Is it me, or was the FBI trying a little bit TOO hard to convince folks it nailed the right guy when it accused Bruce Edwards Ivins of being the man responsible for 2001’s anthrax attacks?
That was more than two weeks ago, and in that time I’ve reviewed some other FBI cases that make me, well, leery of its claim. I’ll start with the most outrageous on an especially egregious list and move on from there.
Remember Joseph Schultz and Krissy Harcum? In March 2002 they were driving in Anne Arundel County when FBI agents stopped them. One shot Schultz in the face with a rifle. The agents were looking for a bank robbery suspect — except Schultz wasn’t the guy.
Less known is Warren Grace, a drug dealer turned informant for the FBI. As an informant, Grace was supposed to be on a home monitoring device, which he undid and was riding around with a car full of heroin in 2002 when Baltimore police stopped him.
Grace was set to testify against Walter Poindexter and Deon Smith in a federal drug-dealing case. When lawyers for Poindexter and Smith learned that the federal government’s star witness undid his home monitoring device and was riding dirty around Charm City, they called prosecutors on it. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna had to spend all night working out a plea bargain for the defendants.
Luna never made it to court. Instead, he got into his car — or someone forced him into his car — and took a ride through several states. He was found the next day face down in a Pennsylvania stream, stabbed 36 times and quite dead.
That was in 2003. Five years later, the FBI, whose agents investigated Luna’s murder, still hasn’t solved the case. In fact, it dredged up a theory that Luna may have possibly committed suicide. That fictional character known as Boo Boo the Fool wouldn’t even believe that one, which didn’t stop the FBI from putting it out there anyway. Around the same time that the Grace-Luna business was going on, some $36,000 went missing from the evidence room of the federal courthouse. Has the FBI been able to determine who took it?
I tried calling the FBI this week, and, as I suspected, it was like playing Russian roulette with my sanity, only with the revolver having bullets in five of the revolver’s six chambers instead of just one. A spokesman for the Baltimore FBI office said it was no longer commenting on the Luna case. It wasn’t commenting on the missing 36 G’s either. The spokesman said the Department of Justice might have a comment.
Dean Boyd, the DOJ press guy, said he didn’t know anything about the Luna case. Boyd said he didn’t know anything about the FBI supposedly “losing” the files of Luis Posada either. Ah, Luis Posada! Reputed to be the worst individual mass murderer and terrorist in the Western Hemisphere, this blight on humanity has alighted on our shores. Posada is an anti-Castro Cuban who’s been connected with the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jet that killed more than 70 people and bombings of Havana hotels in the late 1990s that left one man dead.
The DOJ filed immigration charges against him and is trying to get rid of the guy. The FBI had a file on him that detailed his dealings with other anti-Castro Cubans suspected of playing a part in the Havana hotel bombings. FBI agents wanted to arrest Posada for violating the Neutrality Act, and had the goods on him in their file.
Journalist Ann Louise Bardach wrote a story about Posada and those FBI files for the November 2006 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. What happened to Posada’s FBI files?
Someone in the bureau either “lost” them or they were destroyed, according to Bardach’s story. Bardach quoted an FBI spokeswoman who said she could neither confirm nor deny that Posada’s FBI files were destroyed.
So let’s review: An innocent man is shot in the face; a drug-dealing miscreant turned informant is riding dirty in the city; there is no resolution for either the Luna case or the missing $36,000; and the files on a suspected terrorist were “lost.” And the FBI wants me to believe it got the right guy in Ivins.
Hey, who am I to doubt?
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
