This Is Your FBI?

What a worthy report on FBI shenanigans in our state capital (“The G-Man, the Shrimp Scam and Sacramento’s Big Sting,” by Mark Gladstone and Paul Jacobs, Dec. 11)! It’s clear that the taxpayer’s crime-fighting dollar is being shortchanged when FBI Special Agent James J. Wedick Jr. opts out of fighting dangerous street crime and/or armed bank robbers so that he can instead dream up schemes to entrap public officials. It’s sure a lot safer for Wedick than fighting crime.

We know that our public officials are not all choirboys and choirgirls, and we don’t need an $80,000-a-year agent- provocateur to tell us that.

Marianne G. Stiles

Los Alamitos

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The FBI in the last 20 years has lost sight of its original mission: to protect Americans from violent criminals. With bloated budgets, the FBI has pushed into so-called white-collar crime to intimidate the business community. Instead of being tenacious crime fighters in the Eliot Ness tradition, they seem to be “creating” crimes themselves while misusing authority.

Wedick created a fictional business and targeted former Republican Assembly Leader Patrick Nolan, a man whom even the FBI never accused of seeking personal profit. Nolan, an ideological conservative, was more interested in electing Republicans. Wedick was used by one of Nolan’s arch-enemies and doesn’t understand that he was manipulated by a faction of the Sacramento political community.

Wedick and his team have managed to ruin some careers, but they have not put a stop to corruption.

Shawn Steel

Los Angeles

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I’m confused. Wedick seems pleased that he’s responsible for the 1990 ballot initiative “that bars honorariums like the one that (state Sen. Frank) Hill took from an undercover agent.” It appears to me that it was legal, in 1982, for Hill to accept an honorarium for $2,500. That’s extortion?

Also confusing: Watson “arranged for Frank Hill to co-author a bill for $10,000 . . . .” So why only $2,500? Even less, when you consider that the check was declared as income and taxes were deducted. That’s money laundering?

Hill continues to have his defenders, undoubtedly because many, such as I, have witnessed his thoughtfulness, his pride and his devotion to work, community, family and friends.

Maureen Krock

Whittier

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The authors respond: Honorariums were indeed legal in California as payment for speeches and appearances. However, a jury found that Hill violated federal extortion law by taking the money in exchange for official action.