Probe to Focus on Prosecutors in Gang Trials : Crime: U.S. attorney says Chicago’s notorious El Rukn group was dealt death blow, but defense alleges cover-up involving key witnesses in jail.

Federal prosecutors hailed their string of convictions against the notorious El Rukn street gang as a death blow, but investigators are studying allegations that the government covered up questionable treatment given to jailed witnesses.

U.S. District Judge James F. Holderman directed a disciplinary board to examine the actions of U.S. Atty. Fred Foreman and his assistants, calling the prosecution “a scandal.”

And a paralegal testified in court Friday that she held sexually explicit conversations with one witness, a cooperating El Rukn, and helped him smuggle a box of laxatives into Chicago’s federal Metropolitan Correctional Center.

“This hearing has turned from a motion for a new trial into a scandal, and I think it’s absolutely outrageous,” Holderman said Thursday.

Friday’s testimony centered around paralegal Corinda Luchetta, who also admitted giving a witness a “sip of beer” in prosecutors’ offices.

Holderman said Foreman and his assistants should have taken strong action against Luchetta and reported her to higher authorities at the time of the December, 1991, conversations.

Foreman denied that his office had done anything wrong and said its integrity was not compromised. Assistant U.S. Atty. Barry Elden, representing the government in court Friday, declined to comment.

Prosecutors claimed they had decimated the gang’s leadership after 36 members were convicted and 16 others pleaded guilty to various charges over the last 1 1/2 years.

For the past three weeks, Holderman has been overseeing an inquiry into whether the chief El Rukn prosecutor purposely did not tell the defense that two former gang generals testifying for the government had tested positive for drugs in the jail in 1989.

The inquiry is part of hearings on a request for a new trial for three men convicted of supplying drugs to the El Rukns. The defense attorneys said Friday’s testimony showed that critical information was not provided to them during the trials.

“There was a wealth of information that we were entitled to that we were never given,” defense attorney Richard Kling said.

Under immunity from prosecution, paralegal Luchetta testified Friday that she helped smuggle a box of laxatives into the federal jail near the courthouse for one of the El Rukn members turned government witnesses during the years-long investigation of the gang.

She also told a packed courtroom that she had sexually explicit conversations with El Rukn witness Eugene Hunter, which unknown to her were taped because Hunter had called from the jail. But Luchetta said her conversations were only a way to communicate with the witnesses and obtain information.

“Sex was Eugene’s thing, and sometimes it was easier to obtain information using that vernacular,” Luchetta told the court. “I’m frankly ashamed of what I’ve seen in this transcript.”

Luchetta testified that she smuggled a box of “Ex-Lax” into the Metropolitan Correctional Center for cooperating El Rukn witness Ervin Lee.

But Holderman and Kling suggested that she could have smuggled drugs into the jail. They noted that Hunter had helped Luchetta transcribe hours of taped telephone calls between El Rukns, most of which was in a complicated code prosecutors said included references to drugs--and they suggested “Ex-Lax” could have been a reference to drugs.

Luchetta said the box was sealed, and that she was unaware that sending the box into the jail was improper.