Main Justice: The Men and Women Who Enforce the Nation's Criminal Laws and Guard Its Liberties.

The era of big government may or may not be over, but federal law enforcement remains a Republicans and Democrats alike. As Jim McGee and Brian Duffy point out in their useful book, Main Justice, the U.S. Justice Department budget rose from $2.3 billion to $9.8 billion during the Reagan-bush years; the number of federal prosecutors nearly doubled to 7,881. Since President Clinton's inauguration, the 1994 crime bill and the 1996 counter-terrorism law have given these prosecutors, now in excess of 8,000, more power to enforce an ever-growing list of federal laws.

"No federal entity, wields more power that can more directly touch an American life than the Justice Department," the authors say. "The Central Intelligence Agency can dispatch spies and the Pentagon can launch cruise missiles, but the Department of justice can eavesdrop on your phone conversations, search your home with a warrant or threaten you with federal prison."

And it is doing all of these things at record levels. in a rare look at how government really works, McGee and Duffy illustrate how the increased federalization of law enforcement has helped the government fight drug smuggling, violent crime, and terrorism - and how it has also produced troubling increases in wiretaps and ethical complaints against prosecutors. It seems that centralized crime fighting can both protect and undermine democracy. "If tyranny someday arrives in the United States, it will be accompanied by federal prosecutors and agents," the authors write. "If it is turned away, federal prosecutors and agents will be owed the nation's thanks."

McGee is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, Duffy the investigations editor at U.S. News & World Report (and a fellow grad student of mine at Northwestern University many years ago). Both authors formerly worked at the Miami Herald, and many of their anecdotes are set in South Florida, where the hand of federal law enforcement is especially, heavy.

McGee and Duffy give the feds high marks for successful investigations of the Cali drug cartel. And public demands to "do something" about violent crime have led to aggressive federal efforts against gangs, from the "Gangster Disciples Nation" of Chicago to "The Bottoms Boys" of Shreveport, La.

Many of these massive investigations rely on what the book describes as a record-setting pace of federal wiretaps. As McGee reported recently in The Washington Post, there were 340 court-approved federal wiretaps in 1992, the last year of the Bush presidency; that number is expected to exceed 700 this year, even as Congress debates granting more wiretapping powers in the wake of TWA Flight 800 and the Olympic bombing.

The rise of wiretapping, not to mention other tapes of investigative searches. underscores the growing and unprecedented power of federal law enforcement authority. "The full array of federal crime-fighting weaponry has created a force in the United States that was never contemplated by the framers of the U.S. constitution," the authors write.

Obviously, this kind of power can corrupt. McGee and Duffy report a troubling rise in the number of formal complaints against federal prosecutors - up 78 percent between 1992 and 1993. Worse, incidents of prosecutorial misconduct have forced judges to throw out cases, including prosecutions of the El Rukns gang in Chicago go and a major payola case in southern California. Defense attorneys in the Oklahoma City bombing case have served notice that they will make government misconduct a major part of their case.

Like the power to tax, the power to prosecute can destroy. McGee and Duffy describe how Ed Meese's Justice Department filed pornography cases against individual companies in different federal jurisdictions; the idea was to get defendants fighting several cases at once, possibly bankrupting them.

The authors, however, are hopeful. They cite this comment by ex-attorney General Griffin Bell: "In a democratic society people have to trust the government. Otherwise, you go under.... There are some honest people left."