Judge Calls Postal Drug Inquiry One of the ‘Lousiest’

In unusually harsh criticism of a law enforcement agency, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge has called a cocaine-trafficking probe by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service “one of the lousiest jobs of investigation I ever heard of in my life.”

The judge urged jurors to write letters of complaint to the postmaster general.

Judge Philip F. Jones spoke out last Wednesday after jurors in his court acquitted veteran postal worker Frank A. McDonald on charges that he sold cocaine and other contraband to an informant who was working for the Postal Inspection Service.

McDonald was one of 12 workers at the main Los Angeles post office who were charged last year with selling contraband based on the uncorroborated word of the informant.

McDonald testified that he sold nothing.

Additional Criticism

In an interview, Jones expanded on his remarks, calling the investigation amateurish and “a mess.”

“I won’t call it a comedy of errors because it isn’t funny,” he said.

He probably should have urged jurors to write to congressional representatives rather than the postmaster general because that would be more likely to lead to an investigation, Jones said.

The judge’s statements came after the jurors asked permission to make a rare formal statement of their own.

“Speaking collectively,” jury foreman Robert J. Graham told the court, “we felt that the efforts of the United States post office were inadequate in this trial and the trial should never have come to court based on the evidence that was presented to us. That is all we wanted to do is make that clear.”

Jones then told jurors: “I join with you wholeheartedly. . . . I thought that was one of the lousiest jobs of investigation I ever heard of in my life. . . . And I want to encourage you people and urge you that I think we ought to write to the postmaster general of the United States and tell him what we think about this.”

Lack of Corroboration

Jones told the jurors that he was distressed by the failure of the Postal Inspection Service to corroborate the word of the informant, a former construction worker with no law enforcement training, who was given a job as a low-level postal employee.

“I see police officers in here all the time,” the judge told the jurors, “and they always corroborate the sales in some manner. They don’t let people go in alone and make these sales and expect them to hold up in court.”

The judge said he was also upset that postal inspectors made no effort to recoup the $5,000 an agent said he had given the informant to purchase drugs from McDonald.

“Frankly the idea of them throwing our money around so loosely, supposedly to buy drugs, with no hope of getting it back--that offends me deeply,” the judge told the jurors.

Los Angeles Postal Inspector-in-Charge Wilhelm J. Maisch, apprised of the comments of the judge and the jury foreman on Monday, said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Our investigation revealed the facts as we investigated them. As to whether all the facts were able to get on trial and be presented in court, I’m not aware exactly of what all was presented.”

The probe was the subject of a Times article in June that reported the probe was flawed because it relied on uncorroborated evidence from the informant and may have resulted in the arrest of some innocent people along with some who really were dealing drugs.

So far, five of the workers have been acquitted and four have been convicted. Three remain to be tried.

The probe was unusual because physical or electronic surveillance was not attempted in most cases, and in no cases were investigators successful in observing or overhearing a complete drug deal, according to court records and narcotics experts from other law enforcement agencies.

Standard Techniques

Postal investigators also did not employ means of partial corroboration in common use at other law enforcement agencies. These methods include searching an informant before and after he goes to buy drugs, and marking money in hopes of recovering it later from drug sellers.

The cases were also unusual because the cocaine the informant bought turned out to be fake half of the time.

In McDonald’s case, the informant said he spent $4,000 on 70 grams of contraband that turned out to be 97% mannitol and 3% cocaine. Then he said he followed that up with a $1,000 purchase of 17 grams of contraband that turned out to be 100% mannitol.

Mannitol is used by scientists as a base for diet foods and by drug dealers to dilute cocaine, although, as one expert in narcotics investigations said, “Nobody snorts 3% cocaine.”

Selling mannitol, which costs about $8 a pound, or any other substance by falsely representing it to be cocaine is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. Sale of cocaine itself is punishable by up to five years.

Postal inspection service cases are normally tried in federal court, but federal prosecutors declined to file charges in these cases for reasons they have refused to explain publicly.

The district attorney’s office filed the charges instead.

No Criticism of D.A.

Judge Jones said he had no criticism of the district attorney’s office for filing the cases.

However, a Postal Service spokesman in Washington, Lou Eberhardt, said any blame directed at postal inspectors is misplaced.

Postal inspectors, he said, “do the investigation, but somebody else looks at the facts in every case and says ‘Yes, I should take this to court’ or ‘No, I should not.”

Eberhardt told a reporter: “You should be talking to whoever decided to take this to court.”

A spokesman for the district attorney’s office, Richard W. Hecht, said Monday that “the quality of the investigation . . . was substantially less than what we are accustomed to in narcotics investigations.”

Hecht, director of the bureau of central operations in the district attorney’s office, said that when it became apparent about a month ago that prosecutors were losing these cases at a high rate, he directed trial attorneys to interview the two key witnesses--a postal inspector and the undercover informant--before deciding whether their credibility seemed sufficient to pursue an individual case in court.

If any trial attorneys believed the witnesses were not credible, Hecht said, he would have recommended that charges in that case be dropped. Such interviews were conducted before the McDonald case went to trial, Hecht said.

On Monday, Hecht said, he expanded his directive to require that trial deputies and their supervisors interview the witnesses.

The Times is not publishing the informant’s name at the request of postal inspectors who said they feared for his safety.

Maisch, the chief postal inspector in Los Angeles, refused to say Monday whether the informant was still at work.