Good guys win in Philly. (Insider Report).

Since 1997, THE NEW AMERICAN has detailed the travails of four former Pennsylvania Bureau of Narcotics Investigation (BNI) agents whose careers were ruined after they attempted to disrupt a Dominican drug ring protected by the State Department, CIA, and Clinton administration. (See "Smuggler's Dues" in our April 28, 1997 issue, and "Dealing With Druggies," in our June 22, 1998 issue.)

In 1995, the agents learned that proceeds from Dominican heroin sales were being sluiced into the coffers of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), whose presidential candidate, the late Jose Pena-Gomez, was identified by the CIA as the State Department's favored candidate for the Dominican presidency. The BNI officers refused to cooperate when the CIA demanded to know the names of confidential informants within the Dominican drug network. Immediately thereafter, the agents were taken off the streets, defamed in the press as corrupt and abusive, and threatened with civil lawsuits.

In early February, a federal civil rights case filed by two of the BNI agents, John "Sparky" McLaughlin and Charles Micewski, went to court. After deliberating for a little more than five hours, the jury returned a unanimous verdict favoring the plaintiffs, awarding a total of $1.5 million in punitive damages to McLaughlin and Micewski.

Utterly vindicating the veteran anti-narcotics agents, the verdict was hailed by Dominican critics of the Marxist PRD. In a congratulatory letter to Agent McLaughlin, Carlos Zorrilla, a journalist in Santo Domingo, described the verdict as "a victory ... for people like me who have always known what the PRD really is and represents. We are living in a state of hell because of the imposing of the PRD by the Clinton administration in 2000, the year they finally got what they wanted since 1994."

According to a February 13th article in the Dominican Republic's NEPA News service, Dominican President Hipolito Mejia, Pena-Gomez's successor as the PRD head, "announced a government-appointed commission will hire a legal firm in the United States 'to defend the honor' of Pena-Gomez."

In a telephone conversation with THE NEW AMERICAN, Agent McLaughlin pointed out that he and his BNI colleagues had filed the civil rights lawsuit because they had never been given an opportunity to clear their names. Their detractors accused them of criminal misconduct, but never pursued the matter in court. He also pointed out the role played by THE NEW AMERICAN, which broke this story six years ago: "This is a great victory, and it all started with you guys."