HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/rising.tide

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 6KB | 100 lines

Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
From: [e-mail] (Sol Lightman)
Subject: RISING TIDE OF DRUG WAR ABUSES
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1993 20:31:32 GMT


   02/07       For Ex-Defendant, The Nightmare Continues

BY COURTLAND MILLOY

  Harry Davis had been in bed that morning a year ago when he heard a knock on
his apartment door in Fort Washington. He got up, put on his pants and opened
the door. Fifteen police officers, carrying assault weapons and dressed in black
garb that looked like some kind of ninja outfits, stormed in, knocked Davis to
the floor and held him there with a shotgun to his head.
  "They run through the house and pull my girlfriend out of bed with no clothes
on, and then they spread her legs out like she was hiding something up in her,"
Davis said. "I'm wearing pants and no shirt and she's naked, and they open the
windows. It's winter. We're freezing. Then they proceed to destroy the place."
  Davis was arrested in a crackdown on the "P Street Crew," an alleged cocaine
distribution ring operating in Northwest Washington. Last week, U.S. District
Court Judge Stanley Sporkin dismissed the case against him.
  "The evidence did not have him in any actual drug transaction," said Justin
Williams, an assistant U.S.  attorney in charge of the case. "All I can say is
that there is nothing further pending against him."
  Except harsh recollections of the United States mocking its constitutional
ideals.
  During the raid on Davis's apartment, police tore out the walls and crushed
family photographs in their frames. They confiscated his automobile and seized
his car-leasing business.
  When the charges were dropped, Davis asked for his car and was told that it
had been forfeited back to the bank because he had not kept up his monthly
payments.
  He was told that his business papers would be returned, if government clerks
could find them. But he would not be compensated for the damage to his apartment
and personal belongings.
  Police had charged that Davis, 49, used his business to launder $100 million
in drug money. Inside his apartment, they found $8,000 in deposits from
customers who had leased cars from him. There were no drugs, no guns or any
evidence of the dirty millions that he was supposed to have washed.
  Nevertheless, then-Attorney General William Barr held a spectacular news
conference at the Justice Department and announced that 450 law enforcement
officials from as far away as  New York had smashed the notorious P Street Crew.
Davis was implicated as the mastermind and portrayed on television every night
for nearly a week as yet another so-called black coke kingpin in handcuffs.
  The law does not always respond this way. In 1989, Anne Arundel County police
seized seven pounds of cocaine, more than 60 pounds of marijuana, five pounds of
hashish, $70,000 in cash and numerous weapons from the home of two National
Security Agency psychologists. They did not destroy the house, nor confiscate
property.
  In fact, police were careful to allege that the drug operation was run by the
couple's 21- year-old son. The parents were not charged.
  To add insult to Davis's injury, police then transported him and the other 17
P Street defendants across state lines to have their cases tried in Virginia,
where juries are whiter and reputedly harsher on black defendants. U.S. District
Court Judge Albert V. Bryan saw their arrival for what it was, a charade, and he
ordered the defendants returned to D.C.
  Before his arrest, Davis had worked part time as an amateur boxing referee
and trainer at a gym in suburban Maryland. There he met some of the youths who
also were arrested and later plea bargained for three-year sentences in the P
Street case.
  Davis said he had tried to help one of the youths "get his act together" by
giving him a job as an office cleaner and messenger in his car-leasing company.
According to Davis's attorney, the relationship was distorted by an informer
who was bargaining with police in a desperate bid to keep himself out of
prison.
  After being released on bond, Davis found work as a car salesman.
  "A customer recognized me as `that man from the P Street Crew,' " Davis
recalled. "My employer checked my record and found this `felony arrest.' "
  He was fired.
  During court proceedings dismissing the drug charges last week, prosecutors
reserved the right to refile charges against Davis.
  "I'm still a suspect?" Davis asked.
  "It's not a word we would be using," Williams said later.
  Judge Sporkin had said that refiling charges against Davis would be "unwise."
  But the request by prosecutors had the effect of leaving Davis's innocence in
question. That the government had acted immorally, however, was beyond the
shadow of a doubt.
  "What about my reputation? I have done nothing wrong," Davis said in court.
"You break into my home, humiliate my friend, destroy my business and after
investigating me for a year, just drop the charges. What can you say to me?"
  "You're free," the judge told him. "Next case."



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