Drug Kingpin's Release Adds to Clemency Uproar

Doty said that those were worthwhile commutations--noting that both defendants were sorrowful and had completed most of their prison time.

The pardon attorney's office refused to release any information about Vignali's commutation to The Times.

Horacio Vignali said he learned that his son was out on Jan. 20, the day Clinton left the White House and George W. Bush became president. "My son called the house and he said, 'They're turning me loose! They're turning me loose! I'm a free man! I'm a free man!' "

The father insisted that his son put together the pardon request with minimal help from Los Angeles attorney Don Re. (Re did not return phone calls for comment.)

Ron Meshbesher, a Minneapolis defense attorney who also represented the son during his trial, said that several days after the commutation the Vignalis called him at his office.

The son came on the line "all excited," Meshbesher recalled. The stunned lawyer asked: "How'd you get out?" Vignali told him that the "word around prison was that it was the right time to approach the president." The son insisted he had written the application himself.

In an interview with The Times, Horacio Vignali insisted that Clinton's commutation was not payback for his Democratic Party contributions. He said that he met Clinton only once, in 1994, around the time of his son's conviction. Vignali said he shook the president's hand in a rope line at a fund-raiser.

Although he insisted that he had not orchestrated his son's freedom, the senior Vignali conceded that others may have helped.

"I guess some people wrote on his behalf," he said. "I have no idea who they are. I just don't know."

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Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this report.