T
The420Guy
Guest
'I'm going to call them as I see them, and this guy is a skunk. You can
quote me on that. He shouldn't be out there. I would think that the DEA
would find this guy an embarrassment. Because I've been in law enforcement,
and the guy embarrassed me.' --Investigator for California Attorney General
Bill Lockyer
"Clinton smoked it!" bragged the Measure G commercials that aired all last
fall over K-WINE Radio, 94.5 FM in Ukiah, CA: "So did Bush and Gore!"
Unlike closet potheads George Bush or Al Gore, though, Measure G actually
won the election right there on voting day, November 7, 2000, as a whopping
majority of Mendocino County voters pulled the lever to legalize marijuana
there. Or at least to oblige Mendo's sheriff and prosecutors to make pot
busts their lowest possible enforcement priority, while the county's Board
of Supervisors are to lobby state and federal governments for "the
immediate decriminalization of marijuana."
A Hard Line On Pot Enforcement
And it gets better yet, thanks to the California Green Party which pushed
and largely wrote Measure G. According to a grave impartial analysis of
this new ordinance by Mendo county counsel Peter Klein, the new law
"prevents the Board of Supervisors, the Sheriff, the District Attorney, the
Auditor-Controller and the Treasurer-Tax Collector from spending or
authorizing the expenditure of public funds or authorizing or approving any
sort of payment should such expenditures be made for the investigation,
arrest, or prosecution of any person, or the seizure of any property in any
single case involving twenty-five [25] or fewer adult flowering female
marijuana plants, or the equivalent in dried marijuana."
Six out of every ten voters in Mendocino pulled the lever for Measure G,
due largely to those entertaining "Clinton smoked it!" spots on K-Wine.
These spots were the creation of Green Party stalwart Dan Hamburg, Ukiah's
former Congressional representative in Washington (before the Democrats
disenchanted him.) Legalizing pot by county statute is a largely symbolic
achievement, Hamburg acknowledges, since the federal government can easily
intimidate local officials who try to enforce pot laws like Measure G and
Proposition 215. The most salient concrete value of legislative activism
like this, he indicates to HT, may be to incite the feds to overstep the
bounds of legality themselves, in trying desperately to annul such new
laws. And they've already done that in Mendo.
A Rogue DEA Agent, or a Rogue DEA?
The experience of Radio Station K-WINE in Ukiah, which underwent a tense
spell of entirely illegal political intimidation out of the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration while they were running those "Clinton Smoked
It" spots during the election campaign, probably presages the sort of nasty
response the feds are already working up for Measure G's enactment next
month, Dan Hamburg suspects. "What their next move will be is anybody's
guess," he tells HT, "but I think we catch a whiff of it in seeing this
character Mark Nelson appear."
It was a rather notorious California-based DEA field agent named Mark
Nelson [see below] who contacted K-WINE to procure transcripts of those
Measure G commercials, as reported in the Santa Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT in
November. Asked why the federal DEA was involving itself with intimidation
of free political speech in a local election, their San Francisco
public-information officer, Joceyln Barnes, smoothly responded,
"Headquarters wanted actual transcripts of the radio ads. That's all I can
say. It was done at their request." Then she added: "It was just part of a
routine gathering of information about marijuana ballot-related issues
across the US."
That was the DEA's story to the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, and they were sticking to
it until HIGH TIMES started calling with followup questions: like, does
this mean the DEA now opens a criminal investigative case on every single
person involved in political efforts to change the marijuana laws? They
stuck to their initial story very effectively for a while, by neglecting to
return calls to HT from their San Francisco office for weeks. But then
after some calls to DEA headquarters in Virginia--the very "headquarters"
cited by officer Barnes when she spoke to the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, as requesting
the K- WINE commercial transcripts created by Dan Hamburg--Jocelyn Barnes
finally started talking on the phone directly to this HT correspondent.
So then, was DEA agent Mark Nelson in fact directed by DEA "headquarters"
to demand those transcripts from K-WINE? "No, he was not under orders to do
that," Barnes replied. Bingo!
The DEA Lied? Stop The Presses!
The next HT question to Barnes was why DEA Agent Nelson, if he was
routinely collecting information about marijuana initiatives around the
nation in general, chose to contact a privately owned and operated local
radio station for this information which he could and should have gotten
from the county Election Supervisor's office. "He didn't want information
ABOUT the actual measure itself," Barnes somehow found herself saying out
loud. "He just wanted information about that particular ad. That's all he
wanted, and that's where he heard it, on the radio, so he called to inquire
about obtaining it."
"Yes," she next told HT flatly, when asked again if Nelson was working on
his own initiative, not headquarters', in making this demand for the K-WINE
transcripts. Then she quickly added that she believed the transcripts had
been "turned in to the supervisors, and I think they rest with the
supervisors here, the management." If there was really a supervisor in
charge of them, though, she wasn't giving any names.
The K-Wine transcripts, Barnes then reassured HT, are "not going to be used
for anything. If anything they would just be collected and reviewed and
forwarded to headquarters."
That's DEA national headquarters in Arlington, VA? "Just for informational
purposes," Barnes was bleating now, "just so they'll know what is going on
in the field."
So if this demand by Agent Nelson for those transcripts wasn't part of any
formal DEA investigation of marijuana-related political initiatives in the
2000 elections, then was it a for particular case he was involved in? "No,
this had nothing to do with a particular case. He heard the advertisement,
and I guess he thought it was important."
DEA to HIGH TIMES: Don't Believe All You Read
So, since San Francisco DEA public-information officer Barnes was telling
HT in December an entirely different story from what she'd told the Santa
Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT in November, reporter Mark Geniella there was asked
about the discrepancies. All he knew was what she'd told him: Agent Nelson
"was just doing what headquarters had requested. They wanted actual
transcripts of the ads," Geniella confirmed. "I certainly stand by the
accuracy of my account. This raises the question of what did the DEA want
with a political ad? Why don't they get the ballot measure?"
Contacted herself, then, about these discrepancies, Joceyln Barnes
proceeded to speak to the accuracy of the Santa Rosa PRESS- DEMOCRAT. "That
article has lots of errors in it," she told HT, "so please don't refer to
it. And that was the problem [originally] with returning your call." It was
all the fault of the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, that is--even the weasly way HT had to
pull rank on Barnes to get her to talk to HT in the first place!
When the HT reporter showed every sign of swallowing and being satisfied
with this explanation, DEA officer Barnes gradually proceeded to speak more
easily. Asked why DEA field officers would be demanding transcripts of
political ads for marijuana initiatives, to feed up the chain to their
superiors somewhere, she had a great explanation now, once she got
comfortable talking: "As an agency it is important for us to be aware about
what's going on about the different drug reforms around the country, and
headquarters may not get that information by not being in that particular
area where the different reforms are being passed or initiated. So it's
within the realm of what we do--intelligence, enforcement--it's just part
of what we do in just keeping our agency informed so that we'll be better
informed. We don't participate in the political process."
Fornication And Forgery As Investigative Tools
Well, if you're working at a little local radio station in the California
outback, and a DEA agent starts demanding your marijuana-initiative
commercial transcripts during election season, you might not be irrational
to have some qualms about running ads like that in the future. Especially
if your station's in Northern California, where the spicy and entirely
supra-constitutional adventures of Drug Enforcement Administration Special
Agent Mark Nelson have been fodder for news broadcasts for years now.
Nelson's name was hardly unknown to people at K-WINE Radio in Ukiah, and
the way he treats people who fall under his investigative purview has
become legendary in those parts.
Stories about the DEA's Mark Nelson began percolating around Northern
California during the 1999 trial of John Dalton, a Mendocino mechanic
busted in 1996 after a five-year investigation by the DEA. Dalton was duly
convicted of mass pot cultivation in September of '99, largely thanks to
the suppression by federal judge Susan Ilston of all references to the
phenomenal activities undertaken by DEA case agent Mark Nelson in the
course of "investigating" Dalton. San Francisco defense attorneys Tony
Serra and Shari Greenberger were unable, therefore, to show the jury how
Nelson had recruited Dalton's wife Victoria as a snitch, and gotten her to
wear a wire in bed with the guy while they made pillow talk about
pot-growing. Since the judge prohibited the jury from hearing a word about
this, Dalton wound up getting 27 years in jail.
A DEA Romance: Blindfolds, Handcuffs, Target Practice
Poor Dalton wasn't the only figure in the case getting screwed by the
amiable Victoria, either. There was also a 1997 reprimand against Agent
Dalton, levied out of DEA headquarters for developing an "inappropriate
relationship with an informant"--earning Nelson a month's unpaid
suspension--evidently initiated by the informant herself: Mrs. Victoria
Dalton, going now by her maiden name, Horstman.
This spicy matter was actually called to Judge Illston's attention by the
prosecutor in the Dalton case, during an evidentiary hearing out of the
jury's presence, so's it couldn't be sprung on her by surprise by the
defense. The judge was invited by the feds themselves to examine all
aspects of allegations of Nelson's patterns of unlawful behavior. Among
many other extraordinary things, the Assistant US Attorney prosecuting
Dalton piously stipulated that in September of 1997, Agent Nelson had
falsified the date on Victoria's fingerprint informant-identity card,
endeavoring to hide from his superiors an episode in which he'd taken her,
blindfolded, to a government safe-house, where some unspecified consensual
activity of a slap-and-tickle nature transpired. (The lucky Victoria was
ultimately paid $4,800 by the DEA for her exuberant undercover work in the
case.)
The judge herself was appalled for the record, when she heard about the
fingerprint-card forgery. "You're telling me your witness committed
perjury," Judge Illston told the prosecutor. "I'm very concerned about
this." And then she learned from a friend of Victoria's how Agent Nelson,
betraying tokens of mounting passion for his comely snitch, began making
remarks about her husband like, "I will do anything, and I mean anything,
to get him and send him to prison for the rest of his life!" But since the
judge was not concerned enough to permit any of this soap-opera turbulence
to come to the attention of the jury, they convicted the defendant on the
evidence of DEA Special Agent Mark Nelson (himself married to another, even!)
Only Following Orders, Or Just Getting Laid?
Special Agent Nelson was so determined to put John Dalton away that he
shamelessly bedazzled poor Victoria with an inflated idea of her place in
the DEA hierarchy itself, from the looks of things. "We were able to show
that she was assigned a number," recalls the lead investigator for Tony
Serra's defense firm at the time, H.B. O'Keady. "She thought she was acting
as an agent for the DEA, and she underwent firearms training. We claimed it
was at the direction of the DEA, and the DEA claims they know nothing about
it."
So the pious disavowal of Mark Nelson's supra-constitutional activities by
his DEA superiors is nothing novel, as O'Keady--who is now an investigator
for the office of California Attorney General Bill Lockyer--can illustrate.
"This woman," he recalls, "had a known history of alcoholism, and Nelson
plied her with alcohol." Which could certainly explain why DEA headquarters
wasn't ready to back him up afterward, even if they did--as Nelson
repeatedly claimed during his DEA internal-investigation hearing--pose
absolutely no objection to his snitch-handling style at the time of the
Dalton investigation.
John Wayne Gone All Slimy
Attorney General investigator O'Keady recalls Nelson vividly. "I was a
police officer for many, many years. I've been an investigator for many
years. I work for the Attorney General of California now," he says. "I've
seen it in the police, when a guy gets that John Wayne thing, I Am Above
The Law. Nelson has a lot of that in him."
Advised that the DEA still had Nelson working in the field for them as late
as last November 7, O'Keady recalled his famous fingerprint-card forgery in
the Dalton case: "He put one date on there, when in fact it was the date
he'd had her up at the safe house, blindfolded. He didn't want anyone to
know he'd had her up to the house, so he changed the date on that card. And
they're using this guy as a spokesman to go around to the radio stations?
That's ripe. That guy's so dirty that--you know what? I'd want to take a
shower for three days if I shook hands with that guy. I don't know what
Mark's assignment is now; it ought to be a cell in San Quentin."
Institutional Corruption, or What?
As it invariably happens with DEA falsehood-landslides like this,
conspiracy theories abound, and some even endeavor to exculpate the DEA
itself from any prime responsibility in the political intimidation of
K-WINE Radio in Ukiah. One brainstorm theory posits a lone bureaucrat
somewhere inside the notorious Intelligence division at the DEA, working on
his or her own maverick impulse, directing Special Agent Nelson to go and
terrorize this little Ukiah radio station--and selecting Nelson for the job
specifically so that afterward, if he claimed he was only following orders
from above, it could be written off as another falsehood from a DEA field
agent already notorious for personal misconduct and prevarication. This
scenario would at least soundproof the DEA as an institution from charges
of criminally interfering with a free election inside the United States of
America.
To sound this notion out, national DEA information officer Mike McManus in
DC was contacted. The question put to McManus was whether San Francisco
press officer Barnes told the Santa Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT one story in
November, believing it to be true on the basis of information then
available to her, and then told a different story in December to HT, on the
basis of information subsequently handed down to her from McManus' exalted
office. McManus replied masterfully, with questions only: "Just what is
this story about? Nelson's background or his picking up transcripts?"
Newshawk: David Isenberg
Pubdate: 23 Dec 2000
Source: High Times (US)
Copyright: 2001 Trans-High Corporation
Contact: letters@hightimes.com
Address: 235 Park Ave. S., 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003
Website: High Times · The Magazine Of High Society
Author: Preston Peet, Special to HighWitness News
Note: We are posting this web only item as an exception to policy do to
reader interest.
Referenced: DEA Defends Methods
MapInc
quote me on that. He shouldn't be out there. I would think that the DEA
would find this guy an embarrassment. Because I've been in law enforcement,
and the guy embarrassed me.' --Investigator for California Attorney General
Bill Lockyer
"Clinton smoked it!" bragged the Measure G commercials that aired all last
fall over K-WINE Radio, 94.5 FM in Ukiah, CA: "So did Bush and Gore!"
Unlike closet potheads George Bush or Al Gore, though, Measure G actually
won the election right there on voting day, November 7, 2000, as a whopping
majority of Mendocino County voters pulled the lever to legalize marijuana
there. Or at least to oblige Mendo's sheriff and prosecutors to make pot
busts their lowest possible enforcement priority, while the county's Board
of Supervisors are to lobby state and federal governments for "the
immediate decriminalization of marijuana."
A Hard Line On Pot Enforcement
And it gets better yet, thanks to the California Green Party which pushed
and largely wrote Measure G. According to a grave impartial analysis of
this new ordinance by Mendo county counsel Peter Klein, the new law
"prevents the Board of Supervisors, the Sheriff, the District Attorney, the
Auditor-Controller and the Treasurer-Tax Collector from spending or
authorizing the expenditure of public funds or authorizing or approving any
sort of payment should such expenditures be made for the investigation,
arrest, or prosecution of any person, or the seizure of any property in any
single case involving twenty-five [25] or fewer adult flowering female
marijuana plants, or the equivalent in dried marijuana."
Six out of every ten voters in Mendocino pulled the lever for Measure G,
due largely to those entertaining "Clinton smoked it!" spots on K-Wine.
These spots were the creation of Green Party stalwart Dan Hamburg, Ukiah's
former Congressional representative in Washington (before the Democrats
disenchanted him.) Legalizing pot by county statute is a largely symbolic
achievement, Hamburg acknowledges, since the federal government can easily
intimidate local officials who try to enforce pot laws like Measure G and
Proposition 215. The most salient concrete value of legislative activism
like this, he indicates to HT, may be to incite the feds to overstep the
bounds of legality themselves, in trying desperately to annul such new
laws. And they've already done that in Mendo.
A Rogue DEA Agent, or a Rogue DEA?
The experience of Radio Station K-WINE in Ukiah, which underwent a tense
spell of entirely illegal political intimidation out of the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration while they were running those "Clinton Smoked
It" spots during the election campaign, probably presages the sort of nasty
response the feds are already working up for Measure G's enactment next
month, Dan Hamburg suspects. "What their next move will be is anybody's
guess," he tells HT, "but I think we catch a whiff of it in seeing this
character Mark Nelson appear."
It was a rather notorious California-based DEA field agent named Mark
Nelson [see below] who contacted K-WINE to procure transcripts of those
Measure G commercials, as reported in the Santa Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT in
November. Asked why the federal DEA was involving itself with intimidation
of free political speech in a local election, their San Francisco
public-information officer, Joceyln Barnes, smoothly responded,
"Headquarters wanted actual transcripts of the radio ads. That's all I can
say. It was done at their request." Then she added: "It was just part of a
routine gathering of information about marijuana ballot-related issues
across the US."
That was the DEA's story to the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, and they were sticking to
it until HIGH TIMES started calling with followup questions: like, does
this mean the DEA now opens a criminal investigative case on every single
person involved in political efforts to change the marijuana laws? They
stuck to their initial story very effectively for a while, by neglecting to
return calls to HT from their San Francisco office for weeks. But then
after some calls to DEA headquarters in Virginia--the very "headquarters"
cited by officer Barnes when she spoke to the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, as requesting
the K- WINE commercial transcripts created by Dan Hamburg--Jocelyn Barnes
finally started talking on the phone directly to this HT correspondent.
So then, was DEA agent Mark Nelson in fact directed by DEA "headquarters"
to demand those transcripts from K-WINE? "No, he was not under orders to do
that," Barnes replied. Bingo!
The DEA Lied? Stop The Presses!
The next HT question to Barnes was why DEA Agent Nelson, if he was
routinely collecting information about marijuana initiatives around the
nation in general, chose to contact a privately owned and operated local
radio station for this information which he could and should have gotten
from the county Election Supervisor's office. "He didn't want information
ABOUT the actual measure itself," Barnes somehow found herself saying out
loud. "He just wanted information about that particular ad. That's all he
wanted, and that's where he heard it, on the radio, so he called to inquire
about obtaining it."
"Yes," she next told HT flatly, when asked again if Nelson was working on
his own initiative, not headquarters', in making this demand for the K-WINE
transcripts. Then she quickly added that she believed the transcripts had
been "turned in to the supervisors, and I think they rest with the
supervisors here, the management." If there was really a supervisor in
charge of them, though, she wasn't giving any names.
The K-Wine transcripts, Barnes then reassured HT, are "not going to be used
for anything. If anything they would just be collected and reviewed and
forwarded to headquarters."
That's DEA national headquarters in Arlington, VA? "Just for informational
purposes," Barnes was bleating now, "just so they'll know what is going on
in the field."
So if this demand by Agent Nelson for those transcripts wasn't part of any
formal DEA investigation of marijuana-related political initiatives in the
2000 elections, then was it a for particular case he was involved in? "No,
this had nothing to do with a particular case. He heard the advertisement,
and I guess he thought it was important."
DEA to HIGH TIMES: Don't Believe All You Read
So, since San Francisco DEA public-information officer Barnes was telling
HT in December an entirely different story from what she'd told the Santa
Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT in November, reporter Mark Geniella there was asked
about the discrepancies. All he knew was what she'd told him: Agent Nelson
"was just doing what headquarters had requested. They wanted actual
transcripts of the ads," Geniella confirmed. "I certainly stand by the
accuracy of my account. This raises the question of what did the DEA want
with a political ad? Why don't they get the ballot measure?"
Contacted herself, then, about these discrepancies, Joceyln Barnes
proceeded to speak to the accuracy of the Santa Rosa PRESS- DEMOCRAT. "That
article has lots of errors in it," she told HT, "so please don't refer to
it. And that was the problem [originally] with returning your call." It was
all the fault of the PRESS-DEMOCRAT, that is--even the weasly way HT had to
pull rank on Barnes to get her to talk to HT in the first place!
When the HT reporter showed every sign of swallowing and being satisfied
with this explanation, DEA officer Barnes gradually proceeded to speak more
easily. Asked why DEA field officers would be demanding transcripts of
political ads for marijuana initiatives, to feed up the chain to their
superiors somewhere, she had a great explanation now, once she got
comfortable talking: "As an agency it is important for us to be aware about
what's going on about the different drug reforms around the country, and
headquarters may not get that information by not being in that particular
area where the different reforms are being passed or initiated. So it's
within the realm of what we do--intelligence, enforcement--it's just part
of what we do in just keeping our agency informed so that we'll be better
informed. We don't participate in the political process."
Fornication And Forgery As Investigative Tools
Well, if you're working at a little local radio station in the California
outback, and a DEA agent starts demanding your marijuana-initiative
commercial transcripts during election season, you might not be irrational
to have some qualms about running ads like that in the future. Especially
if your station's in Northern California, where the spicy and entirely
supra-constitutional adventures of Drug Enforcement Administration Special
Agent Mark Nelson have been fodder for news broadcasts for years now.
Nelson's name was hardly unknown to people at K-WINE Radio in Ukiah, and
the way he treats people who fall under his investigative purview has
become legendary in those parts.
Stories about the DEA's Mark Nelson began percolating around Northern
California during the 1999 trial of John Dalton, a Mendocino mechanic
busted in 1996 after a five-year investigation by the DEA. Dalton was duly
convicted of mass pot cultivation in September of '99, largely thanks to
the suppression by federal judge Susan Ilston of all references to the
phenomenal activities undertaken by DEA case agent Mark Nelson in the
course of "investigating" Dalton. San Francisco defense attorneys Tony
Serra and Shari Greenberger were unable, therefore, to show the jury how
Nelson had recruited Dalton's wife Victoria as a snitch, and gotten her to
wear a wire in bed with the guy while they made pillow talk about
pot-growing. Since the judge prohibited the jury from hearing a word about
this, Dalton wound up getting 27 years in jail.
A DEA Romance: Blindfolds, Handcuffs, Target Practice
Poor Dalton wasn't the only figure in the case getting screwed by the
amiable Victoria, either. There was also a 1997 reprimand against Agent
Dalton, levied out of DEA headquarters for developing an "inappropriate
relationship with an informant"--earning Nelson a month's unpaid
suspension--evidently initiated by the informant herself: Mrs. Victoria
Dalton, going now by her maiden name, Horstman.
This spicy matter was actually called to Judge Illston's attention by the
prosecutor in the Dalton case, during an evidentiary hearing out of the
jury's presence, so's it couldn't be sprung on her by surprise by the
defense. The judge was invited by the feds themselves to examine all
aspects of allegations of Nelson's patterns of unlawful behavior. Among
many other extraordinary things, the Assistant US Attorney prosecuting
Dalton piously stipulated that in September of 1997, Agent Nelson had
falsified the date on Victoria's fingerprint informant-identity card,
endeavoring to hide from his superiors an episode in which he'd taken her,
blindfolded, to a government safe-house, where some unspecified consensual
activity of a slap-and-tickle nature transpired. (The lucky Victoria was
ultimately paid $4,800 by the DEA for her exuberant undercover work in the
case.)
The judge herself was appalled for the record, when she heard about the
fingerprint-card forgery. "You're telling me your witness committed
perjury," Judge Illston told the prosecutor. "I'm very concerned about
this." And then she learned from a friend of Victoria's how Agent Nelson,
betraying tokens of mounting passion for his comely snitch, began making
remarks about her husband like, "I will do anything, and I mean anything,
to get him and send him to prison for the rest of his life!" But since the
judge was not concerned enough to permit any of this soap-opera turbulence
to come to the attention of the jury, they convicted the defendant on the
evidence of DEA Special Agent Mark Nelson (himself married to another, even!)
Only Following Orders, Or Just Getting Laid?
Special Agent Nelson was so determined to put John Dalton away that he
shamelessly bedazzled poor Victoria with an inflated idea of her place in
the DEA hierarchy itself, from the looks of things. "We were able to show
that she was assigned a number," recalls the lead investigator for Tony
Serra's defense firm at the time, H.B. O'Keady. "She thought she was acting
as an agent for the DEA, and she underwent firearms training. We claimed it
was at the direction of the DEA, and the DEA claims they know nothing about
it."
So the pious disavowal of Mark Nelson's supra-constitutional activities by
his DEA superiors is nothing novel, as O'Keady--who is now an investigator
for the office of California Attorney General Bill Lockyer--can illustrate.
"This woman," he recalls, "had a known history of alcoholism, and Nelson
plied her with alcohol." Which could certainly explain why DEA headquarters
wasn't ready to back him up afterward, even if they did--as Nelson
repeatedly claimed during his DEA internal-investigation hearing--pose
absolutely no objection to his snitch-handling style at the time of the
Dalton investigation.
John Wayne Gone All Slimy
Attorney General investigator O'Keady recalls Nelson vividly. "I was a
police officer for many, many years. I've been an investigator for many
years. I work for the Attorney General of California now," he says. "I've
seen it in the police, when a guy gets that John Wayne thing, I Am Above
The Law. Nelson has a lot of that in him."
Advised that the DEA still had Nelson working in the field for them as late
as last November 7, O'Keady recalled his famous fingerprint-card forgery in
the Dalton case: "He put one date on there, when in fact it was the date
he'd had her up at the safe house, blindfolded. He didn't want anyone to
know he'd had her up to the house, so he changed the date on that card. And
they're using this guy as a spokesman to go around to the radio stations?
That's ripe. That guy's so dirty that--you know what? I'd want to take a
shower for three days if I shook hands with that guy. I don't know what
Mark's assignment is now; it ought to be a cell in San Quentin."
Institutional Corruption, or What?
As it invariably happens with DEA falsehood-landslides like this,
conspiracy theories abound, and some even endeavor to exculpate the DEA
itself from any prime responsibility in the political intimidation of
K-WINE Radio in Ukiah. One brainstorm theory posits a lone bureaucrat
somewhere inside the notorious Intelligence division at the DEA, working on
his or her own maverick impulse, directing Special Agent Nelson to go and
terrorize this little Ukiah radio station--and selecting Nelson for the job
specifically so that afterward, if he claimed he was only following orders
from above, it could be written off as another falsehood from a DEA field
agent already notorious for personal misconduct and prevarication. This
scenario would at least soundproof the DEA as an institution from charges
of criminally interfering with a free election inside the United States of
America.
To sound this notion out, national DEA information officer Mike McManus in
DC was contacted. The question put to McManus was whether San Francisco
press officer Barnes told the Santa Rosa PRESS-DEMOCRAT one story in
November, believing it to be true on the basis of information then
available to her, and then told a different story in December to HT, on the
basis of information subsequently handed down to her from McManus' exalted
office. McManus replied masterfully, with questions only: "Just what is
this story about? Nelson's background or his picking up transcripts?"
Newshawk: David Isenberg
Pubdate: 23 Dec 2000
Source: High Times (US)
Copyright: 2001 Trans-High Corporation
Contact: letters@hightimes.com
Address: 235 Park Ave. S., 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003
Website: High Times · The Magazine Of High Society
Author: Preston Peet, Special to HighWitness News
Note: We are posting this web only item as an exception to policy do to
reader interest.
Referenced: DEA Defends Methods
MapInc
