Prosecutor Quits Over Boss’ Role in Pardon

A Los Angeles-based prosecutor engaged in fighting organized crime that originates in the former Soviet Union said Sunday that he was resigning to protest the role that his boss, U.S. Atty. Alejandro N. Mayorkas, played in winning the prison release of a convicted cocaine trafficker.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Duncan DeVille said that Mayorkas’ action--making a phone call to aides of former President Bill Clinton on behalf of cocaine trafficker Carlos Vignali--made it impossible for him to keep working in the narcotics unit of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

In a resignation letter to Mayorkas, he said: “I frequently place in danger both my life and, more importantly the lives of law enforcement agents, in the pursuit of drug dealers. Accordingly I cannot support your recent actions in assisting in the pardon” of Vignali.

Mayorkas revealed last month that he had phoned the White House counsel’s office about Vignali’s case at the urging of Vignali’s father, Horacio Vignali, a wealthy donor to political candidates. “I think in hindsight I should not have made that call to the White House,” Mayorkas said.

Clinton’s brother-in-law Hugh Rodham took a $200,000 fee from Horacio Vignali for pushing for the release but returned it at Clinton’s insistence after the controversy broke out.

The younger Vignali, of Los Angeles, was convicted of conspiracy to move more than 800 pounds of cocaine within the United States. He was sentenced in 1994 to 15 years in prison but was released after the former president’s decision to commute his sentence Jan. 20, the last day of the Clinton administration.

The decision was one of 176 acts of clemency that Clinton granted on his last day in office and was widely criticized by law enforcement officials, including members of the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, which had won the original conviction.

DeVille, a 37-year-old career prosecutor, said in an interview in Moscow that he felt compelled to resign in part because of his dealings with prosecutors in Russia and Armenia, where questions about corruption and the rule of law are highly pertinent.

DeVille was in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, launching a Justice Department program in which federal prosecutors in Los Angeles work with their Armenian counterparts to fight corruption when news of the Vignali pardon reached him.

“I’d been a proponent of the rule of law and preaching the gospel of the rule of law in Eastern Europe for the past few years,” he said. “Now suddenly I started getting asked by prosecutors about this pardon. . . . I kept being called a hypocrite.”

DeVille, a specialist in criminal groups from Russia and Armenia that operate in Southern California, said his faxed resignation to Mayorkas will take effect in 60 days. He was in Moscow to take depositions from a Russian witness in a federal extortion case.

Before joining the U.S. attorney’s office two years ago, DeVille said, he had been in Russia in connection with an American Bar Assn. project on judicial reform in Eastern Europe. Before that, he was an assistant attorney general for the state of Colorado and an assistant district attorney in Denver.

Other Southern California public figures besides Mayorkas who wrote or called the White House on the Vignali matter in the waning days of the Clinton presidency were Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, former Rep. Esteban Torres, state Sen. Richard Polanco and former state Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa.

Since the revelations, Mahony and Villaraigosa have said they erred in getting involved in the case. Baca has admitted making calls regarding Vignali, but denied that he supported a commutation.