War on Drugs Crippled by Lack of Funds, Says U.S. Attorney’s Office

As the Reagan Administration and Congress mount the battlements for a new war to wipe out drug trafficking in the nation’s Southwest, San Diego’s top federal prosecutor is warning that budget cuts and shortsightedness are handicapping law enforcement in San Diego, a major drug gateway along the U.S.-Mexican border.

In an interview last week, U.S. Atty. Peter K. Nunez of San Diego noted that he has lost five lawyers--10% of his legal staff--to attrition this year, and he cannot fill the jobs because of limitations imposed by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-cutting legislation. Nunez’s office staff, also hit by budget cuts, makes photocopies on both sides of the page. Training for employees has stopped completely.

Earlier this month, Nunez convened a meeting to inform the chiefs of federal investigative agencies in San Diego that he would not prosecute cases requiring spending by the U.S. attorney’s office through Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year.

A few days later, Nunez said, investigators presented a case that would have required the subpoenaing of large numbers of bank documents. Nunez, a career prosecutor appointed to his post by President Reagan in 1982, told them to come back after Oct. 1, that there was no money to pay the copying costs.

“Somebody suspected of doing a crime is not going to be investigated, because there’s no money to pay for it,” an exasperated Nunez said. “At least they’re not going to be investigated now.”

The cutbacks have hit U.S. attorney’s offices nationwide, delaying criminal investigations, stifling civil litigation to collect debts to the government and forcing federal lawyers to work longer hours with fewer perks and less office assistance.

Since March 1, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings rollbacks have forced Nunez and his colleagues to trim about $14 million from already tight budgets; over a year’s time, according to the Justice Department, nearly $50 million has been sliced from government lawyers’ spending plans. After the latest round of budget cuts, the budget for U.S. attorneys offices nationwide was $322 million this year.

Imagine, then, the skepticism with which Nunez greets pronouncements from Washington about a new campaign to choke off drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Plans for “Operation Alliance,” announced last week by Vice President George Bush and Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, include the hiring of 60 assistant U.S. attorneys in border cities to prosecute the cases expected to be generated by the coordinated crackdown on drugs.

But concrete decisions about where and when those lawyers will be sent and where the money will come from to pay them haven’t been made--that is part of the next phase of Operation Alliance, according to Mike Fleming, a spokesman in Houston for the anti-drug operation.

Plans for deploying the investigators who will generate cases for prosecution are far more certain. The U.S. Customs Service is scheduled to post 110 additional enforcement officers along the California-Mexico border, and the Internal Revenue Service is getting 25 more agents to investigate money laundering and narcotics industry profits, agency spokesmen said.

“Basically, you have an increased enforcement effort and a reduced prosecutorial effort going on at the same time,” Nunez said. The equation, he warned, cannot work: “You can’t do more with less.”

Justice Department officials insist the budget rollbacks, absorbed from one end of the federal government to the other in an effort to trim the federal deficit, have not had a harmful effect on law enforcement.

“We’re exercising what we think is fiscal management,” John Russell, a department spokesman in Washington, said Friday.

That means that federal prosecutors nationwide have been ordered to carefully review all tasks that require travel or other major expenses. A memo last month directed them to postpone routine cases involving such costs until after Oct. 1.

“They’re to exercise judgment,” Russell said. “On the big cases, the priority cases, there will be no change.”

Yet Russell conceded that U.S. attorneys across the nation have complained about the budget cuts. In Los Angeles, U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner, like Nunez, has lost 10% of his staff of attorneys since Jan. 1, a drop of 11 lawyers.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are ordering fewer transcripts, canceling travel plans and delaying depositions and grand jury sessions until after Oct. 1 to save on payments to court reporters, according to Richard Drooyan, chief assistant U.S. attorney.

“We don’t get the significant cases out as fast as we would like because we don’t have as many people to put on those cases,” Drooyan said Friday. Initiatives in both criminal prosecution and civil litigation are not even considered. “We’re not looking in those directions because we don’t have the resources to do it,” he explained.

Drug prosecution, one of the planks in the campaign against drugs announced by Reagan early this month, has not been spared from the cuts.

“There’s no question in my mind that current and future investigations are not being worked with the enthusiasm and dispatch they would be if we had adequate resources,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Stephen G. Nelson, coordinator for the Presidential Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force in San Diego.

“We’re working at, I would say, 50% to 60% of capacity,” Nelson said. “Here we are at one of the focal points--in proximity to Mexico, with marijuana, black-tar heroin, the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country--and we have attorney openings we can’t fill, secretarial openings we can’t fill, and guidelines we have to abide by regarding non-expenditure of funds.”

The Southwest in general and San Diego in particular have solidified their reputation as major passageways for illicit drugs in the past two or three years, as federal anti-drug enforcement efforts have forced traffickers to transfer their operations from southern Florida and the Southeast.

In San Diego, where a significant money-laundering case a year ago turned up $1 million in drug profits, it has not been unusual this year to uncover $40-million laundering schemes, according to Ken Ingleby, agent in charge of U.S. Customs investigations.

Nonetheless, federal investigative agencies--including the FBI, the IRS and the Customs Service, which has been designated the lead agency for Operation Alliance--mostly have been able to cope with the limits strapping the U.S. attorney’s office, including Nunez’s newly announced moratorium on new cases, by absorbing pretrial costs and pacing the presentation of cases to prosecutors.

Some investigators have found it frustrating, however, to deal with an understaffed law office at the end of the law enforcement pipeline.

The Criminal Investigative Division of the IRS, for instance, expects that it may have to defer desired prosecutions because of Nunez’s moratorium on cases requiring expenditure by his office, said Robert Pledger, chief of the division’s office in Laguna Niguel.

The Drug Enforcement Administration also runs into prosecutorial roadblocks in San Diego.

“We’re very sympathetic to the U.S. attorney’s office,” said DEA spokesman Ron D’Ulisse. “We have noticed from casual observation that they are overworked. We have a hard time getting a lot of cases through--not from lack of desire but from inability to expend a lot of manpower on them.”

Yet with the announcement of the anti-drug crackdown, Nunez said he had to believe that Washington would provide the bodies to get the resulting legal work done.

“I’m optimistic,” he said. “I’d be very disappointed if we didn’t get some number of new resources in the near future.”

But the note of caution remained. “That will not help me to handle civil cases or immigration cases or any other part of my responsibility,” Nunez said. “I’m still concerned about how we carry out the rest of our responsibilities.”