RIVERA DEFENDS TV SPECIAL; 3 MORE SUSPECTS RELEASED : Critics ‘Would Rather Take a Shot at Me Than Applaud Cops . . . Breaking a Major Cocaine Bust,’ He Says

As TV reporter Geraldo Rivera went public this week to defend his widely criticized Dec. 2 anti-drug special, Florida officials released three more suspects arrested in one of the show’s controversial on-air narcotics raids.

Broward County, Fla., prosecutors admitted this week that they have no case against most of the people arrested there during the live broadcast of “American Vice: The Doping of a Nation.” Suspects arrested during the broadcast in San Jose and Houston were released two weeks ago.

But even as the Florida case was falling apart, Rivera returned to television to answer critics of the live broadcast.

In a pre-recorded two-part interview broadcast Wednesday and Thursday on the syndicated “Entertainment Tonight” program, Rivera said critics of his show “would rather take a shot at me than applaud the actions of the cops in south Florida in breaking a major cocaine bust.”

Sheriff’s deputies “didn’t have any evidence” against three of the five persons arrested in front of Rivera’s camera crew and millions of Americans, said Miami defense attorney Robert Duboff in a telephone interview Wednesday after state prosecutors decided not to proceed with cocaine trafficking charges against Patrick Lewis, Ricardo Mott and Sonnie Miller.

“It could not be proven that they had anything to do with the drugs seized that night,” said Dave Casey, a spokesman for the state attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale.

The raid netted more than two kilograms of cocaine and a cache of automatic weapons. Cases against two other suspects, Nelson Scott Jr. and Minnie Jackson, were “still pending” Thursday, and charges are “probably forthcoming” against them, Casey said.

Duboff said his three clients returned Wednesday to their homes in the Bahamas, where Lewis is a police officer. During the “American Vice” broadcast, Rivera and arresting officers repeatedly referred to the Bahamian police officer’s presence among those rounded up in the raid.

Now that his clients are free, Duboff said, he is “evaluating the merits of a civil suit” against the county, its sheriff and the “media people” associated with the “American Vice” program broadcast on an ad-hoc network of 163 stations across the country, including KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles.

Attorneys in Houston are likewise contemplating legal action as a result of the on-air arrest of house painter Terry Rouse, who was released by a state judge who found the authorities had no probable cause for criminal charges against her.

In San Jose, where Manuel Chavez was released before the program aired in the Pacific time zone, officials have banned TV crews from accompanying police on drug raids. (Legal action against the San Jose police or Rivera appears unlikely there because Chavez--described by police as an illegal Mexican immigrant--has not been heard from since the night of the broadcast.)

In his interview on “Entertainment Tonight,” Rivera said that he has been unsuccessfully pursued by “legal hyenas” through the years. “It’s much easier,” he said, “to win their cases in the (newspaper) columns--most of which are hostile to me--than in the courts.”

Rivera said he “lamented” that innocent people were arrested in the raids, including Rouse, who he said was being portrayed in the press as the “St. Joan of house painters.” He insisted that all the arrests were based on legally obtained search warrants and evidence obtained in undercover drug buys and that he “went beyond the standard care” taken by news organizations covering such stories.

“I’m not Attila the Hun,” Rivera said. “I followed the police doing what they do scores of times a day in this country. I think that’s the basic point they made.”