In Washington last Friday, Janet Reno's star prosecutors from the early 1990s finally got their own day in court. Since a Congressional report was published in March, Richard Gregorie, Michael Band and Mary Cagle have been implicated in the mistreatment of Dade County Commissioner Joe Gersten in 1992. At the time they were senior prosecutors at the Dade State Attorney's Office, then run by Reno. The office was investigating Gersten over sex-and-drugs allegations — allegations that destroyed his career, and that he says were fabricated.

On Friday the three were summoned to Washington (two of them by subpoena) to a hearing of the House Committee on Government Reform.

The performances were robust, with Richard Gregorie — the man who indicted Gen. Manuel Noriega and is now a senior federal prosecutor — leading the charge. The force of Gregorie's personality impressed many at the hearing, including its acting chairman, Congressman Chris Shays, R-Conn.

There was much apparent conviction in Gregorie's belief that Gersten was indeed guilty and that the prosecutors had done their job fairly. Many left the hearing believing it was a political hatchet job designed to damage Reno, who has announced she may be running for Florida governor.

Gregorie and company cited a blizzard of facts and legal precedents in support of their actions. Congressman Shays, who stood in for Chairman Dan Burton when the latter was detained with a family illness, had insufficient knowledge of the case — which is enormously complex — to counter the onslaught.

Gregorie, Band and Cagle left the hearing clapping each other on the back and laughing. The day was a spin victory for the prosecutors and for Janet Reno — the Florida Democratic icon whose specter hovered over the proceedings through the entire day.

And spin is what this case is about. The Miami Herald, a longtime enemy of Gersten and his family, has provided its readers with almost no details of the ex-commissioner's case, or of many truly sensational factual findings of congressional investigators. Even Miami's alternative newspaper, New Times, has relied heavily on Gregorie's spin for its coverage — even dropping the obligatory word "alleged" in describing crimes for which Gersten was never convicted or even charged.

Only among newspapers in Australia, where Gersten now lives, and in reporting by a Miami TV station, WSVN, and the Weekly Planet, have facts highly critical of Reno and her aides been examined.

Through the 1990s, the State Attorney's Office claimed that, on April 29, 1992, the flamboyant Dade County Commissioner had been caught in a crack den with prostitutes. Gersten has long denied the accusation.

Janet Reno's witnesses at the time claimed Gersten was with them that fateful night, smoking crack in an orgy, after which they took his car. But Gersten was well known to be drug-phobic. And the witnesses were, after all, hookers and crack addicts beholden to the SAO for other crimes.

Last August, Reno's old State Attorney's Office finally opened the files on the 9-year-old case. They brought to light the astonishing fact that prostitute Lisa McCann, the state's key "crack den" witness, had indeed arranged to have Gersten framed — for murder.

A Miami Police report by Detective Michael Osborn details how a 15-year-old boy, Wayne Pearce, had been sent down to Miami Homicide by McCann.

At McCann's direction, Pearce stated he had seen a bald, heavyset man driving a light blue Mercedes (a description that matched Gersten) shoot a transvestite known as "Champagne." Champagne had been found dying from gunshot wounds in an alley three days earlier.

But Pearce misidentified the murder location. Other facts didn't check out.

Had Osborn not broken his witness down, the frame-up might have succeeded. But Pearce confessed in a deposition that he "was told by Lisa to come to the police and tell this story because she was going to be paid some money by the FBI" — money she would share with him.

Pearce duly confessed that he "has never seen anyone known as Joseph Gersten."

To say the least, Osborn's murder report undermined the credibility of Lisa McCann, Janet Reno's key "crack den" witness. Or it would have — had Reno not ensured that it never saw the light of day.

Now a probable candidate for Florida governor, Reno claims not to recall the murder frame-up involving her long-term enemy, and one of Dade's highest-profile politicians. At the least, this stretches credulity. According to a 1993 FBI document, Reno involved herself in fine details of Gersten's case even after she went to Washington as U.S. Attorney General.

Last month, the Planet exclusively obtained Wayne Pearce's original sworn statement about his Gersten murder frame-up.

The Pearce confession not only blows the state attorney's "sex-drugs" case against Gersten out of the water, it confirms, for the first time, that the murder frame-up began at government level.

The Planet passed the Pearce document on to the House Committee on Government Reform in Washington. James C. Wilson, chief counsel for the Committee — which is investigating Gersten's mistreatment in 1992 — describes the Planet's find as "the law enforcement document of a lifetime."

The Dade State Attorney's Office has apparently destroyed its copy of the document. Despite public records requests, the office has refused to provide copies of the file on the "Champagne" case — some of which disappeared after being spotted in the files and copied by an attorney. An office spokesman has refused to comment.

To begin with, Pearce in his statement says he had already told "the other man … I have nothing to do with this" — that is, witnessing the murder. Osborn now confirms that "the other man" was the cop who brought Pearce in, Patrolman J.L. Garcia. (Garcia has since died.)

Garcia was, bizarrely enough, bringing in a "murder witness" who was telling him that he was not a murder witness.

Not only that, but Osborn says Garcia bugged him for days thereafter, asking if he'd "charged Gersten with murder yet."

So who was Patrolman Garcia?

Garcia was, at this time, assigned to Reno's State Attorney's Office. Garcia was also the sometime aide to Miami City Commissioner J.L. Plummer, campaign adviser to the then Dade mayor, Steve Clark. Gersten had announced, just three weeks before, that he would run against Clark in the coming mayoral election. He was widely expected to win.

The Pearce statement was much cited in the House Committee's public hearing in Washington last Friday.

As the Committee heard, the statement's most ominous revelation comes on page 12.

Osborn: "As far as you know, that guy (Gersten) has nothing to do with Champagne?"

Pearce: "No … FBI man going to pay her $400 to call the man. Then the FBI trying to set up the man for something he didn't do and all she want to do was get the money. … The whole thing is lie that man didn't do nothing."

Who, then, was the FBI man?

Detective Osborn first learned of Pearce's allegation against Gersten at 6:55 p.m. on May 1, 1992. In a remarkable corroboration of Pearce's claim, at 6:54 p.m., FBI Special Agent Michael Bonner was with Lisa McCann, facilitating (and recording) a phone call from McCann to Gersten. The purpose was to make Gersten incriminate himself.

Detective Osborn told Mary Cagle — who oversaw the state attorney's sex-drugs investigation — about the murder frame-up. Asked how long it would have taken for news of it to be conveyed to Janet Reno, Osborn says: "About 30 seconds. Gersten was a county commissioner. There's no way that after I talked to Cagle, Reno wasn't told immediately."

Osborn later hand-delivered his murder report to Cagle. "She asked me not to tell Gersten's lawyers about it," he says.

This raises the stakes quite a bit in the Gersten affair. And it makes it more understandable why crucial files have gone missing.

All evidence of the murder frame-up was closed by the state attorney for five years, till the statute of limitations ran out — then, illegally, for another three years after that.

Osborn says it would have been routine for the Pearce statement to have been delivered to the state attorney. Yet when the files were finally opened last year, under pressure from WSVN, the statement was not among them.

Osborn's murder report was briefly there in August. By the time Congress obtained the SAO's files soon after, it had disappeared.

Pearce's confession also undermines Reno's chief objection to the present congressional investigation.

"We never charged him," Reno has consistently said. So what can Gersten object to?

But by not charging Gersten — and instead stringing out the allegations for a year with well-planned media leaks — Reno destroyed Gersten's career, family, impending marriage, assets and reputation.

But the Pearce statement now makes it clear that Reno could not afford to charge Gersten anyway. To do so would have forced her to destroy files (a serious crime) or furnish Gersten's lawyers with all the evidence in her possession.

John Macgregor is a correspondent based in Australia. He has reported more on the Joseph Gersten than any other reporter in that country. He can be reached at johnmac@turboweb.net.au. Editor John Sugg contributed to this report. He can be reached a 813-248-8888 or johnsugg@weeklyplanet.com. The Planet's previous reports on Reno and Gersten can be found at www.weeklyplanet.com/reno/

This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2001.