Paul Perez. Greg Holder. Bobby O'Neill. And, of course, the ubiquitous Sami Al-Arian.
Picture those names as dots. Connecting them produces a scary picture of corruption and abuse in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa, aided and abetted by the two daily newspapers.
Paul Perez resigned two weeks ago as U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida. The papers were adoring in their accounts of the Bush appointee's tenure. He nailed a rather pathetic mobster from a New York crime family. He went after some easy-game drug smugglers. Perez's office convicted Tampa's former housing boss, Steve LaBrake — a louse who all but wore a neon sign around his neck proclaiming that he was a crook.
Al-Arian was mentioned in the press accounts. The Trib made it sound like Perez forced the former USF professor to confess to helping a terrorist outfit — but the paper somehow forgot the stunning rebuke a jury handed Perez when it didn't return a single guilty verdict after 10 years of federal investigations that squandered, according to law enforcement sources, more than $50 million of taxpayer money.
The Times was a bit more cagey. The St. Pete paper allowed Perez to whitewash the Al-Arian debacle by chirping: "I'm proud of the Al-Arian prosecution. I think it was important to expose (Al-Arian) for what he is in my mind, and that's a white-collar terrorist."
Perez's boasts about collaring a terrorist ring hollow. After all, one of Perez's top aides, O'Neill, has for years owned a bar that has raised money for the Irish Republican Army, similar in every relevant way to much of what Al-Arian was charged with. It's a fact the Times at least should have recalled — since it ran a lengthy story on O'Neill and his IRA connections in December 2005. That was only after Creative Loafing had been reporting for seven years about the prosecutor's associations with the terrorist group.
Public corruption is a touchy subject in the U.S. Attorney's Office — and at the Hillsborough County Courthouse. Last fall, Perez proclaimed there was no corruption in the courthouse. "Perez vanquished the cloud that has hovered over the courthouse for four years, and the public can have confidence that nothing is amiss in the halls of justice," the Trib gushed in an editorial whose gullibility must have sent Tampa's sleazy lawyers into paroxysms of laughter.
Oh, sure, a few judges were run out — the one who fancied dressing up in his secretaries' panties and the one who relaxed by breaking into his colleague's office and the chief judge who happily accepted crates of booze from the head of the local crime family.
But many honest cops and G-men know that the courthouse is still pest-ridden, and a few years ago they were happily conducting an investigation to fumigate the place.
Until Perez pulled the plug.
At the heart of the corruption story is a real victim: Judge Greg Holder. The jurist was framed in a plot that involved the U.S. Attorney's Office. And no one — not Perez and not the daily newspapers — has ever investigated it.
Holder is a straight shooter. He knew some of his colleagues on the bench were crooked, and he volunteered to aid a federal/local task force investigating judicial corruption. One top Tampa detective, James Bartoszak, said in sworn court documents that Holder's life was endangered by his courageous attempt to bring honesty to the courthouse.
The probe stalled, however, and Holder wrote the Justice Department complaining that the bosses in the U.S. Attorney's Office were undermining their own corruption probe.
Holder was in the Air Force Reserve. An academic paper he prepared in order to gain a military promotion was stolen from Holder's office. A sophisticated effort was made to make a copy of the document appear to have been plagiarized.
And then the document magically materialized in the hands of one of Perez's assistants, who claimed he didn't know the origin.
As Detective Bartoszak said in an affidavit: "It is more than an 'amazing coincidence' that the allegations against Judge Holder only surfaced after he wrote to complain about the investigation being stopped."
Because Perez slapped the lid of secrecy on his office — with no explanation to the public or to Holder — what happened is still unknown. Perez wouldn't let his employees tell the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth. He wouldn't open his office's files. And Perez "lost" some of the critical evidence that was known to exist.
The Tribune waded in with a story that asserted the only reasonable conclusion was that Holder was guilty. The story was authored by reporter Michael Fechter, who had become a mouthpiece for the U.S. Attorney's Office during the Al-Arian case and who at some point began bedding one of Perez's assistants.
The Air Force and the JQC cleared Holder of any and all wrongdoing, demolishing the smears by the Trib, Perez's office and the JQC's Holder-hating lawyer, the late Tom McDonald.
Still, the crime against Holder has never been solved, despite an abundance of clues.
So, with all of that, Perez resigns after declaring that the County Courthouse is pure. The daily newspapers and the prosecutor never raise the issues about what was going on inside the U.S. Attorney's Office. No one seems interested in who framed Judge Holder. The press isn't about to scrutinize O'Neill because so many reporters and editors belly up to the bar at the prosecutor's Four Green Fields, jostling for prime position with the many defense lawyers who represent clients in the federal courthouse and who stuff money into the prosecutor's pocket via bar patronage.
Yet Perez trumpets and the Tribune parrots that clouds of suspicion have been "vanquished." No, all that has been defeated is an honest justice system. When Judge Holder gets justice — and a full accounting from Paul Perez — then maybe Tampa can feel some confidence in its "lawmen."
In the meantime, Perez made a clean getaway.
This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 3, 2007.