Also this issue:

Naval Gazing
City may have let Toll Brothers off the hook before the Naval Home fire.
-Gwen Shaffer

Peace!
Thousands of Philadelphia-area residents protest war.
-Gwen Shaffer

Eighth District Councilmanic Mania
-Mary F. Patel

The Bell Curve
City Paper's weekly gauge of Philly's Quality of Life

February 20-26, 2003

city beat

Presidential Pique

Johnny On the spot: BNI Agent John McLaughlin is the target of Dominican ire.

The leader of the Dominican Republic is mad as hell and sending lawyers to Philly.

by Howard Altman

A recent Wilkes-Barre federal jury verdict is causing an uproar in the Dominican Republic.

Hipolito Mejia, president of the Dominican Republic, is dispatching a team of lawyers to Philadelphia to sue two former narcotics investigators who claimed that Mejia's Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) took part in a scheme to raise campaign funds by selling drugs in Philadelphia, New York and Massachusetts. Mejia is also dispatching his country's U.S. counsel general, Francisco Pena, to Philadelphia. And last week, both houses of the Dominican Republic legislature voted unanimously for a censura, or censure, of the agents, John McLaughlin and Charlie Micewski.

McLaughlin and Micewski, dubbed the Bastard Squad, were assigned to the state Attorney General's elite Bureau of Narcotics Investigations (BNI) in the fall of 1995 when they told their superiors, the FBI, the DEA and the CIA that they had uncovered a plot by the PRD to sell drugs to raise money for presidential candidate Jose Francisco Pena Gomez. At the time, Mejia was the party's vice-presidential candidate, though he was in no way connected to the plot. Thousands of pages of internal and confidential BNI, DEA and CIA records back up those claims.

Mejia's ire was raised over a recent Wilkes-Barre federal jury verdict awarding McLaughlin and Micewski $1.5 million to compensate them for having their constitutional rights violated by the Office of the Attorney General. In a lawsuit filed in 1998, the agents claimed that AG Mike Fisher and his senior staff retaliated against them for filing an October 1997 lawsuit against Fisher, the U.S. State Department, the FBI, the DEA and the CIA. In that suit, since dismissed, McLaughlin, Micewski and two other BNI agents, Dennis McKeefery and Eddie Eggles, claimed that their investigations were stopped and their careers ruined after the CIA stepped into their investigation of the PRD.

"The people of the Dominican Republic are very upset," says Juan Pena, special assistant to Counsel General Francisco Pena (the son of Pena Gomez, who died in 1998). "Pena Gomez was the mentor of the Dominican democratic system. He is the one who fought for democracy after years of dictatorship. He was the one to fight for freedom. The country is upset that the spiritual and political father of our nation has been smeared."

Pena (no relation to either the counsel general or the former president) called the allegations that the PRD sold drugs to raise campaign funds "trash and garbage."

"The party denies [the claims]," Pena says. "The party raised money all over the United States by having raffles. That is the way they do fundraising. And dinners. Allegations against Pena Gomez are a pure lie. He had a great power around the world and was able to raise funds anywhere. The $500,000 [that McLaughlin and Micewski were about to seize as drug assets before the State Department shut down the investigation] is nothing."

Pena says Mejia is particularly incensed by the jury's verdict, "because the officers received money, which means that they are right. That is offensive to our leadership."

Attorney Don Bailey, the former congressman and state auditor general who spent years helping McLaughlin and Micewski fight for vindication and who engineered the lawsuit that angered Mejia, calls any action by the Dominican Republic "frivolous."

"Mejia has no claim," says Bailey, a decorated Vietnam vet. "Furthermore, truth is a defense. They obviously don't know that Pena Gomez himself went to the State Department and told them that his party was being used to carry drugs."

McLaughlin says he isn't losing any sleep over Mejia's actions.

Even if the attorneys should arrive and take legal action, McLaughlin says he is still not worried.

"I have more than enough factual evidence" to prove that the PRD was involved in drug dealing in the U.S., he says. "I have enough tapes and documents and DEA documents about people who have been arrested from that party. If they come, they would be leaving with their hats in their hands."

So why did Mejia publicly lambaste McLaughlin and Micewski?

"It was all rhetoric," says McLaughlin. "They had to say something after we won."

McLaughlin adds that the Dominican congress' censura "is crapadoro. I am not in the Dominican Republic. What difference does it make if they censure me?"