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4.5.2001 00:22
Federal probes have great resources
 Sometimes local officials want federal prosecutors to tackle tough corruption cases, but other
times turf battles can develop between U.S. Attorneys and state prosecutors.
By
TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer
Over the past 30 years, U.S. Attorneys' offices have targeted local political corruption as a law-enforcement priority, sparking a slew of indictments and a chorus of criticism from some legal scholars who assert that federal prosecutors have exercised their discretion too aggressively, taking on cases that should more rightfully have been handled by the states.
They point, for example, to the federal-court conviction of an Illinois state judge who agreed to accept a bribe to fix a sham case filed by the FBI, but then, fearing a trap, backed out before any bribe was paid. The judge -- who had a history, before the Feds' involvement, of accepting bribes from a local defense lawyer -- was found guilty of racketeering and sentenced to serve a four-year sentence in federal prison.
Why have the Feds stepped so aggressively into state and local corruption cases?
Often, overworked and underfunded state prosecutors ask for help from their federal counterparts in investigating local corruption. Legal scholars say that such intervention is necessary if local law-enforcement officials are unwilling to prosecute such defendants themselves.
The late Charles F. C. Ruff -- the director of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, who more recently was legal counsel to President Bill Clinton, wrote in a 1977 law-review article that federal prosecutors have "a virtually insurmountable advantage" when it comes to investigating and prosecuting crimes.
Information about criminal activity is funneled into the federal law-enforcement system from a host of sources, including IRS agents, bank auditors, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Customs Service. Federal prosecutors have much smaller caseloads than state prosecutors and have more resources available to conduct investigations.
And "equally important," Ruff wrote, the U.S. Attorney "is likely to have the motivation to act against individuals whom his state or local counterpart may be reluctant to challenge."
But federal prosecution of local officials for acts of corruption often creates conflict between U.S. Attorneys' offices and state prosecutors.
John S. Baker Jr., a law professor at Louisiana State University, wrote in a 1999 law-review article that, sometimes, the Feds simply make arrangements with police departments to take cases, without consulting with local prosecutors.
"For example, the police in Richmond, Va., have a card from federal agents telling them what cases they want to prosecute. Police in some cities automatically provide federal prosecutors with duplicate arrest sheets, which allow federal prosecutors to indict without consulting the district attorney," Baker wrote.
When Governor Almond was U.S. Attorney in Rhode Island, he and James E. O'Neil, the former state attorney general who was rejected by voters in 1992, had some turf battles that became public.
Almond said during one of his gubernatorial campaigns that his office did not investigate former Republican Gov. Edward D. DiPrete on corruption charges because O'Neil had told him to keep his hands off, a scenario O'Neil denied.
Almond called it "a classic turf battle."
There was also some friction between Almond's and O'Neil's offices over an investigation into the collapse of the failed RISDIC-insured Jefferson Loan and Investment Bank.
O'Neil never presented the DiPrete case for indictment. But his successor in office, Jeffrey B. Pine, did and secured guilty pleas from the former governor and his son Dennis DiPrete. The state attorney-general's office has also successfully prosecuted members of Cianci's first administration; two corrupt Cranston officials, former Public Works Director Raymond Azar and former Parks and Recreation Director John Soscia; and three corrupt judges: Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas F. Fay, Superior Court Judge Antonio S. Almeida, and Family Court Judge John Fuyat. State racketeeering and bribery charges are pending against three other former Cranston officials: John Calcagni, the former purchasing agent accused of running a kickback scheme with former Treasurer Kathleen DeLuca and her husband, Raymond, the city's director of computer services.
But as Ruff, the former Watergate prosecutor and Clinton legal counsel, wrote: around the nation, "the probability that state prosecutors will discover or pursue corruption at the highest levels of state government is slim."
Since U.S. Attorneys often have "divergent policy judgments, whether a particular form of criminal activity is prosecuted [by the Feds] may well depend more on where it takes place than on who engages in it or how serious is its impact on the community," Ruff wrote.
Over the last three decades, federal prosecutors in Rhode Island have prosecuted more local corruption cases than state prosecutors have. Former House Speaker Edward P. Manning, Pawtucket Mayor Brian J. Sarault, several members of Sarault's administration and contractors who paid kickbacks for city work, North Providence Mayor Salvatore Mancini, and several prominent officials in Cianci's first administration were prosecuted by the Feds.
In addition, a joint federal-state investigation into Johnston municipal corruption led to convictions in federal court of three former town officials -- including a councilman -- two developers, and one former supervisor for the Providence Water Supply Board.
Sometimes, the Feds take jurisdiction in cases that could conceivably be brought in the state courts because the penalty, upon conviction, would be much greater in the federal system of justice than a conviction could bring on the state level.
But state prosecutors often complain that federal prosecutors "cherry pick" the best corruption cases -- only those they deem to be winnable, wrote Baker, the law professor at Louisiana State University.
Yet the Feds are sometimes not as successful in winning corruption cases.
According to Baker, the cost of prosecuting a federal case is generally at least three times what it would cost in state court.
But despite the great resources of the federal government and the FBI's sophisticated investigatory techniques, the likelihood of conviction in a federal corruption case is not that great, according to Baker.
Only one in four cases brought by the FBI results in conviction, according to a study of Justice Department statistics by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In Rhode Island, successive prosecutions of former House Speaker Manning resulted in no convictions, and Mancini -- who was represented at trial by Cianci's lawyer, Richard M. Egbert -- was acquitted.
THE LOCAL
corruption cases the Feds have taken on outside Rhode Island have varied widely:
A Chicago alderman, Casimir Staszcuk, was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison for receiving $9,000 from a zoning consultant in return for a promise not to oppose zoning amendments affecting property within the the alderman's ward.
More than two dozen members of the vice squad of the 18th Police District in Chicago, including its commander, Charles Braasch, were convicted in an extortion scheme in which the defendants obtained more than $5,000 a month from 53 bars. The bar owners were told that, in return for their payments, they would be protected from police harassment and regulatory laws and would be forewarned of raids.
The executive director of the New Bedford (Mass.) Redevelopment Agency was convicted of taking payments from the president of an engineering company in exchange for the awarding of contracts by the agency.
A judge on the Philadelphia Traffic Court was found guilty of collecting bribes from employees to guarantee their continued tenure and to fix traffic tickets.
A Texas county sheriff and his deputy were convicted of taking bribes from a federal prisoner who was allowed to have contact visits with his wife and girlfriend in the county jail where he was in custody.
An Illinois state judge was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison for failing to disclose "loans" from lawyers who appeared before him.
The Feds have have been playing a more and more active role in corruption prosecutions since the early 1970s.
According to Richard Thornburgh, who was chief of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, and later U.S. attorney general, the Feds started picking up more of these cases in the 1970s "to fill a vacuum created by the inability or unwillingness of state and local law-enforcement agencies to deal adequately with the task of ferreting out corruption."
In 1980, the Department of Justice designated corruption of major public officials as one of its six national priorities for investigation and prosecution. Those to be targeted, the Department of Justice said, should be governmental and law-enforcement officials and judges.
THE STATUTE
the Feds have used to indict many of these officials is the Hobbs Act, a statute enacted in 1946 as a weapon against labor racketeering. Under this statute, a former governor of Oklahoma, a former attorney general of Alabama, a former mayor of Newark, and numerous local and state legislators, councilmen, policemen, and other political figures have been convicted.
In the pre-Watergate era, federal prosecutors used the Hobbs Act to target officials who were alleged to have committed extortion by instilling fear in their victims.
Justice Department officials, however, expanded their interpretation of the statute, because, as they delved deeper into local corruption, "they encountered a level of sophistication in the making and receiving of illicit payments" that they believed might make it hard for them to prove that victims of extortion had made payments under duress, wrote Ruff in his Georgetown Law Journal article.
In 1972, a federal appeals court opened the door wider for prosecutors to go after corrupt public officials. No longer was it necessary for them to prove that the victim had made a payment involuntarily, under fear or duress. All prosecutors had to do was prove that such officials, using the power of their office, had wrongfully taken money or property that was not due them "under color of official right."
During the last 30 years, prosecutors have also used three other federal statutes to target corrupt local officials: the Mail Fraud Act, the Travel Act, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The federal RICO statute had been aimed at combatting the infiltration of legitimate businesses by organized crime, but, like the Hobbs Act, it has been used since the early 1970s to prosecute local officials "on the take."
The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, wrote in a 1998 Year-End Report of the Federal Judiciary that "the trend to federalize crimes that traditionally have been handled in state courts not only is taxing the Judiciary's resources and affecting its budget needs, but it also threatens to change entirely the nature of our federal system."
Digital Extra:
Find out more about the work being done by U.S. Attorneys in Rhode Island and elsewhere at:
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/usa_websites.html
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