Tag: FBI

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Opinion

The Big Dance

The government showed its Tennessee Waltz playbook in the Roscoe Dixon trial last year, but prosecutors face a few more obstacles as they try to convict John Ford.

The X-factors include Ford himself, his attorney Michael Scholl, bagman Barry Myers, controversial U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, and the Justice Department’s public corruption prosecutors in Nashville, who have Ford under a separate indictment.

In many ways, of course, the trials will be more alike than different. Prosecutor Tim DiScenza will play obscenity-laced audio and videotapes of Ford wheeling and dealing with an undercover FBI agent pretending to be an executive of E-Cycle Management. The payoff picture will be shown from different angles. Jurors will hear how the phony company was created and the role played by informant Tim Willis. Willis and the FBI agents who pretended to be free-spending E-Cycle executives will testify.

But Ford is an iconic name in Memphis politics, and he was a genuine leader in the Tennessee Senate. Dixon, on the other hand, was a plodder and secondary figure even in the estimation of his friends. He bumbled through an appearance on the witness stand, and his lame alibi and inconsistencies made him easy prey for DiScenza. The shrewdness that made Ford a self-described consultant with a high-six-figure income could also make him a formidable defendant, whether or not he chooses to testify. His reputation as a big talker given to outrageous overstatements might actually help him fight the three counts of his indictment that accuse him of threatening Willis.

Scholl has the benefit of learning from the trials of Dixon and Calvin Williams, a former Shelby County employee who was also convicted. Dixon’s attorney, Coleman Garrett, opened with the entrapment defense. Dixon went off in another direction when he took the witness stand. Based on pretrial motions, Scholl will apparently argue that Ford considered the money he got from E-Cycle to be a legitimate consulting fee.

The key witness against Dixon was Myers, described as being “like a son” and “protégé” to the senator. Myers, who did not begin cooperating with the FBI until the Tennessee Waltz indictments became public, was the bagman for Dixon and others. On secretly recorded tapes with E-Cycle bigshots, Myers calls Ford “the big juice” and one of the “heavy hitters” in the legislature. But Myers was not as close to Ford as he was to Dixon. As far as we know, Myers was not Ford’s bagman. Nor is some other bagman waiting in the wings to testify against Ford. It appears that Ford did his own collections.

In the year since Dixon went to trial, the political climate has changed. The Justice Department has taken a pounding from Democrats, who now control Congress, and some Republicans. Last month, it came to light that Gonzales was involved in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, including Bud Cummins of Little Rock. A Republican, Cummins said he resented the misstatements about the firings more than the dismissal itself and believes the Justice Department has lost credibility.

Gonzales is due to testify before the U.S. Senate next week, if he survives that long. Ford jurors will be instructed not to read or watch news during the trial, but Scholl may have an opportunity to suggest that Ford was politically targeted as a Democrat.

Dixon jurors were introduced to the concept of “predication” or predisposition to commit a crime. “You can’t go out trolling for public officials, can you?” DiScenza asked an FBI agent, who explained that Tennessee Waltz began as an investigation of Shelby County Juvenile Court. Jurors heard tapes of Dixon and Myers discussing bribes for helping a dental clinic (for which Dixon was not indicted) to show he was predicated.

In the minds of many Memphians, John Ford was predicated by being John Ford — a fast driver and big talker with marriage problems and expensive tastes. But that won’t cut it in court. Prosecutors will have to be careful not to trip over their own colleagues in Nashville.

In 2006, Ford was indicted in Nashville in connection with his “consulting” payments from companies doing business with the TennCare program. The indictment pushed Ford’s trial date back to April to allow Scholl to review hundreds more documents. Nashville prosecutors will only say that their case will follow sequentially the Memphis Ford trial.

(Check www.memphisflyer.com for regular trial updates.)

Categories
Opinion

Politics and Justice

How long do you think it will take the national media to follow the strands of the fired federal prosecutors story to Tennessee? I’d say about two weeks, at most.

On April 9th, former state senator John Ford goes on trial in federal court in Memphis. He’s a big fish in his own right and he’s the uncle of Harold Ford Jr., who is a celebrity, and the brother of Harold Ford Sr., who had his own federal trials in 1990 and 1993. The second trial, which resulted in Ford’s acquittal, was marked by exactly the sort of political meddling in the Justice Department that is now being exposed in the Bush administration.

There are so many good angles it’s hard to cram them all in, but here goes.

Don Sundquist’s name could come up in the John Ford trial because the powerful senator from Shelby County was a go-to guy from 1994 to 2002, when Sundquist was governor. Ford has a May 22nd trial date in Nashville on charges related to consulting.

But there’s much more. When he was a congressman in 1991, Sundquist recommended that Hickman Ewing Jr. be replaced by Ed Bryant as U.S. attorney for Western Tennessee. Ewing and his assistants were on the trail of Harold Ford Sr., who confronted Ewing in an elevator in the federal building in 1989 and told him, “You are a pitiful excuse for a U.S. attorney, but I can guarantee you that you won’t be the U.S. attorney much longer.”

Like the eight fired prosecutors who are now in the news, Ewing was replaced in mid-term. Ewing, Sundquist, and Bryant are Republicans, while Ford is a Democrat. In 1993, Bill Clinton was the newly elected president, and when Democrats in the Justice Department tried to influence jury selection in the second Ford trial, the government’s two trial attorneys resigned, albeit for only a day. So did Bryant, who was going to be replaced anyway along with 92 other U.S. attorneys as part of the new administration.

Sundquist, of course, went on to become governor. In his second term, when Tennessee Waltz was still just a song, federal prosecutors began an investigation of fraudulent state contracts. One close friend of Sundquist, John Stamps, was sentenced to two years in prison in 2005. Another Sundquist friend, Al Ganier, was indicted on federal obstruction charges in 2004. Three years later, he doesn’t even have a trial date. But in a court order in 2005, U.S. district judge Karl Forester wrote that Sundquist was “the impetus” for the federal investigation and said prosecutors had evidence that Sundquist “improperly interceded” on Ganier’s behalf.

Sundquist has not been charged and has said he is confident he is not under investigation. If the phrase “improperly interceded” rings a bell, that’s what has Joseph Lee on the hot seat over at MLGW in connection with another Ford, brother Edmund.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Memphis and Nashville who were there at the start of the political corruption investigations have moved on. In Memphis, Terry Harris took a job with FedEx. In Nashville, Jim Vines resigned in 2006, and first assistant Zach Fardon left in January.

Will Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resign? He apparently lied about what he knew about the firings and when he knew it. Lying can be criminal. It was one of the factors that got Roscoe Dixon such a harsh prison sentence, and it’s one of the charges against Michael Hooks Jr., scheduled to go to trial later this year.

The bumbling of the Justice Department has been criticized by, among others, Bud Cummins, former U.S. attorney in Arkansas, who was fired last year to make room for a pal of Karl Rove and then smeared by his old bosses. Two years ago, Cummins, a Republican, staunchly defended Gonzales and President Bush.

If Republican prosecutors are upset, how do you suppose Democratic pols feel about being seven times as likely as Republicans to be indicted? A suggested opening argument in the John Ford trial: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the 1996 presidential election, Memphis delivered Tennessee, whose electoral votes clinched it for Clinton/Gore. The Republicans and Karl Rove never got over it, and Mr. Ford is the victim of a political vendetta by a Justice Department whose leadership lies.”

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News The Fly-By

Identity Theft

It sounds like a scene from a mafia film: In a covert meeting, a drug-dealing, crooked cop agrees to sell information about a confidential informant to another drug dealer. But unbeknownst to the cop, the other dealer is secretly taping the conversation for the FBI.

Last week, the FBI arrested Thomas Braswell, an officer with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO), and charged him with bribery for allegedly selling confidential information. Pending an investigation, he was relieved of duty with pay.

According to the complaint filed with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Braswell received $500 late last month from an undercover informant posing as a coke and steroids dealer in exchange for the address, Social Security number, driver’s license history, and date of birth of another informant used in the SCSO investigations.

Braswell obtained the information through SCSO computers and read it out over the phone. All the while, the informant was taping the conversation. Several other conversations were also taped via telephone and during face-to-face meetings.

During one conversation, Braswell discussed his efforts to obtain steroids. Sheriff Mark Luttrell says it was Braswell’s drug involvement that prompted the FBI investigation.

“In this case, officers were working on some drug crimes. In the course of that routine investigation, this case came up involving [Braswell],” says Luttrell. “They just started following the leads. It wasn’t a situation where we started out targeting a particular officer.”

Though Braswell’s primary duties were those of a patrolman, he had access to the same informant database that drug and gang units have.

“There’s certain information that all of our law enforcement officers have access to,” says Luttrell. “It’s considered for official use only. That doesn’t mean it’s top-secret or highly classified. But there is an understanding that it’s considered to be sensitive information not to be released to the public.”

Luttrell acknowledges that Braswell could have put an informant in danger had he given that information to a real drug dealer. He says that informants range from “John Q. Citizen to someone with a criminal background.”

“Fortunately, we became aware of this in time. We were able to control it,” says Luttrell. “We just have to be very aggressive in responding to it.”

As a result, Luttrell says the SCSO will be beefing up lessons about handling sensitive information in their in-service training, the 40 hours of classes every officer takes annually.

They’ll also be looking at their system of storing confidential information.

“Anytime you have an event like this, you certainly look at your internal procedures to see if your restrictions are tight enough,” says Luttrell. “We’ll go through that routine process of accessing our security.”

Braswell is the third SCSO officer charged in a federal investigation since 2005. According to personnel records obtained by the Flyer, Braswell was cited for attempting to start a fight with another officer in 2004. He’s also been cited for improper handling of a traffic ticket, accidentally discharging his weapon in the prison ward, and crashing his police vehicle.