen; interviewing lawyers, many of them former federal agents and prosecutors; and mailing letters to hundreds of federal prison inmates. He sifted through hundreds of other misconduct allegations via the Internet, where he also researched opinions from the 13 U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. He had soon collected more than 14 boxes of misconduct complaints, based on an examination of more than 1,500 cases, from Boston to Omaha; San Diego to Atlanta. Some were simply sour grapes, but many included detailed court records and documents obtained through desperate searches — prisoners and their families sometimes waiting years before getting answers from federal agencies through Freedom of Information Act requests. Many times, the answers included information about key evidence that had been hidden from the defendants at their trials. Since the vast majority of federal criminal cases involve drugs, the vast majority of the misconduct complaints involved drug cases, but victims also included engineers, teachers, business owners, organized crime figures, lawyers and politicians — including former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Through them all, Moushey found a common theme: a growing gap between the protections that the Constitution guarantees and the U.S. Department of Justice’s aggressive pursuit of convictions. He also found hints of change. For two decades, get-tough-on-crime legislation enjoyed an almost free ride in Congress, even when it contained few safeguards against overzealous agents and prosecutors. Earlier this year, the House passed a Citizen’s Bill of Rights to address some complaints against federal prosecutors, although it was gutted when Congress approved its annual appropriations bill last month. Out of control Legal rules have changed, allowing federal agents, prosecutors to bypass basic rights November 22, 1998 By Bill Moushey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer Loren Pogue has served eight years of a 22-year federal prison sentence on drug conspiracy and money laundering charges. Pogue, a Missouri native, never bought drugs, never sold them, never held them, never used them, never smuggled them, never even Loren Pogue had never been saw them. involved with drugs until a government informant tied him to a But because federal prosecutors phony real estate deal after lying allowed a paid government about a drug cartel link. The informant got cash for the informant to lie about Pogue’s information. Pogue, 65, got 22 years involvement in the sale of a parcel in prison, even though he’s still not of land to supposed drug sure why he was the target of an smugglers, he was convicted. investigation to begin with. (Joe Under tough federal sentencing Patronite) guidelines, a judge had no choice but to give the Air Force veteran what might effectively be a death sentence. Pogue — father of 27 children, 15 of them adopted — is 65. He doesn’t expect to leave prison alive, and as details later in this story will show, he is baffled that the government he served for more than 30 years worked so hard to betray him. In another case, hundreds of miles away, federal agents interrogated businessman Dale Brown for four hours at a Houston, Texas, warehouse. When he tried to leave, they stopped him. When he asked for a lawyer, they refused to get him one. After Brown finally was charged in a government sting called Operation Lightning Strike, federal prosecutors denied that the warehouse interrogation had even happened. They said the dozen others who reported the same coercive tactics in the sting were making it up, too. Federal sting operations are supposed to snare criminals, but in Operation Lightning Strike, federal agents spent millions of dollars entrapping innocent people who worked on the periphery of the U.S. space program. The evidence against them was contrived. The guilty pleas were coerced. Those who fought the charges won. Brown said all it cost him was his business, his savings, his family and his health. In Florida, prisoners call the scam "jumping on the bus," and it is as tantalizing as it is perverse. Inmates in federal prisons barter or buy information that only an insider to a crime could know — often from informants with access to confidential federal crime files. The prisoners memorize it and get others to do the same. Then, to win sentence reductions, they testify about crimes that might have been committed while they were in prison, by people they’ve never met, in places they’ve never been. The scam succeeds only because of the tacit approval of federal law enforcement officers. Cocaine smuggler Jose Goyriena used "jump on the bus" testimony to help federal prosecutors put three men in prison for life, and he was set to do it again for prosecutors who promised to cut his 27 year sentence by 10 years or more. Prosecutors knew Goyriena had bragged about his lies to cellmates, but the prosecutors didn’t reveal what they’d heard to any of the men Goyriena had helped condemn — violating one of the fundamental tenets of American justice. It was defense attorneys who finally caught Goyriena in the scam. In this nation’s war on crime, something has gone terribly wrong. A two-year investigation by the Post-Gazette found that powerful new federal laws designed to snare terrorists, drug smugglers and pornographers are being aimed at Loren Pogue, above, was caught in a business owners, engineers and government sting driven by a paid petty criminals. informant. When the sting failed to snare big-time drug dealers, the Whether suspects are guilty has informant trapped someone he come to matter less than making knew: Pogue. (Joe Patronite) sure they are indicted or convicted or, more likely, coerced into pleading guilty. Promises of lenient sentences and huge government checks encourage criminals to lie on the witness stand. Prosecutors routinely withhold evidence that might help prove a defendant innocent. Some federal agents work so closely with their undercover informants that they become lawbreakers themselves. Those who practice this misconduct are almost never penalized or disciplined. "It’s a result-oriented process today, fairness be damned," said Robert Merkle, whom President Ronald Reagan appointed U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida, serving from 1982 to 1988. "The philosophy of the past 10 to 15 years [is] that whatever works is what’s right." The Justice Department did not respond to questions the newspaper posed in writing about concerns raised in this series. Nor would it return phone calls requesting comment. A sting gone awry When a trap didn't net big game, government targeted the little guys November 23, 1998 By Bill Moushey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer Dale Brown was a poster boy for the American dream, an athletic former Eagle Scout whose start-up company near the Johnson Space Center outside Houston hustled contracts with NASA. Brown worked seven days a week, The entrance to the Johnson Space 18 hours a day getting his company Center in Houston, where a started in the late 1980s, trying to multimillion dollar federal sting pair clients and their promising netted 15 low-level arrests. (Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette) technologies with niches in the billion-dollar needs of the U.S. space program. Like most small companies, Brown’s Terraspace Technologies Inc. sometimes struggled to make ends meet. A man who bragged about his Mississippi roots and his ability to make things happen promised to change that in 1992. John Clifford told Brown he had developed a product that NASA might use and he was prepared to spend big money to get it noticed. It was called a miniature lithotripter, an ultrasound device whose technology might one day be used to improve the medical monitoring of astronauts in space. Brown checked out Clifford and his companies with Dunn & Bradstreet, the Better Business Bureau and the banks that worked with him. All gave the Mississippi man a thumbs-up. "I came to believe this guy was our savior, our knight in shining armor," Brown said.

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