For a pile of years, my pal, the award-winning Brit investigative journalist, Andrew Gumbel, has been digging deep into the plot behind the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and all that went wrong with the FBI investigation of that ghastly day. His co-author, Roger G. Charles, has been researching the issue—and the untold story— for even longer. So the two wisely joined talents and forces to produce an exhaustively researched, wonderfully written, and genuinely riveting book on what we weren’t told about the issue and why we should care: Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed–and Why It Still Matters

The jiggly iPhone video above was taken at a book launch party for Andrew on Sunday late afternoon in Santa Monica. When the video begins, he was just launching into the explanation that, in the 1990’s, the extreme right fringe began forming into leaderless cells. Then he outlined for us the tale of how the FBI investigation into the bombing—before and after the bombing occurred— went so dreadfully awry.

In the video below, Actor Todd Waring reads an excerpt from the book.

(NOTE: that unfortunate ringing phone is not mine.)

Here’s a clip from what Michael Isikoff had to say about the new book in the Daily Beast.

The story of the Murrah building bombing receives its most comprehensive accounting yet in Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed-and Why it Still Matters—a new book by journalists Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles. It is a cautionary and at times startling tale, filled with bizarre characters from the outer fringes of American political life, with continuing relevance today. The feds certainly had legitimate reason to be worried about Islamic extremists in the mid-1990’s. But there was an equally menacing threat that was being largely ignored by federal law enforcement, a resurgent movement of loosely connected extremist hate groups, Christian Identity fanatics, and gun-toting militia members, all convinced that American liberty was in grave peril.

As Gumbel and Charles amply document, U.S. law enforcement had plenty of warning signals that these groups were planning violent attacks—and even that the Murrah Building itself might well be one of the targets. One of the movement’s most charismatic leaders, a white supremacist Arkansas death-row inmate named Richard Wayne Snell, had plotted to blow up the Murrah building years earlier. Snell, a convicted double murderer fond of quoting Rudolf Hess, had warned prison guards there would be “hell to pay” on April 19, his execution date. One of Snell’s most devoted acolytes, Louis Beam, also talked about “something big” that would take place that day—which was also the anniversary of the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. This law-enforcement debacle had become a rallying cry for the far right, but for reasons ranging from bureaucratic rivalries to political timidity, few in Washington were paying any attention.

Now go and it!

NOTE: JAIL COMMISSION STORY COMING TOMORROW I’ll be running it in three parts. Part 1 will be published Tuesday morning.

AND IN OTHER NEWS….MORE THAN 2000 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WRONGLY CONVICTED SINCE 1989, ACCORDING TO NEW DATABASE

David Savage of the LA Times has the story. Here’s a clip:

More than 2,000 people have been freed from prison since 1989 after they were found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes, according to a new National Registry of Exonerations compiled by University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University.

Its sponsors say it is by far the largest database of such cases, and they hope it will help reveal why the criminal justice system sometimes misfires, prosecuting and convicting the innocent.

“The more we learn about false convictions, the better we’ll be at preventing them,” said Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor.

The registry covers the period since DNA came into common use and revealed, to the surprise of many prosecutors and judges, that a significant number of convicted rapists and murderers were innocent. The Innocence Project in New York says DNA alone has freed 289 prisoners since 1989.

Criminal law experts have been studying the growing number of exonerations. Some cases have involved police corruption or witnesses who recanted. Experts have also pointed to faulty eyewitness testimony and lying witnesses as common problems.

On a warm Saturday night in mid-September 2007, a 22-year-old gang member named Giovanni Macedo waded into a crowd near MacArthur Park and—as he had been told to do—opened fire on a street vender who had failed to pay the gang of which Macado was a member $50. Specifically, Macedo claims membership in the Columbia Lil’ Cycos (CLCS), a clique of the 18th Street gang, was reportedly ordered to shoot the vender by members of his clique who were more senior than he was.

Although he did what he was told, he wasn’t a great shot. He hit the vender four times, but the wounds fortunately were not fatal.

Yet another of Macedo’s bullets went way wide of the mark with truly tragic results. A woman, a friend of the vender, was standing nearby with her 23-day-old baby, Luis Angel Garcia, who was in his stroller. One of Macedo’s errant bullets hit the tiny boy and killed him.

The shooting, as mentioned above, was over money. Extortion, to be specific.

There is a longstanding pattern in which the EME—the Mexican Mafia—requires “taxes” to be paid by anyone, namely gangs, who sells narcotics in areas of town it considers to be under its jurisdiction. Traditionally, they collect the taxes from the Latino gangs over which they excert power.

In the past few years, however, the EME has extended it’s taxing strategy to various kinds of people who are not gang involved and not selling drugs. In an around MacArthur Park that evidently meant the street venders who sold various wares in the area—clothing, knickknacks, food, that sort of thing. The street gangs were the collectors of the money and the deliverers of threats, to persuade the venders to pay up. Extortion, in other words.

The greater portion of the extortion money, which piled up into considerable amounts each month, reportedly went up the food chain to EME hire ups.

This particular vender didn’t like being extorted and said no to the demand for $50. After several go-rounds, the gang members decided the vender had to be “dealt with.” The order went out from those at the top of the clique to shoot the vender. The rest of the tragedy unfolded from there.

As it happens, the EME is not at all in favor of shooting uninvolved 23-day-old babies. In fact the Big Brothers, so to speak, were very unhappy about the matter, and held all the Columbia Lil’ Cycos responsible.

To fix matters, the CLCSs were told to kill their shooter, Giovanni Macedo. Otherwise there would be “consequences” of a dire nature for the gang as a whole.

A kidnapping plot was concocted to kidnap Macedo and to take him to Mexico on the pretense of getting him out of town for his own good, to avoid arrest. Instead, once in Mexico Macedo was strangled. A rope was looped around his neck, and then he was tossed by his former friends off the side of a raised road in an isolated area.

Unbeknownst to the kidnapper/stranglers, Macedo did not, however, die. Instead, he lived to be brought back to the US to testify in great detail for the Feds. (In return for his cooperation, he was sentenced in a plea deal to 51 years and four months prison for the killing of baby Luis.)

The result of Macedo’s testimony plus that of a list of others was that, on this past Friday afternoon, four additional members of the CLCS clique were found guilty of a pile of RICO charges, namely participating in a racketeering enterprise responsible for the September 2007 shooting of the street vendor and the murder of baby Luis—and the attempted hanging of their fellow homeboy Macedo too.

With Friday’s guilty verdicts, a total of 37 people have been convicted in the same RICO case investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the LAPD.

The four defendants found guilty on Friday, one of them the main Mexico kidnapper, are scheduled to be sentenced by United States District Judge Dean D. Pregerson in September.

Those involved with the case at the US Attorney’s office seemed particularly satisfied with Friday’s verdict.

US Attorney Andre Birotte Jr stated for WitnessLA, “To me this case represents the advantages of a focused, selective strategy that targets the very worst offenders for prosecution. The results here will resonate loudly among the gang and also the neighborhood where the gang operates. The message that this case sends is that no one— not even a gang leader or shot-caller—is either above or outside the law. And that is a message that we are proud to send.”

Photo by Brian Van der Brug, Los Angeles Times

A song for May Day, 2012, “Jack of All Trades”

THE FBI HEROICALLY STINGS, THEN LOCKS UP INEPT AND RIDICULOUS ANARCHISTS ON MAY DAY

This is from Alex Pareen at Salon. It will make you very sad for the FBI, very sad for the idiotic anarchists, very, VERY sad for the rest of us who are paying our hard earned tax dollars to fund this nonsense. A clip:

Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park….

To give you an idea of the…um.. ept-ness of the group: among their discussed strategies to avoid capture was to get tacks to throw in the road behind them in the event of a chase.

The LA Times also reports on the arrest, albeit in a more serious tone.

PEW CENTER FINDS WARM & TRUSTING FEELINGS ABOUT SCOTUS REACH A QUARTER CENTURY LOW

Yeah, now that’s a shocker. (cough) Bush v. Gore, Citizens United (cough, cough).

Actually, the interesting part is that the grim view of the Supremes is shared almost identically by Democrats, Republicans and independents. Moreover the survey was taken right after the health care hearings in the high court. So where ever you fell ideologically on the matter, it seems you were mighty disgruntled. Or at least half of those surveyed were.

Check out the rest here.

ADULT ED: SHOULD LAUSD REALLY TURN ITS BACK ON A QUARTER MILLION STUDENTS?

Former Adult Ed teacher John McCormick challenges the wisdom of eviscerating adult education in Los Angeles in an LA Times Op Ed. Here’s a clip from the center of the essay:

….The repercussions of cutting or losing adult education would extend far beyond the staffs and students at the schools. Many local businesses, such as pharmacies, hire students who have been certified by adult school skill centers. High school dropouts return to adult school to get their diplomas. Eliminating adult schools would diminish the workforce. And people who make less money pay less in taxes, they spend less, and they often have to depend more on government to meet their basic needs.

Closing adult schools would also result in collateral damage to K-12 children. My students often attended the same schools at night that their children attended during the day. Because kids usually pick up English faster than their parents, if the parents don’t learn the language, they become marginalized in their own families. They cannot communicate with teachers, help with homework or even understand what their kids are saying. So instead of being able to help their kids assimilate, parents are more likely to remain isolated.

THE OTHER BIG SUPREME COURT CASE: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin writes about another potentially far reaching US Supreme Court case that we should all be tracking. As usual everything rests on Justice Kennedy. Here’ a clip from Toobin’s story:

As the legal and political worlds await the Supreme Court’s verdict on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the Justices have another case in the near future which may prove nearly as significant. The health-care case will be decided by June, but next fall the Court will return, perhaps for the last time, to the fraught subject of affirmative action in university admissions.

The facts of the new case are straightforward. Abigail Fisher, a white high-school student in Sugar Land, Texas, was rejected for admission to the University of Texas-Austin. The state requires all students in the top ten per cent of their high-school classes to be admitted to state universities, but students who fall just short of that threshold, like Fisher, are admitted according to a formula; race is one factor in the equation. Fisher’s lawsuit is based on a claim that any consideration of race by a university in admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case amounts to a direct challenge to the most famous decision authored by Sandra Day O’Connor during her long and consequential service on the Court. In 2003, the Court held, by a vote of five to four, that the University of Michigan Law School could consider race as one factor among many in determining whom to admit. In Grutter v. Bollinger, O’Connor said that diversity was such an important goal in American life that universities could engage in some level of race-consciousness in screening candidates. But O’Connor’s opinion imposed a time limit:

We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

Now, less than a decade after her ruling, the Court appears poised to throw it out….

“SAVING OUR SONS: A COMMUNITY CONVERSATION” WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT LA TRADE TECH

This is from the press release on the event, which is sponsored by a bunch of good folks:

California Community Foundation invites parents, educators, employers, community, civic and religious leaders, and all concerned members of the public to participate in a historic town hall on the need to change and improve conditions for Black male youth in Los Angeles that are adversely affecting their futures.

Twenty years after the civil unrest in Los Angeles, Black male youth have significant challenges related to their educational and employment prospects. Additionally, while Black male youth make up 10 percent of L.A. County’s youth population, they comprise approximately 33 percent of all youth under probation supervision.

The event on May 2 is supported by Brotherhood Crusade, Community Coalition, Liberty Hill Foundation, Los Angeles Urban league, Youth Justice Coalition, Youth Mentoring Connection, and the Office of the Mayor, City of Los Angeles, and will feature a personal appearance by actor and activist Larenz Tate (TV’s “Rescue Me”, and films such as, “Ray”, “Love Jones”, “Crash”, and “Menace II Society”).

The event will take place on Wednesday, May 2, at 6 p.m., in the North Tent at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College, 1937 Grand Ave., Los Angeles 90015

Photo by David Maxwell, European Pressphoto Agency / May 1, 2012

LYRICS FOR “A JACK OF ALL TRADES”

…after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

it slipped my mind that today was Cesar Chavez Day. So since many are taking the day off (and, yes, many of us aren’t), the promised Part 2 of Aero Bureau will appear Monday, not today.

In the meantime, watch the hour-long PBS video on the Farm Worker’s Movement at the end of the post ( It reminded me about, among other things, all those years that no one I knew would have dreamed of eating table grapes. Even after the strike was over, it took a long time to learn to like them again. I imagine I was far from alone in that somewhat irrational post-strike reaction.)

POLICE UNION VERY UNHAPPY THAT SOME DEPARTMENT INSIDER LEAKED TO THE LA TIMES THE NAME OF THE OFFICER INVESTIGATED FOR RACIAL PROFILING

New LAPPL prez Tyler Izen wrote LAPD Inspector General Alexander Bustamante a strongly worded letter asking for an investigation into the matter.

“…the unlawful disclosure of the confidential information regarding any officer by unscrupulous self-serving individuals has reached a level of indecency so great that we will not stand by and remain silent,” he wrote.

(The full text is here.)

And, to remind you what we’re talking about, here’s an opening clip from Joel Rubin’s LA Times article.

A white police officer has been targeting Latino drivers for traffic stops because of their ethnicity, a Los Angeles Police Department investigation concluded — marking the first time the department has found that one of its officers had engaged in racial or ethnic profiling.

For decades, the question of profiling — “biased policing,” in LAPD vernacular — has bedeviled the department. Accusations that the practice was commonplace throughout the 1970s and ’80s alienated the LAPD from the city’s minority neighborhoods. And, despite dramatic reforms that have boosted the department’s image in recent years, complaints of profiling have persisted, with hundreds of officers being accused of bias each year. Until now, none of those complaints has been substantiated.

.

Of course, at least the LAPD’s probable Peace Officer Bill of Rights violator wasn’t a department captain who, in a fit of pique, blurted the existence of an IAB investigation against an LASD sergeant formerly under the captain’s command, all this in front of a very full and public board of supervisors meeting. Making matters worse, the captain failed to include in his blurt (that had a wild-eyed county attorney looking to be on the verge physically tackling him) the information that the charge had already been resolved in the sergeant’s favor—but instead inaccurately implied the exact opposite.

FBI SAYS IT DIDN’T REALLY MEAN THAT “SUSPEND THE LAW” THINGY IT HAD IN ITS COUNTER-TERRORISM BOOKLET

Wired Magazine’s Danger Room section has the not-terribly-cheering story. Here’s a clip:

The FBI once taught its agents that they can “bend or suspend the law” as they wiretap suspects. But the bureau says it didn’t really mean it, and has now removed the document from its counterterrorism training curriculum, calling it an “imprecise” instruction. Which is a good thing, national security attorneys say, because the FBI’s contention that it can twist the law in pursuit of suspected terrorists is just wrong.

“Dismissing this statement as ‘imprecise’ is a rather unsatisfying response given the very precise lines Congress and the courts have repeatedly drawn between what is and is not permissible, even in counterterrorism cases, over the past decade,” Steve Vladeck, a national-security law professor at American University, says. “It might technically be true that the FBI has certain authorities when conducting counterterrorism investigations that the Constitution otherwise forbids, but that’s good only so far as it goes.”

The reference to law-bending was noted in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller from Sen. Richard Durbin that Danger Room obtained. When Danger Room asked for the original document, the FBI initially declined. On Wednesday, a Bureau spokesperson relented, but refused to say who prepared the document; how long it was in circulation; and how many FBI agents, analysts and officials received its instruction….

IN NEW YORK CITY A CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT BOARD GETS THE POWER TO PROSECUTE NYPD OFFICERS FOR MISCONDUCT

“Lawyers for the independent agency that investigates allegations of police abuse in New York have been given wide new powers to prosecute officers in misconduct cases under an agreement city officials reached on Tuesday,” writes Al Baker for the NY Times.

This is something that could be very useful to consider in LA. It involves both civilians and police officers.

REMEMBERING THE FIERCE AND GIFTED ADRIENNE RICH, AND THE FABULOUS EARL SCRUGGS

The New York Daily News has an unusually good send off for the enormously influential feminist poet, Adrienne Rich, who died this week.

And in this video from the PBS Newshour Judy Woodruff and Jeffrey Brown help us say goodbye to both Rich and Earl Scruggs, who also died this week.

“He made you stop in your tracks,” said Bela Fleck of the brilliant and beloved banjo innovator Scruggs.

Yep. That he did.

And here he is doing it again— with those he inspired.

And now back to Cesar Chavez.

A former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy was charged today, Friday, with agreeing to accept $20,000 in bribes in exchange for smuggling contraband to an inmate inside the troubled Men’s Central Jail, the facility that has been ground zero for the inmate-abuse-by-deputies scandal.

The case against Gilbert Michel, 38, was announced by United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. and Thomas E. Perez, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

Michel was of course the guy whose arrest for smuggling in a cell phone at the behest of the FBI’s confidential informant got Sheriff Baca all in a lather. (Baca has since backed off and stopped blaming the people who caught the lawbreaking, bribe-taking deputy—rather than the deputy himself.)

In a plea agreement also filed Friday, Michel agreed to plead guilty to the charge and to cooperate in an ongoing investigation.

Michel, who resigned from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in September 2011, was assigned to the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

In the plea agreement, Michel admits that he agreed to accept $20,000 in cash in exchange for smuggling contraband into the jail for delivery to an inmate. The contraband included a cell phone, cigarettes and a note – which in jail parlance is called a “kite.”

The inmate, as it turned out, was a confidential informant for the Feds.

Moreover, according to the plea agreement, the dollars for contraband deal wasn’t a one shot. Michel. it seems agreed keep charging the phone for the inmate, holding the phone for safe keeping when he (Michel) went off shift, then returning the phone to the inmate/informant when the deputy came back on—each time for a hefty payment, which the informant/inmate made clear was from money obtained by illegal means.

The bribery charge carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison.

The case against Michel is part of an ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI, thus the plea deal in return for cooperation is considered significant by LASD watchers.

On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made the surprising decision to remove controversial Judge Manual Real from the federal RICO case that involves Alex Sanchez.

This news shocked nearly everyone who is closely tracking the Sanchez matter. Yanking a federal judge from a case is anything but business as usual.

As most longtime WitnessLA readers know, Alex Sanchez is the Salvadoran-born, former MS-13 gang member turned highly respected gang violence reduction activist who has been accused of a long list of Federal racketeering and conspiracy charges. According to the government’s case, the supposedly reformed Sanchez never reformed at all, but remained, in reality, a MS-13 shot caller who ordered at least one murder.

(For the rest of the backstory click here and then scroll down a bunch and read from the bottom up.)

The judge assigned to his case, U.S. District Court Judge Manual Real, was appointed to the federal bench in 1966 by Lyndon Johnson.

At nearly 88 (his birthday is Jan. 27), Real is what we used to call a character. He has spent 45 years on the same bench and, in his court room, he projects an image that combines the demeanor of an irascible uncle who mutters loudly and tyrannically over his soup at Thanksgiving dinner, with that of a glowering bird of prey.

Yet, unlike your irascible uncle, Real wields enormous power over the lives of those who come before him. According to his critics, who are many and varied, he is a bully on the bench who often makes up his mind on a case before it goes to trial and then may visibly telegraphs his opinion to all in the courtroom. He once threatened to throw then California Attorney General Dan Lungren into jail for contempt and used to be known for telling lawyers “This isn’t Burger King. We don’t do it your way here.”

Real’s reversal rate is estimated to be 10 times the average for sitting federal judges.

He has had at least ten cases outright snatched away from him by appeals courts.

In 2006, there was serious talk of impeaching him.

Even in the Sanchez case, it took four separate hearings and the interference of the 9th Circuit, before Real would allow Sanchez’ attorney to fully present arguments for setting bail for Sanchez. (However, to Real’s credit, in January of 2010 Real called for a special closed door hearing, after which he did set Sanchez’s bail at $2 million, an amount that friends and supporters had already raised in the form of surities and property.)

Since Sanchez was originally arrested on the RICO charges in June 2009, this means, had thee been no bail he would have spent, as of this writing, 2 years and 7 months in jail, with no trial as yet in sight.

The change in judges will, of course, push Sanchez’ trial back still further.

Yet, with the alarming wild card presence of Judge Real now removed, no one in either the Sanchez or the prosecution camps, appears to be complaining.

NOTE: In the interest of transparency, it’s important that I tell those of you new to this story that I consider Alex Sanchez a respected and valued friend. This means that while I work very hard to give readers the most factual possible information on the issue, I also have strong feelings about this case.

In a well-reported story in Sunday’s LA Times Robert Faturechi writes that the FBI is investigating beatings of inmates and misconduct by deputies in the LA County Jail system—indicating a far wider probe by the Feds into abuse inside the jails than had previously been disclosed.

This is good news.

It had already been reported that the FBI was looking into the alleged beating witnessed by ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim earlier this year. But Faturechi’s story indicates that the probe goes much further than the Lim case. (We have heard rumors that it is even wider still.)

One of the most intriguing tidbits from Sunday’s story is the little matter of the cell phone: It seems that FBI agents managed to sneak a cellphone to an inmate in the hope that they would get unfiltered reports from inside the jail.

Here’s a clip:

The inquiries include allegations that deputies broke an inmate’s jaw and other facial bones and beat another man for two minutes while he was unconscious.

Their investigation created a flap recently when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department brass discovered that an inmate inside Men’s Central Jail was an FBI informant equipped with a cellphone he was believed to be using to communicate with agents on the outside.

Sheriff Lee Baca, who had not been notified by the feds of the plant inside his jail, is expected to meet with U.S. Atty. André Birotte Jr. soon to discuss the phone incident and the growing tensions between the two law enforcement agencies.

The problems of abuse and mistreatment inside LA County’s huge jail system are longstanding (See Part 1 of WitnessLA’s DANGEROUS JAILS series by Matt Fleischer). Yet, despite years of civil rights lawsuits, reports by the ACLU, and a plethora of anecdotal reports by laypeople who work or volunteer inside the jail , there has been little outcry from the public and/or pressure from policy makers for genuine reform.

The news that the FBI is investigating the abuse and that the investigation appears to be widening in scope and seriousness…is a very good sign.

When California Lawyer Magazine contacted Pulitzer-winning author/journalist, Edward Humes, to write something about the case of Alex Sanchez (published in their February issue), Humes said he first took the story assignment because he was intrigued by the notion that someone as beloved as gang intervention leader Sanchez was said to be living an elaborate double life.

“That becomes the HBO movie, right?” he said.

But as Humes delved into the details of the case and began going to Sanchez’ hearings in federal court, presided over by Judge Manual Real (a character so extravagantly quirky that he begs to be incorporated into a novel), Humes says he began to wonder if perhaps the real story wasn’t something quite different than the tale he first imagined.

As most WitnessLA readers know, Alex Sanchez is a former MS-13 gang member turned highly respected gang violence reduction activist who has been accused of a long list of Federal racketeering and conspiracy charges. According to the government’s case, the supposedly reformed Sanchez never reformed at all, but remained, in reality, a MS-13 shot caller who ordered at least one murder.

Since most LA media outlets have all but ignored the story, I wanted to know more about how and why Humes became interested. Hence our conversation.

Humes told me that one of the things that first caught his attention when he began to get into the case was the fact that bulk of the evidence that the federal lawyers presented against Sanchez focused on four wire-tapped conversations in which Sanchez took part. “But you have these dueling interpretations of the main quotes.” Humes said. As he writes in his article, the government’s interpretation is provided by an LAPD gang expert named Frank Flores. The defense had the conversations independently translated by gang intervention and recovery expert Father Greg Boyle.

I asked Humes what he thought of the discrepant interpretations. “Frankly, Father Boyle’s version of the conversations make a lot more sense in context,” he said

After looking at the dueling translations, Humes said he began to wonder why the government’s interpretation of conversations and events seemed all to require an assumption of guilt.

“The Supreme Court is very clear that the prosecution’s job is-–not to win—but to see that justice is done. So one of the questions I still want answered is why are they so convinced that he [Sanchez] is dirty since they haven’t produced convincing evidence so far? There may be a lot more at the trial, but based on what they’ve produced so far….”

As to whether he has a gut feeling about Alex Sanchez guilt or innocence himself, Humes won’t commit. “Let’s just say that basically I have a lot of questions about the government’s case. And they need to be answered.”

Humes’ willingness to ask questions has produced an even-handed, thought-provoking and informative look at the case thus far.

Below you’ll find a clip from the story’s opening. But be sure to read the whole article from beginning to end. it’s more than worth your time.

[FIRST, ONE SMALL NOTE: The Sanchez trial was supposed to have begun yesterday, on Valentine's Day. It has now been delayed until September 2011, at the earliest. With the ever-receding trial date in mind, it is worth remembering that, had Sanchez' attorney and supporters not managed to get the presiding judge to reverse himself and grant Sanchez a $2 million bail (and even that only after four bail hearings and the intervention of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals), the defendant---whether guilty or innocent---would have remained in jail from June 2009 until....whenever.]

The four phone calls that put Alex Sanchez in jail—and in the middle of a massive federal racketeering and conspiracy case—were angry, profane, and seemingly illuminating. They opened a rare window not only onto the brutal, secretive, backstabbing world of one of America’s most notorious street gangs, but also on the life of Sanchez himself, a nationally prominent anti-gang activist in Los Angeles credited with steering hundreds of young people away from lives of crime and violence.

What Sanchez didn’t know in 2006 when he participated in those calls was that the FBI was listening in. Nor could he have guessed that the words he spoke would help convince a federal-local investigative task force that Sanchez was leading a double life, publicly opposing gangs in his day job, then moonlighting after hours as a leader or “shot-caller” of the Los Angeles street-gang-turned-international-crime-syndicate known as Mara Salvatrucha—MS-13.

The feds characterized one conversation in particular as a smoking gun. It was a conference call with several known members of MS-13, who continually referred to Sanchez as Rebelde, Spanish for rebel, his old nickname from the gang life he’d supposedly left behind 15 years before. The men on the tape debated what to do about an El Salvador – based gangster known as Camarón (the Shrimp), whom Sanchez accused of falsely branding him a police informant—a veritable death sentence in these circles. Sanchez wanted to turn the tables: “He has to face the consequences,” he urged. “We have said it, we go to war.”

Little more than a week after that exchange, the lifeless corpse of Camarón, whose real name was Walter Lacinos, was found shot through the head in La Libertad, El Salvador, a hotbed of MS-13 activity.

Had the FBI just heard Sanchez’s alter ego, Rebelde, order a hit on Camarón? That was the story the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles offered at a press conference in June 2009 to announce a historic racketeering indictment against Sanchez and 23 named MS-13 members.

“Today in Los Angeles, where the MS-13 gang was formed, we are holding its leaders accountable for the violence and intimidation they have used to bring terror to the citizens living and working within the gang’s territory,” then-U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien told reporters. The indictments marked the latest assault in a nine-year war on MS-13 by the FBI, which had used 21 court-ordered wiretaps to monitor thousands of phone conversations.

The wiretaps had already helped build an earlier state case against the alleged top shot-caller for MS-13 in Los Angeles. (It also appears that the FBI had made informants out of the alleged “CEO” of MS-13’s worldwide operations, as well as his second-in-command.) Now the recordings were being used in an effort to bring down Sanchez, a poster boy for the gang-prevention efforts that many law enforcement officials reflexively distrusted.

The latest indictments charged that the defendants had conspired to engage in extortion, drug dealing, robbery, witness intimidation, and seven murders. The complaint also described a failed conspiracy to assassinate one of the government’s top gang experts, Detective Frank Flores of the Los Angeles Police Department.

This was a major breakthrough in the fight against MS-13, proclaimed then-LAPD Chief William Bratton, speaking at O’Brien’s press conference. He branded the gang “a cancer … that lacks a single redeeming quality.” And yet no aspect of the story drew as much attention as the charges against Sanchez.

Read on.

The video is from March 2009 at UCLA where Alex Sanchez was on a panel examining “Global Perspectives of Youth and Violence.” Three months later, Sanchez would be arrested by the FBI for racketeering and conspiracy, charges that could get him sentenced to life in prison.

As you may or may not have heard, the FBI is now very worried that bad guys are texting and Skype-ing and Facebook-messaging each other (Duh!), and that law enforcement can’t wiretap these forms of communication the way they can cell phones, land lines, email and the like.

Okay, one can understand the concern.

As a consequence the feds want to change a one or two things.

Many critics are flagging this as a privacy issue. But it’s much worse than that.

What the FBI and other law enforcement agencies involved are really looking for is the ability to control the design of the technology itself.

Charlie Savage of the NY Times has a very good grip on the basics of what is being proposed. So begin by reading his story.

Here’s how it opens:

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

[BIG SNIP]

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

Dempsey is not exaggerating.

The Feds are asking to change and approve the next generation architecture of such technologies as Skype, Facebook. and others, in such a way that limits peer-to-peer communication.

Not good.

The discussion Monday on Patt Morrison’s show was particularly good—and alarming— on the topic. So listen.

(Susan Landau, formerly of Sun Microsystems, now at Harvard, and Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative, are both especially good on the show.)

This is only the beginning of the conversation. It is an issue that is very much worth your attention.

For those of you following the Alex Sanchez case, Tom Hayden has a story in the Nation that gives more of the details of the hearing that took place earlier this month.

Hayden describes how Sanchez’ attorney, Kerry Bensinger, makes some intriguing legal points. I don’t think Judge Real will buy them, but Real seems to enjoy defying the expectations of others, so who can say?

PS: Be forewarned, Hayden weaves into the story the issue of the controversial fatal shooting of Manuel Jaminez by an LAPD officer in Westlake, which I think mixes apples and oranges. But whatever. Read the Sanchez material. His remains a very painful case—but also an ever more interesting one.