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This is a very big story: LA’s Underground Power Broker May 26, 2005 Tony Adams and his partner, Gerry Wehr, smelled something fishy when they arrived in Los Angeles back in 1994 to arrest Carlos Vignali, the target of one of Minnesota’s biggest drug cases. The Minneapolis narcotics officers had caught the 22-year-old Vignali on a wiretap conspiring to distribute crack cocaine in the Twin Cities. They checked into the Hilton on Grand Avenue under names known only to their local contacts at the DEA. Within hours, they say, they received a call from defense lawyer Anthony Brooklier, who represented an alleged associate of Vignali. Strangely aware of how to contact the visiting officers, Brooklier, a high-paid mouthpiece for celebrities and accused gangsters, wanted to know what the officers were up to. Soon they would discover that Brooklier’s client had fingered not just Carlos Vignali but also Vignali’s father, Carlos “Horacio” Vignali, as major drug traffickers. Brooklier wasn’t the only one who seemed ahead of the game. A local DEA agent told Adams and Wehr right where to look for the younger Vignali and showed them written statements offered by Brooklier’s client, who described in detail how the elder Vignali allegedly ran drugs out of his auto-body shop on Figueroa Street, near the L.A. Convention Center. The DEA report intrigued the Minnesota cops. During their four-day stay in Los Angeles, after taking in a Dodger game, they staked out the body shop and quickly grew suspicious about father Vignali. But they returned to Minnesota with more questions than answers. It would be eight years before a congressional investigation produced DEA documents, one dating as far back as 1976, that described Horacio Vignali as an alleged underworld figure who boasted of trafficking in heroin. More here: http://www.laweekly.com/news/las-underground-power-broker-2140006