Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Win at all costs - Aggressive attorney at OPR targets prosecutor, loses on all counts

Web Extras: Marketplace, Bridal, Headlines by Email, Postcards

Aggressive attorney at OPR targets prosecutor, loses on all counts

December 13, 1998
By Bill Moushey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer


	William Hogan, a federal prosecutor in Chicago, was the target of an OPR investigation concerning favors given to imprisoned witnesses during an investigation and prosecution of the notorious El Rukn gang in Chicago. Hogan was eventually cleared by a federal administrative judge, but he is angry over what he calls sloppy investigative work by “rank amateurs” in the OPR.

Agents of the Office of Professional Responsibility came down hard on William R. Hogan.

But Hogan, a prosecutor in the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office, was vindicated last August by a judge who determined that the exhaustive OPR investigation showed he was guilty of no wrongdoing.

"I have a very, very unfavorable view of OPR," said Hogan last week. "I would say they were rank amateurs.

"The agents involved and the lawyer involved had never tried any major cases. They had no concept of how to try the case. They had no experience in dealing with the witnesses and no appreciation of the realities and practicalities [of what goes on in this job]."

In the early 1990s, Hogan was the prosecutor who successfully won guilty pleas and convictions against 56 members of Chicago’s notorious El Rukn gang — one of America’s most violent street gangs. Police say the gang might be responsible for as many as 600 murders.

But in 1994, appeals courts began to reverse some of the convictions. Some gang members said they’d been granted special favors in exchange for their testimony, and defendants they testified against weren’t informed of that special treatment, as required by federal discovery law.

Hogan was accused of allowing cooperative El Rukn witnesses to use drugs while in jail, to have sex with their girlfriends, to receive free cigarettes, food and beer, and to receive clothes and unlimited telephone privileges.

The Justice Department said in a statement Friday that it pursued an investigation of Hogan after it concluded that he engaged in "professional misconduct, poor performance and mismanagement" in the El Rukn prosecutions.

OPR, in one of its largest investigations ever, spent two years looking into the charges against Hogan. Based on OPR findings, he was fired in 1996.

At every step along the way, Hogan insisted he’d done nothing wrong. He said most of the people OPR interviewed told the investigators Hogan had done nothing wrong. He filed mountains of paperwork proving his contentions, he said.

Yet OPR filed charges against him anyway.

While some of the charges made by El Rukn gang members about the favoritism they received were true, the incidents occurred without Hogan’s prior knowledge while the gang members were in custody of entities like the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service, Hogan said.

Last August, a judge ruled that OPR had gotten its facts wrong.

"They had the burden of proof and they couldn’t prove anything," Hogan said.

A 196-page opinion issued by Howard J. Ansorge, an administrative judge, said: "A thorough analysis of the record in this appeal reveals that the agency did not carry its burden of proving any of the charges listed in the notice of proposed removal. Because the agency did not prove any of the charges, I reverse the agency’s action removing the appellant from employment."

Hogan went back to work and the government was ordered to reimburse him for back pay and legal expenses. He is again trying cases. He is negotiating with the Justice Department to recover the hundreds of thousands of dollar he spent fighting for his professional life. He is also negotiating the amount of back pay he is due.

But he feels his reputation has been irreparably damaged.

Once those negotiations are complete, Hogan will decide whether to continue his employment with the Justice Department.

"They looked at every single aspect of my personal life, every woman I ever dated, interviewed friends, family members, friends of family members. They interviewed the guy my youngest sister used to date who had a subsequent drug problem. . . . They dredged [the man’s past] up in front of his wife and daughter — absurd things. Their theory was I must have had some involvement [in drugs]."

The bottom line, Hogan said, was that the OPR investigation was simply incompetent.

"They got a ton of things wrong, even the most basic elements of the information. The two agents and lawyer who conducted it were completely incompetent and completely venal in the manner in which they created the report."

While the OPR investigators traced his life back to his childhood, Hogan said, none of the investigators who worked on a daily basis in the El Rukn case ever had even one conversation with the lawyer who filed the charges against him.