May 5
USA:
ONLY HUMAN: Looking for Sparks of Justice
International justice has taken a pasting during the watch of this
administration.
In 2002, President Bush said, "We want the United Nations to be effective,
and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's
most important multilateral body to be enforced." But this year he
nominated John Bolton to be America's representative to the U.N. - a man
who has said treaties are not legally binding, calling them mere
"political obligations."
The United States continues to get away with being shocked - shocked that
torture took place in its facilities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo,
Afghanistan, in dozens of American detention facilities around the world,
and in at least half a dozen Middle Eastern and South Asian countries
notorious for torture to whom we outsource our terrorism suspects. Not
even a smoking gun - an order approving illegal interrogation methods -
put Ricardo Sanchez, a lieutenant general and the former head of coalition
forces in Iraq, in the dock. Which must have been good news for everyone
above him in the torture chain whose heads he might then have been
motivated to deliver to an alert prosecutor.
The United States shunned international justice for the trials of Iraqi
bigs, opting instead for a so-called "Iraqi-led tribunal" in which access
to lawyers from the time of arrest is not guaranteed, proof of guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt is not required and the death penalty is not
banned.
The United States called for the prosecution of Sudanese officials for the
ongoing crimes against humanity in Darfur, a made-to-order job for the new
and permanent International Criminal Court, the only extant court with
both the capacity to outlast the evasions of Khartoum and the credibility
and expertise to get the job done. ICC jurisdiction was the choice of much
of the world. But the United States, most of the Arab League and Sudan
itself opposed any role for the ICC, proposing instead blatantly
unworkable alternatives.
Taken together, it is indeed a bleak picture: an administration that views
the ICC as part of a march toward world governance rather than as the best
chance to ensnare monstrous abusers who will otherwise not be held
accountable by any national justice system.
There are some who would point to small hopeful signs that the
administration has shifted course. On closer examination, however, even
the few and scattered signs of governmental decency fade as we come closer
to them.
Take the recent surprising, but fluky, American change of heart regarding
the ICC. Pierre Prosper, the American ambassador at large for war crimes,
had said, "We don't want to be party to legitimizing the ICC." An American
official who monitors the ICC is quoted as saying, "We are studying the
options, and the ICC is not one of them." But just last month, when the
Security Council voted on a resolution calling for the referral of the
Darfur matter to the ICC - a necessary step because Sudan is not an ICC
member - the United States abstained, allowing the referral. Why?
It is not that the administration got religion, but that religion - this
time to good effect - got to the administration.
Christian groups have been deeply engaged in Sudan for years because of
the long internal North-South, Christian-Muslim struggle that has only
recently been settled. So they know and care about Sudan and are eager to
protect that hard-won peace. They don't trust Khartoum, and they dismissed
its assurances that it would prosecute the war criminals. Nor were they
fooled by America's nonsensical proposal to create a new outpost of the
temporary International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to carry out the
Darfur prosecutions. They stood their ground - they are a tenacious bunch
- and the administration gave in.
Then there was the announcement by Washington that it would comply with a
ruling by the World Court - from whose mandatory jurisdiction it withdrew
itself in 1986 - directing the United States to re-examine the death
sentences of dozens of Mexican nationals on death row in Texas. The
Mexicans had been denied their right under American treaty obligations to
consult with their consular officials "without delay" upon detention. In
fact, their consular officials did not even know of their existence until
they had been sentenced to death and their appeals had been all but
exhausted.
Again, hold the champagne. After its surprise announcement of compliance,
the United States dropped the other shoe: It would exercise its right to
back out of the relevant part of the treaty altogether. Thus in the
future, foreign nationals in the United States will not have the right
that was illegally denied the Mexicans. Concomitantly, neither will
American nationals detained abroad have the right of consular
consultation.
And finally, at least for now, there's the Bolton nomination. Bolton had
the bad fortune to have been caught trying to spin weapons of mass
destruction analyses just when we really, really didn't want anymore such
fairy tales. Last week, rock-solid Republican John Whitehead, a deputy
secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, uttered the "w" word -
"withdrawal." If that is where the nomination is heading, the Senate, and
not the administration, will get the credit. Bitter irony: Bolton may pay
a higher price for his bullying than will be paid by Sanchez and his
fellow soldiers at Abu Ghraib.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, the 19th-century mystic, famously found sparks
of joy in places of the most hopeless darkness. Perhaps he could find them
in the tawdry international justice record of this administration. I
can't.
(source: Forward (Kathleen Peratis, a partner in the New York law firm
Outten & Golden, is a trustee of Human Rights Watch)
*********************
Bringing Down the Brotherhood----Inside the feds' war on the countrys
deadliest prison gang: 16 murders, 21 death-penalty cases, and snitches
galore.
A wide red line runs across the floor of the visiting room like a clown's
grin, separating the guard post and the civilian exit from the rest of the
place. Prisoners are forbidden to cross that line.
Joseph Principe stays way, way clear of the line. The last thing he needs,
today or any of the other days he has to spend behind bars, is trouble.
Maybe it's the olive-green uniform, maybe it's the way he stands for a
frisk, but there is little to distinguish Principe from the other convicts
in this medium-security lockup on Colorado's high plains. Only this: When
the female guard who pats him down tells him to tuck in his shirt, he
doesn't give her attitude -- just a slight smile.
"Is this new?" he asks.
She shakes her head slowly. He turns away from her, for modesty's sake,
and tucks. The whole exchange takes only a few seconds, but it's rich in
ritual. Here are the rules, ancient and implacable, thus it has always
been and always shall be... and over here is Joe Principe, a man in a
unique position to understand both the absurdity and the necessity of what
is being asked of him.
Until a few years ago, Principe was the one doing the frisking and making
inmates toe the line. He was a correctional officer at the
highest-security prison in the country, the U.S. Penitentiary
Administrative Maximum. Better known as ADX, the federal pen outside of
Florence is home to many of the nation's most dangerous terrorists, gang
leaders and murderers, and Principe was their keeper. But then the world
turned upside down, and he found himself on the wrong side of the bars.
Disgraced cops who go to prison usually end up in some form of protective
custody -- "checking in," convicts call it. But that's not Principe's way.
He walks the yard with the rest of the cons, takes his meals with them.
Checking in is for rats, and Principe is no rat. His refusal to snitch is
a point of pride with him. Depending on how you look at it, it's the one
thing that has kept him alive -- or the thing that got him in trouble in
the 1st place.
News travels fast in prison, rumors even faster. Everybody knows a little
bit about who Principe is and what he once did. "Usually all they hear is
that this guy used to be a fed," he says. "It gets passed around. So I put
it out there: 'You got any questions? Bring them to me. I'll tell you
what's up.' But I don't feel comfortable telling them the whole story."
The whole story, as Principe tells it, is about snitches and the games
they play. One day you're a trusted employee of the United States Bureau
of Prisons. Then the snitches go to work, and you're a pariah. Before you
know it, you're a named defendant in the biggest, hairiest high-stakes
racketeering case the federal government has ever prosecuted. That's your
name on the 110-page indictment, linked to a bunch of hard-core killers,
dope dealers and degenerates -- lifers and career criminals with nicknames
such as The Baron, The Hulk, Blinky, McKool, Tank, Turtle, Youngster and
Lucifer.
Unveiled in 2002 by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, the
sprawling indictment is the culmination of years of effort by federal and
state agencies to smash the Aryan Brotherhood, the most notorious of all
prison gangs. The case is stunning in scope, targeting forty defendants --
virtually the entire upper management of the AB, as well as various
"associates," wannabes and stooges -- for their alleged roles in a
criminal enterprise stretching over decades. It encompasses 16 murders,
dating back to the 1979 near-beheading of an inmate by AB leader Barry
"The Baron" Mills, and sixteen other plotted or attempted murders;
numerous heroin deals, in and outside of prison; and other acts of mayhem
intended to enforce the gang's will on the toughest prisons in the
California and federal systems.
The case has been long in coming -- in part, prison officials say, because
the fear created by the AB is so pervasive. Although bona fide members
make up less than 1/10 of 1 % of the federal prison population, the AB has
been blamed for up to 25 % of the killings in federal pens. It's also said
to be responsible for at least 6 inmate murders at California's Pelican
Bay State Prison. Allied with the Mexican Mafia and no longer a
white-supremacist organization, the group has zero tolerance for
informants, rival drug, gambling or pimping operations, or pain-in-the-ass
innocent bystanders. AB loyalists have executed their own brethren for
homosexual indiscretions. Outsiders desperate to impress the gang have
been known to slaughter suspected snitches in hopes of an invitation to
join.
In one infamous 24-hour period in 1983, 2 AB lifers escaped their
handcuffs and killed 2 guards in the most secure unit of the federal
penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. They did it, most chroniclers of the
event agree, for sport as much as spite, simply because they could --
spurring the outcry for a federal supermax that eventually led to the
construction of ADX, the "Alcatraz of the Rockies." Yet despite being
housed in the bowels of ADX, Mills and Tyler Davis "The Hulk" Bingham have
allegedly continued to direct AB activities in other prisons, including
the killing of black inmates in Illinois and Pennsylvania during a
racially charged turf war in the late 1990s.
In recent months, nearly half the defendants in the racketeering case,
many of whom are already serving long sentences for other crimes, have
accepted plea deals --including Principe. All of the 21 who remain are
eligible for the death penalty. Although the government has not yet
declared in which instances it will seek death, the group is likely to
include Mills and Bingham, who are expected to go to trial next year. The
only way to deal with the AB, the feds have decided, is to do what Mills
tried to do to an inmate named John Marzloff back in '79: cut off its
head.
But prison gangs are multi-headed beasts, and the feds have made some
questionable deals in their effort to crush the AB. Much of the
information and several key witnesses behind the racketeering case can be
traced to a single cellblock at ADX known as H Unit, a secret intelligence
unit where 6 top defectors from the gang were assembled and debriefed. The
existence of the operation was first disclosed in Westword 5 years ago,
when a former resident of H Unit charged that the group's members conned
their handlers, smuggled out sensitive documents and embellished their
stories in order to obtain special privileges and transfers to less
austere prisons ("A Broken Code," July 27, 2000).
Other informants have since come forward with their own tales about H
Unit, and attorneys for the death-eligible defendants are challenging the
credibility of the state's top snitches. They contend that the defectors
tailored their testimony to suit the government and that the whole
debriefing process was fatally flawed.
"I think this case started with H Unit," says Dean Steward, Mills's
attorney. "All of these guys were looking to find a way out of ADX. They
had other agendas, but that was their top priority -- getting out of
there."
The murky case against Principe relied almost entirely on the snitches in
H Unit. And if that case is any indication of the type of evidence the
government hopes to present against Mills and the other AB leaders,
putting them on death row may be harder than it sounds.
"There was no honor in my case, just a lot of lying and exaggerating,"
Principe says. "Add to that the dirty tricks they used on me -- the
dungeon housing, the delays, the manipulation of discovery. The court
process has become a playground for egocentricity and snitch sniping. It's
a disgrace to justice."
Nobody sets out in life with a gnawing ambition to spend time in prison.
Inmates don't plan on ending up there, and neither do staff. Correctional
officers often come to their profession down a winding path that starts
out with a hankering for the military or law enforcement, or possibly just
for a uniform and the authority that goes with it.
For Joe Principe, the calling had nothing to do with uniforms or the scent
of danger; it was all about a regular paycheck and good benefits and a
pension. After trying on all sorts of jobs and lives, he found himself
turning thirty, ready to settle down and raise a family. Corrections
looked like his ticket to suburbia, a way of repudiating what had gone
before.
"I've mellowed out quite a bit," he says, "but I used to have quite an
itch to scratch."
Born and raised in the Bronx, Principe reinvented himself throughout his
youth. He joined the Army right out of high school, went airborne with the
First Ranger Battalion, jumped out of airplanes. Then he decided to chuck
the Army and major in philosophy at Manhattan College. Then there was the
whole '80s greed-is-good thing; he was the guy up in the booth at the
American Stock Exchange, frantically flashing hand signals to the options
traders on the floor. The crash of '87 put an end to that one.
After that, there was a stream of other jobs, including a stint as a
private investigator, working insurance and marital surveillance cases all
over New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Fun -- hell, yes, but his
fiance wanted him to find something more stable, and the Bureau of Prisons
was hiring. "I never thought of it as a fighting-crime thing," he says.
"It was a job I could handle, I guess, that I didn't think would bother me
too much."
Principe started at USP Lewisburg in central Pennsylvania in 1991. The
hours were regular, the camaraderie among staff strong. Three years later,
the bureau opened its new supermax in Florence. Rated highly in his work
at Lewisburg, Principe decided to put in for a transfer.
ADX was a new kind of prison, designed to house the system's high-risk
inmates in isolation 22 hours a day. The place was a maze of control
rooms, double doors and cameras. When prisoners were taken out of their
cells -- to the recreation cages in the yard, for example, or to phone
their lawyers -- they were heavily shackled and escorted by 3 guards. For
Principe, accustomed to the noise and action of Lewisburg, working inside
ADX was like taking a moonwalk.
"It was kind of scary quiet," he says. "All the doors and grills, and it
takes you forever to walk from one side to the other. It was supposed to
be safer, but things can always happen. Those bars, they're an illusion. I
used to tell the young officers, "Make believe they're not there. Because
when you start depending on them, you're going to start screwing up.'"
Crazies who'd assaulted staff at other prisons often wound up at ADX.
Sure, they were behind double doors, but that didn't make them any less
crazy -- quite the opposite. Now they had all day to try to figure out how
they were going to nail you with one of their shit-piss cocktails. One
inmate was known for stripping and oiling his body for the anticipated
tussles with the extraction team; you could put him in a 4-point restraint
on his bed, and he'd still bite off a chunk of his shoulder and spit it at
you. Just how were you supposed to "manage" wack jobs like that?
The place was different, all right. With all the cameras and rules,
Principe couldn't shake the feeling that the staff was under the
microscope just as much as the cons were. Lewisburg had been "old-school";
guards had a fair amount of discretion about how they dealt with inmates
in certain situations, as long as they didn't violate security or common
sense. But ADX was a high-tech, button-down, by-the-book tomb, and its
atmosphere became even more stifling to Principe after the arrival of
Michael Pugh, its fourth warden in five years of operation.
Pugh was a veteran administrator who made no secret of his belief that he
had some "dirty" staffers at ADX, people who were being co-opted,
blackmailed or paid by prison-gang leaders to look the other way. Principe
was a union steward who saw merit in reaching an accommodation with
inmates to make life easier all around.
"I did little things," Principe says. "If a guy needs some soap or
toothpaste, I never had a problem helping him out with that. There are
officers who do it, and there are officers who don't. But I guess that
made me appear vulnerable or something.
"The way I look at it, they're already locked up. What are you going to
do? If you make them miserable, they make you miserable. So there were
little things, minor rules -- like this issue of passing, okay? Bureau
policy says you don't pass anything from one inmate to the next. At
Lewisburg, they didn't trip on little things like that. They're just happy
if nobody dies on shift."
Principe knew who Mills and Bingham were. There was a notebook full of
inmates' pictures that guards were supposed to inspect on a regular basis,
listing gang affiliations, escape attempts, history of violence -- the
problem prisoners' whole claim to fame. But he says he didn't extend any
special courtesies to Aryan Brotherhood inmates, and he scarcely paid any
attention to the notebook.
"A lot of guys sign it without really looking at it," he says. "After a
while, you don't care. You do your eight, you hit the gate. It's a job.
They want you to get more involved, but the job is miserable enough
without poking around and peeking at everybody's deepest, darkest
secrets."
As Pugh pursued his search for dirty staff, the relationship between the
administration and the union quickly deteriorated. Principe posted an
off-color limerick on the union website mocking the new warden. He and
several other outspoken critics of the new regime soon found their loyalty
under attack. "Federal agencies have no patience with First Amendment
enthusiasts," he notes.
On August 16, 1999, Principe was getting ready to leave on vacation when a
lieutenant summoned him to his office. "He handed me this paperwork saying
I was assigned to home duty," he recalls. "No reason. To this day, I've
never gotten a reason."
There were no particular duties associated with his new assignment. He
merely had to stay at his house, a living, breathing testament to others
on the folly of being a renegade. For the next seven months, he sat tight,
drawing his pay and wearing the stigma of being "under investigation" like
a badge.
Even after he was arrested and thrown in the county jail, the checks kept
coming.
The Aryan Brotherhood started out in the early 1960s in the California
prison system as a prison gang obsessed with race. It was perhaps a
predictable response to the increasing presence of black gangs in Folsom,
San Quentin and other state abattoirs. Supposedly, in the early days, you
had to be part Irish to join; members sported shamrock tattoos as a sign
of undying loyalty to their brothers.
But in time, prosecutors say, the organization's leadership became much
more interested in power than race. They developed sophisticated gambling,
extortion and dope operations; pimped out male inmates of all persuasions
(despite their loud contempt for homosexuality); ordered hits on their own
weak links; and forged uneasy truces with black and Hispanic factions. By
the late '70s, several veterans of the California group, including Mills,
had hit the streets and then moved into the federal prison system on new
charges. Although never vast in numbers, the AB was now so far-flung, with
hundreds of "associates" eager to align themselves with the group in
exchange for protection and status, that it developed 2 "commissions,"
consisting of three members each -- one to oversee the California prisons,
the other to run business in the federal pens.
For years, few law-enforcement officials paid attention to the AB; as long
as their principal victims were other inmates, there was little public
outrage over their activities. But the 1983 killing of the 2 Marion
guards, as well as incidents of street violence from paroled members who
were dealing drugs and expected to pay "taxes" to the gang, drew
increasing scrutiny. In the mid-'80s, the FBI tried to build a
racketeering case against the AB, citing the extensive narcotics network
in California prisons and the group's apparent efforts to extort Mafia
elements inside the walls. "Source information indicates that the AB has a
stranglehold on some of the top LCN [La Cosa Nostra] members who are
inside the prison system," one report stated, "so now it allows the AB
access to the funding of organized crime."
But in 1989, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles declined to
prosecute the case, reportedly because of credibility problems with the
snitches that the FBI had developed. A scandal had just erupted at the Los
Angeles county jail over a "snitch tank" full of informants who'd
fabricated testimony in homicide cases in order to get their sentences
reduced, and the FBI fretted that some so-called AB defectors might
actually be double agents seeking to infiltrate the witness-protection
program. "There are many witnesses in the WITSEC program who have
testified against members of the AB and now have contracts on their
lives," one memo advised.
Over the next decade, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)
became the lead agency investigating the AB. A new crop of informants
emerged, especially after a war erupted in federal pens between the gang
and the DC Blacks in the late 1990s ("Marked for Death," May 25, 2000). In
1998 the probe landed what may have been its biggest fish. An ADX inmate
named Kevin Roach, who claimed to be a high-ranking AB "councilman" who'd
served directly under federal commissioners Mills and Bingham, expressed
an interest in cooperating with authorities.
Roach was placed in H Unit, an isolated area tucked near ADX's central
control room. For several months, he was the only occupant of the unit;
guards took to calling it the Roach Motel. In 1999 he was joined by five
other defectors, including a California state prisoner, Brian Healy, who'd
come from Pelican Bay and had been talking to federal authorities for the
past 2 years.
Only a few top administrators and staffers were allowed access to H Unit.
Still, it didn't take long for other guards to notice the bags of food
from the outside world -- ribs, pizza, burgers from Carl's Jr. --
vanishing into the Roach Motel. Rumors spread that Warden Pugh had
assembled a bunch of lowlifes to look at pictures of officers and tell
tales about the "dirty" ones.
But investigating staff was only a small part of H Unit's mission. The
group was given other inmates' mail and asked to decode the secret
messages that AB members were known to conceal in what seemed like
innocuous small talk. (One method of sending orders involved a
disappearing "ink" made of urine that reappeared when heated.) They made
training videos that purported to show how gang members passed notes and
drugs, compromised staff and made weapons out of ordinary commissary
items. They were debriefed at length on their knowledge of various AB
murder plots, even if much of what they knew was hand-me-down prison lore.
And they were handed hush-hush files on everything from other AB rollovers
to Latin American drug cartels, in the hopes that they could fill in some
gaps in pending investigations.
In return for their help, they got perks no ADX inmate could have dreamed
possible. Carl's Jr. A television and VCR. A laptop computer -- and
occasional, supervised access to the Internet. The ability to move freely
throughout the unit. At least one soft-core porn video, smuggled in by one
of their chummier handlers. What would ultimately amount to thousands of
dollars in cash payments, placed in their commissary accounts. And
promises of transfers to less secure prisons or spots in the
witness-protection program.
A few months into the operation, a former AB shot-caller named Danny Weeks
had a falling-out with Roach and was moved out of H Unit. Weeks began
snitching on the snitches. He contacted Westword and declared that the
debriefing was a fraud. Roach and another top informant, Eugene Bentley,
had exaggerated their role in the AB, he wrote, and the group had compared
stories and coached each other on what to tell the grand jury preparing
the racketeering indictment. They had made up stories, taking their cues
from the files provided to them.
"We would theorize what certain things meant and always embellish
everything to make us look good," Weeks wrote. "Kevin would later confide
in me that he was playing the biggest game he had ever played, and if he
made a wrong move he was through. He told me that he had [a BOP
intelligence officer] by the nuts and had told him so."
The game may have included passing on to others the top-secret information
that their handlers gave them. Weeks smuggled sensitive data on a DEA
investigation out of ADX and into a public court file to show how easily
it could be done.
After Weeks went public, Warden Pugh moved quickly to discredit him. He
sent out a memo to staff declaring that Weeks had failed a polygraph test.
But another H Unit graduate, Brian Healy, would later tell a very similar
story to defense investigators about what went on in the unit. "After
they've been fed the information," he said, "the informants know what to
say."
According to Healy, Pugh had personally brought staff files to H Unit and
shown the inmates photos that included the officers' addresses and phone
numbers. He would then ask, "Which of these guys are dirty?"
One of the photos was of Joe Principe. Healy had spent months at ADX
before moving to H Unit, but Principe had done nothing wrong, as far as he
knew. The guard was "certainly no worse" than the chummy intelligence
officer whose gonads Roach claimed to have in hand, he added.
Weeks had made accusations about Principe when he first arrived in H Unit,
accusations that may have prompted Principe's assignment to home duty. But
Weeks would later claim that his fellow defectors had labeled several
guards they didn't like as "AB facilitators" in hopes of getting them
jammed up.
"I knew that Officer Principe had been placed on home leave, and I asked
Kevin the details on that," Weeks wrote. "He told me Principe had been
down here working the bubble when he first rolled over and had treated him
so bad that he had told [investigators] the guy was hooked up with us. He
was going to get indicted with all the AB as a co-conspirator for helping
us conduct our business here at ADX.
"I told Kevin that's kinda hard on the guy. He replied, 'Fuck the puke.
He's lucky I can't kill him.'"
Home duty was a bit like being locked up, Principe soon realized. Nothing
to do, weird thoughts, a deepening estrangement from what passes as normal
society. A hint, maybe, of things to come.
His buddies from the union called with messages of solidarity. Hang in
there, Joe. They can't get away with this. But as the months dragged on,
the calls dried up. So much for the brotherhood of the badge.
His father had just passed away. He was going through a messy divorce and
a custody battle over his kids, sitting on a mortgage and wondering how
much longer he could keep his non-job. If he was going to be branded an
outlaw, he might as well live like one. He wrote poems, hung out in a
tattoo shop, rode his Harley.
People who used to work with him thought he was losing it. He carried guns
and acted paranoid. According to one source, at a union meeting he put
another officer in a headlock -- which might explain why his union pals
stopped calling.
His new friends were other people living on the margins. One of them was a
bartender named Gino. In March 2000, Gino came to him with a story about
being in debt to "dangerous people." Principe loaned him $1,500 and let
him borrow his car for a few minutes to go make the payoff. Hours later,
no Gino. No car.
"I probably should've let the police handle it, but I thought I was too
street-suave for that," Principe would later write to a friend. "I still
had my bike and truck to get around, and I wanted to handle it like a
stand-up guy should."
Five days later, Gino showed up at Principe's house. He had the car but no
cash, just a peace offering: a T-shirt from a Las Vegas casino. Principe
blew up. "I slapped him around," he says. Then he told Gino to go get the
money he owed him.
Gino told a different story to the police. It was a lurid account of
handcuffs, a beating, a haircut lopping off his long hair. An
ex-girlfriend came forward with accusations of her own. Suddenly, Principe
was facing a barrage of charges: kidnapping, sexual assault, menacing,
stalking. Bail was set at a million bucks. The Caon City paper had him
down as some kind of alleged maniac rapist prison guard, with rumored ties
to white-supremacy prison gangs -- all of which made him a very popular
guy in the county jail.
Principe says the ex-girlfriend ultimately recanted her story. Gino did
not.
Principe took the case to trial. He thought he could beat the rap, right
up until the time another ADX employee, a martial-arts workout buddy, took
the stand and claimed that Principe had bragged of doing exactly what the
prosecution said he'd done. Principe insists his friend perjured himself.
"I don't know why he did it," he says. "I assume he was in trouble, too.
He got a promotion and a transfer shortly after that."
Somebody, Principe figured, wanted him in prison. How did a guy like Joe
Principe suddenly get so important?
His lawyers told him that the friend's testimony was damning: He was
looking at 32 years. So they cut a deal with the prosecution before the
case could be handed to a jury. He pleaded guilty to kidnapping and two
counts of menacing. Sentence: 8 years.
Officer Principe was no more. Felon Principe was shipped off to the
Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility. He worked the weight pile, did his
own time. In some ways, he made a better convict than a hack. But he was
under no illusion about where he was.
"I've seen people in prison look out for each other," he says. "But that
falls apart, too. All it takes is one rumor, and a guy can go from being
on top of the pile to checking in."
He didn't check in -- not even when he got an engraved invitation. A year
into his sentence, he had a visit from Les Smith, an ADX intelligence
officer, and Michael Halualani, the ATF agent heading the Aryan
Brotherhood investigation. They handed him a copy of the racketeering
indictment.
In the dozens of criminal acts described in the document, Principe's name
came up in connection with only three obscure incidents. He was charged
with having arranged to put Barry Mills and Kevin Roach next to each other
during recreation so that they could discuss AB business; on another
occasion, he was supposed to have placed Mills next to Eugene Bentley,
another H Unit snitch. He was also accused of falsifying a report of a
1998 fight between T.D. Bingham and a black inmate, Leroy Elmore, claiming
that Elmore had a weapon and had started the fight.
Principe was stunned. Anybody who knew ADX knew that one guard couldn't
move inmates around; it took at least three. Even if Mills ended up on the
yard next to Roach or Bentley, it could have been happenstance or because
of a request to be put next to a workout partner, one of the small
"accommodations" that were sometimes granted at the supermax. It didn't
mean Principe knew anything about their conversations -- which, the
indictment implied, had something to do with the war against the DC Blacks
and a supposed $500,000 contract that mobster John Gotti wanted the AB to
carry out against a black inmate who'd beaten him up at Marion. (The
contract, if it ever existed, was never carried out -- but that didn't
stop the New York newspapers from going wild with the story of Gotti, the
AB and Joe Principe, an Italian kid from the Bronx turned "rogue guard.")
The 3rd charge was even more laughable. Principe insists that he filed a
righteous report, stating that combatants Bingham and Elmore appeared to
go at each other simultaneously. Defense investigators who've seen a
videotape of the fight say that it backs up Principe's version and that
Elmore had a pair of gloves in his hand that could have been mistaken for
a weapon. There's also a strong suggestion in accounts of the incident
that administrators arranged for the fight to occur, since only a glaring
lapse in security could have placed the pair in a sally port together,
along with a member of the Mexican Mafia -- and a SWAT team was standing
by, apparently at the ready to break it up.
Yet the government was saying that these incidents made Principe part of
the whole racketeering conspiracy; if convicted, he was looking at twenty
years to life in prison. "Even if I was truly guilty of putting these guys
next to each other intentionally, how could that be a life sentence?"
Principe asks. "I don't get it."
After Principe had inspected the indictment, his visitors wasted no time
explaining why they'd come to see him. "This is easy," Halualani said.
"You're either with the government, or you're with the Aryan Brotherhood.
What's it going to be?"
Principe stared at him. "Say that again," he said.
The agent repeated himself.
"You're out of your mind," Principe said. "I got nothing to say to you."
"This is a life sentence, Joe," Smith added. "The AB or the Dirty White
Boys are going to get you. We're trying to help you."
Help him? They were trying to flip him. Like they'd flipped Roach and
Bentley, the fine pair who'd hung these charges on him.
"I already tried the government," he said. "You let me drown. I'm a
convict now."
He declined their offer. Then he headed for the weight pile and had his
best workout in a long time.
A month later, the feds took him out of Arkansas Valley and flew him to
California. They put him in the special housing unit at Terminal Island.
He'd spend most of the next 2 years in the hole awaiting trial, a life of
isolation that would make home duty look like an endless party.
Shortly after he arrived in California, a corrections officer cuffed him
and took him to recreation. Principe recognized his escort. He was someone
Principe had trained years ago, one of the rookies he'd told not to rely
too much on the bars to protect him.
Using the racketeering laws, the government has scored several victories
in its war against the Aryan Brotherhood. Numerous AB soldiers have been
flipped or convicted on conspiracy charges, and two years ago, Paul
"Cornfed" Schneider, a prominent AB leader at Pelican Bay, got a life
sentence for conspiracy in the 1995 murder of a sheriff's deputy.
But the cases against upper-level AB have tended to be marathon
prosecutions, often yielding meager results. Tracing the carnage behind
prison walls to its source can be a daunting task, especially when your
chief witnesses are convicts with long histories of violence themselves --
and you're asking a jury to believe that they took their orders from
someone else who belongs on death row.
"If you take the informants in our case and do a body count, then compare
it to the defendants, their body count is way higher," says Dean Steward,
Mills's attorney. "One of their witnesses has supposedly killed seven or
eight guys."
It took three trials in Kansas to convict AB stalwart Michael "Big Mac"
McElhiney of running a heroin ring in the Leavenworth federal pen. In the
1st trial, a female juror fell in love with the defendant. A guilty
verdict in a 2nd trial was reversed on appeal. The 3rd time around,
McElhiney caught 30 years on top of the 21-year sentence he was already
serving.
Last year's prosecution in Illinois of David Sahakian, alleged to be one
of the AB's federal commissioners, was an even greater debacle. Sahakian
and two other Marion inmates were charged with murder and conspiracy in
the stabbing death of a black inmate, Terry Walker. The trial lasted seven
months, cost more than $3 million just for the defense mounted by
court-appointed lawyers, and resulted in a hung jury on most of the
charges. Sahakian was convicted on a single charge of possession of a
homemade knife -- a tough charge to beat, since the shank was found
concealed in his rectum.
Interviews by defense attorneys with jurors after the trial indicated they
were hung 7-5 in favor of acquittal on the homicide charges, says Steward.
"The jurors found the informants -- Kevin Roach and a bunch of others --
to be lying weasels," he says. "They found the Bureau of Prisons personnel
who testified to be incompetent and hiding things. They found the prisoner
witnesses called by the defense to be charming and truthful. 'Charming and
truthful' -- those are their words."
The Los Angeles racketeering case gives the feds another shot at
McElhiney, Sahakian and other top AB members. But first they'll have to
overcome defense efforts to suppress the snitch testimony arising out of H
Unit, which Steward calls "hopelessly tainted." A hearing on the matter is
scheduled in June.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Jessner, who's been pursuing the case
since the late '90s, declines to comment on the H Unit operation. "That's
something that's going to be decided at the hearing," he says. "It's not
appropriate for me to say what happened before the witnesses testify. The
proof will be in the pudding."
Since Weeks first blew the lid off H Unit five years ago, several other
disgruntled informants have told their stories to the defense, accusing
the government of reneging on its promises to them. Some claim to have
been fed information or offered incentives to lie; others say they've been
threatened with being put in general population and labeled a rat if they
don't play ball. Some appear to be playing both sides. One told defense
investigators he should be considered "a double-edged sword that cuts both
ways."
Yet the snitch testimony is essential if Jessner is going to convince a
jury that Mills and Bingham, despite being locked down under the tightest
conditions the Bureau of Prisons has ever devised, continued to send and
receive messages, order murders and settle disputes across the federal
prison system. Defense-team veterans such as Terry Rearick, an
investigator who's known Mills and Bingham for decades, says the premise
has problems.
"You got a bunch of dysfunctional dope fiends, and the government's theory
is that they became this well-oiled killing machine," Rearick points outs.
"These guys are a bunch of broke-dick convicts. Mills can't tell them what
to do. I mean, they get two fifteen-minute phone calls a month at best,
all their mail gets copied and read -- and they're running the prison
system? Come on."
But if Mills and Bingham are as powerful as the indictment claims, then
what does that say about the effectiveness of supermax prisons such as
ADX?
"In order for the government to prevail at trial, the Bureau of Prisons is
going to have to concede that they were incompetent and screwed up,"
Steward says. "That's an enormous problem in the prosecution's camp right
now. They don't want to admit that they couldn't control the people they
were supposed to be controlling."
Among staff at ADX, the case presents other worries. The federal system
reinstated the death penalty in 1988, after a 25-year moratorium, but it's
never been used as widely as it could be in the AB case. News of the
indictment was met with trash talk from some AB loyalists. In many cases,
the defendants were already serving time for some of the same crimes for
which they were now facing conspiracy charges; Mills, for example, is
already doing life for the 1979 murder of inmate Mazloff. Others, like
Bingham, are up for parole in a few years. Now the government was making
noises about killing them.
The rumor mill went crazy. For every one of ours they execute, the AB
types were reportedly saying, we're going to take out 2 guards.
Principe scarcely slept during his first eight days in the hole. He'd seen
hardened cons crack up in places like this. He was a rookie and knew it.
How was he going to endure it?
He got busy. He grabbed stacks of paperbacks off the book cart. He read
Melville, Tolstoy, Hesse, Emerson, Dumas, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky,
Hemingway. He read Don Quixote, then tackled it again, this time in
Spanish.
He studied books on writing and labored over his own letters. "These
concrete cages can birth geniuses and madmen, monks and monsters, if
strong wills prevail," he wrote.
For exercise, there was just room enough in his cell to do burpees -- a
hybrid of jumping jack and push-up, popular among the military and
convicts. When he started, he could barely do fifty of them at a time.
Before long, he could do 500. When he was taken out to the yard, he was
often allowed a recreation cage next to another AB defendant who became
his workout partner. The guards who escorted him were basically doing the
same thing he was accused of doing at ADX, but no one nailed them with
conspiracy charges.
He read through piles of reports, the discovery in his case. There was
nothing anywhere to establish that he'd ever been paid to help the AB,
that he had benefited in any way from this vast conspiracy.
He meditated. He prayed.
The feds came back to see him every few months. Was he ready to cooperate?
Did he want to strike a deal in exchange for a nicer cell? The case kept
getting continued, delayed, dragged out.
"For the first year, I was focused," Principe says. "I was intact. Then it
started to change."
There are stages a person goes through when suffering sensory deprivation
-- "SHU syndrome," as it's known in special housing units. At one point,
everything the staff did seemed to annoy Principe. He began to believe
they were going out of their way to mess with him. He became angry at the
slightest provocation. The walls closed in.
The extraction teams were called. Principe took the pepper spray and
shouted defiance. He did his best to wear them out. He was turning into
one of the crazies he used to dread dealing with.
It is not a time he wants to talk about now. "You have no idea what it was
like," he says. "They break you down to the point where you're ready to
make a deal."
He would not become a snitch. He was adamant about that; besides, what did
he really know that could interest them? But the prosecutors were eager to
deal anyway. They wanted to plead out the lesser charges without exposing
too much of their hand in the death-penalty cases. After two years in the
hole, Principe was presented with a "global plea agreement," designed to
settle the charges against multiple defendants. The catch was they'd all
have to sign off on it, or no deal -- a neat way of getting the defendants
to pressure each other to get on board.
Assistant U.S Attorney Jessner was handing out good deals, Principe says.
He was a regular Monty Hall. "I wanted to go to trial," Principe insists,
"but my attorney explained to me that the jury would be listening to
Bentley and Roach, and if the jury believed them, I'd be looking at a lot
more time. I didn't know what I should do. It was one of the most grueling
decisions of my life. I wanted to clear my name, but maybe the wise thing
to do was to let it go."
In February he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit
racketeering. He got 15 months, to be served concurrent with the state
time he was already doing for the assault on Gino. The prosecution wanted
to close the hearing to reporters, but Principe insisted on it's being
open. He wanted everybody to know that his deal included no pledge of
cooperation in other cases. He wasn't a witness for the prosecution or the
defense. He was done.
He returned to Colorado to serve his time. The biggest capital case in the
nation's history lurched on without him. He concentrated on learning to
walk in regular strides again. All that time in the hole and in leg irons
had left his calf muscles atrophied, best suited for shuffling half-steps.
He was going to fix that. He was going to do his time standing up, walking
the yard like a regular convict.
"The only thing I got going for me is I held my mud through this," he
says. "This has been a humongous humble pie -- a whole pie, being
force-fed to me from day one -- to go from that side to this side.
Humility is, I guess, a good thing."
He looks around him, at the guards, the prisoners, the red line, as if
seeing it all for the 1st time.
"I'm ready for a break," he says.
(source: Westword)
*********************
Urge Congress to Oppose Overreaching and Punitive Crime Laws
The criminal justice system needs major reform. But instead of focusing on
the obvious flaws in the death penalty system and reforming sentencing
guidelines, several Members of Congress are pushing legislation that would
dramatically increase the application of the death penalty, impose overly
harsh sentences and result in innocent people going to prison.
This proposed legislation -- the Gang Deterrence and Community Protection
Act of 2005 (H.R. 1279) -- would further restrict the ability of judges to
consider the circumstances when sentencing individuals. Instead of
allowing judges the discretion to sentence offenders, this legislation
would deprive judges of the ability to impose sentences that fit the
particular offense and offender. As a result, innocent people could be
forced to accept plea bargains rather than risk a harsh minimum sentence.
The death penalty system is plagued with errors and false convictions.
More than 100 innocent people have been released from death row, some
after serving many years in prison. By expanding the death penalty to new
crimes, this proposed legislation could increase the number of innocent
individuals sentenced to death and possibly even executed.
Under the current proposal, people could be convicted and sentenced to
death for the crime of illegal "participation" in a gang based on broad
definition of a "gang," which could be as few as 3 people. The bills loose
definitions and expansion of the death penalty could increase the
probability that people are wrongly convicted and possibly even executed.
This legislation does nothing to prevent young people from joining gangs.
Criminal justice reform needs to address underlying youth violence issues,
not exacerbate existing problems.
Take Action! Let your Representative know that expanding the death penalty
and imposing new mandatory sentences is neither rational nor fair.
- The death penaltys use should not be expanded. This bill would increase
the number of federal crimes eligible for the death penalty. There are
numerous examples of people spending years -- and even decades -- on death
row only to be exonerated. The expansion of the death penalty could
increase the likelihood that innocent people will be sent to death row and
even executed.
- This legislation further erodes the sentencing discretion of judges by
imposing mandatory minimums that would result in unfair and discriminatory
prison sentences. Mandatory minimum sentences deprive judges of the
ability to impose sentences that fit the particular offense and offender.
This creates an unfair advantage for prosecutors when charging people,
thus contributing to the very problem mandatory minimums were created to
address.
- Creating a vague definition of "gangs" could increase wrongful
convictions. Under this legislation a group of people as small as three
people would be considered a "gang." Offenses that were committed 10, 15
or even 20 years apart could be used to convict people as a "gang" member.
(source: ACLU)
