DEA agent who worked in Latin America goes to trial:

[Judi Lynn]

Informant testifies against DEA agent
By THOMAS J. SHEERAN • Associated Press • January 9, 2010

CLEVELAND -- A rogue informant testified Friday that he framed people on drug charges in undercover buys supervised by a federal agent charged with helping the informant.

Jerrell Bray, 38, who has served time in prison for manslaughter and perjury, was the government's lead witness at the trial of Lee Lucas, 41, a 19-year veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Lucas, who was Bray's handler in a 2005 cocaine sting in Mansfield, took notes and occasionally whispered to his defense attorney as Bray described a series of frame-ups in which he typically asked a friend to pose as someone setting up a buy.

Bray framed 17 people by deliberately misidentifying them or staging scripted phone calls to make them appear to be drug dealers, prosecutors said.

More:
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20100109/NEWS01/1090319

~~~~~
U.S. probe puts Cleveland DEA agent's work under scrutiny
Career has been marred by several investigations

http://media.cleveland.com.nyud.net:8090/metro/photo/lee-lucas-dea-052309jpg-ad41df0b2daeb1fb_medium.jpg

Lee Lucas
Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer, File

Sunday, July 29, 2007
Mike Tobin, Amanda Garrett and John Caniglia Plain Dealer Reporters

In 1992 -- just six years after graduating from St. Edward High School -- Lee Lucas tailed two dirty cops through the sand and glamour of Miami's drug underworld.

Thanks in large part to his efforts, the cops, two cocaine kingpins and more than a dozen others were ultimately convicted of dealing bundles of Colombian powder out of a neighborhood bar near the Orange Bowl.

It was an exceptional beginning to Lucas' career as an agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency charged with enforcing federal drug laws.

But he soon ran into trouble: A federal appeals court said Lucas acted either "deliberately or recklessly" in misleading a judge about the track records of the informants he used in the case.

The convictions stood, as there was enough other evidence to support them. But Lucas' misrepresentations foreshadowed a DEA career that has been marred by at least a half-dozen investigations of unethical or unlawful behavior.

He was cleared of any wrongdoing, and Lucas moved from the air-conditioned DEA offices of Miami to the jungles of Bolivia and, ultimately, back home to work in Cleveland. Through it all, Lucas made one major case after another for prosecutors, targeting everyone from small-town thugs to international playboys.

Now, however, a U.S. Justice Department investigation threatens not only to ruin Lucas' career, but also to unravel dozens of drug cases here and overturn scores of convictions.

Geoffrey Mearns, dean of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University and a former federal prosecutor, said last week that Lucas' cases are likely to be examined for truthfulness.

More difficult, however, is limiting fallout. Federal prosecutors regularly ask jurors to rely on the truthfulness of federal agents, he said.

More:
http://truthinjustice.org/lee-lucas1.htm

[Peace Patriot]

1. "...to the jungles of Bolivia..." Hm. I wonder if he was there when the DEA was colluding with

the white separatist rioters and murderers, who wanted to split off Bolivia's eastern provinces into a fascist mini-state in control of Bolivia's gas and oil riches. President Evo Morales through the U.S. ambassador AND the DEA out of the country for their collusion. (September 2008)

--

"He was cleared of any wrongdoing, and Lucas moved from the air-conditioned DEA offices of Miami to the jungles of Bolivia and, ultimately, back home to work in Cleveland. Through it all, Lucas made one major case after another for prosecutors, targeting everyone from small-town thugs to international playboys." (my emphasis)

--

Something else stirs in my mind reading about this case.

"Bray framed 17 people by deliberately misidentifying them or staging scripted phone calls to make them appear to be drug dealers, prosecutors said." (my emphases)

I am reminded of the CIA "suitcase full of money" caper out of Miami--aimed at slandering/toppling the leftist presidents of Argentina and Venezuela. The patsies who were used as part of that 'spy thriller' were likely framed by "scripted phone calls" as "agents of a foreign government" (Venezuela) and then charged with "failing to register with the Attorney General" (Alberto "torture memo" Gonzales). A character named "Guido" was caught by customs at the airport in Buenos Aires with a suitcase packed with $700,000 U.S. smackeroos. He had wormed his way aboard a private jet chartered by Venezuela's oil company. He somehow evaded arrest and flew back to Miami (where he keeps two Jaguars in the driveway at his upscale condo) and turned up as a "witness" for a cockamamie DOJ case to convict several patsy businessmen of failing to register with Alberto Gonzales. (The DOJ claimed that these businessmen tried to pressure Guido to shut up about the Chavez connection.) The Miami Hairball featured this case in headlines for months. The hook was that Hugo Chavez had sent the money (via the Miami mafia??) to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, now president of Argentina (she won easily without Guido's help). As Venezuela's VP said, if they had wanted to take money to Cristina Fernandez, they would have taken it on Chavez's plane, with full diplomatic immunity, two days later when Chavez visited Argentina. And that really is the question: Why would they put a suitcase packed with obvious bricks of money on a private plane, with a character like "Guido," who has to go through customs? It makes no sense at all.

That is because the whole thing was designed at the Bushwhack-purged CIA (who really did a lot of harm to the CIA--they used to be more skilled). Anyhow, "scripted phone calls." Hm. And this guy was in Miami, too.

-----------------------

You know, I think one of the hidden tragedies of the Bush Junta was the damage it did to people like this DEA agent--people who may have started off honest and true, brave people willing to take on big drug lords and vicious murderers, skilled professionals, believers in the rule of law, essentially good and loyal and ethical people and a credit to any society, who got turned into slimebags by all the slime around them in the Bushwhack government--and worse, got turned into torturers and murderers and war profiteer operatives and mercenaries, because that's who was running things at the top.

I don't know this man's story--so I don't know if this fits him. And I don't know if he's guilty. But I do know that a lot of other people got caught up in crimes that they never would have thought of committing, but for the culture of crime--the lawlessness, the viciousness, the contempt for human dignity, the massive theft--that ruled the White House, the Pentagon, the DOJ and all of Washington DC for eight years. I greatly admire those who resisted--at risk of their careers and probably their lives. And I feel pity for some--for instance, the lower level grubs at Abu Ghraib, who took the hit for torture when in truth they were following orders from the top. It takes extraordinary moral courage to resist such a culture when you can be jailed and even executed for not following orders.

I think of how that fetid Bushwhack culture must have stunk up every agency in the country and every level of the federal government. The agencies and operations of the "war on drugs." The Department of Justice. Every level of every arm of the U.S. military. Our federal prison system. The National Guard. FEMA. The CIA. The NSA. 'Homeland Security.' The USAID. The EPA. NASA. Everything, stinking of crime and toadyism and cowardice, with a few "bright light" exceptions. People who had been honest all their lives, and had provided good government service, must have begun to wonder why. Why continue to be honest when the government stank to high heaven at the highest levels?

One other thought: I hope that Mr. Lucas is not a scapegoat.