Alcee and the Leak

“Stay away from Kevin Gordon. He’s hot. He is using your name in Hialeah.”

If they consider the issue at all, Americans probably expect the person in charge of overseeing their nation’s spies to be smart, insightful and thorough — but above all else, he or she must be able to keep a secret. As the debate builds over who will next lead the House intelligence committee, at least one conservative publication has asked whether the Democrats’ presumptive pick, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), has whispered secrets that ruined federal investigations.

When the House impeached federal judge Alcee Hastings in 1989, 16 of the 17 counts had to do with a bribery allegation dating to 1981, as we detailed yesterday. But one count was different, the National Review‘s Byron York noted a few days ago, and it cuts to the very core of whether Hastings is suitable to chair the House intelligence committee.

It was an accusation that in 1985, he leaked secret government information that ruined three FBI probes.

The House voted to impeach Hastings on that count, known as “Article XVI,” but the Senate unanimously voted to acquit, blasting the House prosecutors for using “weak” evidence, leaving “gaping holes” in their proof and “fail[ing]. . . to identify any credible motive” for Hastings to leak the information.

What happened? Did Hastings leak a secret? Or was the case as weak as the senators said?

The alleged leak occurred in Miami in 1985 — that’s right: Crockett and Tubbs, loafers with no socks, casual white suits paired with pastel T-shirts, immaculately trimmed stubble, and lots and lots of blow.

The local FBI office kept itself busy. They ran wiretaps and undercover agents to catch dirty cops taking bribes from big drug dealers; longshoremen said to be extorting huge sums from workers trying to join their union; and a ring of zoning officials doing favors in exchange for bribes.

One of the guys under FBI surveillance was Kevin “Waxy” Gordon. Anywhere else, a name like “Waxy” should have been enough to keep a guy out of a government job. But in Miami, he was a local zoning officer — and drug dealer. He was also a pal of the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Steve Clark.

Then-Judge Alcee Hastings wasn’t close with Mayor Clark like Waxy was. According to arguments by Hastings’ defense lawyers in his 1989 Senate trial, the judge and the mayor never visited each other’s homes, never met at each other’s offices, never even spoke on the phone. When they saw each other, it was by chance at local civic events.

It’s unlikely the judge ever met Waxy, but he knew the name well: he signed the FBI’s requests for the wiretaps that allowed agents to eavesdrop on Waxy’s phone conversations, and he got weekly updates about what the Feds were hearing.

One late summer day, a bureau agent and a U.S. attorney were briefing Hastings on the latest details they’d pulled off their tap on Waxy’s phone. Waxy’s been talking about Mayor Clark, they told the Judge. Hastings was struck by that revelation, according to congressional prosecutors in the 1989 impeachment trial.

“That is heavy stuff,” the prosecutors said Hastings exclaimed. “The mayor better watch out what he’s doing.”

On the morning of September 6, 1985, a local group held an event honoring Judge Hastings and others at the Miami Hyatt Regency. Mayor Clark attended, sitting in an aisle seat. Hastings gave the keynote speech; what happened in the next moments may never be known for sure.

In repeated sworn testimony before a grand jury and Congress, Clark has maintained that after Hastings concluded his speech, the judge walked down the center aisle of the room, stopped to shake Clark’s hand, and whispered sensitive information about an ongoing FBI investigation into the mayor’s ear.

“Stay away from Kevin Gordon,” Clark says Hastings told him. “He’s hot. He is using your name in Hialeah.”

Clark immediately telephoned his office and ordered his staff to set up a meeting with Gordon, the former mayor has repeatedly recalled.

But there are problems with that story.

First, times don’t match up: Hastings completed his speech around 10 a.m., but the FBI wiretap on Waxy’s telephone recorded an urgent call from Mayor Clark’s office to Waxy at 8:58 a.m., more than an hour before the mayor says he heard that Waxy was “hot.” Second, Hastings and three eyewitnesses maintain that he exited the room immediately through a door behind the dais, and had no contact with anyone in the crowd, including Clark.

House prosecutors said Clark’s memory was faulty, and Hastings must have brush-passed FBI secrets to the mayor before, not after, his address. But Clark adamantly stands by his story that it happened afterwards.

House prosecutors never identified Hastings’ motive for sharing these secrets. After all, there’s little evidence the mayor and the judge were closer than mere acquaintances. Why would Hastings share potentially career-ending information with a man he had recently learned had criminal ties?

When pressed to establish Hastings’ motive during the 1989 Senate trial, House prosecutor Rep. George Gekas (R-PA) admitted he had no basis to determine the judge’s motive, which left his team to conclude Hastings must have wanted to demonstrate to the mayor that he could “do a favor” for him, and thereby show “that he was a powerful man.”

Why a federal judge with a lifetime appointment would need to demonstrate his potency to the local mayor — and break a law, and compromise several ongoing investigations — was never answered.

Also, Hastings’ lawyers pointed out, Mayor Clark had an unusual group of friends beyond “Waxy.” Clark regularly played golf with Tony Amoroso, an FBI agent with direct access to the same investigative files from which Hastings was accused of leaking. Amoroso would have provided another avenue for Clark to have learned of Waxy’s trouble, and one at least as plausible as Hasting’s alleged brush-pass.

Clark’s golf group also included H. Paul Rico, the “undercover FBI agent” who set up Hastings’ alleged extortion accomplice, William Borders, in the 1981 bust that eventually led to Hastings’ criminal prosecution. (He was acquitted, as we’ve reported.) It has since come out that Rico was a corrupt agent who set up murders for mob boss Whitey Bulger.

Hastings’ defenders, including his former chief defense counsel Terence Anderson, maintain that the congressman is innocent, and Mayor Clark was put up to lying about him by his FBI pals.

Rico and the mayor’s other pals had tried to get Hastings on bribery in 1981 and failed, Anderson explained to me today. “For the rest of [Hastings’] life, he’d sit in judgement of the work of the men who’d tried to get him and missed.”

Was the leak allegation the product of a a cabal angry FBI agents eager to take down Hastings by any means possible? Unlike the case against Hastings, that argument is supported by no evidence but plenty of motive.

One fact isn’t in dispute: Clark learned of the FBI investigations, and so did Waxy. The bureau immediately pulled its undercover agents, and shut down two of its investigations completely.

Mostly bad news came out of the episode: Waxy was busted on drug charges; he died of a heart attack a few weeks later. Rico died in federal custody in 2004. Miami Vice was made into a movie and released this summer; it flopped.

But Alcee’s within sneezing distance of one of the most sensitive posts in the federal government. Whether that’s good news or bad, that’s up for debate. I guess you could say, though, that by any measure — Hastings is hot.