The Thin White Line

MIAMI was a boom­town in the nine­teen-eight­ies, a time when drug mon­ey flowed in by the bil­lions, like petrodol­lars. Joel Hirschhorn was Dia­mond Joel then. He wore a dia­mond tie tack, a dia­mond pinkie ring, a gold bracelet, and a gold Rolex with a dia­mond bezel, which he said was called a Mia­mi Timex. He got him­self a forty-foot boat—a sportfisherman—and then trad­ed it in for a big­ger one. He liked to call it “the boat that dope bought,” though the actu­al name he gave it was the A Quit-All—an allu­sion to his pro­fes­sion, which was crim­i­nal-defense attor­ney.
     Maybe the osten­ta­tion was an affront to the agents and pros­e­cu­tors who were fight­ing the drug war, and earn­ing lit­tle by com­par­i­son, but Hirschhorn didn’t wor­ry about them at the time. The mon­ey to be made by mem­bers of what was deri­sive­ly called “the white-pow­der bar” of Mia­mi was tremendous—why pre­tend oth­er­wise? You could get a good whiff of the pros­per­i­ty any night at the bar of the Mutiny Hotel, in Coconut Grove, where attor­neys drank cham­pagne with their traf­fick­er clients. “Rarely did a week go by with­out a five-fig­ure fee,” Hirschhorn says. “Clients just walked in and plunked the mon­ey down. I got paid in cash, gold, sil­ver, cars, planes, real estate—you name it.”
     For most Mia­mi attor­neys who spe­cial­ized in drug cas­es, includ­ing Hirschhorn, the boom times end­ed with the decade. The enforce­ment effort in south Flori­da ulti­mate­ly proved too dis­rup­tive to most of the traf­fick­ers, and by now the impor­ta­tion of drugs into the Unit­ed States has large­ly migrat­ed west. True, the Cali car­tel of Colom­bia, which is reput­ed to be the prin­ci­pal sup­pli­er of cocaine to the Unit­ed States, did con­tin­ue to ship cocaine through Flori­da well into the nineties, but Hirschhorn was not on the short­list of attor­neys called upon by car­tel mem­bers. Today, he does most­ly white-col­lar work. He has shed all the gaudy jew­el­ry, and his boat is up for sale. “It’s too damn expen­sive to use,” he says. “And since the gov­ern­ment chased away all the dopers—and their boat mechanics—you can’t get decent help any­more.”
     Hirschhorn says that the prac­tice of defend­ing drug traf­fick­ers has become too dan­ger­ous anyway—and he isn’t talk­ing about the dan­ger posed by irate clients. He and his peers had antag­o­nized the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment for too long; as the drug war inten­si­fied, so, appar­ent­ly, did the government’s hos­til­i­ty toward lawyers. First, the pros­e­cu­tors used for­fei­ture pro­vi­sions in drug cas­es to con­fis­cate fees paid to attor­neys, on the ground that the funds were pro­ceeds of ille­gal activ­i­ty; and they increas­ing­ly came to view lawyer con­duct that had once been tak­en for grant­ed as crim­i­nal. Nowhere else in the nation, it seems, is the ten­sion between the gov­ern­ment and the defense bar greater than in Mia­mi. “A lot of my col­leagues who didn’t real­ize that the eight­ies were over find them­selves in the nineties look­ing over their shoul­der,” Hirschhorn says.

ON JUNE 5th of this year, the Mia­mi Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office unsealed a mas­sive rack­e­teer­ing indict­ment that illus­trat­ed how high the stakes have become for lawyers in drug cas­es who are seen by the gov­ern­ment as hav­ing crossed the line into crim­i­nal­i­ty. The indict­ment runs to a hun­dred and six­ty-one pages, and it describes in detail the activ­i­ties not only of the reput­ed boss­es and scores of reput­ed mem­bers of the Cali car­tel but also of six Amer­i­can lawyers—Michael Abbell, William Moran, Don­ald Fer­gu­son, Joel Rosen­thal, Robert Moore, and Fran­cis­co Laguna—who were hired to rep­re­sent some of them. The lawyers are alleged to have engaged in a num­ber of ille­gal acts, most of which would tra­di­tion­al­ly have been clas­si­fied as obstruc­tion of justice—acts such as prepar­ing false affi­davits or try­ing to dis­cour­age arrest­ed car­tel mem­bers from coop­er­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment.
     Before the indict­ment was hand­ed down, how­ev­er, the lawyers learned that instead of being charged with obstruc­tion, which is pun­ish­able by a max­i­mum of five years per count, they would be charged with the very crime alleged­ly com­mit­ted by their clients—importing into the Unit­ed States more than two hun­dred and twen­ty tons of cocaine, an offense that car­ries a manda­to­ry life sen­tence. In the government’s view, when the lawyers’ actions were tak­en togeth­er they demon­strat­ed that the lawyers act­ed not as mere lawyers but as “house coun­sel” to the enter­prise itself. In addi­tion to the drug con­spir­a­cy, the gov­ern­ment planned to charge the lawyers under the RICO, or Rack­e­teer Influ­enced and Cor­rupt Orga­ni­za­tions, statute; accord­ing to this the­o­ry, prepar­ing a false affi­davit was an act of rack­e­teer­ing. In addi­tion, each of the lawyers alleged­ly received mon­ey from the car­tel and then paid some of it back, or to a third party—thereby, accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment, con­ceal­ing the source of the funds—so they would also be charged with mon­ey laun­der­ing.
     In April and May, before the indict­ment came down, three of the lawyers plead­ed guilty. Joel Rosen­thal and Robert Moore each con­fessed to one count of mon­ey laun­der­ing; Fran­cis­co Lagu­na plead­ed to one count of the con­spir­a­cy to import cocaine and one count of obstruc­tion of jus­tice. A fourth lawyer, Don­ald Fer­gu­son, held out until after he was named as a defen­dant in the indict­ment, but then, on July 3rd, he, too, plead­ed guilty, to one count of mon­ey laun­der­ing and one count of con­spir­ing to obstruct jus­tice. All four lawyers, who are yet to be sen­tenced, are expect­ed to appear as wit­ness­es against Michael Abbell and William Moran, the two lawyers who, to date, are still going to tri­al. Abbell and Moran will have to sit at the defense table along with twen­ty-odd alleged drug traf­fick­ers also named in the indict­ment. Abbell has achieved the great­est noto­ri­ety in the case, because he was once a sec­tion chief in the Crim­i­nal Divi­sion of the Jus­tice Depart­ment and, before he switched sides, was involved in extra­di­tion pro­ceed­ings against drug traf­fick­ers. Rosen­thal and Fer­gu­son, mean­while, are for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors.
     Mem­bers of the Mia­mi defense bar, although they con­cede that many of the acts that all six lawyers are accused of com­mit­ting are plain­ly ille­gal, are angered and stunned by the government’s use of the rack­e­teer­ing and drug-con­spir­a­cy statutes. “This indict­ment is so over­board as to be beyond imag­i­na­tion,” says Abbell’s lawyer, Roy Black, who is best known for win­ning an acquit­tal in the William Kennedy Smith rape case. Moran’s lawyer, Albert Krieger, who unsuc­cess­ful­ly defend­ed John Got­ti in New York in 1992, argues that not all the attor­neys who took pleas may have believed they were guilty. “Can I under­stand if they were so fright­ened by the poten­tial for life impris­on­ment that they just threw up their hands?” he says.
     Gov­ern­ment offi­cials con­fi­dent­ly say they will let the jury decide whether the case is exces­sive, and they deny any motive of vin­dic­tive­ness. Still, the hard feel­ings are there. William Rosen­blatt, who ran the Unit­ed States Cus­toms Ser­vice branch in Mia­mi dur­ing the time—nearly four years—the case was being assem­bled, and who retired last Decem­ber, does not attempt to dis­guise his loathing for turn­coats like Abbell. “I look upon these attor­neys, if they’re guilty, as trai­tors,” he says. “Hell, are we in a war or not? Why aren’t these guys being charged with treason?”

THE CASE against the Cali car­tel and its lawyers began on August 23, 1991, with a ship­ment of con­crete fence posts and cor­ner­stones that arrived at the port of Mia­mi on a steam­er from Venezuela. Cus­toms agents and agents of the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion board­ed the boat to inspect the car­go, and dis­cov­ered that the hol­low cores of the con­crete blocks con­tained about thir­teen and a half tons of cocaine. Instead of seiz­ing the ship­ment, the agents con­duct­ed sur­veil­lance to see where it would end up. The con­crete blocks sat in a Mia­mi ware­house for three months, and then, in mid-Novem­ber, oper­a­tives of the Cali car­tel removed some of them and took them by truck to Longview, Texas. At this point, sev­er­al peo­ple were arrest­ed, includ­ing Gus­ta­vo Naran­jo, a native of Cali who lived in Longview and ran the oper­a­tions of the car­tel along the south­west Unit­ed States bor­der.
     Naran­jo was locked up in a Texas jail, and on Novem­ber 20th he received a vis­it from a cus­toms agent based in Mia­mi named Edward Kacerosky. It is often dif­fi­cult to get jailed mem­bers of the Cali car­tel to coop­er­ate with law-enforce­ment agents, because it is well under­stood by all con­cerned that the price may be death for both the coop­er­a­tor and his fam­i­ly in Colom­bia.  Nev­er­the­less, accord­ing to an affi­davit sub­mit­ted by Kacerosky, Naran­jo began to give him details of the Texas oper­a­tion and of oth­er activ­i­ties of the Cali car­tel. Kacerosky was called back to Mia­mi on Novem­ber 23rd, and three days lat­er he tele­phoned Naranjo’s court-appoint­ed lawyer, a local man, to let him know that he planned to return to Texas for fur­ther talks with Naran­jo. The lawyer told Kacerosky he would be wast­ing his time: a Mia­mi attor­ney named Joel Rosen­thal had sud­den­ly shown up at the Texas jail, and Naran­jo wasn’t talk­ing to the gov­ern­ment any longer.
     Joel Rosen­thal, who is over six feet tall and trim, with a dis­tinct New York accent, was well known to peo­ple in Mia­mi law enforce­ment. He had been an assis­tant Unit­ed States Attor­ney, first in Man­hat­tan and then in Mia­mi, where he won numer­ous con­vic­tions in drug cas­es and rose to chief of the fraud sec­tion. In 1981, he left the gov­ern­ment and went into pri­vate prac­tice as a defense attor­ney. He soon found him­self rep­re­sent­ing mem­bers of the Medel­lín car­tel of Colombia—the Cali’s more vio­lent and less cor­po­rate pre­de­ces­sor, which more or less died with its boss, Pablo Esco­bar, in 1993. Rosen­thal liked to boast about his meet­ings with Esco­bar in Colom­bia. He bought a thir­ty-three-foot boat and docked it direct­ly across from Joel Hirschhorn’s A Quit-All. Nev­er­the­less, Rosen­thal man­aged to main­tain good rela­tions with fed­er­al agents. “We cer­tain­ly saw him as a legit­i­mate, though high-priced, lawyer,” Thomas Cash, the for­mer head of the D.E.A. divi­sion in Mia­mi, says.
     From the day Rosen­thal showed up at the Texas jail, he no longer struck the agents as legit­i­mate. He hired a Texas attor­ney to rep­re­sent Naran­jo in place of his court-appoint­ed lawyer, and was alleged to have paid that attor­ney near­ly three hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars out of funds that he him­self had received from the car­tel. (This is the basis of the mon­ey-laun­der­ing count to which Rosen­thal has plead­ed guilty.) Naran­jo was nev­er­the­less con­vict­ed, and in Novem­ber of 1993 he once again began coop­er­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment. This time, agents want­ed to know about Joel Rosen­thal. Accord­ing to Kacerosky’s affi­davit, Naran­jo claimed that Rosen­thal, upon arriv­ing at the prison, said he had been sent by Mike—that is, Miguel Rodríguez Ore­juela, the alleged Cali-car­tel boss—and that Rosen­thal remind­ed Naran­jo that if he talked to the author­i­ties he “knew what would hap­pen.” (Rosen­thal has denied threat­en­ing Naran­jo; he was ulti­mate­ly not charged with that offense.)
     As the inves­ti­ga­tion pro­gressed, agents heard sto­ries of oth­er lawyers who were appar­ent­ly try­ing to rein­force the cartel’s code of silence—perhaps the strongest evi­dence that the lawyers were act­ing as house coun­sel. After Harold Ack­er­man, who ran the Mia­mi oper­a­tion of the Cali car­tel, was arrest­ed, in April, 1992, his attor­ney, Robert Moore, a short, slight­ly paunchy man with a mus­tache, whose father was a city judge, was also alleged to have remind­ed his client that coop­er­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment could be risky. The gov­ern­ment heard evi­dence that on Moore’s instruc­tions Ackerman’s son, Alan, cleaned out his father’s safe-deposit box­es of one mil­lion one hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars in cash and brought the mon­ey to Moore’s office for safe­keep­ing. Moore was alleged to have paid back all but fifty thou­sand dol­lars over the next year—an act of mon­ey laun­der­ing in the eyes of the gov­ern­ment.
     Only one of the lawyers tar­get­ed in the case was not based in Mia­mi, and that was Michael Abbell; he worked out of a small crim­i­nal-law firm in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Now fifty-four, mar­ried, and the father of three, Abbell is a grad­u­ate of Har­vard Law School who joined the Jus­tice Depart­ment in 1967 and, four­teen years lat­er, was made head of its inter­na­tion­al-affairs office, which nego­ti­at­ed with for­eign coun­tries for cus­tody of inter­na­tion­al crim­i­nals, includ­ing drug traf­fick­ers. In 1984, Abbell left the Jus­tice Depart­ment to go into pri­vate prac­tice. Lat­er the same year, Gilber­to Rodríguez Ore­juela, who is reput­ed to have found­ed the Cali car­tel with his broth­er, Miguel, was arrest­ed in Spain. Gilber­to Rodríguez faced indict­ments in New York and Cal­i­for­nia, and the Jus­tice Depart­ment peti­tioned Spain for cus­tody of him. Rodríguez turned to Abbell, who sought and obtained a con­flict-of-inter­est rul­ing from the Jus­tice Depart­ment, per­mit­ting him to rep­re­sent the alleged drug lord. To the frus­tra­tion of Jus­tice, Rodríguez was sent back to Colom­bia, where he was released. In the late eight­ies, Abbell made him­self even more unpop­u­lar with his for­mer allies in the drug war by appear­ing on Capi­tol Hill to argue against treaty amend­ments that were being sought by drug-enforce­ment agents.
     Abbell con­tin­ued to do legal work for the Rodríguez broth­ers, and in Jan­u­ary, 1991, he hired an obscure Mia­mi lawyer, Fran­cis­co Lagu­na, as a full-time asso­ciate. Lagu­na, who is in his thir­ties and was born in Colom­bia and speaks flu­ent Span­ish, appears, from the indict­ment, to have been the most deeply immersed of all the lawyers in the day-to-day affairs of the Cali car­tel. He main­tained fre­quent con­tact with Miguel Rodríguez by pub­lic tele­phone. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Lagu­na, fed­er­al agents had obtained the code num­bers of the deb­it cards he used to make his calls, and were able to inter­cept many of the con­ver­sa­tions.
     Abbell and Lagu­na worked togeth­er close­ly. In ear­ly 1991, the reput­ed No. 3 boss of the Cali car­tel, José San­tacruz Lon­doño, faced the for­fei­ture of six­ty-five mil­lion dol­lars that had been seized in New York and else­where. Lagu­na was alleged to have received doc­u­ments from an econ­o­mist work­ing for San­tacruz which showed that the seized mon­ey had come from legit­i­mate sources, such as a cat­tle farm and a sug­ar plan­ta­tion. A short time lat­er, accord­ing to the Mia­mi indict­ment, Abbell “voiced his con­cern to Lagu­na about the obvi­ous fal­si­ty of the doc­u­ments,” and asked Lagu­na to “amend the doc­u­ments so that the fal­si­ty was not obvi­ous.” The pho­ny doc­u­ments were filed in Brook­lyn fed­er­al court, the indict­ment says.
     Though Abbell was some­thing of a scholar—he had col­lab­o­rat­ed in the writ­ing of a mul­ti-vol­ume trea­tise on extradition—he had not spent a lot of time in the court­room. For assis­tance with the San­tacruz for­fei­ture case, he turned to Don­ald Fer­gu­son, a well-groomed and polite man, who was a far more expe­ri­enced tri­al lawyer, and who had been a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor in Mia­mi dur­ing the mid-sev­en­ties. The Mia­mi indict­ment does not spec­i­fy what, if any­thing, Fer­gu­son did in the for­fei­ture case that was improp­er, but it does accuse him of a num­ber of oth­er ille­gal acts. To give one exam­ple, Fer­gu­son and Fran­cis­co Lagu­na vis­it­ed Harold Ack­er­man, the jailed Mia­mi car­tel boss, and were alleged to have got him to sign a false affi­davit that Miguel Rodríguez need­ed for a legal pro­ceed­ing in Colom­bia.
     Of the six accused lawyers, the one whose appear­ance in the case seemed to sur­prise peo­ple the least was William Moran, a fifty-six-year-old who has a trim, gray­ing beard and is giv­en to wear­ing cow­boy boots. His law prac­tice had nev­er been a typ­i­cal one, even for Mia­mi. In June, 1980, his part­ner, George Gold, was shot dead in front of the law firm’s front door, and three years lat­er Moran’s ground-floor office was fire bombed. (Both deeds were ascribed to dis­grun­tled drug clients, but recent evi­dence sug­gests that Gold was sim­ply mis­tak­en for some­one else.) Moran had a drink­ing prob­lem, and in 1984 he was arrest­ed for cocaine pos­ses­sion. His life has been marked by tragedy: his first wife com­mit­ted sui­cide, and his sec­ond wife died of can­cer. He has since remar­ried; his third wife accom­pa­nied him to his arraign­ment wear­ing a cow­boy hat.
     No one ever said that Moran was not a tal­ent­ed tri­al lawyer. He start­ed out in the six­ties as a pros­e­cu­tor in the Dade Coun­ty State Attorney’s Office—the office that, after he left, was run by Janet Reno. As a defense attor­ney, he fought hard for his clients. “Some pros­e­cu­tors did not like his style,” Lawrence Kerr, who was Moran’s asso­ciate after Gold died, says. “They might say he was com­bat­ive, even obnox­ious.” The Mia­mi fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor Michael Sul­li­van recalls that once when he was in the mid­dle of a clos­ing argu­ment Moran got up and strolled right between him and the jury.
     Moran is said to have met with Gilber­to Rodríguez Ore­juela in 1984 in a Span­ish prison, and, after that, was hired by Gilber­to and Miguel to rep­re­sent mem­bers of the Cali car­tel. The Mia­mi indict­ment accus­es Moran of many of the same alleged acts of rack­e­teer­ing that have been lev­elled against the oth­er lawyers, such as prepar­ing false affi­davits and try­ing to pre­vent arrest­ed sus­pects from coop­er­at­ing. He is expect­ed to con­tin­ue to main­tain his inno­cence, and go to tri­al. “Bill doesn’t believe he did any­thing wrong, and there­fore he has no choice but to stand and fight,” Kerr, his for­mer asso­ciate, says.

THOUGH the Mia­mi indict­ment is one of the tough­est attacks on alleged lawyer mis­con­duct in mem­o­ry, the Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office seems to have been unpre­pared for the indig­na­tion of the defense bar. As is cus­tom­ary with a pend­ing mat­ter, pros­e­cu­tors han­dling the case—William Pear­son, Edward Ryan, and Lisa Hirsch—have declined to speak to the press, and in a recent inter­view the Mia­mi Unit­ed States Attor­ney, Kendall Cof­fey, was unusu­al­ly guard­ed. Still, Cof­fey main­tained, the use of the con­spir­a­cy statute against the attor­neys was ful­ly jus­ti­fied. If a per­son who mere­ly loads cocaine on a boat, and does noth­ing more, can be charged with the crimes of the entire enter­prise, he asked, then why not a lawyer who tries to shield that enter­prise by improp­er means?
     Mem­bers of the defense bar claim, how­ev­er, that the indict­ment is an attempt to intim­i­date lawyers who defend drug sus­pects. They say that the six lawyers, in addi­tion to being charged with undis­put­ed crimes, are accused of a range of mis­deeds that until now have been con­sid­ered per­fect­ly prop­er. For exam­ple, on at least one occa­sion William Moran secured bond for a drug sus­pect who sub­se­quent­ly fled the coun­try, and the secur­ing of bond has been charged against Moran as an act of rack­e­teer­ing. Defense attor­neys argue that their clients jump bail all the time, so to make the lawyer cul­pa­ble for this—let alone on a rack­e­teer­ing count—is absurd. Gov­ern­ment agents say the evi­dence at the tri­al will show that Moran knew that the sus­pect would flee, and that he arranged for the bond to be paid at the direc­tion of Miguel Rodríguez.
     On anoth­er occa­sion, Moran, accord­ing to the indict­ment, con­firmed to a client that a cer­tain Rafael Lom­bra­no was a con­fi­den­tial infor­mant, and about two months lat­er Lom­bra­no was mur­dered. Though Moran has not been charged in the mur­der, Albert Krieger, his lawyer, says that the gov­ern­ment obvi­ous­ly intends to tar Moran with the crime by infer­ence. Yet, Krieger says, it would have been improp­er for Moran to with­hold the infor­ma­tion about Lom­bra­no, for it is a lawyer’s express oblig­a­tion to inform his client of all poten­tial wit­ness­es in order to pre­pare an ade­quate defense. “On what basis does the lawyer come to the con­clu­sion that a wit­ness is going to be killed?” Krieger says. “The bad rep­u­ta­tion of his client as fos­tered by law enforce­ment?”
     In addi­tion, many defense attor­neys say they are per­plexed by the government’s the­o­ry of mon­ey laun­der­ing in the case. While agree­ing that it is ille­gal to know­ing­ly trans­fer dirty mon­ey, mem­bers of the Mia­mi bar say they nev­er thought there was any­thing wrong with pass­ing along part of a fee to anoth­er attor­ney. Yet this is the mon­ey-laun­der­ing charge to which Joel Rosen­thal has plead­ed guilty. Pros­e­cu­tors explain that Rosen­thal, in their view, was not per­form­ing a legit­i­mate legal ser­vice but was mere­ly bro­ker­ing the mon­ey.
     In any event, gov­ern­ment agents appear high­ly con­fi­dent of win­ning. The prosecution’s case has already suc­cess­ful­ly met some strong chal­lenges. Last year, a fed­er­al judge was pre­sent­ed with some of the evi­dence that had been gath­ered against the six lawyers, and he grant­ed search war­rants on the offices of them all—a most unusu­al pro­ce­dure, giv­en the tra­di­tion­al priv­i­lege of con­fi­den­tial­i­ty between lawyer and client. The Mia­mi bar was out­raged. “Do you know what hap­pens in these search­es?” Roy Black, Abbell’s lawyer, says. “Ten or fif­teen strangers come in and make you sit some­where while they rum­mage through your files, notes, cal­en­dars, and let­ters. Then they take most of it. It’s like being bur­glar­ized.”
     An even big­ger chal­lenge to the Mia­mi pros­e­cu­tors was get­ting Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cials in Wash­ing­ton to approve the indict­ment. Attor­ney Gen­er­al Janet Reno was not involved in the review process, per­haps because she is per­son­al­ly acquaint­ed with sev­er­al of the accused lawyers. Her deputy, Jamie Gore­lick, was close­ly involved, how­ev­er. Attor­neys for the accused made the trip up to Wash­ing­ton, and argued vehe­ment­ly against the indict­ment, and, though they ulti­mate­ly did not pre­vail, the review process dragged on for a long time. Much too long, in the opin­ion of cus­toms agents who had worked on the case, and had expect­ed the indict­ment to be unsealed in Feb­ru­ary. Jus­tice was appar­ent­ly ner­vous about the scope of the charges against the lawyers, and need­ed fur­ther reas­sur­ance about the qual­i­ty of the evi­dence, because of prob­lems that had occurred in anoth­er case with some strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties.
     Ear­li­er this year, L. Antho­ny White, a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor in Reno, Neva­da, tried to per­suade a jury that Patrick Hal­li­nan, a San Fran­cis­co lawyer, had act­ed as house coun­sel to a mar­i­jua­na-smug­gling ring, and was there­fore him­self guilty of large-scale drug traf­fick­ing. The hun­dred-page rack­e­teer­ing indict­ment filed against Hal­li­nan accused him of numer­ous acts of mon­ey laun­der­ing and obstruc­tion, includ­ing try­ing to pre­vent arrest­ed ring mem­bers from coop­er­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment. As his star wit­ness, the pros­e­cu­tor called Ciro Man­cu­so, the con­fessed ring­leader, who had been Hallinan’s client. The jurors did not like Man­cu­so or the deal the gov­ern­ment had struck with him in return for his tes­ti­mo­ny, which per­mit­ted Man­cu­so to keep more than five mil­lion dol­lars in cash and real estate, and held the promise of a sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tion in sen­tence. In his clos­ing state­ment John Kek­er, the lawyer for Hal­li­nan, said, “They’ll tell you it’s a war on drugs.… It’s a war against defense attor­neys.” Hal­li­nan was acquit­ted after four hours of deliberation—a huge­ly embar­rass­ing set­back for the Jus­tice Depart­ment.
     Clear­ly, Jus­tice believed that the Mia­mi case was stronger than the Hal­li­nan case, because the indict­ment, though it was delayed, arrived intact and pow­er­ful. Cus­toms agents remain con­vinced, how­ev­er, that the Mia­mi bar, some of whose mem­bers are Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty con­trib­u­tors, exert­ed polit­i­cal pres­sure on the Jus­tice Depart­ment. (Those agents “are full of shit,” Moran’s attor­ney, Albert Krieger, says.) And agents are angry that Jus­tice gave the lawyers per­mis­sion to turn them­selves in vol­un­tar­i­ly, and that Michael Abbell’s arraign­ment was put off by a day so that he could attend his son’s grad­u­a­tion. “If one of us had been indict­ed on these charges, we’d have been tak­en out in chains,” Bon­ni Tis­chler, the new­ly appoint­ed head of Unit­ed States Cus­toms in Mia­mi, says.

LAST MARCH, appar­ent­ly in response to pres­sure from the State Depart­ment, the Colom­bian author­i­ties began to crack down on the Cali car­tel, and in the past two months Gilber­to Rodríguez and José San­tacruz, both of whom are named in the Mia­mi indict­ment, have been arrest­ed. Miguel Rodríguez, also a defen­dant in the Mia­mi case, is said to be on the run.
     Yet even if the Cali car­tel is ulti­mate­ly dis­man­tled, the war on drugs will con­tin­ue. So will the debate over the tac­tics employed by the gov­ern­ment to fight that war. Defense attor­neys com­plain that the Fourth Amend­ment pro­tec­tion against unrea­son­able search­es and seizures has become almost nonex­is­tent in drug cas­es. They ques­tion the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the government’s prac­tice of issu­ing sub­poe­nas to lawyers in drug cas­es for infor­ma­tion about the pay­ment of legal fees—information that might be used to incrim­i­nate the lawyers’ own clients. Ger­ard E. Lynch, a law pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, who served as chief of the crim­i­nal divi­sion of the Man­hat­tan Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office, and has also done crim­i­nal-defense work, con­curs. “The Con­sti­tu­tion has def­i­nite­ly tak­en a beat­ing in the drug war,” he says.
     Lynch believes the Mia­mi case may intim­i­date good, aggres­sive attor­neys and deter them from rep­re­sent­ing drug defen­dants. He even believes that that may have been part of the government’s design. But he is not pre­pared to say that pros­e­cu­tors were wrong to bring the case; that judg­ment will depend on the qual­i­ty of the evi­dence pre­sent­ed at the tri­al, which is expect­ed to begin next year. “There is absolute­ly no rea­son why a lawyer can’t be guilty of con­spir­ing with a drug enter­prise,” he says. “And it would be fool­ish for the gov­ern­ment to close its eyes to the fact that there are a lot of cor­rupt lawyers out there.” ♦