When the U.S. Attorney's Office had Darrell "Skalion" Riviere extradited from Dominica in 1989, the prosecutors slapped him with seven counts of gun possession and smuggling.

The federal prosecutors wanted Riviere so badly they had sent a U.S. Customs Service plane to bring him back.

Riviere, a Dominican native who lived on St. Croix, had been stopped at a Dominican airport after customs agents found:

• 1 Cobra M-10 9 mm machine gun.
• 1 Cobra M-11 .380-caliber machine gun.
• 1 semiautomatic .22-caliber pistol.
• Silencers for each weapon plus lots of ammunition and accessories.

He had it all inside a television set he was carrying.

He pleaded guilty in Dominica the day after his arrest and paid a fine.

That was not Riviere's first clash with the law. He was one of several men convicted in 1980 of robbing a Pueblo Supermarket on St. Croix.

He was convicted of four counts of first-degree burglary, seven counts of first-degree robbery, one count of first-degree assault, vehicle theft and possession of a firearm during a crime of violence.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison Feb. 27, 1981. He was paroled in 1986. Later that year, he was arrested on drug charges. The U.S. Attorney's Office dropped the charges when the main witness couldn't be found.

The U.S. Attorney's Office saw his arrest in Dominica as a chance to put him away. But they couldn't make the charges stick.

Jim Oliver, the assistant U.S. Attorney who handled the case, filed the wrong charges.

As a result, the U.S. Attorney's Office was forced to accept a plea bargain to three of the seven gun charges. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop assault charges against Riviere and not seek to have him sentenced as a habitual offender, which would have meant a minimum 10-year prison term.

Riviere had faced more than 30 years. He got less than two.

Pete Anderson, commander of the Police Department's Special Operations Bureau at the time, flew to Dominica to help bring Riviere back. He says he is still angry over how the U.S. Attorney's Office botched the case.

"This made those of us who worked on the case very angry," Anderson says. "The American system of justice is supposed to be an adversarial proceeding. But in the Virgin Islands police have one hand tied behind their backs because of poor prosecution."