Mishandling of Informant Hurt Cases, DEA Concedes

Dozens of drug enforcement cases nationwide have been dismissed, plea-bargained or threatened with reversal because of the U.S. Justice Department’s abysmal handling of its undercover informant program, according to an internal report, court documents and interviews.

Officials in the Drug Enforcement Administration and federal prosecutors failed the public when they ignored repeated warnings about a rogue, unreliable undercover informant for more than 12 years, DEA investigators concluded in a report released under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

And because the DEA had no system for tracking its informants, other agents and prosecutors kept using its most prolific operative, unaware of his pattern of lying under oath and criminal misconduct, according to the 157-page report, which was based on a yearlong investigation.

In its report, the DEA acknowledged that drug agents and prosecutors failed to disclose problems involving key informant Andrew Chambers in many of the 280 cases he worked on, jeopardizing convictions dating back to 1984. The agency paid Chambers, whose behavior prompted the DEA’s internal investigation, about $2 million in taxpayer money.

As a result of Chambers’ actions, federal prosecutors in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri and Colorado have dismissed outright the criminal charges against at least 26 alleged drug dealers.

In Miami, prosecutors dismissed at least four cases against suspected cocaine and heroin traffickers because they felt “sandbagged” by the DEA, the report said.

In Los Angeles, a plea bargain allowed a five-time felon facing another prosecution to walk out of jail three months ago even though prosecutors wanted him in prison for life.

Angry Prosecutors Refuse to File Charges

The DEA, like the FBI in its handling of the Oklahoma City bombing case against Timothy J. McVeigh, failed to turn over internal records to the defense in criminal prosecutions, as required under federal law. Whereas the FBI did not provide thousands of pages of documents to defense lawyers, the DEA did not reveal the key informant’s misconduct.

“With the DEA, it is a case of government run amok with nobody watching,” said Terry Rearick, chief investigator for the Los Angeles federal public defender. “And when they got caught, they just cut deals and plea bargains with people to make them go away.”

Some federal prosecutors, angry at not being told of the misconduct, refused to file charges against some suspects arrested by the DEA. They plea-bargained others instead of taking them before a jury.

And now defense lawyers may appeal scores of cases.

DEA Administrator Donnie R. Marshall declined to comment about the report or the agency’s relationship with Chambers.

Michael Chapman, the agency’s chief spokesman, said, “Problems have been identified, and we have taken corrective action.”

The agency has begun setting up a central system to monitor informants, according to the Justice Department, which oversees the DEA and federal prosecutors.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles received Justice Department approval May 25 to install its own system to track informants, not just for the DEA, but for all federal law enforcement agencies, said interim U.S. Atty. John Gordon.

“We wanted to address a problem that occurred here to prevent it from reoccurring,” he said. “If ours works well, it may be the template” for other prosecutors nationwide.

The drug agency launched its internal probe last year after news agencies, including The Times, published detailed reports about its relationship with Chambers.

The agency recently released an edited version of the previously confidential report to defense lawyers and the media in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The report said investigators interviewed more than 100 agents, prosecutors, lawyers and judges to determine “how Chambers was able to testify falsely in judicial proceedings without the knowledge” of federal authorities.

Although the report was spurred by Chambers’ actions, it found “systemic” problems with the DEA’s paid informant program.

The probe revealed an agency with “no effective system in place” to manage its thousands of paid informants, even though their undercover work and testimony is crucial in putting drug dealers behind bars.

Report Cites Neglect, Ineptitude

Few informants are without legal problems of their own, and often agree to work for the government in exchange for leniency. Federal law requires the government to turn over negative information about informants--including criminal histories and records of false testimony--so defendants can challenge their accusers’ credibility in court.

In its report, the agency cited management deficiencies, as well as neglect, ineptitude and even cover-ups among agents and federal prosecutors, in some cases out of reluctance to “blackball” successful informants like Chambers.

Driven in part by the lucrative payments, “Chambers was able to exploit, either wittingly or unwittingly, that weakness in the DEA [confidential informant] system” by working drug cases in 31 cities, the report said.

Federal investigators concluded that Chambers lied at least 16 times in drug cases and that he was arrested at least 13 times, on charges that included fraud and assault. Twice he solicited a prostitute and then claimed to be a federal agent to avoid arrest.

Chambers was convicted once, for soliciting a prostitute. Investigators found that some other charges were dropped after authorities interceded on his behalf.

The internal report does not place blame on the agency’s highest officials. Top management, it concluded, was not aware of Chambers’ misconduct until mid-1999, 14 years after he first lied on the witness stand and got arrested while working for the government.

If top managers had known of the problems, they could have kept cases from being tainted by warning agents and prosecutors nationwide. They, in turn, could have alerted defense lawyers, according to the report.

Chambers, a 43-year-old former Marine from the St. Louis area, ultimately helped the DEA arrest more than 400 suspects and seize $6 million in assets. On assignment, he would drive into cities in a fancy car, meet the street hustlers, set up deals and then help agents bust everyone involved.

His success led to paid jobs with the FBI, the Customs Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies.

But the DEA now believes Chambers began lying on the witness stand in 1985, just a year after joining its payroll.

By then, he was working cases in Los Angeles, site of one of the agency’s most active field offices.

On three occasions, Chambers told federal juries in Los Angeles that he had a criminal record and that he had lied under oath in previous trials, the report said.

The first time, on June 9, 1988, the DEA agent working with Chambers left the courtroom and alerted her supervisor. Her concerns were never documented in Chambers’ case file or sent up the chain of command, the report said.

Despite her concerns, the agent told investigators that she continued using Chambers through the early 1990s in about 25 cases involving “violent large-scale drug traffickers.”

The prosecutor in the case also did little to raise warnings about Chambers, saying it was the DEA’s responsibility, the report said.

In the late 1980s, authorities told Chambers he could no longer work for the federal government in the Los Angeles area because of a dispute over how he spent public money.

Still, his popularity among agents soared elsewhere.

By the early 1990s, he was working in at least 12 states. He also came back to Southern California, working DEA cases out of a Santa Ana office for three years.

Chambers testified that he never smoked, drank, took drugs--or got arrested. He was an informant, he would say, because he wanted to clean up the streets.

The DEA report concedes that Chambers lied repeatedly about his criminal record, his failure to pay income tax and his level of education. The agency says he never lied about the “material” facts of a case.

In 1995, U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham in Denver accused the DEA of “outrageous government misconduct” for paying Chambers so much money to work drug cases. He ordered prosecutors and agency officials to pull together a centralized record of Chambers’ work, payments and court testimony, so lawyers nationwide could access it.

Instead, prosecutors dismissed the drug case in question--and four others, the report said.

Prosecutors in Denver also warned the DEA’s office of chief counsel in Washington about Chambers. But agency lawyers ignored them, the report said.

In 1996, Chambers was back in Los Angeles helping the DEA and the FBI with their takedown of alleged drug overlord Edward Stanley Jr.

Rearick, the investigator for the public defender’s office, got the case and became suspicious. The government’s unidentified operative sounded a lot like Chambers.

“I thought, it can’t be,” Rearick said recently. “There’s no way the DEA would be that stupid.”

But Chambers was indeed the informant. So a federal public defender, H. Dean Steward, petitioned the DEA for its files on him.

The agency refused. Rearick and Steward investigated Chambers on their own and uncovered evidence of his arrests and false testimony. They brought it to prosecutors, alleging DEA misconduct.

The Los Angeles prosecutors summoned top local DEA officials, demanding to know why they were not aware of Chambers’ problems and why the DEA continued to use him. Like their Denver colleagues, they alerted agency lawyers in Washington. They too were ignored, the report said.

And DEA agents continued to employ Chambers, paying him more in 1997--$366,227--than in any other year, agency records show.

In October 1997, Chambers helped the DEA arrest repeat offender Dave Daly during an alleged drug deal in Los Angeles.

By then, prosecutors had insisted that Chambers’ local DEA file document his misconduct.

However, agents continued to use Chambers.

“Obviously [they] did not check the file, either because they were not required to, or it was not available to them,” the report said.

In 1998, DEA internal affairs investigators interviewed Steward, but dropped the inquiry “when they learned that Steward was not alleging misconduct by a DEA employee” but rather by an informant, the report said.

Restrictions Follow Judge’s Accusations

It wasn’t until July 1999, after U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington D.C. accused the DEA of “extensive government misconduct,” that the agency’s top management was notified of the problems, according to the report.

Even then, the DEA and prosecutors continued using Chambers. And he continued to lie.

Finally, the agency restricted its use of Chambers in September 1999. He was deactivated five months later.

Gordon and Michele Leonhart, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s Los Angeles division, said they stopped using Chambers when his problems became known, and limited his use in subsequent prosecutions.

Still, earlier this year Los Angeles prosecutors were proceeding with their case against Daly when his lawyer, John Martin, filed a 250-page motion to dismiss the charges. He alleged that a history of DEA misconduct in its relationship with Chambers “has stained judicial proceedings across the country.”

Prosecutors offered to release Daly on time served--if he promised not to sue the government. On March 24, he walked out of a downtown lockup a free man.

“I think they didn’t want to run the risk that a judge would find that their own misconduct was so plain as to warrant outright dismissal of the case,” Martin said.

As for Daly, Martin said, “He’s pinching himself that he’s even home.”