May/June 1996
Michael Levine, Prison Life
I would have put them on probation and moved to fire them if they couldn't do the job. I had done it before. But was this any of my business now that I was retired? And if Miguel wasn't a dope dealer, he was certainly a thief, wasn't he?
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'What are you going to do?' asked my wife.
'I wish I knew,' I said. 'It's pure entrapment, but the idiot did his best to sound like a doper. If I'm gonna go against the DEA, I don't want to lose.'
Everyone who has ever carried a federal badge knows how easy it is to convict someone who's been entrapped on little more than an informant's testimony, as long as the informant was clever enough to hide his tracks, the victim gullible enough to fall for the trap, and the agents and prosecutors ambitious and immoral enough to go for headlines, statistics, and winning at all costs.
Until a few years ago, I had believed that most of us in federal law enforcement were people whose pride and consciences would not allow that to happen. I was no longer so sure.
As a result of my books, I'd been receiving letters from federal prisoners who claimed they had been set up by lying criminal informants working for the various competing federal agencies enforcing the drug and money-laundering statutes. Guys like Lon Lundy, a once successful businessman, husband, and father from Mobile, Alabama--a man with no criminal record who was set up by a CI in a no-dope conspiracy case and received a life-with-no-parole sentence; or Harry Kauffman, a once successful Cleveland used car dealer, husband, and father, who was conned by a CI into accepting cash, alleged to be drug money, for some cars and charged with money laundering. And many, many others.
They were men of every race, religion, and national origin in the federal prison system. Most had no previous criminal records, most had had their homes, businesses, and financial assets seized by the federal government, leaving their families destitute. Each had received a prison sentence of more than 20 years. These were men whose lives and families had been destroyed. Their letters to me were desperate cries that affected me deeply. In many cases the rats ended up with a percentage of the assets seized as a reward for their work.
My 25 years in the justice system had taught me that there were plenty of bureaucrats and politicians who, if they didn't like the way you exercised your rights as a citizen, or if they thought they could make headlines, political hay, or a promotion by your arrest and prosecution, would not think twice about using the government's legions of paid belly-crawlers to target you. Few people have the money of a John DeLorean to defend themselves adequately against a slick rat.
The only thing, in my experience, that stopped these rats with badges and rats in public office were people of conscience in positions of authority and a knowledgeable and watchful media. For several years I had been seeing no evidence of either. And as publicly outspoken as I had been about the phony drug war bureaucrats and politicians, I found this all personally threatening.
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