From: aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker)
Subject: Repost - Barrons Article on Inslaw (1 of 2)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 09:39:24 GMT


Date:         Thu, 10 Oct 1991 17:40:40 CDT
Reply-To:     dave 'who can do? ratmandu!' ratcliffe
              <dave@ratmandu.corp.sgi.com>
From:         dave 'who can do? ratmandu!' ratcliffe
              <dave@ratmandu.corp.sgi.com>
Subject:      the INSLAW Case:  part I of "BARRON'S" 1988 2-part piece


Subject: the INSLAW Case:  part I of "BARRON'S" 1988 2-part piece
Keywords: U.S. Deptartment of Justice != "with liberty and justice for all"


      although these 2 articles are dated by more than 3 1/2 succeeding
      years-worth of newer revelations and mounting evidence of cynical
      corruption at the highest levels of the executive branch, as well
      as linkages into the judicial branch of the u.s. government, they
      still provide very useful and well-researched background material.


     In his decision, [federal bankruptcy judge George] Bason compares
     the Justice Department to someone who decides to test drive an
     automobile:  "So the customer drives off with the car and this is
     the last the dealer ever sees of him.  I think that is approximately
     what the Department of Justice has done in this case."


      First of a 2-part piece which began in the March 21, 1988 issue of
              "BARRON'S NATIONAL BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL WEEKLY"
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

                              Beneath Contempt
             Did the Justice Dept. Deliberately Bankrupt INSLAW?
                              By MAGGIE MAHAR


         "A VERY strange thing happened at the Department of Justice . .
      ."
         What that very strange thing was was described in clear and
      exhaustive detail in Judge George Bason's blistering ruling before
      a packed Washington, D.C., courtroom last September.  In a quiet
      voice, Bason, a 56-year-old federal bankruptcy judge with a
      reputation for being meticulous in his judicial approach, told the
      astonishing story of INSLAW vs. the United States of America.
         In his ruling on the case, Bason explained how "through
      trickery, deceit and fraud," the U.S. Department of Justice "took,
      converted, stole" software belonging to INSLAW, a Washington-based
      computer software firm.  In 1982, INSLAW signed a $10 million
      contract to install its case-tracking software, PROMIS
      (Prosecutor's Management Information System) in the Justice
      Department's offices.  But instead of honoring the contract, Bason
      asserts, Justice officials proceeded to purposefully drive the
      small software company into bankruptcy, and then tried to push it
      into liquidation, engaging in an "outrageous, deceitful, fraudulent
      game of cat and mouse, demonstrating contempt for both the law and
      any principle of fair dealing."
         Ultimately, the series of "willful, wanton and deceitful acts"
      led to a cover up.  Bason called statements by top Justice
      Department officials "ludicrous . . . incredible . . . and totally
      unbelievable."
         Some of the evidence against the department came from one of its
      own.  During the course of the litigation, Anthony Pasciuto, deputy
      director of the department's Executive Office for United States
      Trustees, met secretly with INSLAW'S president, William Hamilton.
      At that breakfast meeting at the Mayflower hotel, Anthony Pasciuto
      told Hamilton and his wife, Nancy, how the Justice Department had
      pressured Trustee officers to liquidate their company.  Later, a
      superior confirmed Pasciuto's story.  But at the trial, a horrified
      Pasciuto listened while his superior changed his testimony.  Close
      to tears, he, too, recanted.
         Judge Bason believed Pasciuto's original testimony however.  On
      Feb. 2, 1988, he ordered Justice to pay INSLAW about $6.8 million
      in licensing fees and roughly another $1 million in legal fees.
      Bason wasn't sure whether he could assess a department of the U.S.
      government with punitive damages.  If so, damages could run as high
      as $25 million.  Bason struggled with that legal question and
      finally postponed the decision to a later date.
         Now, no one knows how Judge Bason would have ruled on the
      question of damages.  In November, Judge Bason rejected a
      Department of Justice motion to liquidate INSLAW.  A scant one
      month later, the Harvard Law School graduate and former law
      professor discovered that he was not being reappointed.  The
      decision to replace him followed from a recommendation made by a
      four-man merit selection panel appointed by the chief circuit
      judge, Patricia Wald, a former Justice Department employee.  The
      panel was headed up by District Judge Norma Johnson, another former
      Justice Department lawyer.
         Judge Bason stepped down in February.  He was replaced by S.
      Martin Teel Jr., 42, one of the Justice Department lawyers who had
      unsuccessfully argued the INSLAW case before Bason.  Even jaded,
      case-hardened Washington attorneys called the action "shocking" and
      "eerie."
         INSLAW'S case will be assigned to another judge for disposition
      of damages.  Meanwhile, the Justice Department is appealing Judge
      Bason's initial $8 million award to U.S. District Court.  And, last
      week, the Internal Revenue Service descended on the Hamiltons,
      demanding that the bankrupt company pay $600,000 in back taxes--
      immediately.
         "I restrained the IRS from going after the Hamiltons
      personally--just a few days before I left the bench," Bason
      recalls.  "But that restraining order lasts only 10 days.  I don't
      know what's happening now."
         "It seemed as if the controversy was winding down," observes
      INSLAW'S former attorney, Leigh Ratiner.  "It would follow a
      natural course in the press, and then fade from view."  Inslaw
      would become another shocking event that slinks off into obscurity:
      Someone occasionally might dimly remember and idly ask, "What ever
      did happen to Bill Hamilton and those INSLAW people?  A real shame
      . . . I heard the judge was back teaching law somewhere. . . ."
         But at the end of last week Anthony Pasciuto instructed his
      lawyer to write a letter to Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns.
      Pasciuto has decided to tell the full story that he began telling
      at the Mayflower last spring.  And, in an interview with "Barron's"
      at the end of the week, Pasciuto explained how the Justice
      Department black-listed INSLAW.  It was a tale that involved two
      U.S. trustees, a federal judge who told two versions of the same
      story, and a Justice Department that routinely refused to pay
      certain suppliers:  "If you're on the bad list, you go in this
      drawer," another Justice Department employee explained to Pasciuto.
         Pasciuto knows what happened--but not why.  In the trial, INSLAW
      claimed that C. Madison "Brick" Brewer, the Justice Department
      employee responsible for administering the department's $10 million
      contract with INSLAW, held a grudge against the company:  INSLAW's
      Hamilton had fired Brewer in 1976.  But since the trial, Hamilton
      has become convinced that Brewer alone could not have been that
      powerful.  Bason's removal and Pasciuto's account suggest that what
      motivated the remarkable behavior of the Justice Department was
      something of greater moment than a middle-level employee's petty
      grievance.
         Indeed, three people have lost their jobs as a result of the
      INSLAW scandal--but not paradoxically, those responsible for the
      scandals.  The trio of victims includes Judge Bason and Pasciuto--
      who received notice that he would be fired after he testifed, and
      just two days after Judge Bason was informed that he would not be
      reappointed.  The third casualty of the Inslaw affair was Leigh
      Ratiner a former partner at Dickstein Shapiro and Morin, the firm
      that represented Edwin Meese during his confirmation hearings for
      Attorney General.
         Why Bason and Pasciuto got the axe can easily be inferred.
      Ratiner's forced departure is a little more complicated.  In
      January 1986, Elliot Richardson asked Ratiner to take on INSLAW'S
      defense.  Ratiner agreed, and named D. Lowell Jensen, then the
      Deputy Attorney General, and a long-time Meese friend, in a
      complaint.  Not long after, Meese discussed the case with another
      Dickstein, Shapiro partner, Leonard Garment, the attorney who,
      along with E. Robert Wallach, represented Meese in his confirmation
      hearings.  Meese acknowledged the conversation in a pretrial
      interrogation.  Shortly thereafter, his partners at Dickstein,
      Shapiro asked Ratiner to resign.
         The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is now
      looking into INSLAW--a sign that the lawmakers, too, think that the
      whole story of the "something strange" that happened in the Justice
      Department has yet to be told.  The Hamilton's attorneys aren't
      sure why a department of the U.S. government wanted to liquidate
      their company.  Anthony Pasciuto doesn't know.  Judge Bason is
      still trying to piece together who had it in for him and why.  But
      Bason, Hamilton and the attorneys involved in the case are
      beginning to define the pieces of the puzzle with some pointed
      questions.
         Why did the Justice Department hire Brick Brewer, a former
      INSLAW employee, to supervise a contract with his former employer?
      "The person is going to be biased in favor of the former employer-
      -or he is going to be biased against the former employer," Bason
      pointed out in his decision.
         The judge also noted that D. Lowell Jensen, the former deputy
      Attorney General named by Ratiner in his complaint, was questioned
      on this issue.  Jensen, now a federal judge in California,
      "recognized the general principle that it is a bad idea" to hire a
      former employee, disgruntled or otherwise, for such a task, Bason
      observes.  But, Bason wrote, he was amazed to find "no hint in
      Jensen's testimony that he recognized there was any possible
      applicability of that general principle to the case of Mr. Brewer
      and Inslaw."
         Hamilton discloses that Mr. Jensen himself was already familiar
      with INSLAW.  Hamilton ran into Jensen in the early 1970s, when
      Hamilton was developing PROMIS, the case-tracking system that he
      contracted to sell to the Justice Department.  At that time,
      Jensen, a long-time friend of Ed Meese, was district attorney in
      Alameda Country in northern California, developing his own
      computerized case-tracking system, DALITE.  Jensen competed with
      Hamilton's PROMIS head-on-head.  PROMIS won.
         Hamilton and others familiar with the case ask:  Could Jensen
      still be feeling competitive?  People who have "tracked" the INSLAW
      case point to the coincidences of timing:  INSLAW'S problems with
      the Justice Department erupted soon after Jensen was promoted to
      Associate Attorney General--the No. 3 person in the department--in
      1983.
         Hamilton reveals another curious coincidence:  About 90 days
      before the Justice Department contract began to fall apart, he
      received a phone call from Dominic Laiti, chairman of Hadron Inc.,
      a company in which Earl Brian, a long-time Meese colleague, holds
      an interest (see "Brain's Meese Connection" posting following this
      one, from Barron's Jan. 11, 1988 issue).  Brian's Infotechnology
      controls four of six seats on Hadron's board.  Laiti told Hamilton,
      according to Hamilton, that Hadron intended to become the dominant
      supplier of computer software and services to law enforcers and
      courts and related agencies, and that Hadron wanted to buy INSLAW.
      "We have ways of making you sell," Hamilton quotes Laiti as saying.
         Laiti insists:  "I have no memory of this.  It all sounds
      ridiculous to me."
         The bizarre web of coincidences and connections includes AT&T.
      AT&T had a contract with INSLAW and, during bankruptcy proceedings,
      declared itself a major creditor.  Then, Hamilton alleges, AT&T's
      attorney began to behave less like someone representing a creditor
      interested in salvaging the company than like an attorney for the
      Justice Department bent on liquidating it.  More coincidences:
      AT&T's outside counsel, Ken Rosen, was with an obscure New Jersey
      firm, but formerly had been a member of Deputy Attorney General
      Burns's New York law firm.  Rosen's co-counsel, Shea & Gould, is
      not AT&T's usual outside counsel, either, though it is the firm
      used by Earl Brian.
         Bason questions the failure of high Justice Department officials
      to take any action to investigate serious allegations of
      misconduct.  Both Hamilton and his attorney, Elliot Richardson,
      complained about Brewer's handling of the contract, and requested
      an investigation.
         "There's such a contrast between the total inaction on the part
      of Justice Department regarding Mr. Brewer--and the hammer and
      tongs approach they're using with Mr. Pasciuto," Bason observes.
         Last Thursday, Pasciuto's attorney, Gary Simpson, delivered his
      letter to Deputy Attorney General Burns--and met with the Senate
      committee.  At the end of the week, that committee met with Bason,
      as well.  Senator Nunn's committee may find some answers--and ask
      more questions--that will illuminate this bizarre story.
         For now, Pasciuto does know what happened to him and his tale
      provides a window on the strange thing that happened to INSLAW.
         In March of 1982, William Hamilton could probably envision his
      face on the cover of Fortune.  He had just won the $10 million,
      three-year contract with the Justice Department to install PROMIS
      in the department's 20 largest U.S. Attorney's offices, and to
      develop a separate program for its 74 smaller offices.  Hamilton,
      who had contracts with private firms as well, now had a deal with
      the nation's premier law firm:  the Department of Justice.
         PROMIS was unique, and those 94 U.S. Attorney's offices
      represented an entering wedge:  Hamilton could dream of capturing
      the federal judicial system's entire caseload.  In the fiscal year
      October 1, 1982, INSLAW's revenues went up about 35% to $7.8
      million, with more than half of those revenues coming from the
      Justice Department contract.
         But then, that funny thing happened.  The Justice Department
      began postponing payments.  In July 1983, Hamilton says, the
      department suspended nearly $250,000 in payments, alleging that the
      company was overcharging the government for time-sharing.  In
      February 1985, the government terminated the contract with smaller
      offices that had been generating revenues of $200,000-$300,000 a
      month.
         INSLAW's cash flow shriveled.  By Feb. 7, 1985, the government
      had withheld $1.77 million.  Inslaw twisted and turned, trying to
      negotiate with the Justice Department, desperate to find out what
      went wrong.  Finally, in financial shambles, INSLAW filed for
      bankruptcy in late February.  The Department of Justice kept the
      INSLAW software--and kept on using it.
         In his decision, Bason compares the Justice Department to
      someone who decides to test drive an automobile:  "So the customer
      drives off with the car and this is the last the dealer ever sees
      of him.  I think that is approximately what the Department of
      Justice has done in this case."
         In last week's letter to Deputy Attorney General Burns from
      Pasciuto's attorney, Gary Simpson, Pasciuto suggests a pattern of
      harrassment that helped drive INSLAW into Chapter 11.  According to
      Pasciuto, in June of 1984, Robert Hunneycutt, who worked in the
      Department of Justice's finance offices, told him about his
      practice of dividing contractors' bills into three piles.  "One
      pile he would pay right away;  the next pile when he got around to
      it;  and then he opened a drawer and pointed to some invoices in
      the drawer and said:  "These invoices may never get paid.'"
      Hunneycutt then identified such invoices as belonging to companies
      on the "bad list."
         "Mr. Pasciuto asked who was in that pile," the letter to Burns
      goes on, "and he said that INSLAW was an example and that `People
      in the U.S Attorney's offices don't like INSLAW they are in this
      pile. . . .'"
         When "Barron's" phoned Hunneycutt, he returned the call, and
      left this message:  "Mr.  Hunneycutt knows nothing."  In a
      subsequent conversation, he denied the conversation with Pasciuto.
         But Hamilton claims that the Justice Department was trying to
      starve INSLAW.  They didn't just push to bankrupt the software
      firm, he insists, they wanted to liquidate it, converting it from
      Chapter 11 to Chapter 7, as soon as possible.  Why?  Hamilton
      speculates that Justice may have wanted to push INSLAW into an
      auction where PROMIS could be purchased cheaply by someone that the
      department viewed more favorably.
         Indeed, the Justice Department did move for liquidation.  And on
      St. Patrick's Day 1987, Anthony Pasciuto met with the Hamiltons at
      the Mayflower and gave them a fuller picture of what was happening
      to them.  A mutual friend, Mark Cunniff, executive director of the
      National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, asked Pasciuto
      to go to that breakfast meeting at the Mayflower.
         "I said, `Don't you know what you're asking me to do?'"
      Pasciuto recalls.  "He said, `I know.'"
         "I knew him for 19 years," Pasciuto explains.  "I said, `Mark,
      I'm doing it for you--and for these poor people.'  I knew they had
      five kids," adds Pasciuto, a graying 44-year-old All-American "nice
      guy" with a strong Boston accent, and an open, slightly pockmarked
      face.  Pasciuto has been married for 21 years, in government
      service for 21 years, and still wears his class ring--U. of Mass.,
      1965.
         So, at the Mayflower, Tony Pasciuto remembers he tried to help
      Bill and Nancy Hamilton--and confirmed their most paranoid
      fantasies:  The Justice Department was out to get them.
         At the meeting with the Hamiltons Pasciuto told them that his
      boss, Thomas Stanton, director of the Justice Department's
      Executive Office for U.S. Trustees, was pressuring the federal
      trustee overseeing the INSLAW case.  William White was being
      pressed to liquidate INSLAW.  According to Pasciuto, in 1985 White
      told him that he was resisting the pressure.  As a result, White
      informed Pasciuto, Stanton denied White's Alexandria office
      administrative and budgetary support and, at the same time, tried
      to have an assistant from the U.S. Trustee's office in New York
      take over the case and convert it.
         The Hamiltons were told by Pasciuto that Cornelius Blackshear,
      the U.S. trustee in New York at the time of INSLAW's Chapter 11
      filing, knew all about Stanton's plan.  Pasciuto said that Judge
      Blackshear had repeated this tale of pressure in the presence of
      United States Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence Pierce in the judge's
      chambers in Foley Square in New York.  Pasciuto also told the
      Hamiltons that the Justice Department had blacklisted INSLAW on the
      department's computer system procurements.
         On March 25, 1985, INSLAW's lawyers deposed Blackshear, and he
      confirmed the story of pressure to liquidate INSLAW.  The very next
      day, March 26, Blackshear met with a Justice Department
      representative, and signed a sworn affidavit, recanting, and saying
      that he had confused INSLAW with another case--United Press
      International, which had also been involved in bankruptcy
      proceedings in Judge Bason's court.
         "I know the difference between UPI and INSLAW, I'm not that
      dumb," Pasciuto observes.  He spells it out with a finger:  "U--P--
      I."
         Cornelius Blackshear left his position as United States Trustee
      and became a United States bankruptcy judge the following fall.
         According to Pasciuto, Judge Blackshear discussed INSLAW in
      Judge Pierce's chambers.  But when questioned on the point, Judge
      Pierce told "Barron's":  "I have made it my business not to get
      into the particulars of whatever Tony [Anthony Pasciuto] got
      himself into the middle of.  Apparently, he thought his employer
      was doing something that was not kosher.  I told him I didn't want
      to know about it--if he needed to, he should hire an attorney."
         When "Barron's" offered to recount the details Pasciuto
      allegedly discussed in his presence, the judge grew agitated:
      "Don't tell me--I don't want to hear it.  I don't want to know
      about it."
         "I did ask him for help--six months before it all happened.  I
      didn't know what to do," Pasciuto recalls.  "Judge Pierce and I go
      back to the time when I was an assistant dean at the School of
      Criminal Justice in Albany--in 1972.  He was a visiting faculty
      member for one year.  We became good friends.  I considered him a
      father figure.
         In his ruling, Judge Bason noted that Blackshear had given "two
      different versions of the same event" and decided that other
      evidence supported the first version.  White also denied the story
      of political pressure in court and Judge Bason asserted in his June
      1987 ruling, "What I do believe is that Mr. White has a capacity to
      forget . . . a capacity which probably all humans share to some
      degree or another."
         Judge Bason went on to point out:  "Mr. White has just recently
      joined a large law firm that practices primarily in Virginia and
      primarily in bankruptcy matters.  Mr. White's future with the firm
      that he so recently joined could well be dependent on income-
      producing work that he does. . . .  It seems to this court that Mr.
      White is not in a position at this point in his career to
      jeopardize his relationship with the U.S. Trustee's office in
      Alexandria, and for him to testify in a way that would be strongly
      disliked and disfavored by the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees
      could well have an adverse impact on the relationship between the
      executive office and the Alexandria office and, in turn, a
      relationship between Mr. White and the Alexandria office."
         But in late spring of 1986, White was still a U.S. Trustee, and
      Pasciuto recalls one more incident involving INSLAW.  White called
      Pasciuto and asked for an extra filing cabinet for his INSLAW
      files.  "I said, `You've got plenty of them over there,'" Pasciuto
      recalls.  White responded, "I know, but I need another one because
      I need to put all the INSLAW files in one cabinet and lock it."
         White was discreet.  So, on June 1, 1987, when Anthony Pasciuto
      walked into that packed D.C. courtroom to take the stand in the
      INSLAW case, he knew that White would not support his story.  He
      also knew that Judge Blackshear had changed his original story.  As
      Pasciuto's lawyer puts it in the letter to Burns:  "Mr. Pasciuto
      was now the only person with recollection of conversations with
      U.S. Trustees in which Mr. Stanton was identified as having put
      pressure regarding the INSLAW case.  Other people's recollections
      were being erased by mechanisms best known to them."
         Pasciuto's boss, Stanton, apparently put his own pressure on
      Pasciuto.  Beginning in 1985, according to the letter to Burns,
      Pasciuto began reporting his concerns about substantial deficits in
      the U.S. Trustee's office to Stanton.  In 1986, Pasciuto spoke to
      the Department of Justice's finance staff and by late 1986, he says
      he had gone on record with the Office of Professional
      Responsibility about financial indiscretions by Stanton.  According
      to Pasciuto, Stanton in September 1986 called him a "traitor."
      Pasciuto began actively looking for other employment, including a
      job as Assistant U.S. Trustee in Albany, N.Y.  But no transfers
      were available for Anthony Pasciuto--until he was subpeonaed to
      testify in the INSLAW case.
         "Within an hour of receiving that subpeona to testify, Mr.
      Pasciuto was given a copy of an appointment paper for a job as the
      Assistant United States Trustee, Albany, New York, signed by Mr.
      Stanton," Simpson, Pasciuto's attorney, reports in last week's
      letter to Burns.  After the trial was over, however, Pasciuto was
      told that the procedure "was changed" and that the deputy Attorney
      General would have to sign off on the form.  That never happened.
         But Pasciuto, who believed the signed appointment papers, sold
      his house in Maryland for $200,000 and bought a house in Albany for
      $250,000.  On the day the movers came, he was told that the sale of
      the Maryland house had fallen through.  "We had to move, we had to
      carry two houses--and we couldn't even move into the Albany house
      yet because the owners wouldn't be moving out for a month," Tony
      Pasciuto recalls.  "So, we stayed with in-laws for a month."  That
      was May 22, 1987.  Nine days later Tony Pasciuto walked into court.
         When he entered the court room on June 1, 1987, Pasciuto was not
      represented by counsel.  According to Simpson, his attorney:  "The
      Justice Department attorney who was handling the INSLAW case, Mr.
      Dean Cooper, did not prepare him well for his trial testimony.  The
      paralegal who was taking notes during the witness preparation says
      that he has lost the notes of that meeting."
         When the questioning began, Pasciuto must have realized that the
      Justice Department attorney was not going to guide him gently
      through his story.  One of Cooper's first questions was "whether
      [Pasciuto] had been seeing a doctor about a stressful condition."
         In his letter to Burns, Simpson explains:  "Mr. Cooper
      apparently knew that Mr. Pasciuto had been seeing a psychiatrist in
      connection with personal problems that he had been experiencing and
      Mr. Pasciuto . . . now knew that the United States Department of
      Justice was prepared to stoop to the level of bringing his personal
      problems into the INSLAW case to get him to be careful about what
      he said."
         Apparently, the tactics worked.  Pasciuto recanted, saying that
      the statements he made to the Hamiltons at the Mayflower were made
      in an effort to hurt Stanton, who was blocking his promotion.
         Judge Bason remembers the scene:  "Mr. Pasciuto seemed to be
      basically a very honest person who had been caught up amongst a
      gang of very tough people--and he just didn't know what to do.  He
      was a career federal employee and he was petrified.  He probably
      had a vision of losing his job, his marriage, everything.  Probably
      he thought the only way he could save anything was to recant.  I
      had to adjourn at one point during his testimony--he was close to
      tears."
         But Pasciuto didn't save his career.  And now, in the letter to
      Burns, he has come forward to make a full disclosure.
         Last week's letter to Burns contains a compelling, painful
      vignette of a chance meeting between Pasciuto and Blackshear, about
      a month after the trial, on July 11, 1987.  If Hamilton felt
      floored by Pasciuto's testimony, so Pasciuto must have felt
      betrayed by Blackshear's change of heart.  The meeting was awkward.
         As Simpson tells the story in the letter to Arnold Burns, it was
      six in the evening, when Pasciuto and his wife were leaving the
      home of a mutual friend, Harry Jones, now U.S. Trustee for the
      Southern District of New York.  Judge Blackshear came up to Tony
      Pasciuto, put his arm around him, and said, "I am sorry, it will be
      all right."
         Pasciuto replied:  "No, it is not going to be all right, they
      are going to fire me."
         Blackshear responded, "They are not going to fire you.  Don't
      they know how much you know?"
         Pasciuto:  "Yes, but they don't care."
         Blackshear:  "But you told the truth."
         Pasciuto:  "Of what importance is the truth if everyone else is
      lying?"
         Blackshear:  "These people came up from Washington and the U.S.
      Attorney's office;  I got confused.  I thought that by changing my
      story I would hurt less people.  I didn't know you were subpoenaed
      until I saw your testimony, which was sent to me by Barbara
      O'Connor."
         Pasciuto:  "Do you remember what we talked with Judge Pierce
      about?"
         "I wanted to see if he was going to continue his crap," Pasciuto
      recalls.  "But he dodged--literally backing away from me--saying,
      again, `They sent someone from Washington and someone from the U.S.
      Attorney's office.  I felt the easiest thing to do was recant.  I
      felt less people would be hurt if I just bailed out.'"
         In Simpson's version, Judge Blackshear had received two
      telephone calls from William White the day he changed his story.
      White told him he had the wrong case.
         Pasciuto, exclaimed, sarcastically:  "What!  They asked you
      about converting *another* case [from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7]?"
         Blackshear, waving his hand:  "I don't want to get into it and
      who the hell cares?"
         Today, after listening to Simpson's version, Blackshear states:
      "I don't remember the specifics, word for word, but I do remember
      having that conversation.  And I don't have any problems with what
      Tony remembers."
         Recalling the scene, Pasciuto says:  "You know, even now--I'm
      not angry.  I can't help it.  I'm not.  Blackshear is basically a
      wonderful person.  It's sad--I'm sorry, I'm not angry.  It really
      is sad.  I feel devastated."
         Tony Pasciuto now has a house in Albany, and soon will have no
      job either in Washington or New York.  Over the past nine months,
      he has spent $12,000 commuting from Albany to the job he still
      clung to in D.C.  Legal fees are draining his savings--the bills
      total $25,000 so far.  "We're lucky that my wife and I were always
      frugal and have the money saved," he says proudly.
         But Tony Pasciuto is frightened.  "At work, ever since I got the
      letter saying they were firing me, I've felt like I was underhouse
      arrest," he relates.  "People come by my office to see if I'm
      there.  If I leave, I have to sign out.  Everyone is supposed to,
      but normally very few people sign out.  If I don't, they try to
      track me down.  If I go to the Men's Room, they come looking for me.
         "I'm just a GS 15," adds Pasciuto, referring to his level in
      government service.  "Stanton, my boss, can't fire me.  Stanton
      made the accusations, but the deputy Attorney General, Arnold
      Burns, will fire me.  How does it feel to know that the deputy
      Attorney General of the United States wants to destroy a GS 15?
      It's scary.  It scares me to death."

                   (To be continued/concluded in part II)


--
                                             daveus rattus

                                   yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                              KOYAANISQATSI

   ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
       in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.
         5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
<end reposted material>
-Steve Crocker
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,talk.politics.guns