today's bust of the Cali cartel
Topics: Rights, Drugs
06 Jun 1995
From: "DG Ervan Darnell"
Let me start with an observation, the Cali cartel is not so much a cartel as
it is a government, sort of a floating one. It makes its own rules. It
uses whatever violence is necessary to enforce those rules. It has no
interest in 'doing the right thing', only in employing whatever supression
is necessary to maintain its power (read this as 'most' instead of 'all'
governments if you want to quibble about it). I mention this for the reason
that while business monopolies under a capitalist system are not
inefficient, monopolies maintained by force are (for all of the usual
reasons). So, today's bust has some good news in a large ocean of bad news:
Cali presumably had 80% of the cocaine market. They are now broken up and
there will, at least, temporarily be some competition. The price of
recreation is going down ;-)
The usual bad news is that we are wasting resources on such perfect
nonsense. The particular bad news is that the drug merchants will not be
tried (because Columbia won't extradite them) instead U.S. lawyers will be
tried for daring to represent them. Several lawyers were arrested. Among
the charges were:
1) One former justice department official advised them how to avoid getting
caught.
2) "Knowingly" accepting drug money.
3) Communicating to detained persons what they should say to the police,
including presumably exhortions to perjury.
All of this adds weight to a now old story: being accused of a drug crime is
tantamount to being convicted. (2) is particularly gruesome. First,
consider that people are being indicted on this 'crime' before anyone is
found guilty of dealing drugs. The implicit assumption is that those
accused of dealing drugs are already guilty and therefore anyone accepting
money from them is accepting drug money. Second, if we still believe
criminal process, it may very well be that there are people who are guilty
but nonetheless deserve to be let go. Point (2) says that they are to be de
facto denied council to make sure they cannot exercise their rights.
The police are free to exhort witnesses to perjure themselves, e.g. "your
testimony that this is the guy will put him away." But if the defense says
"your boss will get off if you shut up" (as is the accusation in this case),
it does not merely make the testimony tainted but it is grounds to arrest
the lawyer!
As for point (1), why is there anything illegal with that either? The
person is not accused of releasing any confidential information or betraying
justice department secrets. He worked for Cali after leaving the (U.S.)
government. It is as if he wrote a book that explained how to launder money
through Cayman. But, no, exercising free speech rights in the interest of
helping drug dealers looks too much like treason and whatever means
necessary will be used to punish any such person.
In the search for evidence, the police seized all of the records of the
various lawyers who had been accused. This means the police had
confidential (attorney client privilege) material on a large number of
defendents, not just those accused in this case (as if they should of even
had that). Now, presumably these documents are carefully opened under court
supervision, uh huh.
This reminds me of a quote I heard on the news the other day regarding the
Oklahoma City bombing, some random citizen was advocating that we get rid of
the appeals process for people accused of such crimes! Again, the
assumption is that anyone accused must be guilty.
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