Reno to Decide on New Charges in BCCI Scandal : Litigation: Case against Clifford and Altman may be ending after acquittal in New York. Others still face trials here and abroad in 5-year-old bank fraud.

WASHINGTON —  The five-year-old, globe-rattling scandal of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International may be winding down quietly behind closed doors in the Justice Department.

Sometime in coming weeks, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno must decide whether to renew federal charges against former Defense Secretary Clark M. Clifford and his former law partner, Robert A. Altman, for their roles in the BCCI scandal.

While Reno could seek a new indictment, people on both sides of the case expect that Altman’s acquittal of all charges in a New York state court Saturday was the last chapter in the criminal prosecution of major figures in the scandal, at least in the United States.

“The New York prosecution was in a very real sense a joint federal-state prosecution,” said Carl S. Rauh, a Washington lawyer for Clifford and Altman. “They had a Justice Department attorney co-prosecuting the case and the FBI and Federal Reserve Board assisted in pursuing it. The federal government has had its bite at the apple.”

A senior Justice Department lawyer acknowledged Thursday that chances appear slim Reno will approve indicting Clifford and Altman. The charges were dropped last year to allow Manhattan District Atty. Robert M. Morgenthau’s office to proceed with its broader case against the two men.

When the state and federal indictments were returned simultaneously in July, 1992, they charged Clifford and Altman with misleading banking regulators about BCCI’s secret control of First American Bankshares here, a bank in Atlanta and the defunct Independence Bank in Encino, Calif. But the federal charges stopped short of Morgenthau’s allegation that $40 million in legal fees and stock profits collected by Clifford and Altman from BCCI constituted bribes.

Clifford and Altman see total vindication in the New York jury’s resounding rejection of the state’s case. After the verdict, which came without the defense presenting any evidence, jurors disparaged the prosecution case.

Although Clifford was deemed too ill to stand trial, he was very much on trial alongside Altman. The evidence dealt with his role as BCCI’s lawyer and chairman of First American, too. So the influential lawyer and former adviser to four Democratic presidents said in an interview Thursday that he feels justified in seeking the return of his good name.

“I’ve been a practicing lawyer for 65 years and this is the first cloud ever against my name, and that made it particularly hard to bear,” said Clifford, who is 86 and had heart bypass surgery in March.

“This is vindication,” he said. “But when you have been subjected to this kind of publicity over a long period of time, then I believe you don’t ever get back what you had before. I will continue working at it, doing the best I can to get back as much of my good name as I had before. But some of it has been taken away from me, I believe, irrevocably, and I regret it very much.”

It is not out of the question that Clifford and Altman will face federal charges. A federal source close to the case said that Reno gained enormous respect for Morgenthau during her years as a state prosecutor in Florida and she may consult the New York district attorney before making a decision.

As happened in the Rodney G. King beating case, Reno could decide that the two lawyers should be tried on similar federal charges despite Altman’s acquittal.

Former Atty. Gen. William P. Barr, who oversaw the federal investigation that led to the indictment of Clifford and Altman in 1992, said that Reno “will have to weigh the extent to which the federal interests were adequately presented in the state forum and she will have to make a practical evaluation of whether the federal case is still as strong as it was thought to be in the wake of the Morgenthau office’s defeat.”

If Clifford sees vindication in the New York verdict, so does Barr. The Justice Department was criticized sharply in Congress and the press for going slow in the BCCI inquiry and bringing a narrow case. In New York, the trial judge threw out the broadest charges against Altman without letting the jury decide on them.

“Some of the criticism of the Justice Department may be put in a better light now,” said Barr.

Morgenthau is still pursuing other aspects of his BCCI investigation and criminal charges are outstanding against senior foreign officials of the defunct bank. But there seems little likelihood that Agha Hasan Abedi, the bank’s charismatic founder, or the others will be returned to the United States from Pakistan and Abu Dhabi.

This is not to say that the reverberations are over elsewhere. Ten former BCCI officials are scheduled to go on trial in October in Abu Dhabi, where the government lost $7 billion in the bank’s collapse.

In Britain and Abu Dhabi, efforts are under way to repay 250,000 customers in 40 countries who lost their savings when BCCI was shut down by regulators around the world in July, 1991. In Britain, the most depositors expect is the equivalent of 30 to 40 cents on the dollar, while customers in Third World countries without bank insurance are likely to get no money back, according to the bank’s liquidators.