Government Misconduct

In a sweeping attack on a major federal investigation, a defendant Wednesday sought a new trial Wednesday on the grounds that his conviction in the murder of a U.S. agent in Mexico was built on government misconduct and perjured testimony. Ruben Zuno Arce, a Mexican businessman now serving a life sentence in Texas, asked a U.S. District Court judge to overturn his conviction in the 1985 kidnapping and slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico.

The case of Thomas A. Drake, a former National Security Agency official indicted last week on charges of providing classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter, is painfully familiar. In 2002, I became the target of a leak investigation stemming from America's first post- 9/11 terrorism prosecution. As a Justice Department ethics attorney, I had inadvertently learned of a court order for all copies of Justice's internal correspondence about the interrogation of the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh.

As vote-counting in Zimbabwe's bitterly contested presidential election got underway Tuesday, allegations of misconduct continued to undermine the credibility of the poll. Opposition politicians, local election observers and foreign political analysts charged that the government of longtime President Robert Mugabe had used every trick in the book to try to maintain its grip on power, indicating that no matter what the outcome, it would never concede defeat.

Residents of Fillmore followed their usual rhythms this week, gathering at the local Starbucks to hash out recent events as giant farm tractors and motorists rolled by on nearby California 126. Talk turned to Pete Egedi, the town's former fire chief, who has been under a cloud since he was accused two years ago of embezzling tens of thousands of city dollars. The latest news about Egedi is like a black eye on City Hall that won't go away, residents say. During a recent court hearing in Ventura, prosecutors alleged that Egedi tapped a city account to write at least $27,000 in checks to himself and his wife, buying a flat-screen TV among other things.

For Dennis LaDucer, getting a job as the second-highest-ranking official in the United Nations' Bosnia police force was a second chance for a life in law enforcement. His first career collapsed in 1997, when he was fired as Orange County's assistant sheriff amid accusations from five women that he groped, propositioned and otherwise sexually harassed them. Now his work with U.N. police has drawn a cloud of suspicion.

Two months after her husband, two young sons and nephew died at sea, Libby Cornett got a surprise visit from a U.S. Coast Guard commander who played for her a tape-recording of a three-second radio transmission. "May . . . Mayday, U.S. Coast Guard, come in," cried a tiny, frightened voice that Cornett immediately recognized as that of her 13-year-old son, Daniel.

A Ukrainian parliamentary commission, concluding a sweeping probe of the Chernobyl disaster, has accused Communist leaders at the time, including Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, of a massive criminal cover-up that led to thousands of deaths. Faced with the worst accident in the history of nuclear power, Soviet authorities in April, 1986, reacted with "a total lie, falsehoods, cover-up and concealment," the commission chairman, Volodymyr Yavorivsky, said.

Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, was starting to attract shady operators and billions in losses were possible. "It has the potential to be an epidemic," Chris Swecker, the FBI official in charge of criminal investigations, told reporters in September 2004. But, he added reassuringly, the FBI was on the case.

In his farewell speech in the Great Hall of the Justice Department nearly two years ago, James B. Comey, the outgoing deputy attorney general, paid tribute to the work of the department on his watch, and the "reservoir of trust and credibility" its thousands of employees had built up with the public over the years. "It doesn't make me worry about leaving," he said, "because this institution ... was in great shape when I got here and will be in great shape when I'm gone."

For a black political leader in America, the allegations publicly leveled against Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young could hardly have been more embarrassing. Young, the 71-year-old, five-term mayor of the nation's sixth largest city and a longtime civil rights advocate, had reportedly helped establish, secretly, a private business that sold South African Krugerrands, the gold coins that symbolize apartheid to many Americans.

Carson's mayor has a tool that almost any politician would love to have: a mute button. If someone talks too much at a City Council meeting, with a flick of the finger, the microphone goes dead. But after receiving a complaint that Mayor Jim Dear was shutting people down because he didn't like what they were saying, rather than waiting until they had used up their allotted three minutes of free speech time, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office is looking into whether he has violated the state's open meetings law. "It's a very unique complaint," said David Demerjian, who heads the district attorney's Public Integrity Division.

Defending the most controversial decision of his career -- if not his life -- former British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared Friday that he had no regrets over going to war in Iraq, calling it the right decision in a post-Sept. 11 world and one he "would take again." For more than six hours, Blair gave a stout defense of the war before an investigative panel whose proceedings were televised nationwide in a riveting moment of political theater. Britons who ditched soap operas and game shows to watch their former leader submit to a prolonged public grilling saw Blair insist that he tried to resolve the standoff with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein diplomatically, that he made the best judgment he could and that the Iraqi people are better off for it. "I had to take this decision as prime minister.

The controversy over American International Group Inc.'s $182.5-billion bailout is intensifying with a government watchdog launching an investigation into potential misconduct in the disclosure of the rescue's details and a House committee preparing to grill the current and former Treasury secretaries about them today. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has been under fire for his role in the bailout of the giant insurer, which he helped engineer as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the fall of 2008.

Northern Ireland's top leader announced Monday that he was stepping down temporarily amid an explosive scandal over his wife's affair with a teenager and allegations of an ethical lapse of his own in connection with the relationship. Peter Robinson, Northern Ireland's first minister, said he was giving up his post for six weeks to concentrate on clearing his name and on caring for his wife, Iris, an influential lawmaker whose spectacular fall from grace has rocked the British province's political scene.

The threat of renewed sectarian violence is at its highest in years. But it's a seamy affair between Northern Ireland's most famous female politician and a man nearly 40 years her junior that has put the province's fragile peace pact between Roman Catholics and Protestants in danger of unraveling. The woman in question is Iris Robinson, 60, the glamorous wife of the leader of Northern Ireland and a canny lawmaker in her own right. For months, she maintained a sexual relationship with a 19-year-old, then allegedly helped set him up in business with money secretly lent her by a pair of property developers.

A federal grand jury has subpoenaed records from Royal Dutch Shell PLC as part of a Justice Department investigation into corruption allegations against former Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, according to sources close to the investigation. The subpoenas and the inclusion of a grand jury are signs of escalation in the investigation, which focuses on whether Norton violated a federal law barring government officials from overseeing any process that could financially benefit a company that the official is negotiating with for future employment.

A former top Small Business Administration official who left to head up SBA lending at a Paramount bank has agreed to plead guilty to taking kickbacks from loan brokers whose deals he helped approve. The plea agreement caps a decade-long investigation that has led to nearly two dozen convictions. The U.S. attorney's office Wednesday charged Gerold Y.

While some details of the Iran-Contra scandal may be in dispute, independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh's findings in no way alter the tale of a secret foreign policy gone wrong. Indeed, as it has unfolded over the past seven years, the plot has proved too thick for any fiction writer to concoct: First, President Ronald Reagan made a decision to sell arms to Iran in opposition to his own policy to remain neutral in the Iran-Iraq war.

When the managing director of a small, trouble-prone Iranian airline won official permission in March to lease a couple of aging Russian-made airplanes, the country's small circle of aviation professionals gossiped about the strings he must have pulled to get the government's approval. And when one of the planes burst aflame on the runway in late July, killing the executive, Mehdi Dadpei, his son and 14 others, few in the industry were surprised. "Aria was famous for not adhering to safety standards for years," said an Iranian aviation industry insider, who spoke extensively to The Times on condition of anonymity.

The Legislature had just wrapped up its annual session when a top aide invited me to a post-adjournment party across the street from the Capitol. I went. Entering the hotel suite, I saw an open bedroom door. And sitting on the bed was an attractive female lobbyist wearing only black panties. Two or three male legislators stood around grinning, chortling. A little embarrassed, I hurried past to the main party group. The bedroom door soon closed. And for the next 45 minutes or so, one legislator after another entered or left the room.