WORKING THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

On the day Carlos Vignali went to prison, he was already thinking about freedom. Led to a holding cell, the convicted cocaine dealer turned to a co-defendant. “My father’s going to get me out,” he said. It had the ring of a rich boy’s boast. It also was true.

The American political system, warmed by money from Vignali’s father, overturned the judicial system that had sent Carlos to prison in 1995. Horacio Vignali says President Clinton’s pardon of his son in January is “a case where America worked.” He called it a miracle. Perhaps it is. But if so, it’s a miracle with a road map, one providing a cold look at the influence that money and connections play in the American system.

Horacio’s campaign to free his son was straightforward, stoked with $160,000 in political donations over six years. His strategy was that of a pyramid scheme. He would persuade one public official to express sympathy for his son, then would use that statement to persuade a second, then cite both of those individuals to bring aboard a third.

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Horacio Vignali tapped into a network of Latino leaders, many of whom, as the campaign gathered steam, never verified Horacio’s version of events: that his son was innocent and, even if guilty, had been punished too harshly. They also believed him when he claimed that his son had no criminal record before his arrest.

By the time the clock ticked down on Clinton’s term, Horacio had secured help from, among others, two congressmen, two California Assembly speakers, the president’s brother-in-law, a cardinal, the L.A. County sheriff, a Los Angeles County supervisor, a city councilman, and even the top federal law enforcement official in L.A.

When Clinton granted 177 acts of clemency in January, on his last morning as president, he was thinking of his legacy. The Vignali commutation, Clinton’s aides say, was granted as a symbolic show of fairness to low-level narcotics felons languishing in prison, where members of Carlos’ old cocaine crew are still serving time--and talking openly about Carlos’ astonishing good fortune.

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Todd Hopson, a convicted drug dealer who heard Vignali’s prediction of freedom in the holding cell, says Carlos was the source of the operation’s cocaine shipments in 1993, and of the schemes and covert cellular phone calls that kept the money and dope flowing until their “good thing” came apart that December. Yet Carlos Vignali is free. “I didn’t pay anybody,” Hopson says. “I didn’t have anybody walk my application up to the White House and put it in front of the president. I didn’t have those connections.”

Horacio sees it differently. He finds nothing wrong with singling out his son, now 29, for special treatment. Horacio was an Argentine immigrant who built a fortune in Los Angeles with his own hands, his own sweat and savvy. Money has always been a means in his world. It was an ethos any small merchant with the drive to succeed might appreciate. When it came to freeing Carlos, he applied the same ethos. Little wonder that to him, “This is a case where America worked.”

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HORACIO VIGNALI IMMIGRATED TO THE U.S. IN 1962. HE WAS from an Argentinian-Italian family. His wife, Luz-Horacio, was from Puerto Rico. He called her Lucy as they Americanized. They were strivers. She had a hair salon; he started an auto body repair shop in 1970 in a commercial strip near the Los Angeles Convention Center. Through good fortune and smarts, he eventually built a business empire that diversified into body shops, parking lots, real estate and luxury cars.

As the Vignalis rose in the world, they moved from West Covina to Pacific Palisades. By the mid-1990s, they counted Tom Cruise and Whoopi Goldberg among their neighbors. Vignali closed his downtown auto yard on Figueroa as the city moved forward on the Staples Center, converting his lucrative land to parking lots for the convention center and the arena.

As with many entrepreneurs, his money and his business with the city brought him contacts with local public officials. He began donating small sums to political candidates. The contributions were a trickle at first, usually less than $1,000 each, but they swelled after Carlos’ December 1993 drug arrest. In the weeks before Carlos’ 1994 trial, for instance, Horacio donated $53,000 to various officeholders.

Horacio also began hosting fund-raisers and providing food for political events, a familiar aproned figure behind a smoky barbecue. The barrel-chested Horacio was blunt and tough, a good man to have on your side. He was a money guy who backed rising Latino political stars. Leaders like Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and Rep. Xavier Becerra, the Los Angeles Democrat who ran for mayor earlier this month, have known him a long time. “My sense was that Horacio liked being around politics,” says Parke Skelton, a veteran Los Angeles consultant who recently worked for L.A. mayoral candidate and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa. “He liked big events and parties. Just a friendly guy. Everybody in the Latino political world liked him.”

In the 1990s Horacio also branched out into the exotic car business. He found the cars at police auctions, restored them and swapped them with car collectors eager to trade up. Carlos, his youngest of four children, a goateed, stocky, hipper version of his father, became both student and entrepreneur. Carlos learned how to detail cars, overhauling them for resale. “I treated him like my best friend, my partner,” Horacio would later testify at his son’s trial.

He sank thousands into Carlos’ rap video company, Fellon Records. He struggled when Carlos’ brother and one sister developed drug habits. When Carlos dropped out of high school, his father told him it was a “big mistake,” then promptly took him into the family business. On the witness stand, Horacio described how he kept Carlos in cash. “Sometimes, I pay him with my own personal checks. Sometimes I pay him two, three, four hundred dollars.”

As early as age 12, Carlos was earning so much in allowance that his father would tell jurors how the boy ironed his money, then neatly stashed it away in a closet. By his 20s, Carlos’ compensation from his father had turned into muscle cars and a $315,000 townhouse. His family had plenty of money, and he discovered he could leverage it quickly by dealing drugs.

Some drug associates knew him as “C-Low,” a wannabe street player, a brown kid who hung with blacks, a daddy’s boy grooming himself as a gangsta rapper. His demeanor fooled even the street hustlers from Minneapolis with whom he became involved. “He was arrogant, and he grew up knowing he was rich,” says Hopson, a self-described “foot soldier” in the drug crew who met with Carlos twice in Los Angeles. “I thought he was getting his money like anybody else, from the street.”

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IT HAD BEEN MINNEAPOLIS DETECTIVE TONY ADAMS’ CASE. WHEN he learned last January that Carlos Vignali had walked out of prison, he was stunned: “It’s like, basically, you’ve just been told that this kid, he’s untouchable.”

Adams is on loan to a joint federal-state law enforcement strike force. Working to bring down the cocaine ring in the early 1990s, he and narcotics agents thought they had a solid, righteous case against Vignali. “He was the No. 1 guy,” Adams says. “We intercepted 7 kilos alone on a wiretap that he said he got himself and turned into crack.”

The Minnesota dealers got their cocaine from Los Angeles. They had a man in California who had been shipping the cocaine they pulverized into crack rocks and sold on the street. By 1993, the California connection, a man named Dale Evans, had come to rely on Carlos Vignali. The cocaine bought with Vignali’s cash was shipped to the Midwest in Western Union packages and overnight mail. The profits paid for pagers, cell phones and trips to Las Vegas.

Carlos linked up with Evans after being introduced by another Minnesota connection, Jonathan Gray, an L.A. hair salon owner known as “J-Bone.” Gray had become one of Carlos’ regular car customers after trading in a 1990 Mercedes for a 1989 Porsche.

The three men became frequent companions, talking real estate and muscle cars. According to wiretaps, they also were lining up drug shipments. The recorded conversations would become the strongest evidence against Vignali. On tapes larded with street talk and code designed to fool outsiders, he and his crew were heard talking about getting “love.” Vignali insisted at his trial that “love” was only loaned money.

The Minnesotans were pleased with their new supplier. Gerald Williams, who ran the Minneapolis end of the operation, said in a prison interview: “Dale Evans told me when he met Carlos that he suddenly had a new plug for us, and that it was going to be sweet. And my impression of Carlos was that he was bigger than all of us. I knew him to be the source.”

As profits swelled, Williams was awed by what he heard about Carlos’ bottomless cash reserves. “He had money. His people and his family had money,” said Williams, who has one more year to serve in a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo. “What Carlos already had, we were trying to get.”

For nearly a year at the height of the conspiracy, the California cocaine paid off. Williams cleared $300,000 a month, buying a Mercedes, a Cadillac and a Porsche. He kept a condominium in downtown Minneapolis and a house in the suburbs. He stayed on the Strip in Las Vegas, betting on craps at $5,000 a toss. “I had so much money, I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Williams said he spoke to Vignali just twice, by phone, when expected packages did not arrive at the Minneapolis nursing home used by the crew as their dope drop. They all talked of “love”--which Williams said was actually code for cocaine. Once Williams was at his house “waiting for the dope at 10 a.m. It didn’t come. I picked up the phone and called Dale Evans, and he checked and said, ‘Wait.’ I could hear Carlos in the background. He said, ‘There isn’t no love yet?’ He wanted to know where the ‘love’ was.”

It was in the hands of the feds, who had intercepted it. They were onto the crew.

Williams was arrested Nov. 10, 1993, and Carlos a month later. Minnesota law enforcement told Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators that Carlos was a drug suspect. They wanted him brought in. A detective showed up at Horacio’s body shop. Investigators were searching for a car involved in an accident, the detective explained. He wanted Carlos to come to the station and verify that the car was not his.

An unsuspecting Horacio said he would send his son over. A week later, Carlos showed up at the sheriff’s station in East Los Angeles. When told he was under arrest, Carlos appeared unperturbed. He was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center, photographed and booked, then led before a federal magistrate. Bail was set at $250,000. Horacio paid. Carlos walked.

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THE FATHER SAT NEAR HIS SON AT THE SEVEN-week minneapolis trial in 1994. Horacio and his wife had flown out from Los Angeles, booking rooms for themselves and Carlos at the Marquette, an old downtown Minneapolis hotel. Carlos’ goatee was gone. He had let his hair grow out. The street hustler showed up in suits. “They really oozed money,” recalls Paul Engh, Gerald Williams’ lawyer. “You could just smell it. Well-cut suits, nice cloth, the kind you get on Rodeo Drive, not the kind you buy at Dayton’s,” a department store in Minneapolis.

Prosecutor Denise Reilly belittled the make-over. Carlos, she told the jury, “has been sent to charm school.” Two dozen other defendants already had pleaded guilty. Several had become informants, among 50 witnesses lined up to testify. Prosecutors had police detectives from Los Angeles and Minneapolis, phone records, videos and photographs. They had parcels of cocaine seized by agents en route to Minneapolis.

Carlos was flanked by two defense lawyers. Even if he appeared flush with cash, Los Angeles attorney Danny Davis told jurors, it did not prove that he was supplying cocaine. “Don’t misunderstand that money means there is something wrong.” On the witness stand, Carlos explained his taped cell phone conversations. It was innocent talk, he said, about loans to prop up business ventures with a group of basketball players. “It’s just from the business world,” Carlos said. “I didn’t know it was for drugs, though.”

Prosecutor Andrew Dunne hammered away at the story. He questioned why Carlos, a shrewd auto trader, would loan large sums to people he hardly knew. Vignali, Dunne said, had been “caught red-handed talking on those telephones about his unlawful activity.”

Horacio testified at length about Carlos’ job at the body shop. Yes, he had lots of cash. But it came from his auto trades, the father said. “Anything he needed, I would always provide for him, always.”

Outside the courtroom, Horacio sought private meetings with prosecutors and the trial judge, U.S. District Judge David S. Doty. “I saw a dad trying everything he could as a father to help his son out,” says Craig Cascarano, Hopson’s defense lawyer.

Doty turned down Horacio’s request to meet in chambers. The judge did not think it proper. Prosecutors agreed to meet with him, but only if federal agents could sit in as witnesses. When Horacio heard their condition, prosecutors said later, he let the matter drop.

The day the jury returned their verdicts, the courtroom turned silent. Carlos was found guilty and later sentenced to 15 years. “The old man was devastated. You could see it on his face,” Cascarano recalls.

Carlos’ face was blank. He went to prison unrepentant.

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AFTER THAT, NOTHING WORKED FOR HORACIO. he hired an appeals specialist to overturn the conviction. Los Angeles attorney Don Re argued that the case had a small mountain of flaws--juror misconduct, improper jury instructions by Doty, lying witnesses, improper use of evidence. All were denied by federal appellate judges.

What about a presidential pardon, Horacio asked Re. The lawyer was skeptical. “I didn’t think Horacio would know how to orchestrate a pardon,” he said later.

But Horacio already was trying. By the summer of 1996, even as the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals considered the case, Horacio was persuading friends in Los Angeles political circles to write White House and Justice Department officials on behalf of Carlos.

The official presidential clemency request would not be filed for another two years. But Horacio prodded influential friends to urge Clinton, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and other high officials to give Carlos “every consideration.” The letters began flowing. In some, whole paragraphs echoed each other--broad hints that the writers had been coached or provided with stock phrases. In a May 24, 1996, letter to the White House, Villaraigosa, to whom Vignali had contributed $2,795, called Carlos a “hard-working young man.” A July 3 letter to Reno from then-Rep. Esteban Torres portrayed Carlos as a “hard-working individual.” Both letter writers noted that Vignali had never been suspected of drug use and had “no prior criminal record.” In fact, Carlos did have a rap sheet. There was an arrest in 1988 for reckless driving, two in 1989 for disorderly conduct, one in 1990 for domestic abuse. He also had admitted to police that he was a member of a West Covina gang.

The letters kept rolling. Baca, then a chief of field operations for the L.A. County Sheriff’s office, and Torres wrote federal prison officials, urging them to transfer Carlos from the penitentiary in Florence, Colo., to one in Lompoc. Carlos “would benefit significantly with more visitation” from his parents, wrote Baca, to whose campaigns Horacio had contributed $11,000. State Sen. Richard G. Polanco, to whom Vignali had contributed more than $20,000, wrote to Clinton encouraging a review of the case.

In July 1996, Horacio enjoyed one of his biggest boosts. Cardinal Roger Mahony, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, wrote to the White House, relying on “the judgment and leadership” of Torres, Villaraigosa, Polanco and then-L.A. City Councilman Richard Alatorre, who had received $1,500 from Vignali. Conceding that he did not know the Vignalis personally, Mahony joined the others in asking that “the facts in this case be reviewed fully.”

Vignali and Torres also approached Becerra. The father came to him “as a friend,” Becerra recalls. The father “wanted a pardon or a commutation. I said I was willing to see the Department of Justice. I wanted to see what they would tell me.”

According to Paige Richardson, a Becerra aide, the congressman then phoned Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. “Give me your sense of things,” Becerra says he asked. “Is this the sort of case [where a pardon] could happen?”

Mayorkas called back several days later. “Basically, he thought the conviction was justified, but the sentence was overly harsh,” Richardson says. “Xavier’s recollection was that it was tough for a first offense.” Becerra relayed the report to Horacio but said he would stay out--for the time being. “I told him I thought it was a longshot to do this.”

Carlos Vignali was moved to a prison in Safford, Ariz., and Horacio tried again in August 1998 to free him altogether, through a formal petition for clemency that his son filed. Torres had notified Clinton that a clemency petition was on its way. “Knowing Carlos,” Torres wrote to the president, “upon his release from custody, I am confident that he again will become a productive member of our society.” Torres, who received no contributions from Vignali, has since retired from Congress and will not discuss his role in the case.

When the federal prosecutors who tried Carlos learned that he was pushing for a presidential clemency bid, they promptly urged Washington to reject it. “I never thought it would have a chance of happening,” Dunne says. His boss, then-U.S. Atty. Todd Jones in Minneapolis, says, “I can’t tell you how strongly we registered our objection to Carlos Vignali getting a break.”

Around the same time that Becerra and Mayorkas discussed the Vignali case, Jones fielded two phone calls from Mayorkas. He said he was calling at the behest of Vignali’s father and wanted to know the depth of Vignali’s involvement in the drug enterprise. “He was checking up on what the case was all about,” Jones says. “Why? Because the old man was calling him.”

Jones and his prosecutors bridled at the perception of interference. They again urged Justice officials in Washington to deny the request, basing their objections on two factors--Carlos Vignali was a major player in the drug conspiracy and he had never apologized for his wrongdoing. Those elements are critical for clemency to pass muster with the pardon attorney’s office at Justice. “If you’ve got a big drug dealer, and he’s not accepted any responsibility, and the U.S. attorney opposes it, that’s the end of it,” says a Justice Department official who deals with pardons.

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HORACIO VIGNALI BEGAN LEANING HARDER. Time was running out. By fall 2000, the only leverage he might have would soon be gone. Clinton’s presidency was almost over. Every American president had ended his term with a flurry of clemencies, and Clinton appreciated that more than most. He had granted only 145 clemencies in seven years--a pace far lower than any of his modern predecessors. As his final year passed, Clinton boosted his numbers.

While his days in office dwindled, Clinton fumed at the performance of the Justice Department’s pardon screeners. “Where the hell are all the pardon applications?” Clinton exploded, according to a senior aide. White House Counsel Beth Nolan was aghast when the pardon attorney’s office told her in late November that “we could expect, at most, 15 favorable recommendations” before Clinton’s last day.

Justice officials blamed Clinton’s own disinterest. He had begun focusing on clemencies late in the game. But the president’s closest advisors felt Justice was slow and hidebound. They echoed Clinton’s prickly suspicion of prosecutors, a bitterness he had nursed since his bruising fights with independent prosecutors over the Whitewater affair and impeachment in 1998.

Clinton identified, too, with victims of what he perceived as over-zealous investigators. He wanted to free low-level drug offenders trapped in long prison terms by rigid federal sentencing guidelines. Clinton’s top lawyers began routing requests around Justice. His aides believed he had the constitutional authority to cut Justice out of the loop, if need be, to find worthy clemency candidates.

His impatience was Horacio Vignali’s opening.

Horacio was now a sad figure making the rounds of political offices in East Los Angeles. He broke down in tears in Villaraigosa’s office, “at the end of his rope,” Parke Skelton recalls. Becerra finally agreed to help. “If there was an injustice done, I felt it was worth it for [Clinton] to take a look,” Becerra said later. He would ask for a review, but stop short of arguing for Carlos’ release.

Richardson said Becerra “gave in because he ran into [Horacio] in town one day and he was pleading. He said, ‘My son doesn’t have much more time.’ ” Horacio’s tears were accompanied by a new flurry of political donations.

Horacio also moved in a new direction, seeking help beyond his Los Angeles circles. Soon he found a perfect middleman: Hugh Rodham, brother of First Lady and soon-to-be New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. How Rodham and Vignali met is unclear. Some public officials who wrote on Carlos’ behalf say they dealt with Rodham; others say they did not. “I don’t recall meeting him,” says Becerra-- though members of his staff had heard his name mentioned in connection with the pardon campaign. Baca would later concede that he took a call from Rodham but the substance of their discussion isn’t known.

A former Miami public defender, Rodham had been angling for a windfall since he was defeated in a 1994 bid to become a U.S. senator from Florida. A foreign venture collapsed. Rodham tried building his private law practice by hooking into class-action litigation against tobacco firms. When he wasn’t weekending amid White House pomp and golfing with the president, Rodham was at home with his wife, Maria, in a drab ground-floor apartment in Coral Gables, Fla. They parked their cars on the lawn. Visitors were greeted by a shabby welcome mat with a picture of the Three Little Pigs.

For Rodham, the Vignali case was a big score. Horacio paid him $4,280, followed by $200,000.

Rodham was well aware of Clinton’s distaste for prosecutors, sentiments Rodham shared, according to his lawyer, Nancy Luque. “Hugh never did pardon work before, but he had done a lot of drug cases,” Luque says. “He didn’t view this guy as a big drug dealer. If you’re from Miami, where you’ve got big South American dealers and you’re talking hundreds of thousands of pounds of narcotics, Carlos Vignali was small potatoes.”

Inside the White House, aides tensed at Rodham’s unsolicited suggestions. In mid-December, Rodham got through to Bruce Lindsey, the Arkansas lawyer who served as Clinton’s loyal trouble-shooter. Rodham was persuasive. He emphasized the letters from Baca and Mahony. He noted that in his 1995 sentence, Judge Doty had found Carlos culpable for, at most, 33 pounds of cocaine (even though prosecutors believed he had supplied far more).

Lindsey and Nolan said that at first, they doubted whether Carlos deserved a president’s attention. Then, however, “we looked at the file and, basically, [the Vignali case] fit the profile of the [minor offenders] we were looking for,” Lindsey later explained. Rodham and Vignali began a final round of lobbying. Baca spoke with a White House lawyer. Mayorkas said he told the White House counsel’s office that he was a friend of the family and that, as U.S. attorney in L.A., he did not believe Carlos would present a problem if returned to the community. Letters came from California Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina and City Councilman Mike Hernandez, who encouraged a review of the case. (Vignali had contributed $2,500 to Hernandez and $1,000 to Hertzberg; Molina received no donations.)

Becerra, who received nearly $14,000 in contributions from Horacio, peppered the White House with calls. Through December and into January, he talked to Maria Echaveste, then deputy White House chief of staff, to congressional liaison Mark Magana and to White House Counsel Meredith Cabe. Reluctant to urge Carlos’ freedom, Becerra kept pressing for a review because so “many were going to bat for this guy.”

Becerra called the White House on Jan. 19, Clinton’s last full day in office. Still no word, he was told. That night, Clinton worked behind closed doors in the Oval Office. In the outer offices, Clinton’s personal secretary, Betty Currie, was cleaning out her desk. Aides were taking pictures down from the walls. Inside, Clinton listened as Lindsey and Nolan flipped through their files and showed him cardboard charts for each of the clemency requests.

The night was reserved for clemency requests from former embattled aides and others. But as he signed off on clemencies that included what became an explosive pardon for fugitive financier Marc Rich, Clinton gave final approval to Carlos Vignali’s commutation.

Carlos still would face five years of probation. He was subject to a “special condition of drug testing.” But his name was listed among minor drug offenders whose sentences were commuted as symbols of Clinton’s compassion.

“To all to whom these presents shall come,” the presidential proclamation began. “Greeting . . . .”

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CARLOS WALKED OUT A FREE MAN. In the only interview Horacio has granted, conducted before the lobbying campaign burst into public view, he expressed joy at his son’s homecoming. But he was bitter, too, he said, at harsh federal sentences that kept young offenders like Carlos locked away: “They screwed my son, OK? That’s what they did.” The more Horacio talked, the more strident he grew. Carlos, he insisted, had handled his clemency application “all by himself.”

“I couldn’t afford anybody,” said the man later found to have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to various political figures. “I guess some people wrote on his behalf. I have no idea who they are.” Asked if Rodham had played a role in the matter, Vignali feigned ignorance: “I have no idea, I’m telling you. Nope.”

Then came the casualties. Revelations that Horacio had pressed every connection at his disposal prompted embarrassed public leaders on both coasts to look inward. Some wondered openly if they had been had. In Los Angeles, an anguished Mahony admitted “a serious mistake in writing to the president.” He had broken “my decades-long practice” of declining to write on behalf of someone he did not know.

Villaraigosa, too, apologized. Becerra, a Villaraigosa rival in the mayoral race, did not. He insisted that he had not urged Vignali’s release and, concerned that he was being singled out for criticism, he released a sheaf of letters, from Mahony and other L.A. leaders written on behalf of Carlos.

Mayorkas, who had hoped to stay on as U.S. attorney even after the election of President Bush, stepped down as Clinton-nominated prosecutors across the country resigned. His calls on behalf of Carlos had not helped his cause. “In hindsight,” he concedes, “I should not have made that call to the White House.”

Clinton’s hopes of ending on a magnanimous note were dashed. Already under fire for his pardon of Rich, the former president had to upbraid Rodham publicly for his work on Vignali’s behalf. The revelations deepened allegations that Clinton’s clemencies were influenced by political cash and favors for friends and relatives.

Rodham locked himself in his apartment. Two days’ worth of parcel delivery notices stickered up his front door until he emerged to shoo away reporters. Through his lawyer, he promised to return his $204,280 fees to Horacio Vignali.

Hillary Clinton’s favorable ratings plummeted. Clinton’s half-brother, Roger, also had to fend off allegations that he pushed clemencies--as did Hillary’s other brother, Tony.

Federal investigators in New York began sorting through the allegations to determine if laws had been broken. A federal grand jury in Manhattan is now investigating. A Republican-led congressional inquiry flashed and then grew quiet. But not before a House panel asked Horacio for his side of events.

*

THERE REMAINS ONLY ENVY IN THE penitentiary cells where three of Carlos Vignali’s old drug crew are still locked away. Todd Hopson, Gerald Williams and Jonathan Gray are all fathers. Like Horacio Vignali, they too have children--16 altogether. Their roles in the drug conspiracy depended on Horacio’s son, Williams says. They were owed one last favor.

“When he put the pardon application in, he should have put all our names on it,” Williams says. “When he paid for his pardon, he should have paid for all of us. And when President Clinton signed that pardon, he should have signed for all of us.

“It’s an injustice that we’re still here.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

THE PLAYERS

HORACIO VIGNALI

Lobbied legislators and law enforcement officials to get his son’s prison

sentence commuted.

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BILL CLINTON

Wanted to free low-level drug offenders trapped in long prison terms by rigid federal sentencing guidelines.

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CARLOS VIGNALI

Sentenced to prison for 15 years for selling cocaine; he had served six when he was set free.

THE ADVOCATES

ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA

While serving in the state Assembly in May 1996, the L.A. mayoral candidate wrote the pardon secretary at the White House and referred to Carlos Vignali as a “hard-working young man.”

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ESTEBAN TORRES

In a July 1996 letter to Clinton, the then-congressman said: “I am confident that [Carlos] again will become a productive member of our society.”

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ROGER MAHONY

The cardinal wrote the White House in July 1996 and asked that “the facts in this case be reviewed fully.”

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LEE BACA

In a 1996 letter, the then-chief of field operations for the L. A. County Sheriff’s office urged that Carlos be moved to the federal prison in Lompoc to be closer to his family.

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RICHARD G. POLANCO

The state senator wrote Clinton on behalf of the Vignalis, urging a review of Carlos’ case.

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XAVIER BECERRA

The congressman asked for a review of the case but stopped short of urging Carlos’ freedom.

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ALEJANDRO N. MAYORKAS

The former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles called the White House counsel’s office, said he was a friend of the Vignali family and that Carlos’ release would not present a problem to the community.

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HUGH RODHAM

Hillary Clinton’s brother emphasized letters from Lee Baca and Cardinal Mahony as he lobbied for Carlos’ release.