For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper through the use of its journalistic resources which may include editorials, cartoons, and photographs, as well as reporting, a gold medal.

The Virgin Islands Daily News, by The Virgin Islands Daily News

For its disclosure of the links between the region's rampant crime rate and corruption in the local criminal justice system. The reporting, largely the work of Melvin Claxton, initiated political reforms.

Winning Work

December 12, 1994

About This Series

By Melvin Claxton

Something makes the Virgin Islands uniquely hospitable to crime. What is it? Who's to blame for the prevailing belief that crime is part of the way things are done here? Reporter Melvin Claxton spent six months interviewing hundreds of criminals, victims, law officers and justice officials. He hand-searched thousands of records and worked with project editor J. Lowe Davis to organize the information into this 10-part series.

This investigative series identifies the Virgin Islands people and institutions that make crime easy, rewarding and acceptable here. The series also analyzes what the territory can do about crime.

INDEX

Day 1 - THE PROBLEM: Crime without punishment is the norm in the Virgin Islands.
Day 2 - POLICE: Disorganization, sloppy work and corruption help crime flourish.
Day 3 - EVIDENCE MESS: Police evidence room mistakes allow murderers and rapists to go free.
Day 4 - MISSING DRUGS: Corruption among law officers handling evidence is widespread and deadly.
Day 5 - EVIDENCE GUNS: Police misuse and mishandling of evidence guns jeopardize justice.
Day 6 - GUN TRAFFICKING: Federal and V.I. laws and regulations allow guns to flow into the territory.
Day 7 - JUVENILES: The Virgin Islands makes crime an easy avenue for youths to get what they want.
Day 8 - PROSECUTION: Inexperienced, unprepared prosecutors let violent criminals avoid prison.
Day 9 - CORRECTIONS: The Virgin Islands does not rehabilitate prisoners, so most commit crimes again after they get out.
Day 10 - SOLUTIONS: The territory can take steps to sharply reduce crime. Professionals and readers make recommendations.

December 12, 1994

1 Man, 24 Arrests, 43 Charges...And He Gets 14 Months in Prison

By Melvin Claxton

Winston "Vibert" Tutein is a professional criminal. He keeps getting caught, but that hasn't interfered with his career.

He has been arrested 24 times on 43 charges since 1988.

He has spent less than 14 months in jail.

Had he been convicted on all 43 charges, Tutein, 34, would have faced 285 years in prison. Lenient plea bargains frequently helped him go free, but that wasn't all: Police time and again failed to do basic work on his cases and prosecutors frequently let the cases slide.
In a 1990 plea bargain, for example, prosecutors agreed to drop four charges, including drug possession, in exchange for Tutein pleading guilty to attempted grand larceny. He had faced 20 years. He got six months.

In all, Tutein was sentenced to 22 months, but because he was allowed to serve a four-month term concurrently with another term, his sentence amounted to 18 months. Of that, he served no more than 14 months, less than one-half of 1 percent of the time his charges could have brought him.
These are the charges he faced:

Grand larceny, 9 counts.
Burglary, 6 counts.
Assault and battery, 6 counts.
Contempt of court, 6 counts.
Resisting arrest, 4 counts.
Robbery, 3 counts.
Escape from custody, 2 counts.
Domestic violence, 1 count.
Assaulting a police officer, 1 count.
Drug possession, 1 count.
Possession of stolen property, 1 count.
Parole violation, 1 count.
Damage to a vehicle, 1 count.
Disturbing the peace, 1 count.

Tutein has been out of prison since March and has already been arrested three times.

One case has already been dismissed, and two are pending.
Tutein's experiences with the law and justice illuminate all that's wrong with the system.

Tutein, whose rap sheet covers seven pages, had 12 of his cases quashed because prosecutors in the Attorney General's Office asked the court to dismiss the charges they had filed. Why? Mostly, they say, police failed to provide records and evidence.
Four more of Tutein's cases were dismissed because prosecutors themselves slipped up and failed to file complaints.

Only three of his 24 arrests led to prison sentences -- a total of 18 months. He actually served less than 14 months because in each case he was paroled.
And each time he was paroled, Tutein violated the terms of his release. That produced one charge of parole violation, but he has never been punished for it.

And even after his sixth arrest in one year, 1988, Territorial Court Judge Eileen R. Petersen released him on his own recognizance.

December 12, 1994

Guilty: V.I. Allows Crime to Rage Unchecked

By Melvin Claxton

He looks like your average 19-year-old, but he isn't.

A product of the squalid, crimeridden JFK housing project on St. Croix, he learned about drugs and guns at an early age. He learned too well. By the time he was 16, police say, he had killed one man and helped murder another--both in cold blood.

He has never spent a day in jail.

He has, police complain, literally gotten away with murder.

His case is far from unique in the Virgin Islands, where crime without punishment is the norm, where careers in crime and violence begin early and where law enforcement and justice systems are so inept and irregular that they perpetuate crime.

The two-time killer, whose name cannot be printed because he was a juvenile when he committed the crimes, claimed his first victim in the chill between midnight and dawn on a Sunday in March 1991.

The youth, then 15, hopped out of a pickup truck and tried to rob construction supervisor Randall Eveans, who was walking with a friend near his Mill Harbour home. Eveans backed away, then turned and ran. But the youth, armed with a handgun, chased the 28-year-old man and shot him in the back. Eveans died on the spot.

Police picked up the youth, and eyewitnesses identified him as the gunman. The U.S. Attorney's Office recommended to the Attorney General's Office, which has jurisdiction over juvenile cases, that the youth be tried for murder.

But the Attorney General's Office did not even charge him, so the police sent him home to his grandmother.

By comparison, Errol Nelson, the youth's 16-year-old accomplice in the fatal robbery, was tried as an adult and received a 25-year prison terrn in a combined sentence for his role in that crime and an unrelated murder.

Just six months after the Eveans shooting, the 15-year-old killed again, police say.

This time, the victim was construction worker Reynaldo "Ras Punky" Rivera. He was shot six times and left to die, pouring blood on a deserted Christiansted street on a September night in l991.

The youth was picked up and questioned. Police were certain that he was one of the killers.

Prosecutors did not even charge him. They sent him home to his grandmother--again.

In the three years since the killings, he has kept up his criminal ways. He has been arrested, again and again, on charges of drug possession, car theft and assault ing an officer. But to date, he has done no time. Each time, he has been sent home to his grandmother.

Why? The public is not allowed to know. Darryl Donohue, the assistant attorney general in charge of the St. Croix office, says V.l. privacy laws governing juvenile cases prevent him from talking about why the youth was not prosecuted.

The case of this violent teenager gives a glimpse of a criminal justice system gone awry.

Homicide is the No. 1 cause of death among Virgin Islands males between the ages of 15 and 30.

This year, the territory is averaging a slaying every 10 days. As of today, the Virgin Islands has had a record 32 homicides since Jan. 1.

Each year the killers get younger, the weapons deadlier and the crimes more brutal.

The escalating violence has put the community on edge and threatens the territory's billion dollar tourism industry.

Who and what are to blame?

The easy answer is young thugs, whose numbers are constantly increasing and who are fighting for turf, respect and profits from crimes. But the real answer goes beyond the criminals to:

Ready availability of guns.
Widespread drug use.
Lack of crime prevention programs.
Tainted law enforcement, crippled by a reputation for corruption and incompetence.
Poorly trained prosecutors.
Inefficient and excessively lenient probation system.
Overburdened courts notorious for light sentences.

A six-month Daily News investigation, which included the examination of thousands of pages of court documents and police records as well as scores of interviews with community leaders, law enforcement agents and other government officials, has uncovered serious problems in the way the territory dispenses justice. And those problems are at the heart of the current crime crisis. Among The Daily News' findings:

Dangerous convicts have been released long before completing their sentences, often without proper supervision and despite prison records indicating they were still violent. Some have gone on to commit murder.
More than 21,000 guns--at least two-thirds of them unlicensed--are in the territory, according to law enforcement estimates. Unlicensed weapons range from cheap Saturday night specials to submachine guns and assault rifles, and many are in the hands of ex-convicts, drug dealers and violent, volatile juveniles, police say.
An electronic device for keeping track of violent crime suspects on pretrial release is far from foolproof. The people running the system admit that they have no way of tracking suspects--some of whom are charged with murder--when the suspects leave their area of confinement. And the Territorial Court marshals who monitor the suspects' movements work only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. They don't work nights, they don't work weekends and they don't work holidays.
Mistakes by police or prosecutors allow more than one-third of all the people arrested to have their charges dropped without ever going to trial.
Only 36 percent of all violent crime cases that go to Territorial Court end in convictions.
Plea bargains account for more than four-fifths of all Territorial Court convictions, consistently undermining tough new V.l. laws meant to deter violent criminals. Only 18 percent of violent crime convictions come from judge or jury verdicts; 82 percent come from plea bargains. A plea bargain means that criminals escape punishment for their actual crimes by saying they are guilty of something less serious.
Two-thirds of the people convicted in Territorial Court are not sentenced to do time.
The 32 percent of the violent criminals who are sentenced in Territorial Court to prison time get light sentences; the average is eight months.
Local prisons are so lacking in rehabilitation and education programs that these institutions are revolving doors. Statistics show that 40 percent of V.l. convicts will break the law again within two years of their release and two of every three will eventually end up committing more crimes.
Police officers, sworn to uphold the law, have themselves been linked to criminal activity, including drug dealing, robbery, rape and murder. Since 1985, 20 officers in a force ranging in size from 315 to 518 have been convicted of crimes and scores more have been fired or reprimanded for criminal or unethical behavior.
Fewer than 10 percent of the crimes reported to police are even investigated. Police say they assess a crime's "solvability" to determine whether to spend time on the case. They say that investigating every crime would take time away from their work on serious felonies. But the result is that 90 percent of all crimes reported are never even investigated.
The Police Department has been billed $80,000 so far this year for hospital treatment for people injured by the officers who arrested them. Suspects were treated for everything from gunshot wounds to broken limbs.
The high dropout rate in the territory's schools funnels youths into crime. Only 7 percent of prison inmates in the territory finished high school compared with 66 percent of the adult population who did.
The Virgin Islands does little to steer youth away from criminal activity.

The territory spends more than any state -- $55,000 a year -- to house and feed a juvenile inmate. That is more than 10 times the amount experts say it costs to run preventive programs that would keep them straight.

December 12, 1994

Who's to Blame? Facts and Figures

By Melvin Claxton

A TIME OF CRIME

In the six years from 1989, the Virgin Islands has had:

162 HOMICIDES, an average of one every 13 days. Those include all killings, from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter, and 37 are still unsolved.
501 RAPES reported, an average of one every 4 days.
2,864 ROBBERIES, an average of one every 18 hours.
4,430 ASSAULTS, an average of one every 11 hours.
18,763 BURGLARIES, an average of one every 2 hours.
12,583 LARCENIES, an average of one every 4 hours.
4,648 CAR THEFTS, an average of one every 11 hours.

VICTIMS BY RACE

Virgin Islands slaying victims in the six years from 1989:

Black, 68.9%
Hispanic, 18.1%
White, 12.8%
Other, 0.2%

MOTIVES FOR MURDER

Virgin Islands murder motives in the six years from 1989:

Argument, 34.5%
Robbery, 14.9%
Domestic violence, 9.4%
Drugs, 7.4 %
Gang violence, 4.7%
Revenge, 4.7 %
Eliminating witness, 1.4%
Other, 23%

WHAT'S VIOLENT CRIME?

Under V.I. law, these are classified as violent crimes: murder, manslaughter, robbery, rape, assault, arson, burglary, larceny and breaking and entering.

BY THE NUMBERS

In the Virgin Islands, crime statistics vary dramatically, depending on which agency is counting. V.I. data kept by federal agencies does not match local data because local figures are done by fiscal year and federal figures by calendar year. Further, the Territorial Court and the District Court keep records in different forms. And nobody can easily access full information on a criminal's previous crimes.

December 13, 1994

Corruption and Disorder: Police Department at Core of Crime Crisis

By Melvin Claxton

On June 14, 1993, Maurice Clarke was treated at St. Thomas Hospital for burns on his chest and stomach. That much is certain.

How he got the burns isn't.

Clarke, 42, says he was beaten without cause, doused with alcohol and set on fire.

The men who did it, he says, were four St. Thomas policemen.

The officers tell a different story. They say Clarke caught fire while freebasing.

The officers, Tracy Richardson, Kent Hodge, Richard Valesquez and Francis Brooks, were fired on the orders of Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly after an internal police investigation. They didn't stay fired.

An arbitrator who reviewed their case ordered them reinstated. He said the government had not proved the officers set Clarke on fire.

The U.S. Attorney's Office and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division continue to investigate the case.

The torching is just one in a growing number of brutality and abuse charges leveled at Virgin Islands police. Complaints against officers are filed with the Police Department at a rate of four a month.

Since 1984, 34 officers have faced criminal charges ranging from grand larceny to murder; 20 have been convicted. The department has ranged in size from 315 to 518 officers.

During the same period, the police Internal Affairs Unit, which probes complaints against officers, investigated more than 260 reports of police wrongdoing and found more than 100 had merit.

Bad cops and sloppy police work hurt not only the department's image but also its ability to fight crime, experts say. Public distrust of officers often means that victims and potential witnesses don't come forward and criminals go free.

"Crime has a lot to do with law enforcement," says National Association of Police Departments Chairman Ron Nelson, whose group is reviewing the V.I. Police Department's request for accreditation. "If the department has problems it's certainly going to feed crime."

That's exactly what a six-month Daily News investigation has revealed.

Among the findings:

More than a dozen guns issued to police officers or placed in the Police Department's evidence rooms on St. Thomas and St. Croix have ended up on the streets in the hands of criminals. Two were used in murders.
Even the territory's top cops have been tainted. The last two police commissioners to leave office were forced out by scandals.
The Attorney General's Office is investigating charges that three St. Croix police officers routinely shake down prostitutes from the Dominican Republic, many of whom are illegal aliens. They reportedly extort money from the women by threatening to turn them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The women, prosecutors say, were too frightened at first to complain, but some eventually did.
Arrests are reportedly imminent in an investigation of police officers who were moonlighting on police time. Prosecutors say they are ready to file charges against several officers who collected thousands of dollars for work they did not do. Investigators say the officers would call in to their shift supervisor, tell him they were on duty, then go to their other jobs.
Officers routinely fail to show up for pretrial hearings with prosecutors and for testimony in court. As a result, scores of cases are dismissed or lost. Prosecutors say police supervisors refuse to accept subpoenas for subordinates -- because then they would be responsible for ensuring that the officers show up in court.
A third of all cases filed by the Attorney General's Office are dismissed in court because police fail to give prosecutors arrest reports, prosecutors say.
Evidence in even the territory's most highly publicized cases is routinely mishandled or lost by the police. In the murder case against Roberto "Robbie" Smalls, the Forensics Division initially mislabeled the evidence it sent to the FBI Crime Laboratory in Washington, D.C. The FBI spotted the error and got the evidence on track. Smalls, the first person prosecuted for murder by the Attorney General's Office under its new expanded jurisdiction, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The police have done a poor job of identifying and removing problem cops. Most officers convicted of crimes received favorable performance evaluations at the time they were committing crimes.
Police recruits are evaluated for psychological fitness for the job, but the man who for two years did the evaluations on many recruits, some of whom are now senior officers, was a fraud and was not qualified to do evaluations.
Charges of corruption on the force are so widespread that defense attorneys routinely try to discredit police officers testifying in court. Defense requests for police personnel records occur so frequently that earlier this year Chief District Court Judge Thomas Moore was forced to set rules on how those files can be obtained.
The five-member Internal Affairs Unit, which investigates complaints against officers, is badly understaffed and has a poor track record of following up on reports of corruption on the force. During the recent election campaign, IAU officers had to double as bodyguards for gubernatorial candidates.
Bad cops stay on the force because union contracts make it virtually impossible to fire them.

"We are supposed to be a paramilitary organization," says Police Commissioner Anthon Christian. "But in reality we are management-union based. I would like to see disciplinary procedures removed from the union contract. Unless this is done we won't have the kind of force we all agree we need."

Since taking over as police commissioner last year, Christian has tried to clean house. Initially, he tried to get rid of 20 officers by firing them or forcing them to resign. Now most are back on the force.

"It is very hard to permanently fire officers because of the nature of union contracts," says Assistant Attorney General Elwood York. "This certainly doesn't give the police commissioner a lot of room to work with."

Confidence in the force, on the decline since the 1980s, plummeted even further this year when reports surfaced that police officers were among the suspects in the March 27 murder of traffic cop Steven Hodge. Hodge was gunned down in front of his home by three or four assailants, police say.

The murder is being investigated by the FBI. And except for one police officer assigned to work with the agency, the Police Department is being shut out of the investigation.

"Any other police department in the nation would be clamoring to find the people who killed one of its own," says a federal law enforcement agent assigned to the territory.

"This police department is just sitting back. That's unheard of."

December 13, 1994

Cop Was a 'Walking Time Bomb': Police Force Blind to Bad Tempers, Bad Deeds

By Melvin Claxton

Joe Merchant had a violent temper, but that didn't keep him from getting on the Virgin Islands police force. The 26-year-old former officer, paroled last month after serving two years of a three-year sentence for rape and oppression, was a man with serious problems long before he became a cop, say friends and former co-workers.

But St. Croix police say that Merchant passed the routine background check before he was hired.

Now there is evidence that the background check was far from thorough and that once he was on the force his supervisors failed to notice the telltale signs of a cop in trouble.

Merchant's former co-workers at Carambola Resorts, where he worked as a security guard before joining the police force, say his temper got him into trouble several times on the job. And Kenneth Christian, Merchant's supervisor at the time, says the Police Department never asked him for a reference.

Police counter that when they called Carambola about Merchant, the officials would only say that Merchant worked there and would not answer questions about his performance. The questionnaire that the police sent the hotel, now under new ownership and management, was returned with questions about Merchant's performance and character unanswered, according to Joan Felix, director of the police department's Internal Affairs Unit, which conducted the background check.

"This is typical of the response we get from former employers of applicants for the police force," Felix says. "I think a lot of employers are worried about lawsuits if they say anything negative."

The police never dug deeper to learn more about Merchant, and that, too, is typical.

Merchant's friends and former co-workers paint a picture of a man quick to explode.

A former girlfriend, who asked not to be identified because she does not want her name linked to Merchant's in the public's mind, calls the former cop "a walking time bomb."

And she says his supervisors on the police force knew it but looked the other way.

Merchant broke into her house in 1989 and held a gun to the head of a man she was dating, she says. She had broken up with Merchant about a year earlier, but he refused to accept it, she says.

In August 1989, he drove his squad car to her home. She and her new boyfriend were watching television, and Merchant demanded to be let in. She refused; he kicked down the door and rushed at her date, she recalls.

"Joe had my friend on his knees and had his gun to his head," she says. "It was the most frightening thing I've ever experienced."

But when she reported the incident to the police, they closed ranks around their own, she says. For example:

The investigating officer's report never reached Internal Affairs.
Her telephone call reporting the incident is not on the police blotter, where all such reports are, by department regulation, supposed to be listed.

By February 1991 Merchant, the cop with the boyish grin and the penchant for trouble, was out of control.

That month, while he was out on patrol, he ordered a woman into his marked police car and drove her to a secluded area on Fisher Street, Christiansted. There he forced her to perform oral sex, then left her at the scene.

Six months later, Merchant struck again, but this time he dragged two fellow cops into trouble with him.

On Aug. 27, 1991, Merchant and partners Brian Gilman and Michael Freeman were on a routine patrol when they spotted a couple near an area of Christiansted known for drug activity. The officers claim that when they saw the couple duck behind a parked vehicle, they thought the two were trying to steal the car. The officers stopped and frisked the couple. The officers claimed they found drug paraphernalia and a small amount of crack cocaine.

But instead of immediately arresting the suspects, Merchant took the woman into a nearby abandoned building and gave her a choice: Perform oral sex or be arrested.

The woman later told investigators that she at first refused to perform the sex act, but Merchant slapped her. She gave in.

The woman's companion claims Merchant's fellow officers held him spread-eagled against the police vehicle while Merchant and the woman were in the building. He told investigators that one of the officers struck him in the head with a nightstick when he tried to see what was happening to the woman.

The officers didn't mention the couple or the incident in their nightly report. And an Internal Affairs investigation into the incident started only after an Internal Affairs officer heard rumors about it on the streets, since the couple were afraid to complain.

Gilman and Freeman were both brought up on internal charges. Gilman, a seven-year veteran, faced criminal charges as well.

Under a special agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office, Gilman pleaded guilty to being "an accessory after the fact of oppression." He was given two years' probation and his record was expunged at the end of his probation.

Gilman was no fallen angel. He had twice been sued successfully for using excessive force. In one incident, he broke the arm of a man he was arresting.

Critics of the Police Department say the Merchant case highlights serious shortcomings in how the department monitors its own and allows rogue cops like Merchant and Gilman to undermine the Police Department's fight against crime.

"If there is just one bad cop, there is reason for concern," Felix says.

December 13, 1994

Cops' Psychologist Fooled Everyone

By Melvin Claxton

When government psychologist Julio Rivera said recruit Desmond Crosley and three other police trainees were not psychologically fit for police work, the four took the department to court.

In preparing their case, the officers delved into the background of the man who for three years in the late 1970s evaluated recruits as well as officers under stress.

They made a shocking discovery: The man who called himself Julio Rivera was a fraud.

The real Julio Rivera was thousands of miles away, teaching psychology at Adelphi University in New York.

"I have heard reports that the man was an escaped mental patient," Professor Rivera says.

Rivera says he heard that the impostor was a black man from the South who managed to pose as a Cuban psychologist -- even though he could not speak Spanish.

The man was able to fool V.I. Health Department officials by presenting forged diplomas and credentials. And if, as Rivera suspects, he was an escaped mental patient, he had been on the receiving end of psychological services enough to know the jargon and talk the talk.

The impostor, whose real name remains a mystery to this day, was also able to fool University of the Virgin Islands officials, who hired him as a part-time psychology instructor.

While with the Health Department, the phony psychologist evaluated many officers who are still on the police force.

Trained psychologists point out that the impostor would have missed mental problems a real psychologist might have spotted.

The case of the phony psychologist highlights the slipshod manner in which those who help select and train police officers are chosen.

"It is conceivable that had this man not been discovered, many people totally unsuited for police work would be on the force," Rivera says. "That kind of thing is always worrisome."

December 13, 1994

Widow Deplores Police Attitude: No News, No Comfort After Cop Shot Husband

By Melvin Claxton

The police have told Greta Powell only one thing about the man who drew a gun and shot her husband dead while their 6-year-old son watched: He's a cop.

The police won't tell her his first name or even the zone where he works.

They won't let her look at the investigation reports even though police brass say the investigation cleared the cop of any wrongdoing in the shooting of Spencer Powell, a 36-year-old moving company packer.

Her son Neiko gave a statement to the police but was never asked to testify at the officer's hearing.

Powell says the police didn't even call or come by to notify her that her husband had been shot. She says she heard about it from a woman who brought her son home.

"She came in with Neiko and say Spencer get shoot and he don't look good," recalls Greta Powell, 36. "But no police ever come tell me anything."

At the hospital, she was told her husband was dead, but she received no sympathy from the police. They threatened not to let her see the body unless she quit crying. They called her "stupid" when she became flustered and stumbled over her son's name, recalls Powell, who has 11 children.

"They kill my husband like a dog," Powell says. "And now they want to act like it's my fault."

Police say it is against their policy to make records from internal investigations public. If they had found that the shooting was unwarranted, the officer would have been arrested and charged, they say.

"But based on the statements of witnesses it was determined it was a justified shooting," says Capt. Vincent Georges, who heads the St. Thomas police Investigations Bureau.

"Under those circumstances, I certainly wasn't going to parade the officer in front of the woman just so she could see who he was."

The only police document on the killing Powell says she has been allowed to see is a 29-line preliminary report by the first officer on the scene. The officer based the report on two witnesses to the shooting.

Spencer Powell was shot once in the chest at close range May 29, 1994, in a Frenchtown bar.

The cop who killed Powell is Anthony Hunt, a seven-year police veteran. Police have refused to release details of his record on the force.

He is a former forensics officer now assigned to guard Lt. Gov.-elect Kenneth E. Mapp, according to police officials.

Police say Hunt shot Powell in self-defense after the man attacked him. They say Powell was drunk and armed with a bar stool.

Hunt was off duty and, police say, he was listening to music next door to the bar when he heard shouting. He went into the bar and found Powell and another man in a fight.

Police say Hunt identified himself and forced Powell outside. They say that Powell turned to hit Hunt in the head with the stool and Hunt drew his gun and shot him dead.

Greta Powell says her son's story differs from the police version. Hunt was not next door but was drinking in the bar, the boy told her.

Hunt was never tested to determine his blood-alcohol level at the time of the shooting.

"My son tell me that his daddy and a black man was arguing and his daddy pick a stool above his head and the man shoot him and he fall dead," Greta Powell says.

"I don't know what kind of training that police officer had. He see the young child right there and he still pull his gun and kill my husband."

V.I. police are trained to shoot a human target between shoulder and waist. At the police shooting range, the targets are just heads and torsos.

Greta Powell says she had to take a $1,400 loan from Island Finance to help pay for her husband's funeral. She works two jobs to support herself and the six children still living at home.

"Nobody know how rough it is now Spencer dead," she says.

December 13, 1994

Department Puts Friends and Family First

By Melvin Claxton

The Police Department bends its rules to get family and friends on the force.

For example, the literacy requirement was overlooked when Dalton Carty was made a forensics detective and photographer in the St. Thomas Investigations Bureau.

The Police Department employed Carty for years as a civilian photographer. He was well-liked, and his photo work was respected. His many friends among the officers wanted to get him on the force.

But Carty can barely read or write. High-ranking police officers and a prosecutor confirm that.

Carty dismisses the charge, saying that he just has a bad handwriting and that he can indeed read.

He has a high school diploma. But officers who were at the Police Academy with him say he was allowed to graduate without fulfilling the requirements.

Sgt. Liston Gumbs, supervisor of the Forensics Division, was an academy classmate of Carty's. He confirms that Carty did poorly.

Carty's literacy level was an issue in several investigations. A former forensics supervisor, Sgt. Antoinette Jackson, says Carty did forensics work in rapes and burglaries, but he could not write a report without help.

Carty was the first detective on the scene of the notorious multiple rape of tourists at the Elysian Beach Hotel in 1989. He never filed a written report, just made an oral report. Nobody has ever been charged with the rapes.

Earlier this year Carty was transferred from forensics to the School Safety Division.

December 13, 1994

Tarnished Brass

By Melvin Claxton

Action: Hyndman received a written reprimand from the governor, stating that his actions violated Police Department "policy and procedure, lacked good judgment and jeopardized the integrity of the department and your leadership." Hyndman kept his job, did not have to pay any fine.

Misdeed: After his appointment as police commissioner by Gov. Juan Luis, George A. Farrelly became a target in federal and local probes into an illegal car transshipment scheme. The investigation raised charges that he accepted a Mazda sports car from a local car dealer in return for helping the dealer beat Japanese quotas on cars to the United States.

Action: Fired by his uncle, Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly, after the investigation. He has never faced criminal charges in the case. A Territorial Court judge ordered him to give back the car.

Misdeed: Last year, while Milton A. Frett was V.I. police commissioner, he was accused of pistol-whipping two men at a Savan bar. The Attorney General's Office investigated the charge.

Action: Frett resigned. No charges.

December 13, 1994

Who's to Blame?

By Melvin Claxton

COMPLAINTS

V.I. police give civilian complaints against fellow officers a cool reception, markedly different from the way they treat complaints from civilians about civilians.
The three-page form on which people can file formal complaints against police officers carries an intimidating warning. It says: "Individuals found to have maliciously filed a false complaint shall be prosecuted. Convicted violators shall be fined not more than $500 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." Finally, the person must sign a statement saying, "The complaint as stated is factual, further I am aware of the consequences of filing a false complaint."
By comparison, people wishing to file criminal complaints against civilians simply have to give their version of events to an officer, who writes the information on a one-page report form. There are no warnings about making false reports.
Since Jan 1, 1993, St. Thomas civilians have formally complained only 12 times about the conduct of cops. On St. Croix, the complaints number 55 for the same period.

December 14, 1994

Police Bungle Evidence: Mistakes and Indifference Let Criminals Go Free

By Melvin Claxton

William Fleming knew nothing about his final year of life.

His last conscious moment was at 3:10 a.m. Aug. 14, 1991, when Yul Barry crashed a rock down on his head.

Fleming, a 65-year-old St. Thomas taxi driver and former nightclub singer, suffered such extensive head injuries that he went into a coma immediately and never recovered.

On the day he died, Nov. 17, 1992, police filed first-degree murder charges against Barry.

Barry, a 29-year-old with a string of arrests but no known convictions, admitted hitting Fleming with the rock. But he insisted he struck in self-defense because Fleming was attacking him with a knife in a dark Charlotte Amalie alley near the Labor Department.

Police and federal prosecutors didn't buy that. They believed Barry smashed Fleming's head in because Fleming resisted when Barry tried to rob him.

Fleming suffered a broken nose, a cut under his right eye and injuries to the front and back of his head.

Police investigators found a football-size rock they believed to be the murder weapon and a knife at the crime scene. They put both in the St. Thomas police evidence room.

Both disappeared.

When the case came to trial earlier this year, police couldn't produce either the rock or the knife.

The U.S. Attorney's office was forced to drop the murder charges against Barry.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nelson Jones handled the case. He says that without the murder weapon and the knife he had no choice.

The Barry case is not unique. Missing evidence has forced the dismissal of dozens of cases each year, including murder, rape and armed robbery, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors also complain that the Police Department rarely punishes the officers responsible for evidence room bungling, even though those screw-ups allow murderers, rapists and robbers to go free.

Sometimes missing evidence does resurface -- too late to be of use.

When Aubrey Joshua went on trial for armed bank robbery in January 1991, the U.S. Attorney's Office planned to use photographs of the scene of the Nov. 26, 1990, heist as evidence.

As usual, police investigators photographed the interior and exterior of the Red Hook branch of CoreStates First Pennsylvania Bank to present as evidence at trial. But at the time of Joshua's trial, two months after the robbery, prosecutors still had not received the pictures.

The police said they couldn't find them.

Prosecutors tried the case without the photographs. The jury deadlocked on the bank robbery charges but convicted Joshua on related weapons charges.

Because of his seven previous felony convictions, Joshua was sentenced to 15 years as a habitual offender. He had faced 50 years on the bank robbery and weapons charges.

Police did eventually deliver the pictures -- nearly 11 months after the trial. The officer who delivered the pictures simply told prosecutors he had stumbled across them while looking for other photographs.

Sgt. Liston Gumbs is the man in charge of the St. Thomas Forensics Division. It is his responsibility, say police brass, to supervise evidence room custodians.

He was directly implicated in at least one case where mishandled evidence let the suspects go free. He was never reprimanded or disciplined for his role in that case.

The Police Department's lack of care with evidence extends to mislabeling items taken from crime scenes, improperly handling them and misplacing them.

"If the evidence is not properly marked you may have a serious problem getting it admitted in court," says former Assistant Attorney General Valerie Collanton.

In a recent case, she says, a defense attorney succeeded in blocking the introduction of bullets as evidence because police did not put any identifying marks on the package when they placed it the evidence room. They had simply wrapped the bullets in plastic, unmarked, according to Collanton, who resigned in August from the Attorney General's Office and now works as a public defender.

"Naturally, the defense attorney told the court that there was no way for prosecutors to say with any degree of certainty which case the bullets were connected with," Collanton said. "This has created a real predicament for prosecutors."

Collanton learned that the hard way when she tried 19-year-old Timothy Greenaway for vehicular homicide. She was given the 2-year-old case just five days before trial, she says, and her most crucial piece of evidence was missing.

The police had sent pieces of the windshield from Greenaway's car and patches of the victim's shirt to the FBI for analysis. The FBI found that fiber samples on the windshield matched the shirt. But when trial time arrived, police could not produce the samples.

"Greenaway's case was that it wasn't his car that killed the victim," Collanton recalls. "The FBI results showed conclusively that it was his vehicle."

But when Collanton asked for the tested samples, police at first refused to go into the evidence room. They said that because sewage gases were seeping into it -- the result of a longstanding construction problem -- it was unhealthy for them to enter.

When FBI agents asked to be allowed to look for the samples themselves, police refused, Collanton says.

"They said the FBI agents weren't authorized to enter the room," she says. "Eventually when the agents were allowed in, they said the room was in such disarray that it was impossible to determine if the evidence was in there.

"They also found packages of evidence addressed to the FBI that were never sent."

At least one package contained blood samples in a murder case, a prosecutor says, which eventually had to be discarded because they had not been stored properly.

Collanton won the vehicular homicide case, based on testimony by FBI experts who had analyzed the missing evidence and on eyewitnesses' accounts. But she says the missing samples almost cost her the case.

December 14, 1994

Police Lose Rape Evidence

By Melvin Claxton

Just after midnight Nov. 20, 1992, a frantic 23-year-old woman pounded on the door of a home at Vessup Bay on St. Thomas. She was naked.

Less than an hour before, she had accepted a ride from the Red Hook dock from a powerfully built man who claimed to be a police officer. But instead of taking her home, he drove her to a secluded spot on Vessup Beach. There he stripped, choked, beat, raped and sodomized her before he drove off, leaving her naked and battered.

Doctors at St. Thomas Hospital examined the victim and confirmed she had been raped and sodomized. Following standard practice, the hospital staff prepared a rape kit, which includes swabs from the victim's body cavities and scrapings from beneath her fingernails. They turned the kit over to the police, who were then supposed to send it to the FBI crime laboratory in Washington, D.C., for DNA and other analysis.

To this day the police can't say what they did with the kit.

As a result, charges against 29-year-old Calito Oquendio, the St. John resident the victim identified and accused of the rape, were dropped. He had faced a mandatory minimum of 15 years to life in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors tried until the last minute to get police to locate the kit.

On Feb. 4, 1994, three days before Oquendio's trial was to begin and 15 months after the crime was committed, acting U.S. Attorney Ronald Jennings asked that the case be postponed because "the Virgin Islands Police Department has failed to submit evidence to the FBI Laboratory as previously requested."

By June, when it was clear the kit wouldn't be found, Jennings gave up and asked that the case be dismissed.

Sgt. Antoinette Jackson is the officer who was responsible for sending the evidence to the FBI. She says she sent it.

Jackson had also lost the evidence in two other cases, and after this one she was finally transferred from the evidence room.

Dropping the charges against Oquendio was especially frustrating for prosecutors because they knew he attacked a woman four months after the Vessup Bay rape.

On March 21, 1993, the 250-pound, 6-foot 5-inch Oquendio offered Marva Smith a ride home in his truck. She accepted.

Smith told Oquendio where she lived, but when they got to the house he drove past it. When Smith asked him to stop, Oquendio said he was simply driving to the corner to turn around.

She grew worried and demanded that he stop and let her out. At that point, she told police, Oquendio punched her in the side and tugged her hair, pulling her head down toward the seat.

Oquendio warned her he had a gun under the seat, Smith told police.

Terrified that she would be raped or killed, Smith tore away from Oquendio and flung herself through the window of the moving truck. She fell face first onto the asphalt road.

She broke her jaw, lost all her top teeth and badly cut and bruised her face and legs in the fall.

Smith was able to give police a description of Oquendio and picked him out in a photo lineup.

She also described the truck from which she jumped. Police traced the truck to its owner, who said Oquendio had also borrowed it on the night of the rape.

Several days later, Oquendio was arrested and charged with kidnapping and third-degree assault. He faced a mandatory minimum of 15 years in jail and a $3,000 fine.

But June 15, 1993, as part of an agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office, he pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, and the kidnapping charge was dropped. He received a five-year sentence and was ordered to pay Smith $30,000 in restitution.

He is scheduled to be released in 1998.

December 14, 1994

Evidence Supervisor: 'I Screwed Up'

By Melvin Claxton

When Sgt. Antoinette Jackson joined the Police Department's Forensics Division, the only training she had in criminal investigations was a home-study course that she paid for herself.

Over the next five years, the only training the department provided her was an FBI course in fingerprinting.

But her lack of preparation did not keep the department from promoting her to the No. 2 spot in Forensics.

Eventually, though, her many evidence mistakes and missteps cost her that job. She believes she is the scapegoat and says the real problem is the department's failure to train and teach officers what to do.

Jackson was transferred from Forensics to patrol duty this August after she neglected to impound a car in which the bodies of two murder victims were found. She left the car at the murder scene, Bluebeard's Beach, for three days even though standard procedure was to have the car towed to the police parking lot the same day for detectives to examine it.

That slip-up got Jackson in hot water with her superiors.

"I got a disciplinary letter and a lot of other negative stuff came out of it," Jackson says. "I know I screwed up. It was my responsibility and I accept that."

But that was not her first problem with evidence. According to police and prosecutors, she has made the following mistakes with evidence:

She returned to the owner the only physical evidence in an armed robbery case. Without the evidence, the U.S. Attorney's Office had to drop the charges.
She lost a rape evidence kit in a particularly violent case, her supervisors say. Charges against the man accused of the rape where dropped by the U.S. Attorney's Office when the kit couldn't be found. Jackson says it was her boss, Sgt. Liston Gumbs, who misplaced the kit. Gumbs denies that.
She was so uncooperative that prosecutors in the Attorney General's Office had to threaten to have her arrested if she didn't produce evidence in Romal Colburne's murder trial.
Prosecutors and police especially wanted to put away Colburne, whom they labeled a cold-blooded murderer and strong-arm enforcer for his neighborhood drug gang.
Colburne was on trial for the shooting death of Samuel "Ziah" Clarke. After shooting Clarke -- over $10 that Clarke owed him for drugs -- Colburne went, unperturbed, to Chicken 'n' Ribs for a bite to eat, witnesses said.
Jackson did not produce the evidence until the day of the trial -- and then only after Territorial Court marshals showed up at her home to arrest her.
She mishandled evidence in the high-profile Roberto Smalls case, prosecutors and police brass say. Smalls was charged with shooting Reynaldo James to death Jan. 9, and Jackson was responsible for collecting evidence in that shooting and in the shooting death of Malik Meyers, 15. Not only did the two murders happen the same day, but they also were in the same vicinity. Jackson put the evidence in the two cases together as though they were from one case. She says she thought Robbie Smalls was involved in both killings. She says Gumbs, her supervisor, knew she was doing this and gave his OK.

Gumbs says he told Jackson the opposite: Treat the cases separately.

Jackson says: "I spoke with investigators from Major Crime. Nobody ever told me it was two different cases. All I was hearing was, 'You send the case off yet?'"

The FBI asked not once, not twice, but three times before Jackson got it right.

Jackson says she had to go through the entire evidence list and separate it before sending the information back to the FBI.

Smalls was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

December 14, 1994

Evidence is Gone, So Is the Case: Cops Blow Chance to Send Baby-Beater Back to Jail

By Melvin Claxton

When federal prosecutors charged Joel Fahie with pulling off an armed robbery July 22, 1993, they had a strong case. Just hours after the robbery, they found a wallet belonging to one of the victims. It was inside a stolen car in which Fahie was riding.

But that wasn't all: One of the victims recognized Fahie, an ex-convict, and ID'd him to the police.

Kenneth Joseph, who worked as a prison guard, had been playing cards with nine other men outside Al McBean Center in Tutu when three masked men drove up and robbed them. Joseph recognized the voice behind one of the masks as Fahie's, and he notified the police as soon as the robbers sped away.

Police and prosecutors placed particular weight on Joseph's identification of Fahie because Joseph worked at the prison when Fahie was there in 1992, serving a one-year sentence for assault.

But Fahie was never convicted of robbing Joseph and the other card players.

Police blunders and mishandling of crucial evidence left prosecutors with no choice but to drop all charges against Fahie, who has a long history of violent crime.

"We had serious evidential problems with that case," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Via.

"Not only could important evidence not be found, but police had given evidence back prior to trial."

For example, police gave the wallet -- the only piece of evidence linking Fahie to the crime scene -- to the victim instead of keeping it in the evidence room.

And they had no idea what they did with the photographs they took of the wallet when they found it in the car.

An internal police investigation revealed that Sgt. Antoinette Jackson, a supervisor in the Forensics Division, gave the wallet to Judith Savage, a police officer, to return to its owner, Joel George. George is Savage's brother.

Prosecutors say by the time the case came to trial, George, who had more than one wallet, couldn't say for sure which was the one the robbers had taken.

So the case rested solely on Joseph's identification of Fahie through a stocking mask during the 2-minute robbery.

Prosecutors thought that was not enough.

Jackson says that the decision to give George the wallet was hers and that she did so because he needed it.

"He had his ID and things he would need for work and his driver's license and stuff," Jackson says. "Since pictures were taken, it was given back."

But she says she had nothing to do with the missing photographs or negatives.

"The negatives were in a bin in Nisky Center where you process people as they come in for fingerprints," Jackson says. She says she has no idea who could have taken them.

Capt. Vincent Georges, Investigations Bureau commander, defended the Police Department's actions in the Fahie case. He said it was not unusual for the department to return evidence before a trial once the evidence had been photographed.

Not so, says Via.

"The decision to return any evidence is a prosecutor's decision, not that of the police," Via says.

"And it would seem to make sense that you would be sure you had the pictures before the wallet was returned."

Before the Tutu armed robbery, Fahie was convicted, in a plea bargain, of third-degree assault. He got a 60-day suspended sentence and a year's probation.

Before that, Fahie had three violent-crime convictions in New York, including one for assaulting a police officer.

But none of his other crimes compared to the one on the evening of April 26, 1991. That night, a hysterical Sabrina Arnette ran into the Charlotte Amalie police station screaming that her boyfriend, Joel Fahie, was beating her 2-year-old baby daughter to death.

Police rushed to the Fahie home and found the baby, Shanaquinn Arnette, dead. She was lying face down on the floor. She had welts and bruises and deep burns on her back and over most of the rest of her tiny body, according to an officer at the scene.

The autopsy found that the fatty tissue on the child's buttocks was fried, as if she had been placed in a frying pan.

The autopsy also discovered old injuries, indicating that the baby had been beaten and burned earlier, too.

Police charged Fahie with first-degree murder.

But the autopsy also found that the cause of death was suffocation, not beating. The coroner said it appeared that someone held a hand over the child's face until she stopped breathing.

Fahie admitted he hit the baby but insisted he did not kill her. Because the baby's mother, the prosecution's main witness, had a history of mental problems, prosecutors weren't sure they could make the murder charge against Fahie stick.

At the time, the territory had no laws specifically pertaining to child abuse, so Fahie was charged with third-degree assault on the baby. He pleaded guilty to that charge and served eight months of a one-year sentence.

The case prompted the Legislature to change V.I. criminal law to include child abuse. Had Fahie been tried under the new law, he would have faced 20 years in prison.

But now, despite his violent past and despite what looked like an open-and-shut armed robbery case, Fahie remains free -- because those charged with helping to keep him off the streets failed to do so.

December 14, 1995

Quotes

By Staff

The FBI agents weren't authorized to enter the (evidence) room.
Eventually when the agents were allowed in, they said the room was in such disarray that it was impossible to determine if the evidence was in there. They also found packages of evidence addressed to the FBI that were never sent.
-- Valerie Collanton
former Assistant Attorney General

I am appalled.
-- Gerald Arenberg
Executive director of the National Association of Police Chiefs

The Police Department's control over confiscated property, including items held for evidentiary purposes, was inadequate.
Specifically, property storage areas were in disarray and were not adequately secured from unauthorized access, property records were incomplete and inaccurate, and confiscated property was not always transferred to property clerks by police officers. Items sent to the Forensics Division for analysis were also not sufficiently controlled or protected.
-- Inspector General's report
January 1994

Various police personnel who were not authorized to enter the property room had access to the key.
-- Inspector General's report
January 1994

December 14, 1994

Who's to Blame? What is Forensics?

By Melvin Claxton

Forensics is the application of scientific knowledge to crime investigations.

THE RIGHT WAY

Standard procedures, as per the National Association of Police Chiefs and the FBI:

Place evidence in sealed containers to minimize contamination. Record time and date evidence is collected and initial container.
Give evidence to evidence room custodian or supervisor and get receipt for it.
Custodian must precisely catalogue each item, give it an ID number, record the number and place the item in the evidence room.
Clothing wet from blood or other fluids must be air-dried in well-ventilated, secure area.
Forensic experts who take evidence to work with it must sign for it with the evidence room custodian. When the evidence is brought back to the evidence room the custodian must sign for it.
Police officers or forensic detectives who enter evidence room must always be accompanied by custodian.

THE WRONG WAY

Each detective in the V.I. Police Department has an area of the evidence room and freely goes in and out. They are individually responsible for keeping track of and accounting for their own cases' evidence.
No custodian keeps track or logs in entries and exits.
Wet evidence clothing is hung in a poorly ventilated bathroom in the police station.
In 30 of 100 cases in the Virgin Islands reviewed by the Inspector General, evidence including cash, weapons, narcotics and audio-visual equipment could not be located or accounted for and 34 firearms sent to Forensics for analysis were missing.

December 15, 2015

An Officer Assassinated: Slaying Blemishes V.I. Law Enforcement

By Melvin Claxton

Outside their Lindbergh Bay home, Steven Hodge's parents have put a memorial sign on the fence above the spot where unknown killers gunned down their son.

It was nearing midnight on Saturday, March 26, and traffic cop Steven Hodge was just getting home from work after an uneventful shift. He had plans to go fishing in his boat in the morning. But something else was uppermost in his mind.

Just two days earlier, he'd made an appointment with a top prosecutor in the Attorney General's Office to talk about what was troubling him. He'd emphasized to the prosecutor that he needed to talk to a person with highest authority --"the engine, not the engineers," the prosecutor recalls Hodge saying.

Their meeting was to be on Tuesday.

Two weeks before setting up the meeting, Hodge confided to a fellow officer that he had witnessed "something" near Water Island that left him so shook up he nearly ran his boat aground. The officer, who has been interviewed by the FBI, says Hodge promised to give her more details later.

He never got the chance.

That Saturday night in late March, Hodge quietly let himself into the Lindbergh Bay home he shared with his parents, careful as always to avoid disturbing anyone. In his room, he found his mother listening to the radio; she'd come in there because his father was asleep and she didn't want the noise to wake him.

They chatted awhile, about nothing in particular, then she went to her room. As Hodge began to undress, he turned the television to his favorite channel -- Court TV.

Hodge, 26, followed his nightly routine. He put his uniform and socks in a nearby hamper, his shoes at the foot of his bed and his service revolver on the dresser. It was the last time he would touch his gun.

He pulled on a pair of shorts that he used as pajamas and settled into his bed. Just then he heard someone in the front yard call his name.

Not his real name, but "Scooby," a nickname friends on the force gave him because his big, friendly grin reminded them of the cartoon character Scooby Doo.

Hodge, shoeless and dressed only in his shorts, opened the front door and stepped outside. Eight long strides took him through the gate and into the street.

In the darkness assassins waited. The 6-foot-5 cop walked straight into a hail of gunfire.

He was hit 21 times. One bullet, from a shotgun fired at close range, left a two-inch hole below his armpit. He died instantly.

His assailants -- investigators believe there were three or four --used at least three types of weapons. Police found shell casings for a .380 automatic, a 9 mm pistol and a shotgun.

At first, investigators assumed the murder was an act of revenge by criminals with a grudge against him. Soon, though, the finger of guilt pointed toward the Police Department itself.

"My gut feeling is that cops were involved," says Police Commissioner Anthon Christian.

That possibility led Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly to ask the FBI to take over the investigation.

FBI agents have been on the case since April. As always, their policy is to say nothing publicly about what they are doing. Except for one officer assigned as a liaison between the Police Department and the FBI, no local officers are privy to information about the investigation.

Privately, investigators confirm that the FBI has uncovered a possible motive: Hodge was killed to keep him from talking about the April 23, 1993, theft of more than 20 pounds of cocaine from the crime lab, which was then under the Attorney General's Office.

The FBI, which was also investigating the cocaine disappearance, recently announced it did not have enough evidence to make an arrest in that case and thus was dropping that investigation. The U.S. Attorney's Office then announced it would not prosecute.

But in dropping the case, the U.S. attorney did not follow usual procedures.

"When the U.S. Attorney's Office decides not to prosecute, they usually turn over their case file," says a V.I. assistant Attorney General. "This time they simply sent a two-paragraph letter saying they weren't going to prosecute."

The case file would contain the investigation findings, including leads and names of informants and suspects.

Now, the search for clues in the Hodge murder has hit a major snag. Investigators can't find Hodge's notes.

The people closest to Hodge, personally and professionally, say he was a meticulous note keeper. He jotted down everything -- dates, facts, appointments, observations, ideas -- yet those notes have vanished. Investigators say they have searched long and hard but have turned up nothing.

They believe it is likely that the missing notes hold the answer to why the six-year police veteran was assassinated -- and to who did it.

December 15, 1994

Who's to Blame? Facts and Figures

By Melvin Claxton

WHAT'S A KILO?

Kilo is short for kilogram, equivalent to 2.2 pounds.

WHAT'S A KILO WORTH?

When law enforcement agents seize drugs, they estimate the value to a dealer. The current value of drugs, depending on purity:

Cocaine $10,500 to $40,000 a kilo.
Heroin $100,000 to $250,000 a kilo.
Marijuana $285 to $3,500 a pound.

WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?

Two federal agencies, Customs and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and one V.I. agency, the Narcotics Strike Force, are the ones that operate busts resulting in seizures of large quantities of drugs.
Customs and the V.I. agents are, by policy, supposed to turn over the drugs to the DEA.
The DEA keeps no more than 40 pounds for use at trial; it destroys the rest.
The DEA keeps drugs needed for trial in safes or well-secured areas. After trial, it destroys the drugs.
The V.I. police and Strike Force do not follow a consistent procedure for handling, storing or turning over control of drugs.

Antiguan drug dealer Mike Tyrell is soured on the Virgin Islands.

Tyrell says that in the late 1980s, he shipped 1,200 pounds of marijuana, which Narcotics Strike Force agents confiscated on the beach. They arrested the crewman -- and charged him with possession of 500 pounds of marijuana.

Tyrell still wants to know what the agents did with his other 700 pounds.

"The Virgin Islands is one of the most dishonest places in the world," he complains.

"Agents on the Strike Force are pretty much on their own. They do pretty much what they please."
Fitzroy Brann, ex-agent for Narcotics Strike Force

RIGHT & WRONG

Police Field Manual regulations require that illegal drugs or narcotics be weighed before being submitted to the Crime Laboratory in order to establish control over the quantities submitted. However, our comparison of three arrest records and of forensic examination reports disclosed inconsistencies in the method used to measure and account for the substances submitted for analysis.
Inspector General's report
January 1994

THE WRONG WAY

Police Sgt. Liston Gumbs shows the exact spot inside the crime lab where $1 million worth of confiscated cocaine was left out on the floor, unattended, overnight. The cocaine vanished.

December 15, 1994

The Cocaine Vanishes

By Melvin Claxton

The mystery baffles even the FBI: How did 20 pounds of cocaine disappear from the Justice Department crime lab without a trace?

The lab, now used by the police Forensics Division, is just south of Vendors Plaza. It is on the corner of Veterans Drive and Talbod Street, one of the busiest intersections in Charlotte Amalie.

The building has two exits; one door opens onto the sidewalk facing Vendors Plaza, the other is sealed shut. The windows are protected by wrought-iron burglar bars.

The building had a silent alarm monitored by ADT Security Systems, just three blocks away.

On the night of the theft in April 1993, the alarm never went off, say sources close to the investigation.

Police who probed the theft of the cocaine found no signs of forced entry and no clues.

ADT personnel will not comment on the matter. But sources say the company's records have been subpoenaed by the FBI.

Sources close to the case say the alarm did not malfunction. It did not ring because someone turned it off.

The cocaine, valued at more than $1 million, was supposed to be in a 6-by-4-foot steel safe with a 10-inch thick, solid steel door.

It wasn't.

It was on the floor.

The Narcotics Strike Force had seized the cocaine after drug traffickers tried to air-drop it to cohorts waiting off the St. Thomas shores. The cocaine was supposed to be held as evidence in an ongoing drug investigation, federal investigators say. At the time the cocaine was stolen, they had identified possible targets.

Why was such a large quantity of cocaine, so important to an investigation, left out in the open in an unsecured area?

Nobody's saying.

The three people who worked at the crime lab at the time have refused to publicly discuss the theft. All three are believed to have had the code to turn off the alarm and keys to the building.

Who else had the code and keys?

Nobody's saying.

Zolly White was the crime lab technician. Since the theft, he and his family have moved to Tallahassee, Fla. He refuses to comment on the missing cocaine.

John Richards, who managed the lab, isn't talking.

The lab's secretary, Lorraine Anim, who now works with the Attorney General's Office, also isn't talking.

Justice Department sources say the cocaine was in the lab for testing. But FBI spokesman Bill Carter says only a tiny sample from each bag of cocaine would have been needed for such tests. The rest, Carter says, should have been locked away in a secured area or turned over to the federal authorities.

Breaches in security in keeping evidence in the territory are commonplace and have weakened dozens of cases, letting countless criminals go free.

The Justice Department has since turned the crime lab over to the police. But that department's record when it comes to keeping evidence is no better.

Auditors for the Interior Department's Inspector General's Office issued a report this year that was highly critical of how the Police Department keeps its evidence.

"Property storage areas were in disarray and not adequately secured from unauthorized access, property records were incomplete and inaccurate," the report said.

The report, released in January, recommended much tighter controls over evidence. Otherwise, auditors said, "the various weaknesses in the Police Department's control of confiscated property could result in the inability to successfully prosecute accused criminals because of the loss or damage of items needed for evidentiary purposes."

December 15, 1994

Agents of Corruption

By Melvin Claxton

Kelvin "Fungi" Derricks (right) and Carl "Monkey" Charleswell have criminal records. They have something else in common: They are agents in the V.I. Narcotics Strike Force, the territory's top drug-fighting squad.

It is an organization plagued with problems:

Seven of the 10 current Strike Force agents have been investigated or targeted in federal sting operations.
Two former members -- one of them the squad's acting director -- were convicted of crimes while they were on the Strike Force. One has served time in a federal prison.
Several current members are being questioned in connection with the March 27 murder of St. Thomas Police Officer Steven Hodge. Federal law enforcement officers believe Hodge was killed because he knew who took $1 million worth of cocaine from the Justice Department's crime lab in 1993.
Two agents are now under investigation for shaking down a St. Thomas man and robbing him at gunpoint of $460.
The U.S. Attorney's Office now refuses to prosecute cases presented by the Strike Force unless some other agency was in on the initial investigation.

The Strike Force's reputation is so tarnished that in 1991 Police Commissioner Milton A. Frett sent a memo to police officers instructing them not to turn over any seized drugs to that force.

And the Attorney General's Office has told the Strike Force's top brass that its prosecutors will not work with agents on drug busts unless those agents allow themselves to be wired for sound.

Strike Force agents have refused, according to the AG's Office.

Unlike police and other law enforcement officials, Strike Force agents have no training program. The agency has tried to compensate for this by hiring former law enforcement officials -- but with little or no regard to credentials or integrity.

Fitzroy "Lobo" Brann, a former member of the Strike Force now living in Atlanta, recently served time for embezzling money from the agency. He blames poor training and lack of supervision for his and the Strike Force's problems.

Brann, who went from Kentucky Fried Chicken cook to Strike Force agent, says the only formal training he received -- 18 weeks at the Police Academy -- did not come until he had been on the force nearly two years.

"When I became a member of the Strike Force, they gave me a gun and put me on the streets," Brann says. "Nobody told me about things like due process or civil rights."

Brann, who was convicted in 1991 of stealing money given to him for a sting operation, believes the Strike Force should be taken out of the Governor's Office and placed under the police. He says this would provide the supervision and controls needed to keep agents in check.

"If there had been greater controls in the office I would not have found myself in a position that I did," Brann says.

"I am not making excuses for my actions, but agents on the Strike Force are pretty much on their own. They do pretty much what they please."

Gaylord Sprauve, Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly's drug policy adviser, runs the Strike Force. He says he has told the governor that it should be disbanded.

He says the police should create their own drugs unit. And he says he would recommend only two Strike Force agents for that unit.

He would not name the two.

Sprauve says he has made several attempts to clean up the Strike Force. Each time, arbitrators put the agents back on the force.

Sprauve blames the Strike Force's problems on local laws and union contracts that prevent him from firing corrupt agents.

"The system does not allow me to do what I have to do," he says.

The Strike Force was created in the 1970s to spearhead the territory's fight against drugs. The Police Department and the Attorney General's Office shared jurisdiction over it. Later, the force was put first under one department and then the other. In 1988, Farrelly placed the force under the Governor's Office.

In every instance it has been a failure.

December 15, 1994

Parade of Shame

By Melvin Claxton

Kelvin 'Fungi' Derricks

Joined the Strike Force: Nov. 29, 1990.

Crime: On Sept. 1, 1984, Derricks, 39, forced a waitress at the Green House Bar and Restaurant to have sex with him under threat of arrest after he planted a marijuana cigarette in her car. He was a police officer at the time.

Legal action: On Dec. 5, 1984, Derricks was convicted of "oppression," a misdemeanor, for misusing his police powers. He also faced charges of kidnapping and solicitation by a public officer. Kidnapping charge was dropped at trial; jury acquitted him on solicitation charge. Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the oppression conviction.

Punishment: One-year suspended sentence and five years' supervised probation. District Court Judge Almeric Christian terminated the supervised probation after 2 years, for good behavior.

Status: Strike Force agent.

George Osborne

Joined the Strike Force: Sept. 15, 1986.

Internal investigation: On Nov. 4, 1988, Osborne, 33, was entertaining a woman in a room at the Strike Force office in the Toro Building on St. Croix when someone entered the office and managed to steal a 500-pound safe containing $5,000 in cash, jewelry and confidential documents, including the IDs of informants.

Legal action: None. Osborne told police investigators that he had heard nothing. Police found the glass door of the office broken, giving the appearance that the thieves gained entry that way. But the investigators also observed that the pieces of broken glass were outside, not inside, the building.

The safe was found months later, abandoned in an open field near Christiansted.

Punishment: Suspended for 18 months with pay. His salary was $19,000 a year. He collected nearly $30,000 before he was put back on the force.

Status: Osborne, Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly's former son-in-law, is now an agent in the St. Croix office of the Strike Force.

Fitzroy 'Lobo' Brann

Joined the Strike Force: Aug. 17, 1986.

Crime: Embezzling $18,000 of Strike Force money. Brann, 31, had been given the money to buy drugs in a sting operation but pocketed it.

Legal action: Arrested in March 1991 and charged with embezzlement.

Punishment: Convicted Sept. 9, 1991. Served 10 months in a federal prison.

Status: Moved to Atlanta.

Carl 'Monkey' Charleswell

Joined the Strike Force: Feb. 2, 1984.

Crime: On June 2, 1990, Charleswell, 40, shot at an off-duty police officer outside the Chart House restaurant during an argument over a woman.

Legal action: Pleaded guilty in June 1990 to three misdemeanors.

Punishment: Territorial Court Judge Ive A. Swan imposed a 90-day suspended sentence.

Status: On paid administrative leave since October 1991 while Strike Force officials try to fire him. He still collects paychecks every two weeks. To date, he has collected nearly $90,000 for doing nothing.

Jose Juan Torres

Joined the Strike Force: Sept. 26, 1983.

Crime: On Dec. 5, 1990, Torres, 44, acting Strike Force director, tried to protect a drug dealer by lying to U.S. Customs agents and V.I. police officers about the dealer's whereabouts.

Legal action: Charged with obstructing justice.

Punishment: In plea bargain, Torres pleaded guilty to interfering with an officer, a misdemeanor. He agreed to leave the NSF and promised never to seek employment as a law enforcement officer in the territory. Sentenced to one year supervised probation, 200 hours community service. By entering the plea, Torres avoided possible 10-year prison term and $250,000 fine that the original charges carried.

Status: He is now a security guard on St. Thomas.

December 16, 1994

Cop Guns for Private Users

By Melvin Claxton

When former Police Commissioner George A. Farrelly -- Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly's nephew -- needed to borrow some extra guns for his private security firm, he knew where he could get them: the V.I. Police Department.

Lt. Howard Daniels, the police training officer, went to the department's St. Croix armory in May 1991 and got four .38-caliber six-shot revolvers for Farrelly's company to use. Daniels was in charge of the armory, but he was not authorized to let anyone outside the department take guns, says Police Commissioner Anthon Christian.

Top police brass say they knew nothing about the loan until one of the guns turned up five months later -- in the hands of a man with a criminal record.

The man, Ezekiel Harris, 25, was picked up by police Oct. 10, 1991, on gun possession charges. Police arrested Harris after an officer looked inside a parked Mitsubishi Mirage in the Mon Bijou area and spotted the gun on the front seat. Harris, who was standing nearby, saw the officer and started to walk away. The officer caught him and, police say, he then admitted he was the driver.

Firearms specialist Sgt. Gregory Bennerson ran a trace on the weapon. The trace showed it to be one of the four lent to Farrelly.

Bennerson says his superiors showed little interest in the case when he reported where the gun came from.

"We were all irritable as hell," Bennerson recalls. "Nobody seemed to care and the explanation we were given for the guns being loaned didn't make sense."

Police believed Harris, who had a previous arrest on larceny charges, stole the gun two days earlier from a vehicle driven by a female security guard who worked for GAF, Farrelly's firm. The vehicle was parked near the Hess container port.

Harris pleaded guilty June 22, 1993, to gun possession charges. He was never charged with the theft of the gun. A police probe revealed that a GAF official gave the gun to the guard, whose name has been withheld by police, to use on the job --even though she was not licensed to carry a gun.

Illegal possession of a firearm carries a minimum six-month sentence.

The police never took any action against the guard or her boss. A gun possession charge against Harris was dropped.

And it was only last year, after an Interior Department Inspector General's audit of the Police Department began, that Police Commissioner Anthon Christian reprimanded Daniels for taking the guns out of the police armory and giving them to someone outside the department.

The audit report recommended that the case be turned over to the Attorney General's Office to determine whether criminal charges should be filed against Daniels, the security guard and Farrelly and his GAF managers.

But Joann Francis, spokeswoman for the Attorney General's Office, says the Police Department never told her office about the case.

The incident is not an isolated example of how the V.I. Police Department fails to keep track of weapons it is supposed to have under its control.

Since 1991, four guns issued to St. Thomas police officers have been used in crimes, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent Jim McCall, who traced the weapons for the police.

Of the four guns, only one had been reported missing by the officer who was supposed to have it.

McCall says one of the guns was used in a murder in 1991 or 1992. He doesn't recall the name of the murdered person.

Police officials say they have no records showing that a gun issued to an officer was used in a homicide.

"I can't recall any incidents in which a stolen police gun was used in a homicide," says former St. Thomas Police Chief Raymond L. Hyndman. "That's something we would take very seriously."

But the incident was mentioned in the Inspector General's report -- a report the police have had for a year.

Inspector General's investigators found the department was either negligent or careless in record-keeping regarding guns.

The report said that between 1991 and 1992 nine guns were reported stolen or lost by officers. One weapon later turned up in police storage.

The report added that replacement guns were issued "without documentation disclosing the circumstances under which the originally issued weapons had been lost or stolen."

December 16, 1994

Cops and Robbers

By Melvin Claxton

The Police Department's lax control over guns is an old and enduring problem. Somebody managed to steal five shotguns right out of the Christiansted police station in 1986.

The shotguns were stored in a gun rack behind the front desk. Police procedure was to keep them secured with a chain through their trigger guards, with locks at each end. The keys were kept in a drawer at the desk.

Police investigators believe the guns were taken while the desk officer went to the bathroom.

To reach the guns, a thief had to enter the station, walk 30 feet to his left, pass through a gate, then walk another 30 feet to his right.

Then he would have to find the key, unlock the chain, remove the guns, retrace his steps with five shotguns in hand and escape onto one of the busiest streets in Christiansted.

Or the thief had to have had help from a police officer.

The police investigation of the incident never identified a culprit.

Carlton Wakefield, the officer in charge at the time the guns were stolen, was reprimanded and has since retired from the department.

The shotguns turned up in the cemetery behind the station, hidden apparently for pickup later.

December 16, 1994

Doing It Wrong

By Melvin Claxton

The Interior Department's Inspector General this year criticized the V.I. Police Department and its officers for failing to safeguard the guns assigned to them or placed in their custody. The report said, in part:

The department on St. Thomas did not perform inventories of service firearms for 11 years.
The department could not account for 123 of the 635 9 mm handguns purchased in 1990 and 1991 and 9 of the 51 .357 magnum revolvers purchased in 1987.
A purchase order and invoice for 18 9 mm handguns included 12 that were not listed on the department's inventory records.
The department purchased 635 9 mm handguns in 1990 and 1991 but could not locate or account for 29 of the guns assigned to St. Thomas-St. John and could not locate 94 of the handguns assigned to St. Croix.
The department purchased 51 high-power .357 magnum revolvers in 1987. However, department officials could not provide documents concerning the purchase or current distribution of those revolvers, and the guns were not in the department's inventory records.

"In our opinion the frequent occurence of lost or stolen firearms indicated that sufficient efforts were not being made to properly secure and safeguard service firearms."

Inspector General's 1994 report

"The department did not have any policy requiring that disciplinary actions be taken against officers or that officers reimburse the department for the cost of firearms lost or stolen."

December 16, 1994

Guns Go In, Guns Go Out: Police Don't Safeguard Firearms in Their Custody

By Melvin Claxton

When traffic cop Steven Hodge saw Douglas Daniel driving without headlights after sunset, he signaled Daniel to pull over. It seemed to be just a routine incident on that February night in 1993.

It wasn't.

Daniel, 25, didn't stop. Instead, he led Hodge on a high-speed chase through Charlotte Amalie; it ended only when he ran a red light and hit another car.

Hodge then searched Daniel's Toyota Tercel. He spotted the butt of a 9 mm pistol under the driver's seat. Police ran a records check on the gun and got a surprise: It was the same weapon they had taken off a suspect a month earlier and placed in the St. Thomas police evidence room.

The gun had never been reported missing from the evidence room.

Investigators were even more surprised when they found out how Daniel, a plumber's assistant with an arrest record, got the gun.

Daniel was allowed unsupervised access to the evidence room to fix a leaking sewage pipe. While there, he helped himself to the gun.

He walked out with it, unnoticed. Nobody paid any attention to his coming and going.

That room in which Daniel freely moved about was the place where police held the evidence for hundreds of upcoming trials -- including dozens of homicide cases.

Law enforcement experts say that unauthorized access to evidence can easily affect the outcome of trials.

"Beyond the criminal act of the gun theft, this must surely be considered a major breach of security," says National Police Accreditation Board Chairman Ron Nelson, whose agency is evaluating the V.I. Police Department's request for accreditation -- a request that so far hasn't been approved.

"There was the potential for contamination of other evidence in the property room," Nelson says.

Daniel was convicted in April -- of traffic violations and illegal possession of a weapon -- and sentenced to six months in prison. Police never charged him with theft of the gun; the incident was swept under the departmental rug.

Lt. Elton Lewis, then head of the Police Department's Insular Affairs Unit, was in charge of the internal probe into how the gun left the evidence room. He recalls his findings as "troubling."

The Insular Affairs Unit recommended stiff disciplinary penalties against the officers in charge of the evidence room at the time -- but no action was taken, according to a former high-ranking officer in the unit.

Sgt. Liston Gumbs, who heads the Forensics Division and is the evidence room supervisor, says only that the officers assigned to the room "showed bad judgment." He says he wasn't on duty at the time and doesn't recall who was.

Police Commissioner Anthon Christian called the officers' actions "plain carelessness."

Careless and sloppy evidence-keeping nearly let convicted felon Roland Jones walk. Jones is serving a 10-year sentence in a federal prison for robbery, assault and gun possession.

Jones, who had a previous grand larceny conviction, nearly got off when police couldn't find the two guns seized from him at the time of his arrest.

Jones had robbed a Hospital Ground man of $600 at gunpoint. The victim called the police, but they never came.

So the victim, who had been hanging his mother's laundry at the time he was robbed, stormed down to the police station to make a report and complain about poor police service.

He got a big surprise. The man who had robbed him was right there, being booked -- but on a different charge.

"That's him! That's the man who robbed me!" the victim cried.

Police had picked up Jones on gun possession charges after stopping a car in which Jones and three other men were riding.

But when prosecutors asked police to produce the guns at trial, they could not. And although police knew the date of the trial weeks in advance, they made no effort to produce the weapons, prosecutors say.

In fact, it was only after a special search -- on the weekend before the case was to begin -- that Gumbs, the man in charge of Forensics and evidence, found the guns.

And evidence room blunders nearly allowed Mitchell "Sebo" Smalls -- described by an assistant U.S. attorney as one of the territory's biggest drug dealers -- to beat a gun rap in May.

Smalls was charged with gun possession in an Oct. 7, 1992, incident. Police Officer Roy Moorhead had chased Smalls down and recovered the gun that Smalls tossed into a pile of trash.

But even though police wanted Smalls behind bars and had even poked through trash and muck to find the weapon he threw away, they misplaced it.

Up to the very day of Smalls' trial, St. Thomas evidence room officers could not locate the .38-caliber revolver.

"We had to get the police chief (Raymond L. Hyndman) himself involved before the gun was found," says Valerie Collanton, a former assistant attorney general. "They couldn't find the gun, and this was a guy the police wanted off the streets."

Theft and mishandling of guns in the police evidence room are enduring problems. The Interior Department Inspector General's audit in January found that 34 weapons sent to the Forensics Division for analysis were missing.

At least two weapons that should have been in the room were found in the possession of criminals on the street.

"Because the control over confiscated property was lax, hundreds of items, including firearms, audiovisual equipment, cash, narcotics and other evidentiary material were subject to loss or theft," the Inspector General's report said.

"For example, in 30 of the 100 cases reviewed, confiscated property could not be located or accounted for."

One leading prosecutor in the Attorney General's Office, who asked not to be named for fear of professional reprisals, called the evidence room "a black hole into which evidence disappears and rarely returns."

For example, he said, he went to the room in search of evidence for one of his cases, evidence that should have been clearly marked, tagged and securely put away. But the woman working at the evidence room could not find it. She kept showing him the wrong items.

"It was like a guessing game. The lady was asking, 'Is this your evidence or is this it?' She really had no idea."

December 16, 1994

The Lethal Weapon

By Melvin Claxton

The middle-aged Dominican woman's nightmares are so terrifying she can barely talk about them -- or about the blood bath on St. Croix that triggered them.

Even now, 22 years later, she retains clear, violent images of the tall, thin Ishmael LaBeet standing in the entrance to Fountain Valley Golf Club, his machine gun blazing -- a machine gun with a chilling secret that would be shielded from the public for 22 years.

ISHMAEL LABEET

1973 -- Convicted of Fountain Valley massacre.
1985 -- Hijacked airliner to Cuba when he was being transferred to mainland prison.
1994 -- Whereabouts unknown; last reorted seen in Cuba.

Even in sleep, the woman sees LaBeet's four accomplices, armed with shotguns and automatic pistols, randomly firing into guests and resort staffers lined up for a roast beef lunch buffet.

One of the survivors of the Fountain Valley massacre, the woman remembers all too vividly seeing eight people murdered in the furious hail of gunfire.

"I try never to think about it. It was the most horrible thing a person could think of."

The massacre destroyed the world's impression of St. Croix as a tropical paradise and plunged the island's tourism economy into a two-decade-long tailspin.

Tourists everywhere associated the Virgin Islands with the machine-gun wielding LaBeet -- now called Ismail Ali -- a decorated but psychotic Vietnam War veteran.

But what few people know is that the machine gun in his hand in that bloody rampage did not come from an illegal gun dealer, nor was it smuggled into the territory.

It came from the St. Croix police property room.

Who took the gun -- one of two kept for special police work -- and gave it to Ali?

Police say it was one of their own. They believe lax security in the property room allowed a St. Croix cop to walk off, unnoticed, with the 30-inch-long, 5-pound weapon.

The property room, where the Police Department kept its firearms and equipment, was in the old police headquarters in a busy section of Christiansted.

"When we checked on the machine gun Ali had used, we discovered it was the same one that had been placed in the evidence room," recalls former police Capt. Ohanio Harris, one of the first cops on the scene at Fountain Valley.

"Evidence pointed to an officer who we believe gave Ali the weapon."

That officer was questioned but never charged. He resigned from the force shortly after the massacre and now works on St. Thomas.

Because he was not charged, police brass won't identify him, but the finger of blame points directly at the department's lax supervision and discipline.

Three years after the massacre, the Police Department moved the evidence room to the newly built Patrick Sweeney Police Headquarters.

But like the Fountain Valley nightmares, the problem of guns missing from the evidence room continues.

December 16, 1994

Who's to Blame? The Black Hole

By Melvin Claxton

LOST

The owner of a condo at the Anchorage, on the East End of St. Thomas, says he rented the unit to a group of mainland fishermen spending a week here for the annual marlin tournament. After they left, the maid found a fully loaded Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver under the mattress.

She turned it over to the condo owner, who called the police for advice about what to do with it.

A policeman came to the condo, wrote out a receipt and said the police would keep the gun safe. He also said that if nobody came forward during the next six months to claim the gun, the condo owner could claim it.

Six months later, the condo owner went down to the police station, handed over his receipt and asked for the gun. The police couldn't find it.

That was seven years ago. The police still haven't found it.

AND FOUND

"We had to get the police chief (Raymond L. Hyndman) himself involved before the gun was found. They couldn't find the gun, and this was a guy ('Sebo' Smalls) the police wanted off the streets." --Valerie Collanton, former Assistant Attorney General.

-- BUT RARELY

One leading prosecutor in the Attorney General's Office, who asked not to be named for fear of professional reprisals, called the evidence room:

A black hole into which evidence disappears and rarely returns.

December 17, 1994

Customs Keeps Gate Open

By Melvin Claxton

When Bruce Barton flew home to the Virgin Islands from New York, his luggage didn't. It took another day for the luggage, mistakenly sent to Puerto Rico, to get to St. Croix. And it took nearly two more days for Barton to find a ride back to the airport from his home in Estate Strawberry to pick it up.

What Barton didn't know as he pulled up to the airport was that Pan American Airways officials, worried because the luggage was standing unattended for so long, had turned it over to the U.S. Customs Service.

Customs agents, with airline employees looking on, opened Barton's suitcase and searched it. They found the clothing and toiletries -- and a gun.

Customs agents allowed Barton to pick up the luggage. When agents asked him if he had anything to declare, specifically a weapon, he said no.

They let him take his suitcase and go. Then they checked with police and found that Barton didn't have a gun license. He also hadn't turned the gun in within 24 hours of arriving in the territory -- as required by V.I. law.

Law officers got a search warrant for his house in Strawberry. There they found the gun -- a .38-caliber police special -- hidden in the folds of an unopened umbrella. Barton admitted bringing in the gun and pleaded guilty to gun possession charges.

Even though law officers feel certain that scores, and possibly hundreds, of guns come into the territory in personal luggage from the mainland each year, Barton's arrest was a fluke.

Most people bringing in weapons pass right through the airport undetected.

In fact, law officials say, you are far more likely to be struck by lightning at least once in your lifetime than to be searched for weapons when you come to the Virgin Islands from the U.S. mainland.

It's not that Customs never checks luggage. It does -- but the luggage heading the other way.

Customs says the reason for this is a tax agreement that allows the Virgin Islands to keep the duties on goods going to the mainland. Customs checks the luggage and packages to determine how much duty it can collect.

On the other hand, no law or agreement allows Customs to collect duty on personal items coming into the territory. Flights between the mainland and the territory are treated the same as flights between two states. It would literally take an act of Congress to allow inspection at entry points from the mainland into the Virgin Islands.

But territorial Police Chief Delroy Richards believes the flow of guns into the territory has reached such dire proportions that the United States should do whatever is needed to shut down the gun trade.

"Unless we have complete inspections at our points of entry," Richards says, "we can never expect to stop illegal weapons from coming in."

December 17, 1994

Dealing Anywhere, Any Way

By Melvin Claxton

He was a licensed Virgin Islands gun dealer, but when federal firearms agents went to look for his place of business, they couldn't find him. And for good reason: The St. Thomas dealer was sitting in a prison in Atlanta for drug charges.

He is one of 36 gun dealers whose licenses have either been yanked or are in serious jeopardy following a crackdown by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau agents and local authorities.

The crackdown followed a six-month probe of the territory's 52 licensed gun dealers. The investigation was conducted by a joint task force of ATF agents; local prosecutors with the Attorney General's Office; and investigators for the Licensing and Consumer Affairs Department.

The Attorney General's Office will not release the names of the 36 dealers, and the ATF now has no agents in the territory to further monitor the dealers or answer questions about the violations charges.

The task force found violations dating as far back as 1980s. Among the findings:

Two dealers had used their licenses to purchase guns for export. One dealer exported guns to Anguilla and the other to the British Virgin Islands.
One St. Thomas dealer had so many violations the task force recommended that the ATF carry out a criminal investigation.
Two dealers openly sell guns from the back of their cars. At least one has been seen in housing projects delivering weapons.
Some dealers have been selling guns for more than six years without ATF or local licenses.
Most people with gun dealer's licenses did not have a secure place to store or keep weapons, as is required by the ATF.
Many gun dealers seem unaware of local gun laws and which weapons are outlawed. One dealer purchased an A-K 47, although the Russian assault rifle is illegal in the territory.
Some dealers kept their records so badly that the task force had no way of knowing how many guns they really sold and who bought them.

The investigation, which started earlier this year, identified only six dealers, three on St. Thomas and three on St. Croix, who are in full compliance with local and federal law.

Here's what happened to the dealers with violations:

7 surrendered their licenses.
4 chose not to renew their expired licenses.
9 had problems that required follow-up inspections.
1 got a warning letter.
11 face losing their licenses; the task force recommended that they not get their licenses renewed.
3 lost their licenses.

Task force representatives say that local dealers who violate federal and local gun laws are a tiny fraction of the illegal gun trade.

Pete Anderson, head of the Police Department's gun unit, says about 50 percent of all illegal guns in the territory were purchased in Florida gun shops. He says Florida is followed by Texas and Louisiana as top sources of illegal guns.

Easy access to guns in those states make them inviting to Virgin Islanders who want to pick up weapons.

And many of the 2,000 workers at the Hess Oil refinery come from those states. Often they bring their guns, law officers say.

And just as often, rather than risk running into trouble trying to return home with them, they leave the guns here, law officers say, selling them privately and without much concern about whether the buyer has a license.

December 17, 1994

Heat On the Street: Virgin Islands a Gun-Traffickers' Paradise

By Melvin Claxton

After getting the best of Robert Petersen in a barroom brawl, Victor Aviles was sure his Hess Oil refinery co-worker had learned a lesson and would leave him alone.

He was dead wrong.

Later that week in August 1993, Petersen, 22, still smarting from his public beating, took his 18-year-old brother's Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol to work and shot Aviles, 33, as he stepped out of a portable toilet.

The bullets hit Aviles in the chest. He died less than an hour later on an operating table.

The gun that killed Aviles was one of 49 weapons that police say Christopher Monbelly and Nigel Crosby smuggled into the territory between August and October last year. The two have just been convicted of illegally bringing the weapons to St. Croix from Miami.

They had the guns in their suitcases.

Police have recovered 11 of the weapons, 10 from the scenes of crimes.

The case highlights the ease with which anyone can bring illegal weapons into the territory, law enforcement officials say.

The open border between the Virgin Islands and the U.S. mainland makes transporting guns to the territory as hassle-free as carrying in a bottle of suntan lotion.

If gunrunners are actually arrested, mishandled prosecutions and lenient sentences effectively undermine the territory's gun laws.

And that helps keep the Virgin Islands armed and dangerous. Consider:

At least 14,000 illegal guns are in the territory, many in the hands of people the police consider dangerous.
Since 1991, police have recovered 620 weapons from crime scenes in the Virgin Islands. But in hundreds of cases each year the weapons are never recovered.
Guns were used in 79 percent of the 33 murders this year.
Guns were used in 28 of the 36 violent deaths, including suicides.
Police say reports of gunfire are so numerous they don't even bother to count them and very few are checked out.
Gun dealing is so loosely regulated that one dealer, fully licensed, sells guns out of the trunk of his car. Another had his license revoked just this year, although he has been in prison in Atlanta for drug possession.
Violations by legal gun dealers are commonplace. Of the 53 Virgin Islands residents who had firearms dealer licenses at the beginning of the year, 47 were cited for long-standing violations of federal or local laws. Some dealers were in violation for more than five years, but nobody checked on them.
Police officers get caught up in the brisk gun trade. Law enforcement officials say they are investigating two police officers suspected of selling guns while on duty in the police station.
A V.I. Police Department recruit was among those arrested in a recent gun raid on St. Croix. He was charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm.
The ready availability of guns turns simple disagreements into deadly encounters. In the last five years, 34 percent of all homicides in the territory resulted from arguments that got out of hand.

One such case was the murder of Miguel Davis, 17, in August 1992. Another 17-year-old, Carlos Greer, shot him in the head in an argument over a girl.

Greer, a senior at Central High School on St. Croix, was irked because Davis began dancing with his ex-girlfriend, Heather Gordon. Greer's temper got hotter as the two danced, and witnesses said Greer started pointing his finger at Davis and pretending that he was pulling the trigger of a gun.

Greer got so worked up he ran to a truck, took out a .38-caliber revolver and shot Davis dead on the spot.

"In cases like this, it is very likely that had there been no gun, there would have been no murder," says Territorial Police Chief Delroy Richards.

"The finality of guns is what makes them so frightening."

But keeping guns out of the territory won't be easy, police and federal officials say, because:

U.S. Customs does not examine personal luggage coming into the Virgin Islands from the U.S. mainland on commercial flights. This has allowed smugglers to move large quantities of guns into the territory undetected.
U.S. Customs seldom checks boats coming into the Virgin Islands to see whether illegal weapons and other types of contraband are aboard. Records show that of the thousands of boats that docked here last year, Customs inspected fewer than 10 percent.

Police can't keep Virgin Islanders from arming themselves to the teeth.There are now 7,000 licensed guns in the territory. Combined with the 14,000 illegal guns estimated to be here, that makes one gun for every three adults in the territory.

The guns that worry police the most are the unlicensed ones, especially those in the hands of criminals and unpredictable, volatile youths.

Since 1989, juveniles have been involved in more than a hundred shootings in the territory, 22 of them fatal.

During the same period, convicted felons -- who are banned by federal law from carrying guns -- shot and killed more than 50 people in the Virgin Islands.

The ready availability of guns has turned St. Thomas housing projects like Bovoni and Thomasville into shooting galleries where residents hear gunfire so often they are afraid to let their children go outside.

And they have turned neighborhoods like William's Delight on St. Croix and Donoe housing project and Hospital Ground on St. Thomas into death zones.

This year alone, 20 youths from Hospital Ground have been shot and three have died.

Few taxi drivers are willing to go near Donoe after dark, their fear heightened by the shooting of a fellow taxi driver who went there Oct. 11 to pick up a passenger.

Even the police want to stay away.

"There are places some police officers don't want to go to unless they must," says a St. Croix forensics officer. "Things have gotten very rough."

Pete Anderson heads the Police Intelligence Unit created on St. Croix this year to try to stem the flow of illegal guns. Already, Anderson's unit has made several arrests --including those of Monbelly and Crosby --but he says the battle is all uphill.

"This is one of the biggest problems facing these islands," Anderson says. "As long as illegal guns are out there, no one is safe."

December 17, 1994

Who's to Blame?

By Melvin Claxton

"As long as illegal guns are out there, no one is safe."
--Pete Anderson, St. Croix Police Intelligence Unit

"Unless we have complete inspections at our points of entry, we can never expect to stop illegal weapons from coming in."
--Chief Delroy Richards, Virgin Islands Police Department

"I don't believe we can institute an inspection of all baggage any more than the state of New York could put travelers from Florida through a Customs check."
--Joel Holt, St. Croix attorney

The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, the federal agency responsible for monitoring the gun trade, has not had an agent stationed in the territory since August.
Since 1989, 50 people in the Virgin Islands have been shot and killed by convicted felons -- who are banned by federal law from carrying guns.
Since 1989, juveniles have been involved in more than a hundred shootings in the territory, 22 of them fatal.
The three major sources for illegal guns in the Virgin Islands are, in order: Florida, Texas and Louisiana.
The territory has 52 gun dealers with federal licenses, but only six are not under investigation or facing charges for violating federal and local gun laws.
Two V.I. police officers are suspected of operating a gun-selling business while on duty in the police station. They are under investigation, law enforcement officials say.
Two licensed dealers openly sell guns from the back of their cars. One of those has been seen in housing projects delivering weapons.
Among the 49 guns that Christopher Monbelly and Nigel Crosby illegally brought into the territory in their airline luggage last summer and fall, 10 have already been found at the scenes of crimes.

December 19, 1994

A Clean Slate

By Melvin Claxton

Murray Callan spent his life helping youths. In the end, it was a boy of 15 who took his life. The young killer's name cannot be revealed by police under Virgin Islands law. And if the killer is convicted, he must be released from the Juvenile Rehabilitation Center on his 19th birthday.

He will have no criminal record. His juvenile file will be sealed. Unlike adult felons, he will not lose the right to vote or even run for office.

"He will be getting a clean slate," says Glenn Callan, the slain man's son. "It's a very sad joke."

The boy shot Callan, 69, late one April night this year as Callan and two other tourists walked along Long Bay Road near Paul M. Pearson Gardens. Callan was going to Blockbuster Video to return a tape.

Callan's killer had a 17-year-old accomplice, who will be tried as an adult. But it was the jittery 15-year-old who held the gun and pulled the trigger.

Callan, a former high school teacher from San Diego, had for 20 years operated a swimming school dedicated to teaching infants and young children. His students called him "Uncle Murray."

December 19, 1994

Laws Hide the Danger

By Melvin Claxton

When Alrick Roberts applied for a job as a security guard, he had a criminal past.

But Theo Dependable Security Services on St. Croix, the company that hired him in late 1990, had no way of knowing. Roberts had committed his crimes as a juvenile, so his records were sealed.

The company took the precaution of doing a background check, but the police report on him did not even hint at Roberts' earlier run-ins with the law or his ugly side.

In 1987, at age 16, Roberts was charged as a juvenile with raping a woman in her 20s, according to police. They say he threatened the woman with a machete.

Roberts was allowed to plead guilty to third-degree assault. He spent time in the Youth Rehabilitation Center, the territory's lockup for young criminals, according to those close to the case.

On Oct. 27, 1990, Roberts was one of several newly hired security guards being trained by police Sgt. William Harvey in the use of a .38-caliber handgun. That is a requirement under V.I. law for receiving a license to carry a gun.

Harvey thought Roberts looked familiar but wasn't sure. But even if he had known who Roberts was, local laws would have prevented the officer from saying anything.

So Harvey taught the young security guard gun safety. He also taught him the proper way to draw, aim and fire his weapon.

Two days later, Roberts used a .38 to kill.

The Alrick Roberts story is common in the Virgin Islands where, unlike many states, the records of violent juveniles are kept hidden from the public.

The results have been devastating. This is what a Daily News investigation found:

48 percent of juvenile criminals are repeat offenders.
Juveniles have committed 22 murders in the territory since 1989. V.I. law requires that young murderers tried as juveniles be released when they turn 19. Law enforcement officials know many are still dangerous -- but they can do nothing to alert the public.
The territory's only juvenile prison is called the Youth Rehabilitation Center, but it is no more than a holding pen for the violent young, offering them no substantive rehabilitation, training or counseling.
Youths in detention have attacked guards but have never been penalized. One juvenile tried to rape a female guard and another stole the detention center bus and went for a joy ride. Neither was punished.
Most juveniles graduate to adult crime, law enforcement and justice officials say.
The territory spends $55,000 a year to house and feed one juvenile. Juveniles with special problems are sent to the mainland, at a cost to the territory of as much as $125,000 a year.
Because the Youth Rehabilitation Center has only 27 beds, many juveniles charged with violent crimes are not detained, they are sent home.
There is no pretrial detention center in either district. So many youths picked up for serious crimes are sent home to their parents.
The Youth Rehabilitation Center doesn't have the staff to do pretrial reports or monitor closely youths on probation or in community service.
Juvenile offenders in detention range from 13 to 18 years old, but many cannot read or can read at only the first-grade level.
Although 30 percent of the youths in detention are there for drug-related crimes, the center has no drug rehabilitation program.
A program to deal with juveniles with psychiatric problems was started only last year. Before that, juveniles with mental problems simply served their time and were released.
The detention center has no vocational classes and very little in the way of educational programs.

Anita Christian is a 22-year police veteran who knows the magnitude of the territory's juvenile crime problem: For 12 years she has been the head of the Juvenile Division on St. Croix.

Juvenile crime is out of control, she says.

"When I first joined the division, you didn't see the kind of violence you see now," Christian says. "We have seen a real sharp jump, especially in murders, rapes and robberies."

The Alrick Roberts case, police say, highlights the worst in the system.

St. Croix contractor Michael Caswell and his girlfriend, on vacation from New York, met in Christiansted around noon. It was a perfect October day. The couple grabbed their towels and headed for the beach. They were in love and wanted to be alone. They thought secluded Sandy Point was the ideal spot.

It wasn't.

Miles away in Catherine's Rest, Alrick Roberts was getting dressed. He pulled on a pair of camouflage pants, a cap and black military-style boots. Before he left the house, he put on a gunbelt with a survival knife and stuffed a .38-caliber pistol into his pocket.

He also grabbed a pair of handcuffs he had purchased in an army supply store.

Roberts climbed into his Ford Ranchero and headed to Sandy Point.

He was on the prowl. And he was armed and dangerous.

Caswell was the first to spot Roberts as he walked toward the couple sitting on the sand. When Roberts drew his gun, Caswell's eyes widened in fear.

Roberts handcuffed Caswell and dragged him into the brush. Then he turned his attention to the woman.

Roberts made her undress, then raped her, with the gun pressed against her head.

Roberts then forced the woman to perform oral sex on him -- with the gun still pointed at her head.

The gun went off, shooting her in the shoulder. She fell back, and Roberts turned to Caswell. He pumped a bullet into the handcuffed man's chest, then shot him in the ear to make sure he was dead.

Fearing for her life, the woman fled into the water. Roberts fired at her but missed. Desperately she swam out to sea, struggling against the surf and the pain of her wounded and bleeding shoulder. She treaded water for two hours before a group of fishermen rescued her.

Theodore Elizee is the man who hired Roberts as a security guard. He says that had he had any inkling of Roberts' past, he would not have given him a job that allowed him to carry a gun.

"The police record didn't show anything," Elizee says. "We need to know who these people really are when we hire them."

December 19, 1994

Two Young Rapists, No Arrests, No Justice

By Melvin Claxton

It was almost closing time. The petite, silver-haired woman was busy at the computerized cash register when the bell tinkled to alert her someone had entered the upscale fashion store.

She looked up, and there stood two youths wearing stocking masks. One had a gun, aimed right at her.

Both were wearing Charlotte Amalie High School uniform pants.

The boys took the 50-year-old woman into the back room and tied her hands behind her with a belt. The younger boy held a gun on her while the other searched the shop for money.

"The younger kid kept saying, 'Let's kill her, let's kill her,'" she recalls. "The older one told him no."

They got $800 out of the cash register and $80 from her purse. Then, pleased with their success, the boys went one step further.

They each raped her.

Afraid of antagonizing them, she avoided looking at their faces. Instead, she paid close attention to other details: their shoes, their voices and everything they said.

She heard one call the other by a nickname. She also noticed how the younger boy, about 15, deferred to the other, who seemed two or three years older.

"There was something about the way they interacted that made me believe they were brothers," the woman says.

She made sure the police knew her suspicion that the boys went to CAHS. She spoke with CAHS Principal Liston Davis. He told her, she says, that he believed he knew them.

But the boys -- who fit the description of assailants in at least two other cases -- remain at large.

Weeks after the rape, the victim called the case officer to find out whether she had met with Davis or interviewed the suspects. The officer, she says, responded curtly: "We don't work that way."

"I asked her where else are you going to find high school kids but in high school? It was all so frustrating."

The officer missed appointments with Davis and did not even question the two likely suspects for months.

When the victim urged her to do more on the case, the officer said she was overworked.

That officer was Cpl. Jacklyn Chesterfield. She was arrested Friday on charges of fraud and forgery --specifically, prosecutors say, she was moonlighting by working as a security guard at a store when she was supposed to be doing her police work.

Other factors, unique to juvenile law enforcement, have helped derailed the investigation.

A witness told police he saw the boys hanging around outside the woman's store before the rape and saw them leave afterward.

And when he saw them, they weren't wearing masks.

But the police have allowed him only to leaf through a mug book. He didn't see a lineup.

Why? The police don't do physical lineups in juvenile cases.

V.I. laws hamstring police by preventing them from making public descriptions, pictures or even composite drawings of juvenile suspects.

So the two boys haven't even been charged.

"The most important thing to me is that they never get another opportunity to get near another woman," their victim says.

"They are two young people who are very, very young and very misguided. And the system is letting them get away with it."

December 19, 1994

Who's to Blame? Facts and Figures

By Melvin Claxton

ADDING UP

The territory has seen a 45 percent increase in overall juvenile crime since 1989.

INCORRIGIBLE

Many juveniles are charged with status offenses, crimes that only minors can be charged with. These include violating curfew, underage drinking and running away from home. According to the Human Services Department, "These youths usually demonstrate incorrigible and out-of-control behavior and are among the most difficult of the DHS caseload."
The number of youths charged with status offenses increased 82 percent from 1993 to 1994.
The number of youths adjudicated as delinquents in the Virgin Islands has increased 79 percent territorywide since 1989. In the districts:
St. Thomas-St. John -- 64 percent increase.
St. Croix -- 120 percent increase.

LOCKED UP

During fiscal year 1994 (Oct. 1, 1993-Sept. 30, 1994) 112 boys and 22 girls were in the Youth Rehabilitation Center.

GIRLS TOO

The number of girls in the Youth Rehabilitation Center increased 600 percent, from 3 to 22, from October 1993 to September 1994.

REPEATERS

In just one year, 1993 to 1994, the number of repeat offenders in the Youth Rehabilitation Center increased 38 percent.

BY THE NUMBERS

Comparisons between Virgin Islands and national statistics are virtually impossible because the FBI lists data by calendar year (January-December) in its Uniform Crime Reports, and the V.I. Human Services Department lists the data by fiscal year (October-September).

December 20, 1994

Crime Pays...But Criminals Don't

By Melvin Claxton

It was Dec. 3, 1991, and Carole Williams had just that day picked up her monthly food stamp allotment. She had three young children to feed, but her husband, Quinton, demanded that she cash in the stamps and give him the money to buy drugs.

When she refused, her husband beat her savagely and cut her face, legs and hands with a piece of broken glass. Holding her face up to his, he bit her lower lip, nearly severing it, police say.

To escape, she ran into the streets even though she was naked. She was rescued by a neighbor, who took her to St. Thomas Hospital, where she had to have 100 stitches.

Police arrested Quinton Williams shortly after the incident and charged him with attempted murder and mayhem. As an ex-felon, he faced being sentenced as a habitual offender, which would mean a mandatory 10-year prison term without parole.

QUINTON WILLIAMS
Charged: Attempted murder of his wife
Plea bargain: Assault with deadly weapon
Sentence: Suspended term and probation

But Quinton Williams never did any time for his attack on his wife.

As part of an agreement with the Attorney General's Office, he pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and got a one-year suspended prison sentence and two years' probation.

Under the agreement, approved by Territorial Court Judge Henry Smock, the Attorney General's Office not only dropped the original charges but agreed to remain silent at sentencing and not seek to have Williams treated as a habitual offender.

Numerous similar cases have enraged police and other opponents of plea bargains, who say that under these agreements hundreds of violent criminals are simply slapped on the wrist as their real crimes go unpunished.

And with four-fifths of the convictions in the territory resulting from plea bargains rather than jury or judge's verdict, the issue has prosecutors on the defensive.

A Daily News review of all convictions from 1990 to 1993 showed that 82 percent of the violent crime cases won by the Attorney General's Office came from plea agreements. The U.S. Attorney's Office made deals in 68 percent of its criminal cases.

In plea bargains, the criminal is allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and get a lighter penalty.

"The officers bust their butts investigating and closing a case and what happens? Some prosecutor decides to take the easy way out and plea-bargains the case," says retired police Capt. Ohanio Harris.

On the other hand, prosecutors say, without plea bargains, the already overburdened court system would hopelessly bog down.

And judges say that without plea bargains, criminal cases would take years to wend through the courts. The cost to taxpayers, they say, would be astronomical.

"Without plea bargaining, we would expect to spend millions of dollars a year more for juries, judges, prosecutors and court-appointed attorneys," says Elwood York, chief assistant to Attorney General Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine. "Do you think the public is going to be willing to pay that?"

In a plea bargain, says Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Peters, everyone gives up something -- but gets something in return.

Not so, say police officers, contending that the public loses whenever there's a plea bargain.

And Chief Territorial Court Judge Verne A. Hodge, the territory's former top prosecutor, says that while plea bargains are an important part of the system, some prosecutors are just too quick to make a deal.

"One of the things that concerns me the most is that I believe prosecutors are often too willing to give up the habitual offenders provision as part of the plea," Hodge says. "This is not something that should be taken lightly."

Career criminals sentenced as habitual offenders must be given a mandatory minimum of 10 years. To have criminals sentenced as habitual offenders, prosecutors must file a petition with the court saying they wish to do so. Often, they agree not to do that as part of a deal to get the criminal to plead guilty -- to something less than the charge he faces.

Hodge and others say prosecutors are sending the wrong message to criminals, and they point to repeat offenders like Juan "Juanito" Sanes, whose six-page rap sheet goes back to 1981 and includes 18 arrests and 30 charges. He has not done more than a few months in prison.

But even when criminals go to prison, plea bargains often make them appear less dangerous than they are. And that, says Assistant Warden Eric Browne, makes a difference in where they are housed and even in how soon they will be paroled.

"When a guy goes up for parole and his report states he committed assault, that's a big difference over murder -- when in fact that was what the man really did," Browne says.

Harris says the public must beware: "Unless plea bargains are curtailed, the list of criminals walking the streets will only get longer."

December 20, 1994

Even a Judge Plea-Bargains for an Offender

By Melvin Claxton

When Gillian Harper shot Roberto Clarke, he kept firing until his gun was empty, police say.

Clarke was hit three times in the back. The first bullet knocked him down, but Harper, police say, kept firing at the prone Clarke.

Harper turned himself in the next day. Police charged him with attempted murder, possession of a deadly weapon and first-degree assault.

Assistant Attorney General Marie John and Harper's attorney, Jeffrey Moorhead, struck a deal: Harper would plead to first-degree assault, which carried a possible 15-year prison term.

But Territorial Court Judge Maria Cabret didn't like the deal. She wanted him to get off even lighter.

Prosecutors say that she felt that because Harper claimed he had not intended to kill Clarke, the charges should be lowered to third-degree assault, which carries no more than five-years.

So Cabret rejected the plea and set a court date for trial.

Later, she reversed herself and accepted the plea.

Cabret, who has not returned numerous calls asking for her comments about her handling of this case, is part of a Territorial Court system that has been notably lenient in its sentencing.

Here is what a Daily News investigation has found:

Territorial Court judges sent fewer than 32 percent of violent crime offenders to jail.
They gave the other 68 percent suspended sentences, probation or community service.

December 20, 1994

Even Federal Prosecutors Screw Up

By Melvin Claxton

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."

December 20, 1994

Inept Prosecution

By Melvin Claxton

She was a middle-aged Norwegian woman who had looked forward to her Virgin Islands vacation for years.

She read and reread travel brochures touting the quiet charm of St. Croix -- its historic sites, white sand beaches and friendly people.

In the first four days of her vacation she came to appreciate why the Virgin Islands is called the American Paradise.

On the fifth day, Feb. 2, 1991, it became a hell.

As she was sunbathing on the beach at the Buccaneer Hotel, a youth suddenly appeared and threatened her with a knife. She offered him money not to hurt her, police say.

The youth, Raphael "Sound Boy" Joseph, took the money and a diamond ring the woman held out to him.

Then he raped her.

A few hours later, he was trying to sell the ring in Gallows Bay.

That was not the 16-year-old's first rape, not by a long shot, police say.

A year earlier, police had arrested Joseph for raping or sexually assaulting at least three women. They had witnesses and a strong case.

Joseph even told police that he had sexually assaulted 12 other women.

But Joseph was never tried.

Assistant Attorney General Edward Ennis, who handled the case, filed the wrong charges.

The case was dismissed.

Such mistakes are commonplace in the Attorney General's Office, now the territory's primary prosecuting agency.

Prosecutors in that office fail to file briefs, they show up for trial unprepared, and they file the wrong papers.

The screw-ups have cost the Justice Department hundreds of convictions in recent years and have allowed many violent criminals to go free.

A review of Territorial Court records since 1990 reveals:

One in every two cases handled by the Attorney General's Office is dismissed before it goes to trial.
81 percent of all convictions come from plea bargains to lesser charges.
Hundreds of cases have been lost because the Attorney General's Office has no system for keeping track of cases and ensuring the cases are properly prepared for trial. The office is now creating a system, Attorney General Rosalie Ballentine says.
One-third of all Territorial Court cases in the last five years were dismissed because witnesses or defendants left the territory and the Attorney General's Office didn't have the money to transport them back.
Cases were dismissed because the department did not have enough clerical staff available to type the briefs.
Because of poor planning and office administration, prosecutors don't find out they are handling a case until just a day or so before they have to take it to trial; often those are cases that have been under investigation for months, even years, but the prosecutor has no chance to become fully familiar with the case facts and details.
The Attorney General's Office cannot attract highly qualified prosecutors because salaries for assistant attorneys general average about $35,000 -- among the lowest in the nation for prosecutors and far lower than lawyers in private practice average here.
For years the assistant attorney general's first chance to interview arresting officers and investigators -- usually key witnesses -- was minutes before the trial began.
The attorney general, the territory's No. 1 prosecutor, has never prosecuted a criminal case herself. She says she handled some in a lawyers' classroom clinic in New York.

All too often, the Attorney General's Office stumbles over the little things, like paperwork.

That's what happened in the case of convicted rapist David Eddie. Eddie was released on parole -- even though Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly denied his parole request and the Attorney General's Office says he belongs behind bars.

But Eddie is a free man because the Attorney General's Office failed to tell Eddie and a District Court judge that his parole request had been denied. They had 60 days to tell Eddie and an additional 25 days to tell the judge.

They missed both deadlines and Eddie walked.

Eddie had served 12 years of his 17-year sentence for rape. The Parole Board had approved Eddie's release, but the governor, who had the final say and who had denied similar requests from Eddie before, turned it down.

But nobody told Eddie what the governor did. And since the Parole Board's decision goes into effect in 60 days unless the governor vetoes it, Eddie was sure his parole had been granted.

And when Eddie went to court to win his release, Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Resnick gave the Attorney General's Office 10 days to respond. But 25 days later, when Chief District Court Judge Thomas Moore ordered Eddie released, the Attorney General's office still had not responded.

By the time the Attorney General's Office got around to filing a motion to stop Eddie's release, it was too late.

He was out.

THREE TYPICAL DEALS

ANTONIO GEORGE

Charged: Rape, unlawful sexual contact and 1st-degree assault
Possible sentence: 30 years
Plea bargain: Aggravated assault
He got: 3 years probation

LOUIS BESS

Charged: Murder (1st degree) with dangerous weapon
Possible sentence: Life in prison
Plea bargain: Voluntary manslaughter
He got: 10 years in prison

GARY FOX JR.

Charged: Murder (2nd degree)
Possible sentence: 30 years
Plea bargain: Volutary manslaughter
He got: 5 years in prison

Such inattention and oversights in the Attorney General's Office can have deadly consequences, as in the murder of Donna Gaskin.

Gaskin, who had a long history of abuse at the hands of her husband, Alfredo, filed several complaints with the Attorney General's Office and with the police. She begged them to do something about him.

They did nothing.

Donna Gaskin tried to save herself. She divorced her husband in September 1984 and moved herself and her children away from him.

One month later, she was sitting in her living room watching television. She had just finished dinner and her two daughters -- ages 9 and 12 -- were playing in their bedroom when Alfredo Gaskin stuck a shotgun through the living room window and blew a hole in her side. She died there on the floor.

Gaskin, 50, a former fireman, was convicted of his wife's murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison. St. Croix Women's Coalition co-director Clema Lewis says Donna Gaskin would be alive today if the Attorney General's Office had responded.

Ballentine, who has been attorney general for three years, says her office is moving to correct such problems and improve prosecution.

She says results are visible. Under expanded jurisdiction -- On Jan. 1, 1994, her office took over the prosecution of all violent crimes -- her office hasn't lost a murder case.

Critics of the Attorney General's Office say a big part of the problem is the way staff is managed. For example, under Ballentine's policy prosecutors are assigned to specific judges. But attorneys familiar with the Attorney General's Office say it is an inefficient and destructive policy.

"The problem with that idea is that often an attorney would handle a case for months before it goes to trial and then discover it's assigned to a judge he or she isn't assigned to," says former Assistant Attorney General Valerie Callanton.

"So an attorney with no knowledge of the case is handed the files, sometimes days before the case goes to trial."

The result is usually a dismissal or a generous plea bargain.

December 20, 1994

Q&A with the AG: Interview With Attorney General Ballentine

By Melvin Claxton

The topics:

Standardizing criminal justice operations in both districts, St. Thomas-St. John and St. Croix:

"One of the things we are struggling to do, I shouldn't use the word struggling, I should say striving to do over the last two or three years is to make whatever systems and policies we implement the same from island to island.

Competency of the prosecutors on her staff:

"Competency is a difficult word. It's a matter of whose standard you apply. Is everybody we have the best prosecutors money can buy? No. Are these the best prosecutors in the Virgin Islands or the best prosecutors we can bring from anywhere else? No. Are these people who have a level of competency and ability and who are willing to work in this department for what we pay and with the pressures we put on them? Yes."

Q: How long have you been a prosecutor?

A: I am not a prosecutor.

Q: But you work in this office?

A: I am a litigator, not a prosecutor. There is a difference between being a litigator and a prosecutor.

Q: Judge Brady seems to think you are our chief prosecutor.

A: I am our chief prosecutor because I am in charge of this office. I am also an administrator. That's my job.

Q: I am not quite clear on this.

A: You asked me if I am a prosecutor. I am not going to lie to you. I am not a prosecutor. Do I supervise prosecutors? Yes. Do I hire people with the ability to supervise prosecutors? Yes. Can I prosecute? Yes. Do I know what's necessary to prosecute? Yes.

Q: Have you ever prosecuted a case?

A: I have, as part of a clinic. But I have not been an active prosecutor. I have not done criminal prosecution.

Q: Do you think this affects your ability to run this office, which is primarily a prosecutors' office?

A: Firstly, this is not primarily a prosecutors' office. And it does not affect my ability, no.

Q: This is not primarily a prosecutors' office?

A: This office is the government's law office. A very crucial part of this office is prosecution.

Q: Not the most crucial?

A: Let me tell you something. If there is an issue that involves millions of dollars for the government, is that not important as well? Where there are appeals, whether civil or criminal, where the stakes are what the law is going to be or what this government's financial exposure is going to be, is that not important?

Q: Is crime your primary focus?

A: For me to tell you this is our main focus, no it cannot be our main focus. It is a priority area, it is a very important area, it is critical area. It is an area we give a lot of our time and attention to, perhaps the majority of our time. But we have other important areas as well.

Q: Is this office contributing to crime by having such a high percentage of plea bargains?

A: The only thing that I can tell you is that we have guidelines on how pleas can be offered. The system would literally fail (if we get rid of plea bargains). It really makes sense to plea-bargain cases.

Q: Are you satisfied with the level of convictions:

A: We are easy whipping boys -- if the police don't do what they are supposed to do, it's the AG who gets the blame. If the courts give a light sentence, it's the AG who gets the blame.

December 20, 1994

Quotes

By Melvin Claxton

The officers bust their butts investigating and closing a case and what happens? Some prosecutor decides to take the easy way out and plea-bargains the case.
--Ohanio Harris, retired police captain

Without plea bargaining, we would expect to spend millions of dollars a year more for juries, judges, prosecutors and court-appointed attorneys. Do you think the public is going to be willing to pay that?
--Elwood York, chief assistant to Attorney General Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine

In a plea bargain, everyone gives up something -- but gets something in return.
--Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Peters

Unless plea bargains are curtailed, the list of criminals walking the streets will only get longer.
--Ohanio Harris, retired police captain

One of the things that concerns me the most is that I believe prosecutors are often too willing to give up the habitual offenders provision as part of the plea. This is not something that should be taken lightly.
--Chief Territorial Court Judge Verne Hodge

IT'S THE LAW

Repeat offenders sentenced as habitual offenders must be given a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison.

IT'S A LOOPHOLE

To have criminals sentenced as habitual offenders, prosecutors must file a petition with the court saying they wish to do so. Often, they agree not to do that as part of a deal to get the criminal to plead guilty -- to something less than the charge he faces.

December 20, 1994

Who's to Blame? Facts and Figures

By Melvin Claxton

THE PROSECUTION

In the Virgin Islands, the Attorney General's Office is the local prosecution, handling all civil and criminal violations of V.I. law.
The U.S. Attorney's Office handles all violations of federal law.
Until Jan. 1, 1994, the U.S. Attorney's Office handled all homicide cases and other major felonies. Under what is called "expanded jurisdiction" the territorial and federal governments agreed to let local prosecutors take over those cases.

THE PROSECUTORS

The Virgin Islands' chief prosecutor is Attorney General Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine. She was appointed to the job by Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly three years ago. She has never personally prosecuted a criminal case in court.
The Attorney General's Office has more than 30 assistant prosecutors, whose salaries average $35,000 a year. The chief assistant in the criminal division is Elwood York.
The United States' chief prosecutor in the territory is acting U.S. Attorney Ronald Jennings. He was appointed several months ago by the District Court to replace Terry Halpern, who resigned.

CALL US

Tell us what you think the Virgin Islands needs to do to reduce crime. We have set up a special number for you to call and put your ideas on an answering machine. We will compile readers' suggestions into a story for Thursday in this series' final segment: Solutions.

The number to call is 777-4744.
TODAY noon to 8 p.m.
WEDNESDAY 8 a.m. to noon.

December 21, 1994

Electronic Ankle Cuffs Aren't Foolproof

By Melvin Claxton

Richard Price created the electronic monitoring device used by several counties in Florida to keep track of accused people on pretrial release.

Ankle bracelets emitting radio signals set off a telephone-computer monitor if the wearer leaves the confinement area.

Price says his system, similar to the one used in the territory, was created for one type of offender: people charged with misdemeanors.

But the Virgin Islands has even put people charged with murder on the system.

"The intent was never to put violent criminals on the system," Price says.

How effective is it?

"It's not a leash," Price says. "It doesn't guarantee that the individual will stay where you put him. It would tell you if he left. But it won't tell where he is gone to."

The only people checking to see whether anyone wearing an electronic bracelet goes out of confinement work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. They don't work nights, they don't work weekends and they don't work holidays.

So violent criminals are left unmonitored at least half the time.

Price has a strong warning:

"Like any system, if you try hard enough you can beat it."

December 21, 1994

Getting Paroled

By Melvin Claxton

This is the Virgin Islands process for giving prisoners parole:

Prisoner has served at least half his sentence and has been on good behavior for at least six months before parole hearing.
Psychiatric evaluation is done on prisoners. Evaluator must give his OK.
Corrections forwards prisoner's complete file to Parole Board.
Parole Board interviews prisoner, reviews record and makes recommendation to governor.
Governor has final say. He must act within 60 days or parole board's recommendations automatically go into effect.

Corrections Bureau acting Director Kurt Walcott says savvy prisoners have manipulated the system to gain early release.

"We have guys in here who are nothing but trouble, but for the six months leading up to their parole hearing, they are angels."

Sometimes, he says, the parole board buys their pitch.

December 21, 1994

No Correction in Corrections: Prison Time is Short, Easy, Useless

By Melvin Claxton

Melvin "Melow" Petersen is a violent, dangerous criminal with a hair-trigger temper.

Ten years ago, Petersen grabbed his 8-month-old son Jason from the mother's arms, slashing her hand with a butcher's knife in the process. A police officer, called to the scene earlier by the woman, had to stand by as Petersen used the screaming child as a shield and ran into the house.

He locked himself in the bathroom and as police kicked at the door, he stabbed Jason to death. The coroner's report showed the child had been stabbed eight times in his neck, chest and legs with the 12-inch butcher's knife.

Petersen already had a criminal record that included three arrests, two for assault. A year before the murder he was charged with petty larceny and aggravated assault and battery but was allowed to plea-bargain. He got a one-year sentence and served nine months.

In September 1990, six years into his 35-year murder sentence and 11 years before his earliest possible parole date, Corrections Bureau officials let Petersen out on supervised work release.

During his time in prison the convicted baby-killer had received no psychiatric treatment or rehabilitation.

An armed guard was posted to the work detail, but Petersen walked away and didn't return to prison that evening.

When police found Petersen a day later, he was sitting in a Frederiksted restaurant. The convicted killer was carrying a 9 mm gun, which police traced back to a federally licensed St. Croix gun dealer.

Petersen had something chilling to say to the officers who picked him up. He said he could have killed them if he'd wanted to because he had spotted them before they spotted him.

They charged him with escape from custody and possession of an unlicensed firearm.

Prosecutors dropped the charges. And they never brought charges against the gun dealer believed to have sold the firearm to the convicted murderer.

The Melvin Petersen case wasn't an isolated incident. For years, murderers and other violent criminals were allowed on work release --which provides the minimal supervision.

Corrections officials no longer do that, acting Corrections Bureau Director Kurt Walcott says, but easy parole policies and lenient prison terms still put dangerous criminals back on the streets.

The problems in the territory's corrections system go far beyond that.

Here's what a Daily News investigation found:

A federal grand jury is probing to find out how convicted murderer Raphael Harris was allowed out on supervised work release although such releases for dangerous criminals had been discontinued. A Corrections officer who was guarding Harris at the time of his escape was the subject of an internal investigation and was suspended for five days -- but the suspension was taken out of his vacation time.
Harris was never recaptured alive. He escaped first to St. Kitts and then to Orlando, Fla.
Harris, who had been convicted of killing his wife and cutting her into small bits so her body couldn't be found, stabbed himself in the throat when Orlando police surrounded the house where he had been staying.
Virgin Islands criminals, on average, serve less than half their sentences in prison.
Dozens of violent prisoners are paroled each year, although prison officials say few are rehabilitated.
93 percent of the prison population did not finish high school. Many can't read or write.
The territory's prisons are congested. Golden Grove Adult Correctional Facility on St. Croix, the territory's main prison, was built to hold 136 inmates -- it now houses 275. The St. Thomas Detention Center, in the Alexander A. Farrelly Justice Center, was built to hold 51 pretrial detainees -- it now houses 135 detainees plus 65 convicted criminals.
The territory has no parole officers. Federal and local probation officers, in addition to keeping track of suspects out on bail and criminals on probation, must double as parole officers. They also must prepare hundreds of pre-sentencing reports a year and monitor dozens of convicts sentenced to community service.
Criminals on parole or probation who are picked up by police on new charges rarely have their parole revoked. That's because there is no system for police to use to inform the criminals' probation officers.
74 percent of those in jail had previous arrests or convictions. This figure includes those who have committed crimes as juveniles.
The lack of educational programs and training for inmates means that most come out of prison with no additional legitimate skills and are likely to continue their criminal ways.

"The problem with rehabilitation is that we can't rehabilitate anyone," Walcott says. "We can give them the tools, but that person has to want to rehabilitate themselves."

December 21, 1994

Nobody's Watching Closely: Probation Office Understaffed

By Melvin Claxton

Carmen George is the territorial probation officer. She has a staff of five -- it will be four by January, when one employee retires. That's not even half the number she needs to keep track of the criminals her office must monitor.

A shortage of probation officers spells trouble because it means that criminals in need of supervision may not get it.

Data shows that 40 percent of Virgin Islands criminals break the law again within two years of their release from prison. Many do that while on probation or parole.

And probation is not all that the Probation Office has to handle. The other tasks:

Keep tabs on all suspects out on bail.
Prepare pre-sentencing reports for all convicted persons.
Monitor the more than 400 parolees and probationers.
Make sure people sentenced to community service do their time.

The demands on the office, George says, are so great that she and her staff often put in 10-hour days. Overworked officers sometimes don't catch the early signs of trouble and can't monitor problem offenders carefully, she says.

Too often, some criminals slip through the cracks. Dozens of parole violators who should be sent back to prison are not -- simply because the Probation Office staff doesn't have time to follow their cases closely.

"We completed 35 pre-sentencing reports this month alone," George says. "These reports involve doing detailed background checks, interviewing victims and doing other time-consuming investigations."

That leaves less time to watch parolees and probationers and give them any help they might need.

Her staff, George says, can't keep track of everything. And she says the territory has no system for police to inform her office when they arrest a parolee or probationer.

"I am not blaming the police," she says. "But there is simply nothing in place."

She must rely on word-of-mouth or the media to find out who has been arrested.

"This is a small place," George says. "Sometimes I will see a name of someone arrested in the newspaper and it says that someone is on probation."

If she doesn't catch the name, nobody will yank his parole or probation.

George says this problem could be solved with a computerized system for recording all arrests and listing probationers and parolees.

"What we do now is keep records by hand," she says. "We are still in the Dark Ages."

December 21, 1994

Who's to Blame?

By Melvin Claxton

PRISONERS

V.I. criminals, on average, serve less than half their sentences in prison.
74 percent of prison inmates, including juveniles, have previous arrests or convictions.
The average age of adult inmates is 32; the average age of juvenile inmates is 16.
The Virgin Islands sends few women or girls to prison. The adult prison population is 97 percent male; the juvenile prison population is 84 percent male.
The Virgin Islands also sends few white people to prison; 3 percent of adult prisoners are white, Asian, Indian or other.
Most V.I. prisoners are educationally deficient; 93 percent of adult prisoners don't have a high school diploma and 32 percent of the juvenile inmates (ages 13-18) had dropped out of school at the time of their arrests.

DOING TIME

A day at Golden Grove:

6 a.m. -- Wake-up call.

6:30 to 7 -- Breakfast.

7:15 -- Return to dormitories for housekeeping.

8:15 to 8:30 -- Recreation or duty assignment.

11 to noon -- Lunch.

12:15 p.m. -- Report to recreation or duty assignment.

3:30 -- Return to dorm for head count, then recreation or educational programs.

5 to 6 -- Visits from AA, Narcotics Anonymous, churches.

6:15 -- Return to dorms to play dominoes and cards, write letters, read.

10 -- Lock-down. Lights out, cells closed.

December 22, 1994

Solutions: A 14-point Formula To Fight Crime

By Melvin Claxton

A six-month Daily News investigation of crime in the Virgin Islands uncovered gross inefficiencies and failures in the institutions that deal with criminals.

These failures have contributed to the territory's growing crime crisis.

It was clear that even if such social and economic factors as poverty, unemployment and poor education were eliminated, crime would still flourish because sloppy and unproductive law enforcement and criminal justice would give it an open door.

The problems identified in the series can be corrected, experts and law enforcement officials agree. Among the possible solutions:

Evidence Room

Assign custodians around the clock to protect the evidence and be sure it is not stolen, lost or tainted by mishandling.
Carefully catalogue and tag each item placed in the Evidence Room.
Follow FBI guidelines for storing evidence.
Require signed receipts for all items taken from the Evidence Room.
Require periodic inventory of the evidence items in the room.
Destroy all evidence when case is closed.

"The Evidence Room is one of the most crucial areas in the police department," says Ron Nelson, chairman of the National Association of Police Departments.

"If the integrity of this area is undermined, the ability to win convictions and ultimately fight crime is seriously jeopardized."

Police hiring and discipline

Require that background checks on new recruits be thorough. If former employers won't provide information, interview neighbors and former co-workers as the FBI does before it hires agents.
Reject all recruits who fail any aspect of the police training requirements. Now, recruits can fail in the Police Academy and still be hired.
Require that all recruits pass a psychological evaluation conducted by a certified psychologist or psychiatrist.
Require that all officers undergo annual in-service training and biannual weapons recertification.
Create a civilian review board to investigate and review charges against police officers and top brass. Hold the hearings in public to help build public confidence and trust in the department.
"It is important to have civilian input into how the department is run," says Frank Davis, chairman of the now disbanded Police Advisory Board. "Every time there was something critical of the department, police on the board would get defensive."
Add officers to the seriously understaffed Internal Affairs Division.
Renegotiate the police union contract to take disciplinary actions out of the contract's control. Make sure police brass can fire bad apples and make the firing stick.
Create a community relations division in the Police Department to answer inquiries about police actions and policies.

"The public must see the department as on their side," says Territorial Police Chief Delroy Richards.

"It is imperative that we renew the public's confidence in the force."

Keeping track of criminals

Create a local computerized crime network linking police, courts and probation offices. This would list records of criminals, catch parole violators and make background checks easy.

"We need to know when criminals on probation and parole are picked up again for crimes," says Territorial Probation Officer Carmen George.

"A computerized system is essential."

Juvenile crime

Make public all records of juveniles 15 and older who are charged with violent crimes.
Provide full high school equivalency programs and extensive vocational training in the juvenile detention center.
Make early release from the detention center contingent on completion of educational programs.
Automatically transfer juveniles to adult court if they are charged with homicide, rape, first-degree assault or kidnapping.
Impose a mandatory prison sentence for gun possession by a juvenile.

"Juvenile crime is a major concern for everyone," says Anita Christian, director of the Police Department's Juvenile Division on St. Croix. "The public needs to know the danger these kids pose."

Prosecution

Raise the starting salary for assistant attorneys general from $32,000 to $40,000 to attract highly qualified, experienced prosecutors.
Accept plea bargains only if the defendant would get at least two-thirds the sentence he originally faced.
Appoint an attorney general who is an experienced prosecutor with proven skills and judgment.
Select a qualified solicitor general and let that person handle the government's civil cases.
Require that all prosecutors pass the V.I. bar within a year of joining the office.
Computerize all record-keeping and case-tracking systems in the Attorney General's Office.
Require that all prosecutors get full approval from supervisors before they ask for cases to be dismissed.

Truth in sentencing

Ban suspended sentences for two-time offenders.
Ban suspended sentences and probation for all serious violent crime, including murder, rape, armed robbery, first-degree assault and kidnapping.
Forbid any sentences that circumvent the habitual offender rule.

"The courts play a crucial role in the justice system," says Territorial Court Chief Judge Verne Hodge.

"A judge must always balance fairness, compassion and public interest. Often the three are not compatible."

Punishment

Make people certain that they will pay a penalty if they break the law.

"To be effective, punishment must be efficient, quick and sure," says psychologist Tom Tyne.

Prisons

Expand the prison to accommodate the increased number of convicts that better police work, tougher prosecution and less lenient sentencing will send into the prison.
Make education or vocational classes mandatory.
Provide regular and frequent individual and group counseling and behavior modification therapy to all inmates.
Probation and parole
Double the Probation Office staff from five to 10 officers.
Hire an employment specialist on each island to help parolees and those on probation find jobs.
Maintain round-the-clock monitoring of suspects who are released on electronic surveillance. The overtime should be paid for by the people being monitored since they will be privileged to enjoy partial freedom via the electronic monitoring.
Require the court to provide the Probation Office with a daily list of all people arraigned in court.

Parole Board

Adopt clear and tough guidelines for granting parole.
Require that inmates complete an education program or acquire a job skill, plus meet other existing standards, to become eligible for parole.
Appoint a new Parole Board consisting of retirees with extensive criminal justice experience: a defense attorney, a prosecutor and a police officer. This is common practice elsewhere and creates a highly effective Parole Board, according to Ron Nelson, chairman of the National Association of Police Departments, and others.

Guns

Demand that the Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco Bureau immediately send agents to the territory.
Restrict licenses to carry guns so that only people with acceptable reasons will be carrying guns.
Increase the penalty for possession of unlicensed guns.

U.S. Customs

Work through the delegate to Congress to legalize Customs searches of luggage entering the territory so the Virgin Islands can shut down the flow of guns into the territory.
Require every vessel entering the territory to undergo a Customs inspection.
Increase the number of Customs agents to ensure that agents are posted at all the ports in the territory.
Use X-ray equipment to scan luggage coming into the territory.

Education incentives

Make tuition at the University of the Virgin Islands free for V.I. students who maintain a B or better high school grade point average. This is successful at state colleges and universities.
Insist that teachers provide biweekly reports on students' progress, grades and behavior so parents can deal with problems early.
Introduce special training to enable teachers and counselors to spot kids in trouble.

"It is quite possible by fifth or sixth grade to predict with a great degree of accuracy which kids will be problems," says psychologist Tom Tyne.

"Those kids on the outskirts who are being disruptive in class, challenging their teachers, getting attention from their peers -- the lines are pretty much drawn."

Crime prevention

Provide free, early counseling for problem kids and their parents.
Provide money for recreational programs in high-crime areas.
Fund drug education programs in schools and housing communities.
Create a year-round boot camp-style program for borderline kids.

"We have to put a greater emphasis on preventing crime," says Assistant Attorney General Elwood York.

"Our office is like the coroner's: When we get involved, the deed is done and there's a body."

December 22, 1994

You Said It: Get Tough On Crime

By Melvin Claxton

More than 100 readers called Tuesday and Wednesday with suggestions for solving the territory's crime problem.

The calls came from all three islands, from young and old, from male and female. Every caller sounded angry about crime and much of what's to blame: inefficient and corrupt police, lax laws, out-of-control juveniles, incompetent and negligent prosecutors and an ineffective prison, probation and parole system.

Callers were asked to give their name and island, and the following are the remarks of those who did. Anonymous callers' remarks are not printed. None offered ideas that weren't also expressed by people willing to give their names, with one exception: A woman said that since "real life cop" shows on TV routinely show police being careful with evidence and signing it in and out of the evidence room, the V.I. cops should be forced to watch those shows every week.

I have a serious problem with the attorney general's incompetency. These attorneys just plea-bargain too many cases, and I think it's up to her to call the shots. We need a stronger AG's Office. We don't need this weak thing we have now.
--Shirley Swan, St. Croix

Hire an experienced attorney general, probably a graduate from Harvard or Yale school on the mainland. We probably need to hire a new chief of police. I don't see any problem with hiring experienced people. Juveniles should be tried like an adult from age 15 and older.
--George Walcott, St. Thomas

Create a rotating police force from off-island.
--Judy Smith, St. Thomas

When it comes to juveniles, we cannot publish their names, but I do not believe there is a law that says we cannot publish their mother's, their father's or both of their names.
--Ann Eaton

Capital punishment will do a great deal to solve problems.
--George Paul, St. Croix

We need to put a much greater emphasis on our home life and instill within our children a great sense of respect and honor for each other. We must learn to respect life and property.
--Pastor Kenrick Bukle, St. Thomas

Curtail plea bargains. Get some kind of computer system to keep track of information prosecutors may need for their cases.
--Anita Berhardi, St. Thomas

Youths need some place to go when they drop out of school, some place to go and learn a trade. Don't leave the kids to plan their futures -- you have got to make a future for them.
--Gideon, St. Thomas

The crime series makes the case that crime and malperformance so permeate the Virgin Islands that everything should be changed simultaneously.
But this would be impossible: There are not enough resources.
Instead, we need to do the best we can with what we have, and that is a mathematical programming problem.
We have budgetary constraints and skill constraints and time constraints. Dollars spent on police have different benefits from those spent on drugs or guns or juveniles or the judicial system. And the societal distaste differs for thieves as opposed to murderers as opposed to rapists.
Mathematical programming not only can select the best crime relief program -- that is, the most effective overall combination of departments and how they should be funded and staffed -- but also will show how additional resources could best be employed as well as what would happen if resources were taken from one department and given to another.
Such a model would be illuminating and vastly improve crime control. It is time we stopped horsing around and studied the organizational problem from an overall perspective.
--Wayne Corcoran, Ph.D., St. Thomas

We ought to hire the police from Chicago or New York because they have cleaned up those cities. That's the kind of policemen we have to get down here.
-- Julie, St. Thomas

Police officers should be rotated periodically off-island. The Strike Force is an abomination and should be completely disbanded, especially if you're unable to fire the bad eggs. Promote or expand the special operations forces, which seem to be a lot more effective and less embroiled in controversy.
--Ellen Stewart, St. Thomas

The government should change the police officers. Send the St. Croix police here and the St. Thomas police there -- shift them around. Change some of the people high in the departments. Their families are committing these crimes, and they do not want to prosecute them.
--Janet Baptiste, St. Thomas

Instead of probation, put them to work -- clean up these buildings and the streets.
--Tina Baker, St. Thomas

Eliminate the idea of shielding the identities of our juvenile offenders. If they can pick up a gun and shoot it, we should print their names and pictures on the front page in big red letters.
--Andy Young, St. Thomas

All these prosecutors and Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine should be disbarred for negligence. The judges and lawyers are not doing the job. Let's bring in the federal government and clean this mess up.
-- Richard Blum, St. Croix

Get politics out of crime, out of the criminal justice system by electing judges as you would elect the governor and the senators. That would keep them from having to be partial. Raise the standards for prosecuting attorneys and raise their pay. Clean up the Police Department and raise the standards to qualify. Also raise the salary. Improve community involvement.
--Enim, St. Thomas

Please keep reporting these things that are happening and please name names and show pictures of people. This keeps the whole thing on the forefront and in the public's mind.
I think people will continue to be mad enough to finally get somebody to do something about this. There haven't been enough pictures of the thugs that are doing these things.
--John Gilday, St. Croix

We need capital punishment. As a fifth-generation Virgin Islander, I believe this will make a difference.
-- John Canegata, St. Croix

It's going to involve the concerted effort of the general public, working along with the police. The first place that must be looked at is the police organization. The public has got to demand the kind of police force it wants.
--Police Lt. Alberto Donastorg, St. Thomas

The Police Department should be totally replaced -- every single police officer from the commissioner all the way down to the patrolman. We should bring in outside officers like they do in the French islands for one-year terms. They can't have any relatives here. We need capital punishment. They should put a prison on French Cap Cay. Put them way out there.
--Bruce Short, St. John

If you do the crime you do the time. I don't think the millions of dollars we have saved by plea bargaining is worth having all these criminals on the streets. Hand slaps do not work.
-- David Charles, St. Thomas

The senators and the law bodies need to reintroduce worship into our public schools. When a child has a sense of religion they seem to grow up in a more prosperous frame of mind.
--Victor Brown, St. Croix

Stop letting criminals off so easy.
-- Ashawn Lindquist

Teach our children the fear of God and respect for life. We as adults need to be role models they can pattern themselves after in speech and action. Juveniles should not be protected and should serve some time for their crimes.
-- Joy Daniel, St. Thomas

Get at-risk youth involved in a boat-building and sail training program to get youth the skills they need to live a disciplined life. Act 5664 established a V.I. Maritime Academy in December 1990, but nothing has been done. The maritime industry is a labor-intensive industry, and we could really help the youths.
-- Capt. Mike Phelps, St. Croix

Put the truth of the Bible and prayer back in school. Churches must come out from the pews and pulpits and into the community. We need more street ministry, more outreach. We need more honesty in government spending. The leaders of our community, they are setting a bad example.
-- Jacqueline Reese, St. Thomas

To solve the crime problem you need to cut off the source: teen pregnancy. They have no idea how to raise their children.
-- Linda Martin, St. Croix

Flogging is an action that can help prevent crime. Some parents can't take care of their kids and could bring them into the police to be flogged. The person who is doing the flogging would not be identified.
-- Janville Andrew, St. Croix

We have a number of roadside cleaning contracts that should be eliminated because prisoners should be keeping the roadside clean. They can be paid from the contract money, which they can then use to support themselves and families while incarcerated. Additional guards can also be hired from the moneys we now give to the contractors.
Also, we need interaction between our youth and the criminal justice system: prisoners going to the schools and advising about avoiding crime and telling what they would do different if they could; members of our legal system speaking face-to-face with our youth and letting them know crime is not the way to lead their lives, and telling them the ramifications if they should do.
-- Malcolm McGregor, St. Croix

We can't really alleviate the crime problem until we have people competent enough to help us with it. I was shocked at the stories about the prosecutors. I am in the 20-25 age bracket, and I can't see myself staying here and going to school when things are like this. This is such a small place, yet we have so many departments, committees, police -- it's beyond me why we have this crime problem.
-- Athena Page, St. Thomas

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Public Service in 1995:

Staff

For examining the city's declining inner-city neighborhoods, proposing improvements and helping to organize citizens to ward off further deterioration.

Staff

For disclosing fraudulent practices in a local election, bringing about the overturn of the election and the reform of many of the city's electoral practices.

The Jury

Clark Hoyt(chair )*

vice president/news

Frank Denton

editor

David D. Porter

chief editorial writer

Eileen Shanahan

Washington correspondent

Howard Weaver

editor

Winners in Public Service

1994

1995 Prize Winners

Beat Reporting

The Virgin Islands Daily News, by The Virgin Islands Daily News

Winning Work

A TIME OF CRIME

VICTIMS BY RACE

MOTIVES FOR MURDER

WHAT'S VIOLENT CRIME?

BY THE NUMBERS

COMPLAINTS

THE RIGHT WAY

THE WRONG WAY

WHAT'S A KILO?

WHAT'S A KILO WORTH?

WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?

RIGHT & WRONG

THE WRONG WAY

Inspector General's 1994 report

LOST

AND FOUND

-- BUT RARELY

ADDING UP

INCORRIGIBLE

LOCKED UP

GIRLS TOO

REPEATERS

BY THE NUMBERS

The topics:

IT'S THE LAW

IT'S A LOOPHOLE

THE PROSECUTION

THE PROSECUTORS

CALL US

PRISONERS

DOING TIME

Evidence Room

Police hiring and discipline

Keeping track of criminals

Juvenile crime

Prosecution

Truth in sentencing

Punishment

Prisons

Probation and parole

Parole Board

Guns

U.S. Customs

Education incentives

Crime prevention

Finalists

The Jury

The Jury

Frank Denton

David D. Porter

Eileen Shanahan

Howard Weaver

Winners in Public Service

1995 Prize Winners