Posted on 02/13/2003 7:12:17 PM PST by Coleus
Agents Win Lawsuit Against Pa. Attorney General
(AP) (PHILADELPHIA) A jury has sided with two narcotics agents who claimed their boss -- the Pennsylvania attorney general -- retaliated against them because they uncovered a drug-trafficking ring that diverted profits to a CIA-backed Dominican presidential candidate.
Agents John McLaughlin and Charles Micewski filed a lawsuit claiming their forcible transfer from the Philadelphia office of the state Bureau of Narcotics Investigation violated their civil rights.
A federal jury in northeastern Pennsylvania agreed, awarding $1.5 million to McLaughlin and Micewski on Friday after a one-week trial. The verdict capped more than five years of litigation.
"They won their lives and their reputations back," Don Bailey, attorney for the plaintiffs, said Tuesday. "These people were just destroyed, devastated."
Through a spokesman, state Attorney General Mike Fisher said he will appeal. Although Fisher was named in the lawsuit, it was his predecessor, Tom Corbett, who transferred the agents in 1996.
The agents' allegations involved leftist politician Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, the longtime leader of the Dominican Revolutionary Party and a three-time presidential hopeful. Pena Gomez died in 1998.
McLaughlin and Micewski said they had uncovered a Dominican drug-trafficking ring operating in Philadelphia, New York and other Eastern cities that funneled drug profits to the Dominican Revolutionary Party, which they claimed was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department. The agents said the federal government had allowed Pena Gomez to return to the Dominican Republic after a 1995 fund-raising swing through New York with $500,000 in alleged drug profits.
The agents said that shortly after they made their allegations, the Philadelphia district attorney and U.S. Attorney's office began questioning their credibility and stopped prosecuting their drug cases. More than 125 drug cases were ultimately dismissed or dropped after prosecutors accused agents of fabricating evidence and lying on the witness stand.
McLaughlin, Micewski and other agents from the drug agency's Philadelphia office were subsequently transferred to other bureaus -- and removed from street duty -- by then-state Attorney General Tom Corbett.
The agents filed a civil rights lawsuit in 1997, saying they had "become the targets of vicious unfounded attacks on their credibility and careers by the federal government," with the "marionetted support" of the Philadelphia DA's office and Corbett.
The lawsuit also claimed that Pena Gomez's Dominican Revolutionary Party "was, and is, protected and sanctioned, unlawfully, by agencies of the United States government, to include the CIA and the State Department, enabling the Dominicans to distribute illegal drugs at will to the black and Hispanic populations of the Eastern Seaboard."
"The allegation that the CIA had any involvement in drug trafficking is absurd," CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said Tuesday evening.
The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed. Undeterred, the agents filed a second lawsuit -- the subject of last week's federal trial in Wilkes-Barre -- claiming the state attorney general and his deputies had retaliated against them for the first lawsuit.
The jury awarded $1 million in punitive damages and $500,000 in actual damages.
"We were certainly surprised by the jury's verdict and we respectfully disagree with it. We intend to pursue all our post-trial and appellate remedies," said Fisher's spokesman, Sean Connolly.
Though it's been several years since McLaughlin and Micewski worked Philadelphia streets, Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham said her policy of refusing their cases remains in effect.
"We are very disappointed," said Cathie Abookire, Abraham's spokeswoman. "The verdict will not in any way cause us to change our policy in declining cases in which these officers have participated."
Likewise, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Philadelphia said the office's policy of not accepting the agents' cases for prosecution would not change.
She did even better than that - she filed charges against one of the anti-Clinton protestors for asssaulting the fists of Teamsters with his face. It was tossed by a judge, but not before considerable legal expense...
BWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAW!!!!
Stop it Tom, you're killing me.
There was a time when this board was not crawling with WOD drones?
There has been some stifling going on.
There is a lot of stifling going on at FR these days.
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