Clinton Aide’s Son Faces Drug Charges

The son of Richard W. Riley, the former South Carolina governor named by President-elect Bill Clinton to oversee political appointments for the new Administration, was arrested Wednesday on federal cocaine and marijuana distribution charges. Richard W. Riley Jr., 33, was indicted Tuesday with 18 others in Greenville, S.C., by a federal grand jury on charges of distributing cocaine and marijuana and conspiring to possess the illicit drugs with the intent to distribute them.

The defendants, ranging in age from 16 to 47 years, were indicted after an investigation begun by the Greenville sheriff and police department in mid-1991, according to the FBI in Columbia, S.C. The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in the area, a combination of local, state and federal units that focuses on larger, more complicated narcotics cases, took over the investigation last December.

Clinton, who was in Washington on Wednesday to meet with President Bush, tried to reach the senior Riley, a spokesman said.

“He’s obviously very sympathetic with this, having been through a similar situation with his brother,” spokesman Jeff Eller said in reference to Clinton’s younger half-brother Roger, who served a year in federal prison for cocaine distribution in the mid-1980s.

Roger Clinton, who says he has been free of drugs since a brief relapse in 1987, now is a production assistant in Burbank for Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, television creators and producers and longtime friends of the President-elect and Hillary Clinton.

Unlike “sting” operations in which government agents buy or sell drugs as part of the probe, the investigation was “largely historical in nature,” and attempted to reconstruct past illegal activities, the FBI said.

The brief announcement of the case gave no details of Riley’s alleged actions or that of his co-defendants. It did note they were given a hearing Wednesday before U.S. Magistrate William C. Catoe in Greenville.

The senior Riley, named by Clinton on Tuesday as personnel director for his transition team, will oversee the hiring of 4,000 political appointees. Riley served for two terms as South Carolina’s governor and, like Clinton, was active in the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group.

Now a Columbia, S.C., lawyer, Riley has been mentioned for a senior post in the Clinton Administration, most often as a potential education secretary. He was not in Washington Wednesday night and could not be reached for comment.