From: aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Repost - Barrons Article on Inslaw
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 17:40:40 CDT
Reply-To: dave 'who can do? ratmandu!' ratcliffe
Subject: the INSLAW Case: part I of "BARRON'S" 1988 2-part piece Keywords: U.S. Deptartment of Justice != "with liberty and justice for all" Lines: 510
although these 2 articles are dated by more than 3 1/2 succeeding years-worth of newer revelations and mounting evidence of cynical corruption at the highest levels of the executive branch, as well as linkages into the judicial branch of the u.s. government, they still provide very useful and well-researched background material.
In his decision, [federal bankruptcy judge George] Bason compares the Justice Department to someone who decides to test drive an automobile: "So the customer drives off with the car and this is the last the dealer ever sees of him. I think that is approximately what the Department of Justice has done in this case."
First of a 2-part piece which began in the March 21, 1988 issue of "BARRON'S NATIONAL BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL WEEKLY" -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beneath Contempt Did the Justice Dept. Deliberately Bankrupt INSLAW? By MAGGIE MAHAR
"A VERY strange thing happened at the Department of Justice . . ." What that very strange thing was was described in clear and exhaustive detail in Judge George Bason's blistering ruling before a packed Washington, D.C., courtroom last September. In a quiet voice, Bason, a 56-year-old federal bankruptcy judge with a reputation for being meticulous in his judicial approach, told the astonishing story of INSLAW vs. the United States of America. In his ruling on the case, Bason explained how "through trickery, deceit and fraud," the U.S. Department of Justice "took, converted, stole" software belonging to INSLAW, a Washington-based computer software firm. In 1982, INSLAW signed a $10 million contract to install its case-tracking software, PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) in the Justice Department's offices. But instead of honoring the contract, Bason asserts, Justice officials proceeded to purposefully drive the small software company into bankruptcy, and then tried to push it into liquidation, engaging in an "outrageous, deceitful, fraudulent game of cat and mouse, demonstrating contempt for both the law and any principle of fair dealing." Ultimately, the series of "willful, wanton and deceitful acts" led to a cover up. Bason called statements by top Justice Department officials "ludicrous . . . incredible . . . and totally unbelievable." Some of the evidence against the department came from one of its own. During the course of the litigation, Anthony Pasciuto, deputy director of the department's Executive Office for United States Trustees, met secretly with INSLAW'S president, William Hamilton. At that breakfast meeting at the Mayflower hotel, Anthony Pasciuto told Hamilton and his wife, Nancy, how the Justice Department had pressured Trustee officers to liquidate their company. Later, a superior confirmed Pasciuto's story. But at the trial, a horrified Pasciuto listened while his superior changed his testimony. Close to tears, he, too, recanted. Judge Bason believed Pasciuto's original testimony however. On Feb. 2, 1988, he ordered Justice to pay INSLAW about $6.8 million in licensing fees and roughly another $1 million in legal fees. Bason wasn't sure whether he could assess a department of the U.S. government with punitive damages. If so, damages could run as high as $25 million. Bason struggled with that legal question and finally postponed the decision to a later date. Now, no one knows how Judge Bason would have ruled on the question of damages. In November, Judge Bason rejected a Department of Justice motion to liquidate INSLAW. A scant one month later, the Harvard Law School graduate and former law professor discovered that he was not being reappointed. The decision to replace him followed from a recommendation made by a four-man merit selection panel appointed by the chief circuit judge, Patricia Wald, a former Justice Department employee. The panel was headed up by District Judge Norma Johnson, another former Justice Department lawyer. Judge Bason stepped down in February. He was replaced by S. Martin Teel Jr., 42, one of the Justice Department lawyers who had unsuccessfully argued the INSLAW case before Bason. Even jaded, case-hardened Washington attorneys called the action "shocking" and "eerie." INSLAW'S case will be assigned to another judge for disposition of damages. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is appealing Judge Bason's initial $8 million award to U.S. District Court. And, last week, the Internal Revenue Service descended on the Hamiltons, demanding that the bankrupt company pay $600,000 in back taxes-- immediately. "I restrained the IRS from going after the Hamiltons personally--just a few days before I left the bench," Bason recalls. "But that restraining order lasts only 10 days. I don't know what's happening now." "It seemed as if the controversy was winding down," observes INSLAW'S former attorney, Leigh Ratiner. "It would follow a natural course in the press, and then fade from view." Inslaw would become another shocking event that slinks off into obscurity: Someone occasionally might dimly remember and idly ask, "What ever did happen to Bill Hamilton and those INSLAW people? A real shame . . . I heard the judge was back teaching law somewhere. . . ." But at the end of last week Anthony Pasciuto instructed his lawyer to write a letter to Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns. Pasciuto has decided to tell the full story that he began telling at the Mayflower last spring. And, in an interview with "Barron's" at the end of the week, Pasciuto explained how the Justice Department black-listed INSLAW. It was a tale that involved two U.S. trustees, a federal judge who told two versions of the same story, and a Justice Department that routinely refused to pay certain suppliers: "If you're on the bad list, you go in this drawer," another Justice Department employee explained to Pasciuto. Pasciuto knows what happened--but not why. In the trial, INSLAW claimed that C. Madison "Brick" Brewer, the Justice Department employee responsible for administering the department's $10 million contract with INSLAW, held a grudge against the company: INSLAW's Hamilton had fired Brewer in 1976. But since the trial, Hamilton has become convinced that Brewer alone could not have been that powerful. Bason's removal and Pasciuto's account suggest that what motivated the remarkable behavior of the Justice Department was something of greater moment than a middle-level employee's petty grievance. Indeed, three people have lost their jobs as a result of the INSLAW scandal--but not paradoxically, those responsible for the scandals. The trio of victims includes Judge Bason and Pasciuto-- who received notice that he would be fired after he testifed, and just two days after Judge Bason was informed that he would not be reappointed. The third casualty of the Inslaw affair was Leigh Ratiner a former partner at Dickstein Shapiro and Morin, the firm that represented Edwin Meese during his confirmation hearings for Attorney General. Why Bason and Pasciuto got the axe can easily be inferred. Ratiner's forced departure is a little more complicated. In January 1986, Elliot Richardson asked Ratiner to take on INSLAW'S defense. Ratiner agreed, and named D. Lowell Jensen, then the Deputy Attorney General, and a long-time Meese friend, in a complaint. Not long after, Meese discussed the case with another Dickstein, Shapiro partner, Leonard Garment, the attorney who, along with E. Robert Wallach, represented Meese in his confirmation hearings. Meese acknowledged the conversation in a pretrial interrogation. Shortly thereafter, his partners at Dickstein, Shapiro asked Ratiner to resign. The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is now looking into INSLAW--a sign that the lawmakers, too, think that the whole story of the "something strange" that happened in the Justice Department has yet to be told. The Hamilton's attorneys aren't sure why a department of the U.S. government wanted to liquidate their company. Anthony Pasciuto doesn't know. Judge Bason is still trying to piece together who had it in for him and why. But Bason, Hamilton and the attorneys involved in the case are beginning to define the pieces of the puzzle with some pointed questions. Why did the Justice Department hire Brick Brewer, a former INSLAW employee, to supervise a contract with his former employer? "The person is going to be biased in favor of the former employer- -or he is going to be biased against the former employer," Bason pointed out in his decision. The judge also noted that D. Lowell Jensen, the former deputy Attorney General named by Ratiner in his complaint, was questioned on this issue. Jensen, now a federal judge in California, "recognized the general principle that it is a bad idea" to hire a former employee, disgruntled or otherwise, for such a task, Bason observes. But, Bason wrote, he was amazed to find "no hint in Jensen's testimony that he recognized there was any possible applicability of that general principle to the case of Mr. Brewer and Inslaw." Hamilton discloses that Mr. Jensen himself was already familiar with INSLAW. Hamilton ran into Jensen in the early 1970s, when Hamilton was developing PROMIS, the case-tracking system that he contracted to sell to the Justice Department. At that time, Jensen, a long-time friend of Ed Meese, was district attorney in Alameda Country in northern California, developing his own computerized case-tracking system, DALITE. Jensen competed with Hamilton's PROMIS head-on-head. PROMIS won. Hamilton and others familiar with the case ask: Could Jensen still be feeling competitive? People who have "tracked" the INSLAW case point to the coincidences of timing: INSLAW'S problems with the Justice Department erupted soon after Jensen was promoted to Associate Attorney General--the No. 3 person in the department--in 1983. Hamilton reveals another curious coincidence: About 90 days before the Justice Department contract began to fall apart, he received a phone call from Dominic Laiti, chairman of Hadron Inc., a company in which Earl Brian, a long-time Meese colleague, holds an interest (see "Brain's Meese Connection" posting following this one, from Barron's Jan. 11, 1988 issue). Brian's Infotechnology controls four of six seats on Hadron's board. Laiti told Hamilton, according to Hamilton, that Hadron intended to become the dominant supplier of computer software and services to law enforcers and courts and related agencies, and that Hadron wanted to buy INSLAW. "We have ways of making you sell," Hamilton quotes Laiti as saying. Laiti insists: "I have no memory of this. It all sounds ridiculous to me." The bizarre web of coincidences and connections includes AT&T. AT&T had a contract with INSLAW and, during bankruptcy proceedings, declared itself a major creditor. Then, Hamilton alleges, AT&T's attorney began to behave less like someone representing a creditor interested in salvaging the company than like an attorney for the Justice Department bent on liquidating it. More coincidences: AT&T's outside counsel, Ken Rosen, was with an obscure New Jersey firm, but formerly had been a member of Deputy Attorney General Burns's New York law firm. Rosen's co-counsel, Shea & Gould, is not AT&T's usual outside counsel, either, though it is the firm used by Earl Brian. Bason questions the failure of high Justice Department officials to take any action to investigate serious allegations of misconduct. Both Hamilton and his attorney, Elliot Richardson, complained about Brewer's handling of the contract, and requested an investigation. "There's such a contrast between the total inaction on the part of Justice Department regarding Mr. Brewer--and the hammer and tongs approach they're using with Mr. Pasciuto," Bason observes. Last Thursday, Pasciuto's attorney, Gary Simpson, delivered his letter to Deputy Attorney General Burns--and met with the Senate committee. At the end of the week, that committee met with Bason, as well. Senator Nunn's committee may find some answers--and ask more questions--that will illuminate this bizarre story. For now, Pasciuto does know what happened to him and his tale provides a window on the strange thing that happened to INSLAW. In March of 1982, William Hamilton could probably envision his face on the cover of Fortune. He had just won the $10 million, three-year contract with the Justice Department to install PROMIS in the department's 20 largest U.S. Attorney's offices, and to develop a separate program for its 74 smaller offices. Hamilton, who had contracts with private firms as well, now had a deal with the nation's premier law firm: the Department of Justice. PROMIS was unique, and those 94 U.S. Attorney's offices represented an entering wedge: Hamilton could dream of capturing the federal judicial system's entire caseload. In the fiscal year October 1, 1982, INSLAW's revenues went up about 35% to $7.8 million, with more than half of those revenues coming from the Justice Department contract. But then, that funny thing happened. The Justice Department began postponing payments. In July 1983, Hamilton says, the department suspended nearly $250,000 in payments, alleging that the company was overcharging the government for time-sharing. In February 1985, the government terminated the contract with smaller offices that had been generating revenues of $200,000-$300,000 a month. INSLAW's cash flow shriveled. By Feb. 7, 1985, the government had withheld $1.77 million. Inslaw twisted and turned, trying to negotiate with the Justice Department, desperate to find out what went wrong. Finally, in financial shambles, INSLAW filed for bankruptcy in late February. The Department of Justice kept the INSLAW software--and kept on using it. In his decision, Bason compares the Justice Department to someone who decides to test drive an automobile: "So the customer drives off with the car and this is the last the dealer ever sees of him. I think that is approximately what the Department of Justice has done in this case." In last week's letter to Deputy Attorney General Burns from Pasciuto's attorney, Gary Simpson, Pasciuto suggests a pattern of harrassment that helped drive INSLAW into Chapter 11. According to Pasciuto, in June of 1984, Robert Hunneycutt, who worked in the Department of Justice's finance offices, told him about his practice of dividing contractors' bills into three piles. "One pile he would pay right away; the next pile when he got around to it; and then he opened a drawer and pointed to some invoices in the drawer and said: "These invoices may never get paid.'" Hunneycutt then identified such invoices as belonging to companies on the "bad list." "Mr. Pasciuto asked who was in that pile," the letter to Burns goes on, "and he said that INSLAW was an example and that `People in the U.S Attorney's offices don't like INSLAW they are in this pile. . . .'" When "Barron's" phoned Hunneycutt, he returned the call, and left this message: "Mr. Hunneycutt knows nothing." In a subsequent conversation, he denied the conversation with Pasciuto. But Hamilton claims that the Justice Department was trying to starve INSLAW. They didn't just push to bankrupt the software firm, he insists, they wanted to liquidate it, converting it from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7, as soon as possible. Why? Hamilton speculates that Justice may have wanted to push INSLAW into an auction where PROMIS could be purchased cheaply by someone that the department viewed more favorably. Indeed, the Justice Department did move for liquidation. And on St. Patrick's Day 1987, Anthony Pasciuto met with the Hamiltons at the Mayflower and gave them a fuller picture of what was happening to them. A mutual friend, Mark Cunniff, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, asked Pasciuto to go to that breakfast meeting at the Mayflower. "I said, `Don't you know what you're asking me to do?'" Pasciuto recalls. "He said, `I know.'" "I knew him for 19 years," Pasciuto explains. "I said, `Mark, I'm doing it for you--and for these poor people.' I knew they had five kids," adds Pasciuto, a graying 44-year-old All-American "nice guy" with a strong Boston accent, and an open, slightly pockmarked face. Pasciuto has been married for 21 years, in government service for 21 years, and still wears his class ring--U. of Mass., 1965. So, at the Mayflower, Tony Pasciuto remembers he tried to help Bill and Nancy Hamilton--and confirmed their most paranoid fantasies: The Justice Department was out to get them. At the meeting with the Hamiltons Pasciuto told them that his boss, Thomas Stanton, director of the Justice Department's Executive Office for U.S. Trustees, was pressuring the federal trustee overseeing the INSLAW case. William White was being pressed to liquidate INSLAW. According to Pasciuto, in 1985 White told him that he was resisting the pressure. As a result, White informed Pasciuto, Stanton denied White's Alexandria office administrative and budgetary support and, at the same time, tried to have an assistant from the U.S. Trustee's office in New York take over the case and convert it. The Hamiltons were told by Pasciuto that Cornelius Blackshear, the U.S. trustee in New York at the time of INSLAW's Chapter 11 filing, knew all about Stanton's plan. Pasciuto said that Judge Blackshear had repeated this tale of pressure in the presence of United States Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence Pierce in the judge's chambers in Foley Square in New York. Pasciuto also told the Hamiltons that the Justice Department had blacklisted INSLAW on the department's computer system procurements. On March 25, 1985, INSLAW's lawyers deposed Blackshear, and he confirmed the story of pressure to liquidate INSLAW. The very next day, March 26, Blackshear met with a Justice Department representative, and signed a sworn affidavit, recanting, and saying that he had confused INSLAW with another case--United Press International, which had also been involved in bankruptcy proceedings in Judge Bason's court. "I know the difference between UPI and INSLAW, I'm not that dumb," Pasciuto observes. He spells it out with a finger: "U--P-- I." Cornelius Blackshear left his position as United States Trustee and became a United States bankruptcy judge the following fall. According to Pasciuto, Judge Blackshear discussed INSLAW in Judge Pierce's chambers. But when questioned on the point, Judge Pierce told "Barron's": "I have made it my business not to get into the particulars of whatever Tony [Anthony Pasciuto] got himself into the middle of. Apparently, he thought his employer was doing something that was not kosher. I told him I didn't want to know about it--if he needed to, he should hire an attorney." When "Barron's" offered to recount the details Pasciuto allegedly discussed in his presence, the judge grew agitated: "Don't tell me--I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know about it." "I did ask him for help--six months before it all happened. I didn't know what to do," Pasciuto recalls. "Judge Pierce and I go back to the time when I was an assistant dean at the School of Criminal Justice in Albany--in 1972. He was a visiting faculty member for one year. We became good friends. I considered him a father figure. In his ruling, Judge Bason noted that Blackshear had given "two different versions of the same event" and decided that other evidence supported the first version. White also denied the story of political pressure in court and Judge Bason asserted in his June 1987 ruling, "What I do believe is that Mr. White has a capacity to forget . . . a capacity which probably all humans share to some degree or another." Judge Bason went on to point out: "Mr. White has just recently joined a large law firm that practices primarily in Virginia and primarily in bankruptcy matters. Mr. White's future with the firm that he so recently joined could well be dependent on income- producing work that he does. . . . It seems to this court that Mr. White is not in a position at this point in his career to jeopardize his relationship with the U.S. Trustee's office in Alexandria, and for him to testify in a way that would be strongly disliked and disfavored by the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees could well have an adverse impact on the relationship between the executive office and the Alexandria office and, in turn, a relationship between Mr. White and the Alexandria office." But in late spring of 1986, White was still a U.S. Trustee, and Pasciuto recalls one more incident involving INSLAW. White called Pasciuto and asked for an extra filing cabinet for his INSLAW files. "I said, `You've got plenty of them over there,'" Pasciuto recalls. White responded, "I know, but I need another one because I need to put all the INSLAW files in one cabinet and lock it." White was discreet. So, on June 1, 1987, when Anthony Pasciuto walked into that packed D.C. courtroom to take the stand in the INSLAW case, he knew that White would not support his story. He also knew that Judge Blackshear had changed his original story. As Pasciuto's lawyer puts it in the letter to Burns: "Mr. Pasciuto was now the only person with recollection of conversations with U.S. Trustees in which Mr. Stanton was identified as having put pressure regarding the INSLAW case. Other people's recollections were being erased by mechanisms best known to them." Pasciuto's boss, Stanton, apparently put his own pressure on Pasciuto. Beginning in 1985, according to the letter to Burns, Pasciuto began reporting his concerns about substantial deficits in the U.S. Trustee's office to Stanton. In 1986, Pasciuto spoke to the Department of Justice's finance staff and by late 1986, he says he had gone on record with the Office of Professional Responsibility about financial indiscretions by Stanton. According to Pasciuto, Stanton in September 1986 called him a "traitor." Pasciuto began actively looking for other employment, including a job as Assistant U.S. Trustee in Albany, N.Y. But no transfers were available for Anthony Pasciuto--until he was subpeonaed to testify in the INSLAW case. "Within an hour of receiving that subpeona to testify, Mr. Pasciuto was given a copy of an appointment paper for a job as the Assistant United States Trustee, Albany, New York, signed by Mr. Stanton," Simpson, Pasciuto's attorney, reports in last week's letter to Burns. After the trial was over, however, Pasciuto was told that the procedure "was changed" and that the deputy Attorney General would have to sign off on the form. That never happened. But Pasciuto, who believed the signed appointment papers, sold his house in Maryland for $200,000 and bought a house in Albany for $250,000. On the day the movers came, he was told that the sale of the Maryland house had fallen through. "We had to move, we had to carry two houses--and we couldn't even move into the Albany house yet because the owners wouldn't be moving out for a month," Tony Pasciuto recalls. "So, we stayed with in-laws for a month." That was May 22, 1987. Nine days later Tony Pasciuto walked into court. When he entered the court room on June 1, 1987, Pasciuto was not represented by counsel. According to Simpson, his attorney: "The Justice Department attorney who was handling the INSLAW case, Mr. Dean Cooper, did not prepare him well for his trial testimony. The paralegal who was taking notes during the witness preparation says that he has lost the notes of that meeting." When the questioning began, Pasciuto must have realized that the Justice Department attorney was not going to guide him gently through his story. One of Cooper's first questions was "whether [Pasciuto] had been seeing a doctor about a stressful condition." In his letter to Burns, Simpson explains: "Mr. Cooper apparently knew that Mr. Pasciuto had been seeing a psychiatrist in connection with personal problems that he had been experiencing and Mr. Pasciuto . . . now knew that the United States Department of Justice was prepared to stoop to the level of bringing his personal problems into the INSLAW case to get him to be careful about what he said." Apparently, the tactics worked. Pasciuto recanted, saying that the statements he made to the Hamiltons at the Mayflower were made in an effort to hurt Stanton, who was blocking his promotion. Judge Bason remembers the scene: "Mr. Pasciuto seemed to be basically a very honest person who had been caught up amongst a gang of very tough people--and he just didn't know what to do. He was a career federal employee and he was petrified. He probably had a vision of losing his job, his marriage, everything. Probably he thought the only way he could save anything was to recant. I had to adjourn at one point during his testimony--he was close to tears." But Pasciuto didn't save his career. And now, in the letter to Burns, he has come forward to make a full disclosure. Last week's letter to Burns contains a compelling, painful vignette of a chance meeting between Pasciuto and Blackshear, about a month after the trial, on July 11, 1987. If Hamilton felt floored by Pasciuto's testimony, so Pasciuto must have felt betrayed by Blackshear's change of heart. The meeting was awkward. As Simpson tells the story in the letter to Arnold Burns, it was six in the evening, when Pasciuto and his wife were leaving the home of a mutual friend, Harry Jones, now U.S. Trustee for the Southern District of New York. Judge Blackshear came up to Tony Pasciuto, put his arm around him, and said, "I am sorry, it will be all right." Pasciuto replied: "No, it is not going to be all right, they are going to fire me." Blackshear responded, "They are not going to fire you. Don't they know how much you know?" Pasciuto: "Yes, but they don't care." Blackshear: "But you told the truth." Pasciuto: "Of what importance is the truth if everyone else is lying?" Blackshear: "These people came up from Washington and the U.S. Attorney's office; I got confused. I thought that by changing my story I would hurt less people. I didn't know you were subpoenaed until I saw your testimony, which was sent to me by Barbara O'Connor." Pasciuto: "Do you remember what we talked with Judge Pierce about?" "I wanted to see if he was going to continue his crap," Pasciuto recalls. "But he dodged--literally backing away from me--saying, again, `They sent someone from Washington and someone from the U.S. Attorney's office. I felt the easiest thing to do was recant. I felt less people would be hurt if I just bailed out.'" In Simpson's version, Judge Blackshear had received two telephone calls from William White the day he changed his story. White told him he had the wrong case. Pasciuto, exclaimed, sarcastically: "What! They asked you about converting *another* case [from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7]?" Blackshear, waving his hand: "I don't want to get into it and who the hell cares?" Today, after listening to Simpson's version, Blackshear states: "I don't remember the specifics, word for word, but I do remember having that conversation. And I don't have any problems with what Tony remembers." Recalling the scene, Pasciuto says: "You know, even now--I'm not angry. I can't help it. I'm not. Blackshear is basically a wonderful person. It's sad--I'm sorry, I'm not angry. It really is sad. I feel devastated." Tony Pasciuto now has a house in Albany, and soon will have no job either in Washington or New York. Over the past nine months, he has spent $12,000 commuting from Albany to the job he still clung to in D.C. Legal fees are draining his savings--the bills total $25,000 so far. "We're lucky that my wife and I were always frugal and have the money saved," he says proudly. But Tony Pasciuto is frightened. "At work, ever since I got the letter saying they were firing me, I've felt like I was underhouse arrest," he relates. "People come by my office to see if I'm there. If I leave, I have to sign out. Everyone is supposed to, but normally very few people sign out. If I don't, they try to track me down. If I go to the Men's Room, they come looking for me. "I'm just a GS 15," adds Pasciuto, referring to his level in government service. "Stanton, my boss, can't fire me. Stanton made the accusations, but the deputy Attorney General, Arnold Burns, will fire me. How does it feel to know that the deputy Attorney General of the United States wants to destroy a GS 15? It's scary. It scares me to death."
Subject: the INSLAW Case: part II of "BARRON'S" 1988 2-part piece Keywords: U.S. Deptartment of Justice != "with liberty and justice for all" Lines: 877
That the U.S. Justice Department could engage in a vendetta that would end the career of a federal judge, bankrupt a company, force a partner out of his law firm, cause another federal judge to recant under oath and reach down and wreck the career of a 21-year government-service employee--that's the stuff of a spy novel, set, one would hope, in another country. But resignations en masse from a Department of Justice inhabited by "moles" suggest alarming facts, not diverting fiction.
Conclusion of a 2-part piece which appeared in the April 4, 1988 issue of "BARRON'S NATIONAL BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL WEEKLY"
This part was the cover story with the following title emblazzoned above the seal of the United States Department of Justice:
Rogue Justice: Who and What Were Behind The Vendetta Against INSLAW?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rogue Justice What Really Sparked the Vendetta Against INSLAW By MAGGIE MAHAR
TWO weeks ago, "Barron's" told the story of INSLAW, a small software company that landed a $10 million contract with the Justice Department in 1982. Bill Hamilton, INSLAW'S 42-year-old founder was jubilant when Justice bought the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS), which he had spent his life--and his life's savings--building. But then things took a mysterious and nasty turn. Justice began withholding payments. Contract disputes multiplied. Threats accelerated. Bill Hamilton couldn't understand what was happening or why. But he knew INSLAW's cash flow was shriveling. By 1985, INSLAW was in financial shambles, and Bill Hamilton ended up in federal bankruptcy court. And there, last fall, a federal bankruptcy judge handed down an astonishing ruling. Judge George Bason found that the Justice Department had purposefully propelled INSLAW into bankruptcy in an effort to steal its PROMIS software through "trickery, deceit and fraud." On Feb. 2, 1988, Bason ordered the Department of Justice to pay INSLAW about $6.8 million in licensing fees and roughly $1 million in legal costs. He postponed a decision on punitive damages--which could run as high as $25 million. Trial testimony revealed an unexplained series of "coincidences" surrounding the INSLAW case, including the fact that Justice appointed C. Madison "Brick" Brewer to oversee the INSLAW contract. Brick Brewer had worked for Hamilton--until Hamilton fired him in May 1976. After listening to Brewer's testimony, Judge Bason wrote that he could not understand why Justice picked a man "consumed by hatred" to administer the contract with a former employer. He also couldn't fathom why top department officials ignored complaints from INSLAW attorneys when Brewer began withholding payments. "A very strange thing happened at the Department of Justice . . .," observed Judge Bason, leaving open the question as to just why, at the highest levels, the U.S. Department of Justice condoned a vendetta against a small, private U.S. company. It was November of 1987 when Judge Bason rejected a Justice Department motion to liquidate INSLAW. Not quite one month later, Judge Bason learned that he would not be reappointed to the bench. In the past four years, only four of 136 federal bankruptcy judges seeking reappointment have been turned down. Bason was replaced by S. Martin Teel, one of the Justice Department attorneys who unsuccessfully argued the INSLAW case before him. Bason observes that the Justice Department will now have a "third bite of the apple" on the question of punitive damages. Judge Teel has recused himself from the case, and the Justice Department is appealing. So INSLAW vs. the United States of America hangs in limbo. The INSLAW case also left a Justice Department whistle-blower waiting for the verdict on his 21-year career. When "Barron's" began reporting the INSLAW story two weeks ago, we interviewed Tony Pasciuto. Pasciuto revealed how a Justice Department colleague responsible for paying contractors' bills said he divided them into three piles: "One pile he would pay right away, the next pile when he got around to it, and then he opened a drawer and pointed to some invoices in the drawer and said, `These invoices may never get paid. If you're on the bad list you go in this drawer.'" INSLAW was on the bad list. Pasciuto also repeated what he had been told by Cornelius Blackshear, a federal judge and former U.S. Trustee based in New York. Blackshear had confided that his Justice Department superior in Washington was pressuring him to send someone down to D.C. to help liquidate INSLAW. Apparently, Washington wanted to make sure that the job was done. When INSLAW's lawyers deposed Blackshear, he confirmed the story. During INSLAW's suit, Judge Blackshear recanted. Meanwhile, about one hour after Pasciuto was subpoenaed to testify, his superiors in the Justice Department offered him a long-awaited transfer to Albany, N.Y. Feeling scared and "out there all alone," Tony Pasciuto bought a house in Albany and changed his story. Close to tears, he recanted on the stand. Judge Bason recalls the scene: "Mr. Pasciuto seemed to be basically a very honest person who had been caught up amongst a gang of very tough people--and he just didn't know what to do." According to Pasciuto, after he testified, Judge Blackshear met him at a party and said, "I'm sorry. . . . These people came up from Washington and the U.S. Attorney's office. I got confused. I thought that by changing my story I would hurt less people." When "Barron's" read Pasciuto's version of the conversation to Judge Blackshear, a weary-sounding Blackshear confirmed it: "I don't remember the specifics word for word. But I do remember the conversation. And I don't have any problems with what Tony remembers." Meanwhile, after Tony Pasciuto recanted in court, the Justice Department told him, "Sorry, the procedure was changed. No transfer to Albany." Then, B. Boykin Rose, one of the Justice Department officials who resigned last week, wrote a letter to Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns--another member of the Justice group who bailed out--recommending that Pasciuto be fired. When "Barron's" last talked to Pasciuto, he was commuting from the new house in Albany to a job in Washington, where he said, "I feel like I'm under house arrest." And he was awaiting the end of his 21-year career in government service. "My boss, Thomas Stanton, can't fire me," Pasciuto explained. "The Deputy Attorney General, Arnold Burns, will fire me. How does it feel to know that the Deputy Attorney General of the United States wants to destroy a GS15? It's scary. It scares me to death." Last week, Burns led the dissidents out of the department. Tony Pasciuto's tale is chilling. And it raises two equally disquieting questions: Why did the U.S. Department of Justice want to liquidate Bill Hamilton's software company? And, how high did the coverup of the scheme to destroy INSLAW go?
WHEN six Department of Justice officials resigned last week, department spokesmen insisted that they were NOT leaving because they feared Attorney General Edwin Meese was about to be indicted. Nor had they beaten their wives--should anyone ask. But, according to "Barron's" sources inside Justice, their exodus represents the climax to a much larger, subterranean game of musical chairs that has been going on in the Department of Justice for the past 18 months. "I know of at least 50 or 60 career government employees who have been reassigned or forced out," says one department insider. Another charges the department with using FBI background checks in order to manufacture reasons for forcing employees to leave. "They're trying to find--or force--openings for political appointees that they want to bury as what we call 'moles' in the department," explains a longtime Justice Department hand. "They bury the moles so that the next administration can't find them." The moles, he goes on, are political appointees who are moved into GS (government service) jobs normally held by career government employees. "It could take the next administration two years to figure out who are the career employees and who are the political appointees dropped into their slots," he says. "In the meantime, the moles will be in place--and they'll have the historical knowledge of how the organization works--everyone else will be gone." But even while the moles are burrowing in, the rumor among them is that sunlight is about to flood the shadowy reaches of the department. For last week's resignations suggest that Special Prosecutor James C. McKay is coming closer to addressing the question: "Was there justice at Justice during the past four years?" The INSLAW affair suggests a disquieting answer, for the virtually unpublicized case serves as a window on how Justice did business during the Meese years. In his blistering ruling, Judge Bason charged that the department committed a series of "willful, wanton and deceitful acts . . . demonstrating contempt for both the law and any principle of fair dealing." Originally, Bill Hamilton, INSLAW's founder, thought that only one mid-level Justice Department official was willfully and deceitfully out to get him: C. Madison "Brick" Brewer, the former employee whom he had fired. When Hamilton and his wife, Nancy, put their six children in the family station wagon and drove to a federal court on June 9, 1986, to file a suit against the United States government, they firmly believed that Brewer was their nemesis. But as the trial progressed, their certainty gave way to doubts. Why did Justice put Brewer in that critical and, under the circumstances, highly improper position--and allow him to remain? Why did the Justice Department refuse to settle? Why were the government's lawyers, seemingly not satisfied with bankrupting INSLAW, pressing so hard to liquidate the company? When the trial was finally over at the end of 1987, Bill and Nancy Hamilton had won their case, but they still wanted to know why their company was near ruin. So they followed the counsel of Elliot Richardson, one of their attorneys: They sat down at their dining room table, made a list of all the anomalies in the baffling case, and tried to puzzle out the mystery. "These were all things we were aware of, yet until you organize them and put them side by side, you don't see them," Hamilton observes. "But seeing the strange incidents and coincidences all together, suddenly it popped out at me. There was a coverup--and it wasn't just to protect Brick Brewer. For instance, someone had persuaded Judge Blackshear to recant under oath within 48 hours of his original deposition. Who would have that power? You don't do that to a federal judge to protect Brick Brewer--it's too risky. That's when I became convinced then that there was criminal liability at the highest levels of the department. Then, I started to look at the pieces. And, every time I picked up a rock and turned it over, it seemed to fit." Now, looking back five years, Bill Hamilton believes he understands the reasons for the oppressive behavior of the Justice Department. And he thinks he had an early warning about the department's methods. But he didn't take the warning phone call seriously. As Bill Hamilton tells it, it was April of 1983, and he was sitting in his office--right across the street from the "Washington Post"--when he received the call from Dominic Laiti, chairman of Hadron Inc. "Laiti identified himself, and said that Hadron intended to become the leading vendor providing software for law enforcement nationwide," Hamilton recalls. "He said they had purchased Simcon, a manufacturer of police-department software--and Acumedics, a company that provides computer-based litigation support services for courts. `Now,' Laiti told me, `we want to buy INSLAW.'" "I told him he had just described our ambition," Hamilton relates. "We intended to become the major vendor of these software services ourselves--and we were not interested in being acquired." But Laiti kept pushing, and, according to Hamilton, boasted, as he remembers, "We have very good political contacts in the current administration--we can get this kind of business." The words would reverberate in Hamilton's memory later, but, at the time, he didn't heed the implicit threat. He just repeated, "We're not interested in selling," whereupon, he says, Laiti retorted, "We have ways of making you sell." The story sounds fantastic. Laiti calls it "ludicrous." Is Hamilton making it up? "I would think the whole tale was fantasy-- if I hadn't been involved in investigating the Iran-Contra affair," confides a Senate staffer now involved in an investigation of the Justice Department's software contracts. And Judge Bason states that Hamilton was a levelheaded witness with a scrupulously honest memory: "I was particularly impressed in the last phase of the trial," Bason recalls. "Hamilton could very easily have testified positively in a way that would have been favorable to his case--to an extent of about $1 million. Instead, he testified, `This is my best recollection--but I am not sure.' The contrast between that and the government witness who was so obviously disingenuous!" The call from Hadron was strange, so Hamilton remembered it, but in 1983 he shrugged it off. "I politely, but firmly, cut off the conversation. I'd never had a conversation like that with someone in the software industry. I thought Hadron must be new to software--maybe they were used to an industry where this kind of talk was more prevalent." But now, Hamilton surmises that his troubles may have begun with that phone call. Within 90 days of Laiti's threat, he says, the Department of Justice mounted its attack. And, Hamilton alleges, the attack ultimately became a vendetta, a vendetta that could have been inspired by the convergence of three interests: Hadron, the brazenly aggressive competitor controlled, from behind the scenes, by a Meese crony from his salad days in California: Dr. Earl Brian. Brick Brewer, the embittered former employee who, as project manager, was in a strategic position to do INSLAW harm. D. Lowell Jensen, then the deputy Attorney General, and a ghost from INSLAW's own California past. Jensen had developed a software product to compete with INSLAW and lost--back in the 1970s when Jensen was a D.A. in Alameda County. But Jensen did have the good fortune to meet Ed Meese in the D.A.'s office. So years later, Jensen became top-ranking member of the "Alameda County Mafia," which found a home in the Ed Meese Justice Department. When Bill Hamilton sat down, in good faith, to negotiate a deal with the Justice Department, the people on the other side of the table were not dispassionate government officials. They were instead a hostile crew, inspired apparently by old scores and private interest. Whether carefully organized or spontaneously launched, the attack was successful--for a while, anyway. When the principals and the department were suddenly in danger of exposure, Hamilton charges, the cover-up spread out to embrace the Justice Department bureaucracy, the IRS, and Jensen's successor--former Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns--one of the six who quit last week. "They circled their wagons," Judge Bason wrote. The defense became an offense, and an attorney, a Justice Department whistle- blower, and the judge himself all lost their jobs. Today, only two of the three have found work. Hamilton is luckier. IBM has become INSLAW's savior--rescuing the company from the auction block, and vindicating the worth of its product. Meanwhile, some Senate staffers looking into the INSLAW case believe that it raises questions about Project Eagle, a much larger scheme to computerize the Justice Department, the $200 million contract is scheduled to be awarded before the end of the year. The deeply troubling questions about INSLAW remain. If anything, they are magnified by last week's departures from Justice: "Why?" and, "How High?" "Start," Bill Hamilton says, "with Hadron." For Hadron is indeed, as Laiti allegedly boasted, "well-connected in the Administration." It is controlled by Dr. Earl Brian, the longtime friend of Ed Meese who owns Financial News Network ("Barron's," Feb. 29[, 1988]). In fact, business dealings between the Meese family and Brian's company imperiled Meese's 1984 nomination. And Hadron, Hamilton charges, is one of the keys to the mystery of why INSLAW became the victim of rogue justice. Hadron boasts a history replete with acquisitions, lots of government business--and brushes with the SEC. The outfit emerged in 1979 from the ashes of Xonics, a notorious high-tech fiasco founded and headed by a colorful wheeler-dealer named Bernard Katz. "Barron's" described Xonics in 1976 as a company with a knack for "recognizing income as fast as possible and deferring expense as long as it decently could." In 1977, the SEC brought a lawsuit against Xonics, accusing top management, including Katz, of fraud and manipulating the stock's price, in part by using Xonics stock to acquire other firms. Besieged by two shareholder suits, Xonics agreed to a permanent injunction in April of that year. The company did not admit to any wrong-doing. But the nimble survived. In 1979, Dominic Laiti gathered a group of former Xonics executives, and bought Hadron. By 1983, the company was lauded in the press as "an investment banker's dream." For the child had, it appeared, inherited the parent's acquisitive streak, snapping up nine companies in just three years. The offspring did run into a few SEC snags of its own, however. In 1981, the SEC ruled that the limited partnerships Hadron had set up to fund its R&D efforts were in truth a form of loan financing rather than a source of revenue. By 1982, Hadron had lost $4.5 million and another shareholder suit was pending. But by 1983, Dominic Laiti's group appeared to be on a roll, acquiring their way into an exciting new industry: lasers. Laiti was quoted as saying, "There's the potential for very, very rapid growth." Unfortunately, the roll turned out to be a very, very rapid roller-coaster. By February of 1984, Hadron was announcing sale of its "money-losing laser-equipment division." In the third quarter a year earlier, Hadron had earned a penny-a-share profit, but by early 1984, it was sinking $1.2 million into the red. Hadron's ups and downs continued: a loss of $231,000 for the 1986 fiscal year, a profit of $852,000 a year later--despite a 13% decline in revenues. Since 1979, the price of Hadron's stock has followed the same pattern, swinging wildly from its high of 6 1/8 in December of 1980 to a low of 3/4 in March of 1985. In the past couple of years, the stock has been trading in a narrower range between 3/4 and 1 11/16, and an investor complains that as far as he knows, the company hasn't had a shareholders' meeting since 1983. "I'm not so much perturbed that they don't meet--I wouldn't care if they never met, if the the stock were up around $5 or $6," this sizable holder laments. Still, Hadron has kept bouncing back--with a little help from Uncle Sam: namely, contracts with the Pentagon, a fat settlement with the Agency for International Development and, most recently, a gigantic contract with, yes, the U.S. Department of Justice. Hadron's government connection can be traced to Earl Brian, who was president of Xonics, Hadron's parent, until October of 1977. Brian slipped away from the company discreetly, just six months after Xonics rolled over and agreed to the SEC injunction. Brian was never charged with any wrongdoing; four Xonics officers were required to sign the consent decree, and he was not one of them. Ostensibly, Dominic Laiti led the investor group that then rescued Hadron from the ruins of Xonics, but somehow Brian managed to keep his hand on the levers. Today, Laiti--the man who allegedly phoned Bill Hamilton--is Hadron's chairman, but Brian's business- development company controls four of the six seats on Hadron's board. In March of 1981, Brian resigned from Hadron's board in order, he said at the time, "to divest himself of Hadron to facilitate future transactions" between his business-development company, Infotechnology, and Hadron "under the Investment Company Act of 1940." But by January 1984, Brian was back on Hadron's board, and, according to the 1987 annual report, he's still there, though Hadron is continuing to do deals with Infotech. In October 1987, Hadron sold Atlantic Contract Services to Infotech at book value for a combination of cash and Infotech common stock in a deal valued at roughly $300,000. "Brian does an awful lot of buying and selling," the disgruntled Hadron shareholder observes. "He's making money at it, but I'm not sure his shareholders are making money. I know that, as a shareholder of Hadron, I'm not making any money." Still, in the spring of 1987 Hadron moved into the black in large part because it received $1.6 million from the Agency for International Development. The AID settlement came after the U.S. government cancelled a Hadron subsidiary's business with Syria. But the AID money wasn't the only lucky boon from Uncle Sam. The government has long been a Hadron client: In the 1987 fiscal year, approximately 34% of the company's revenues came from the Department of Defense. And most recently, a Hadron subsidiary, Acumedics, locked up a $40 million contract with the Department of Justice. Hadron never did acquire INSLAW. But there's more than one way to skin a Justice Department software contract. Last October, Hadron's Acumedics division signed the $40 million deal to provide automated litigation-support services for Justice's Land and Natural Resources division. When the Acumedics contract was awarded, competitors groused that the bidding process was unfair. Justice officials respond that all bids went through a stringent review process. "There was absolutely no pressure on me. It was one of the cleanest procurements I've been involved in," recalls Steve Denny, the contracts officer on the case. Justice Department officials also pointed out that the $40 million deal was essentially a continuation of a 1983 contract. Acumedics began doing business with the Justice Department in 1970 as an 8(a) minority business. In 1983, Acumedics was acquired by Hadron--and lost its 8(a) status. But even without the favored status, Hadron somehow managed to hold onto the business, and win a four-year competitive bid contract. Shortly after the acquisition, Earl Brian reappeared on the Hadron board, and, recalls a former Hadron executive, told the board, "If we needed any help in marketing at Acumedics, he had been a member of Reagan's Cabinet, he knew people--and would be willing to make phone calls." The Hadron alumnus adds: "He was just being nice." According to Federal Computer Week, a trade publication: "A competitor for the 1983 contract, who declined to be named, said his company no longer bids on Justice Department contracts. He explained that, after losing the 1983 contract to Acumedics, `We took a look at their bid compared to ours, and it was about $1.5 million over ours.'" Now, the size of Acumedics's newest deal with the government has raised old questions about the man behind the Hadron subsidiary, Dr. Earl Brian, and his connection to Ed Meese. A venture capitalist, and former neurosurgeon, Dr. Brian practiced medicine in Vietnam, then returned to the States, where he became health and welfare secretary in then-Gov. Reagan's California cabinet. There, he served with Ed Meese, Reagan's chief of staff until 1979. Today, Brian owns and oversees Infotechnology (which controls Hadron), the Financial News Network, and, most recently, he headed up an investment group that bought the right to run United Press International. The Brian connection became an embarrassment during Ed Meese's confirmation hearings when Meese acknowledged that his wife, Ursula, borrowed $15,000 from a Meese adviser, Edwin Thomas, in order to buy stock in Brian's company. Coincidentally, just six months later, Brian lent $100,000 to Thomas, who by then needed money himself--and had become a member of the White House staff. Neither Meese nor Thomas listed the loans on their financial disclosure statements. Meese paid no interest, and Thomas only partial interest. Following a six-month investigation, independent counsel concluded that there was no basis for criminal charges against Meese, and while "inferences might be drawn from Mr. Thomas's contact with Dr. Brian . . . whether Mr. Thomas or Dr. Brian committed a violation of law was not within our jurisdiction. Even if we were to make an assumption that Mr. Thomas might have been acting on insider information, we have been given no evidence by the SEC." Bill Hamilton learned of the connection between Hadron, Brian and Meese only after the INSLAW trial ended. But then remembering what Hadron's Chairman Dominic Laiti said about being politically connected--not to mention "ways of making you sell"--Hamilton thought he glimpsed an ominous pattern. Hamilton believes the Justice Department mounted its attack 90 days after the Hadron phone call, "with the apparent objective of forcing INSLAW either to agree to be acquired, or into bankruptcy." Earl Brian, Hamilton is convinced, would have been happy to pick up INSLAW cheaply--at a liquidation sale. Moreover, Hamilton has reason to believe that the No. 2 man in Justice, D. Lowell Jensen, wasn't at all disposed to save INSLAW from the auction block. For, years earlier, Jensen had competed with INSLAW's product, PROMIS, head-on. While holding public office in Alameda County, Calif., Jensen was promoting a rival software, DALITE, that he hoped would be used statewide. Jensen lost. Jensen served as Alameda County district attorney in the early 1970s and during that time he tried to persuade other DA offices to adopt DALITE, the case-tracking software system that he helped develop. To that end, Hamilton alleges, Jensen urged the California District Attorneys Association to incorporate. By incorporating, the association would be in a position to apply for grants, receiving and administering funds needed to finance DALITE training statewide. But, Hamilton recalls, the very month that the association finally incorporated, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, the state's largest, chose INSLAW's PROMIS software--dashing Jensen's hopes for DALITE. Larry Donoghue, now deputy district attorney for the County of Los Angeles, remembers the keen rivalry. He was in charge of selecting software for the L.A. office at the time, and he recalls visiting Alameda County while making on-site inspections: "Jensen called me into his office and I went away feeling what I regarded to be unusual and significant pressure to select the DALITE system. But PROMIS was a more suitable system for a large office. After I made the recommendation to L.A., I remember my conversation with Joseph Busch, who was district attorney there at the time. I said, `Joe what's your reason for hesitating?' He said, `Larry, there is resistance to my selecting PROMIS.' The resistance couldn't have come from within the L.A. office," Donoghue adds, "no one there knew anything about software. By a process of elimination, it must have come from Alameda County." When "Barron's" attempted to reach Jensen for a reply, his office stated that, because the INSLAW case is still pending, he could not comment. But during the trial, Jensen conceded that he had been a critic of INSLAW's software. Yet, he insisted, DALITE was not a commercial product available for sale to the public, and he had no financial interest in it. Jensen didn't own DALITE any more than Bill Hamilton owned PROMIS when he first invented it. Like DALITE, INSLAW's PROMIS began as a government product. Bill Hamilton developed it while working as a consultant for the U.S. District Attorney's office in D.C. in 1970, and improved it while working for a not-for-profit company funded by the Justice Department. PROMIS became commercial software only after Hamilton left this last job in 1981, formed INSLAW, and raised private funds to refine PROMIS. The software then became a proprietary, and highly profitable, product. Presumably Jensen might have had the same luck with DALITE--if PROMIS had not won the California race. Instead, Jensen remained at his post in Alameda County for 12 years. And from 1959 until 1967, Ed Meese served with Jensen, as an Alameda deputy district attorney. When Ronald Reagan became President, Ed Meese recommended that his former colleague, Jensen, be appointed assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division. In 1983, when Rudolph Giuliani resigned as associate Attorney General--the No. 3 spot in the department--Jensen ascended to that post. So in early 1984, when Edwin Meese became Attorney General, his old Alameda County compatriot was already in place. And Jensen was not alone. A network, nicknamed the Alameda County Mafia, already was ensconced in Justice. No fewer than six former Alameda County law-enforcement officials held positions ranging from deputy assistant attorney in the tax division, to commissioner of naturalization and immigration. The former Oakland deputy police chief had snagged a spot as director of the National Institute of Justice. Under Meese, Jensen rose to No. 2, and developed a reputation as a buffer between Ed Meese and his critics. The 58-year-old Democrat was described as "soft-spoken" "apolitical" and a "gentleman of the old standard" in a 1986 "New York Times" tribute, which added, "Colleagues say that Mr. Jensen, better than anyone else at the Justice Department, knows how to duck." The Justice Department's diplomat had to duck when congressional investigators looking into the Iran-Contra affair reportedly found a Justice Department memo dated March 20, 1986, saying that Deputy Assistant Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen was giving a "heads-up" to the National Security Council, warning that Miami federal prosecutors were on Ollie North's trail. Bill Hamilton believes Jensen displayed the same talent for diplomatic bobbing and weaving throughout the INSLAW affair. When Hamilton pieced together the anomalies, he realized Jensen's rise to power occurred in the fateful spring of 1983, when he received the call from Hadron, and all of his troubles began. "Jensen was promoted to associate Attorney General in May or June of '83--and that's when all the contract disputes came up," Hamilton points out. Jensen exhibited a strong interest in the software contract and even served as chairman of the PROMIS oversight committee. In December of 1983, INSLAW's counsel, Elliott Richardson, and Hamilton met with the assistant Attorney General for administration, Kevin Rooney. They expressed their concern that Brick Brewer, the project manager on the INSLAW contract, was biased against the company because Bill Hamilton had fired Brewer some years earlier. Rooney testified in a deposition that, a week later, he told Jensen's oversight committee that Richardson's proposal seemed reasonable. It appeared that the dispute could be resolved. But Rooney left the committee meeting early. After he was gone, Hamilton says, "Mr. Jensen and the other members of the committee surprisingly approved a plan to terminate the word-processing part of the INSLAW contract with the department's Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys." In March of 1983, Hamilton alleges, Bill Tyson. formerly director of that Executive Office, told Hamilton that a Presidential appointee at Justice was biased against INSLAW. In March 1987, Tyson sent a handwritten letter to Jensen, reassuring him that he had denied this allegation under oath--and that he had not named Jensen as the appointee in question. He also sent a note to Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns. In a deposition, Tyson was asked: "Did either Mr. Jensen or Mr. Burns ask you to write the letter?" "No sir." "Did you not realize that by writing a letter to Mr. Jensen of this type informing him of your intended testimony that he would then be able to develop his testimony to be consistent with yours?" "That was not my intention." "But as an attorney, you realize that is a possibility, more than a possibility?" "Well, that was not my intention. . . ." In his ruling last September, Judge Bason characterized portions of Tyson's testimony as "so ludicrous that there is no way I can believe anything that the man has to say." A month before writing the notes, Tyson was removed from his position in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, and he and his secretary were exiled to Justice's Immigration and Naturalization Service--though in positions commensurate with their grade levels. By protesting too much, Tyson could seem to further implicate Jensen. But, the answer to "How High?" leads even higher. Ed Meese himself may have been involved in a push to force Leigh Ratiner, INSLAW's litigating attorney, off the case. Ratiner had been a partner at Dickstein, Shapiro, & Morin for 10 years when Elliot Richardson recruited him to take on INSLAW. Dickstein, Shapiro was the law firm of Chuck Colson, of Watergate notoriety. Colson brought in its principal client, the Teamsters Union. More recently, Dickstein, Shapiro became known in the loop as Leonard Garment's firm. Garment, a former colleague says, has been described as "the only attorney in Washington who will put a senator on hold to take a call from a reporter." Garment was former White House counsel to Richard Nixon, and represented Meese during his confirmation hearings. Meese and Garment put their heads together again after Ratiner filed a complaint in the INSLAW case that named Meese's longtime friend and deputy Attorney General, Jensen. Ratiner, an aggressive attorney with a reputation as very bright, ego-driven, and a loner within the Dickstein, Shapiro firm, relished being viewed as a maverick. So he was displaying his usual independence when he filed the complaint that named Jensen early in October 1986. On Oct. 12, the "L.A. Times" ran a story airing the INSLAW case and the former rivalry between Hamilton and Jensen. On Oct. 23, Ratiner was asked to leave the law firm. Between Oct. 12 and Oct. 23, Ed Meese talked to Garment about the case. In a pre-trial interrogatory, Ed Meese conceded that he had a "general recollection of a conversation with Leonard Garment in which Mr. Garment mentioned that he had discussed INSLAW with Arnold Burns." Arnold Burns, the deputy Attorney General who resigned last week, replaced Jensen when Jensen left Washington to take a federal judgeship in San Francisco in the spring of 1986. When "Barron's" asked Leonard Garment about the conversation, he emulated D. Lowell Jensen. He ducked. "I know there was a suggestion by Meese--or one of his staff--saying he met and spoke to me about INSLAW. Oh, he said it in pre-trial interrogatories? Then . . . it was a question of his recollection." Garment was more emphatic regarding Ratiner's removal. "No one in the Justice Department or the whole U.S. government or the whole USA suggested to me that anything should be done with Ratiner. Nor do I remember mentioning INSLAW to Meese," he continues. "Look--I met with Meese around the date he mentioned, and I discussed with him a matter of foreign policy. I was on my way to Israel. . . . Memory is so tricky, but I don't have the slightest recollection. . . ." Finally, Garment collected his recollections and summed up his position. "As Sam Goldwyn said, `Include me out.'" Ratiner's exit settlement with Dickstein, Shapiro bars him from discussing how and why he left. But Hamilton believes that Burns and Meese expressed dismay at the fact that he had turned the spotlight on Jensen. After Ratiner gave up the case, the firm continued to represent INSLAW, but Hamilton feels their support waned. In January of 1987, Dickstein, Shapiro urged him to settle with Justice for $1 million--of which about half would go to pay Dickstein, Shapiro's fees. A few days later, Hamilton switched attorneys. In September, Judge Bason awarded INSLAW $6.8 million- -plus attorneys' fees. During the trial, Tony Pasciuto's boss, Thomas Stanton testified to another reason why Meese might have been interested in the INSLAW case: INSLAW could besmirch the U.S. Trustee program. The U.S. Trustee's Office had been recently set up to administer bankruptcies nationwide, and it was Meese's baby. Meese made the decision to take the Trustee program national--even though his predecessor, William French Smith, had planned to ditch the pilot Trustee program. Two of Pasciuto's former colleagues in the Justice Department allege that the move to keep the U.S. Trustee program was flagrantly political. "It was a way of getting cronies into office. There would be 50 or 60 positions to be filled," one asserts. Stanton, the director of the Trustee program, seemed well-protected within Justice. This former Pasciuto colleague adds: "It was always puzzling to me how he got away with what he got away with. He'd do things that were blatantly wrong and no one would question him--it's kind of scary." Another former employee confirms, "Irrespective of the law, or anything, if Stanton wanted something, he had the ear of the right people at the highest level--straight from Burns to Meese. If he could not get what he needed, he went to Burns." Outside Justice, bankruptcy attorneys like Patrick Kavanagh, a solo practitioner in Bakersfield, Calif., worry that the Trustee program "concentrates so much power in one government department. . . . It's supposed to act as a watchdog over lawyers and trustees, but the problem is it's more. It has a considerable amount of power to control the administration of cases." When a case moves from bankruptcy to liquidation, the U.S. Trustee's Office names the trustee, who converts the assets, oversees an auction, and retains appraisers who will put a price tag on the leavings. The U.S. Trustee's program also links Justice and the IRS. "The thing that's a little frightening about it is that the U.S. Trustee department sees itself as part of the tax-collecting function of government," observes Charles Docter, the bankruptcy attorney representing INSLAW. "The Justice Department represents the IRS, and the IRS is often the biggest creditor in a liquidation. In the INSLAW case, tax collectors seem unusually determined to see their debt paid immediately. "The IRS showed up in Bill Hamilton's office the day after the trial ended in August. Ultimately, they would demand that he personally pay the $600,000 that INSLAW owes," says Docter. "Usually the IRS calls us before coming to see one of our clients," he notes. "We talk to them on the phone and get it straight." Hamilton doesn't have the $600,000 in his personal savings account. But Docter responded to the pressure by writing a letter in which INSLAW promised to pay the withholding portion of the taxes within 30 days. "Normally, the IRS would wait that long." he says. "Instead, on the 28th day, they went out and filed to convert INSLAW from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7." Once again, they were trying to liquidate INSLAW. Lately, Docter reports, an aggressive IRS has been pursuing withholding taxes by going after the individual who owns a company, "but normally they don't go for the jugular immediately and file for a motion to liquidate." Still on the bench, Judge Bason managed to stop the IRS push to liquidate INSLAW. When the tax collectors filed to convert INSLAW to Chapter 7, Docter recalls having a memorable conversation with an attorney from the Justice Department's tax division. Docter chided the attorney from Justice, saying: "Look, the judge has already found that you tried to steal the software through `trickery and deceit.' Isn't it about time you stopped this heavy-handed stuff? Doesn't anyone in the department have enough guts to say, `We have to start handling this like lawyers?' The whole thing is just completely sullying the Justice Department." Docter states that the attorney from Justice replied: "I don't set policy around here. The Attorney General does." And, Bill Hamilton remembers, Ed Meese approved the Justice Department bonuses awarded after the trial was over, in December of 1987. Three of the six who received bonuses were involved in the INSLAW case: Stewart Schiffer, who directly supervised the INSLAW litigation, received $20,000. Michael Shaheen, head of the "Office of Professional Responsibility," $20,000. Shaheen wrote a letter to Arnold Burns on Dec. 18 recommending that whistle-blower Pasciuto be fired for exercising "atrocious judgment" in telling the Hamiltons what he knew. Lawrence McWhorter, Brick Brewer's boss, $10,000. McWhorter, Judge Bason noted, said, "`I don't recall' or `I don't know' something like 147 times in his deposition." The court found McWhorter's testimony to be "totally unbelievable." Arnold Burns, deputy Attorney General until just last week, headed up the panel that received recommendations for Justice bonuses. With no help from Uncle Sam, Bill Hamilton earned his own bonus. IBM has plans to enter a $2.5 million deal with INSLAW that will bail the firm out of bankruptcy. "About $1 million will be used for software development to integrate INSLAW's products with IBM's own database software," Hamilton says, "and $1.5 million will be used to finance INSLAW's reorganization." Details are still being negotiated. "IBM's law firm has drawn up a contract. We expect to have it signed in two or three weeks," Hamilton adds. In a 1981 speech, Edwin Meese had lauded INSLAW's work on PROMIS as "one of the greatest opportunities for success in the future." It seems he was right: The IBM deal provides the clearest evidence of all of the product's continuing value. Still, the IRS persists in demanding immediate payment--even though the pending IBM contract, not to mention the $8 million owed by Justice, suggest that INSLAW will be able to pay its tax bill. Charlie Docter, INSLAW's attorney, comments on the IRS posture: "The whole thing smacks of a police state. This case scares the hell out of me. ' "Scary" is the word most often used by victims of the INSLAW affair. They are angry, but they also can't quite believe it happened. That the U.S. Justice Department could engage in a vendetta that would end the career of a federal judge, bankrupt a company, force a partner out of his law firm, cause another federal judge to recant under oath and reach down and wreck the career of a 21-year government-service employee--that's the stuff of a spy novel, set, one would hope, in another country. But resignations en masse from a Department of Justice inhabited by "moles" suggest alarming facts, not diverting fiction. Bill Hamilton's story is not based on imagination. It's based on experience, and there's considerable circumstantial evidence that he could have been the victim of a California cabal encompassing onetime members of the Reagan gubernatorial cabinet, and alumni of the Alameda County Mafia. Ed Meese belonged to both groups.
Why did INSLAW rate the attention of such a powerful group? INSLAW was, one Senate staffer suggests, the leading edge of Justice's $200 million "Project Eagle," a plan to computerize the department's tax division, criminal division and the 94 U.S. Attorney's offices. INSLAW predates the four-year-old Project Eagle, and might well offer an easy entry to any company that wants to participate in that program. The Justice Department has taken pains to say that INSLAW is not involved in Project Eagle. But Senate staffers looking into both INSLAW and Project Eagle aren't so sure. Project Eagle seems part of the same pattern of musical chairs: John J. Lane, a respected deputy assistant Attorney General for information technology, left last summer, and according to Government Computer News, Justice has lost its four IRM (information resources management) officials with the longest service in the past year. When Lane left, Justice reorganized its computer operations and created a new position, naming Stephen R. Colgate, who had been director of the Treasury Department's Office of Finance, to head Project Eagle. Asked about his priorities, Colgate was quoted in the trade publication as saying that, for the leadership of the department, "Eagle is the No. 1 priority. Eagle is the technology legacy that this Administration wants to leave behind." A member of Sen. Christopher Dodd's staff who has been looking into the INSLAW case for more than a year takes a more cynical view: "If you wanted to wire [fix] something, this would be the project," he confides. "It's been anticipated for a long time. And, it's a lot of money. So, if you wanted to wire something . . . this would be the one." These days, however, it's unlikely anyone at Justice wants wire anything. Today, there's a new agenda: Everyone is either burrowing in, or getting out. And, before leaving, there's an urgent desire to tidy up. Justice had announced its intention to fire Tony Pasciuto two months ago. But in the end, just a week before Deputy AG Arnold Burns resigned, he agreed to meet with Pasciuto's attorney, Gary Simpson, to hear Pasciuto's side of the case. Five or six officials from Justice were in the room; another three or four--including one who had recommended firing Pasciuto-- waited nervously in the hallway outside. "I was on a roll," confesses Simpson, who is normally matter-of- fact. "It was something else. I was accusing them of all sorts of things, and no one stopped me." Justice ultimately proposed a painless solution: Pasciuto should walk away, go work somewhere else, and they'd acknowledge he had been a good employee. During the meeting, Simpson did most of the talking. "Burns was really taking it on the chin," he recalls. "He jerked back a couple of times, but he didn't say anything. More than once, he nodded assent. When I stated that Blackshear had recanted, he nodded again. And," Simpson concludes, "Burns didn't look like he was hearing any of it for the first time."
Where Are They Now?
LEIGH RATINER has left the practice of law. The man who once negotiated the Law of the Sea treaty for the U.S. government now runs his own business, LSR Enterprises, a maker of filing systems for lawyers. JUDGE BASON, who was denied reappointment as a federal bankruptcy judge, is still unemployed, and looking for work. Judge Bason has no regrets, though he concedes he does not relish controversy. Indeed Judge Bason tried to have himself taken off the INSLAW case when it first came up. "I talked to the chief justice of the District Court and said, `This has the potential of becoming a very hot potato.' I wasn't sure I wanted to get involved in it." George Bason is not, by temperament, a fighter. "My wife tells me I'm very stubborn," the 56-year-old former law professor confesses. "It takes me a long time to make up my mind about things and I tend to reserve judgment until I know as much as I can. But when I make up my mind, I'm very firm. To a very aggressive person I may give the impression of being a pushover, and when I prove not to be one, such people can be very angry." TONY PASCIUTO is luckier. He has been offered a good job at a large financial firm based in New York. If he takes it, he'll be making a lateral move from Justice into the private sector. Meanwhile, his attorney, Gary Simpson, awaits final word on Pasciuto's honorable discharge from the department. The papers are scheduled to be signed today.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
if you've made it to the end of these 2 articles, you understand that there are a lot of questions Ms. Mahar leaves open-ended since, during the spring of 1988 when she wrote this, many aspects of this situation were still grinding on and had not achieved the clarity now more evident. obviously, 3 and a half years later, and a great deal more known about this story, there is much that Ms. Mahar was only able to intimate for lack of more concrete evidence that has since become available. if any of you are interested in following up on any of the points raised in these 2 articles, i'd like to suggest at least a couple of obvious starting points. Maggie Mahar writes that
Bason questions the failure of high Justice Department officials to take any action to investigate serious allegations of misconduct.
and alludes to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired at that time by Sam Nunn:
The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is now looking into INSLAW--a sign that the lawmakers, too, think that the whole story of the "something strange" that happened in the Justice Department has yet to be told. . . . At the end of the week, that committee met with Bason, as well. Senator Nunn's committee may find some answers--and ask more questions--that will illuminate this bizarre story.
why not call up Senator Nunn's office and ask "what happened?" "what did you find out? what did you conclude? is there a report you can send me?" also Senator Dodd's office should be called:
A member of Sen. Christopher Dodd's staff . . . has been looking into the INSLAW case for more than a year . . .
to see if the member she alludes to is still there or ever wrote up a report of their examinations.
-- daveus rattus
yer friendly neighborhood ratman
KOYAANISQATSI
ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.