The Case Against the General: Manuel Noriega and the Politics of American Justice.

During his 1988 trial in Tampa, Florida, Medellin cartel baron Carlos Lehder was portrayed by federal prosecutors as the most monstrous drug trafficker of recent times--a deranged, Hitler-loving thug who turned cocaine smuggling into a multi-billion dollar hemispheric enterprise. By the fall of 1991, Lehder appeared to have undergone a remarkably quick rehabilitation. He was now a certified U.S. Department of Justice truth teller, one of the star witnesses in the government's case against the new demon of the moment, Manuel Antonio Noriega.

Never mind that Lehder had never actually met Noriega, or that his track record for veracity was less than sterling. His character transformation is only one of the many bizarre subplots in the U.S. government's four-year effort to convict the one-time dictator of Panama--a story that is told in exhaustive and at times fascinating detail in Steve Albert's The Case Against the General. Indicted in the winter of 1988, during the peak of drug war hysteria, Noriega had been publicly portrayed as a "drug lord" and poisoner of American children. In December 1989, determined to show his resolve against the cocaine threat, President Bush unleashed Operation Just Cause--an invasion of Panama by 23,000 U.S. troops whose primary goal was to capture Noriega and haul him into a U.S. courtroom.

But while Noriega was unquestionably brutal and corrupt--character defects well known to the CIA officials who had long kept him on their payroll--his actual role in the cocaine trade had been grossly overblown. One charge in the 1988 indictment--that Noriega had taken a $4 million cash bribe from a Colombian drug smuggler named Boris Olarte--lacked even the slightest corroboration. (It later turned out to have been concocted by Olarte after he was imprisoned and facing a lengthy prison term.) Another part of the indictment--a tangled story of Noriega seeking Fidel Castro's help in mediating a dispute with the cartel--was thrown in largely for political reasons in Miami and was doubted even by some of the indictment's authors. Indeed, one of the more startling passages in Albert's book recounts the first serious review of the case by professional prosecutors in Miami shortly after Noriega was brought into U.S. custody. Assigned to head the Justice Department's prosecution team, senior litigation counsel Michael P. Sullivan thought the testimony so weak that Noriega could get off. "It was a loser, he [Sullivan] thought," writes Albert. "It was a loser from day one."

One might well ask why nobody bothered to check with Sullivan before Bush ordered the invasion. Nonetheless, having repeatedly assured the public that the case was airtight, the Justice Department pulled out all the stops: Justice froze Noriega's worldwide assets (without ever identifying them as proceeds from the drug trade), making it difficult for the imprisoned general to mount a full-fledged defense. It taped and analyzed his prison phone calls (inadvertently picking up confidential conversations with his lawyers). It dispatched teams of investigators to pore over thousands of documents seized during the invasion in hopes that something tying Noriega to the drug trade would turn up. Nothing ever did.

So in the end, the Justice Department was forced to rely on the bartered testimony of certified sleazebags like Lehder. There is nothing particularly shocking about such testimony in drug and organized crime trials. But rarely has it been presented with such unabashed zeal and excess as in the Noriega trial. Combing the depths of federal penitentiaries throughout the country, Sullivan's prosecution team offered inmates with absolutely nothing to lose amazingly lucrative deals--dropped charges, sharply reduced sentences, immigration visas for their loved ones--all for a few words that would implicate the general. As a reporter covering the trial, I remember listening to much of this testimony and wondering, how can anyone believe this stuff? At one point, the government produced two lowly denizens of the Miami Correctional Center who told a fanciful story of seeing Noriega yukking it up with the cartel barons at Jorge Ochoa's personal office in Medellin. There was not a shred of corroborating evidence that Noriega had ever been to Medellin, but here was the U.S. government presenting it as fact.

Such testimony, moreover, tends to be highly pliable, depending on circumstances. One of those witnesses, Gabriel Taboada, claimed he had seen the cartel barons giving Noriega a briefcase stuffed with $500,000 in cash. Barely a year after he regaled the jury with this tale, a federal judge in South Carolina refused to grant Taboada the lenient sentence recommended by the Noriega prosecutors. At that point, Taboada recanted, confessing he had made the whole Noriega story up. No matter. Against a hopelessly outgunned defense team, it was more than enough. Noriega was convicted on eight of ten counts against him and sentenced to 40 years.

Albert, a San Francisco-based journalist who edits a legal newspaper called The Recorder, tells the story well, benefiting from the obvious cooperation of lawyers on both sides of the case. He is also determined for the most part to play it straight, dispassionately recounting what (to me at least) seemed obvious excesses and questionable tactics by the government without even venturing an opinion. As a result, Albert fails to put the Noriega case into its larger context--the prime example of an American legal system that has become increasingly warped and distorted by the government's need for big name trophies in the "war" against drugs and crime.