Sunday, May 23, 1999 | 9:19 a.m.
DISCOVERY Commissioner Thomas Biggar has given Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa the worst possible news in her campaign to keep a lid on a reported intelligence investigation of top gaming regulators.
Though he didn't use the "I" word, Biggar told Del Papa's deputies at a hearing last week that he has concluded her office indeed conducted such a probe back in 1996 and that she ought to fess up to it.
What's more, Biggar said he intended to make public documents in the attorney general's own files that support that conclusion.
That includes those now-infamous Ron Harris videotapes in which the disgraced former Gaming Control Board employee leveled a series of unsubstantiated allegations about the casino industry that even Del Papa eventually was forced to disavow.
Del Papa, now in her third term as attorney general, has steadfastly denied conducting an intelligence inquiry. But her office has fought tooth and nail not to turn over the Harris tapes and a mass of documents stemming from the criminal probe into the computer expert's slot cheating activities.
Harris pleaded guilty in August 1996 and cooperated with one of Del Papa's deputies, David Thompson, in a spinoff investigation that reportedly targeted among others then-Control Board Chairman Bill Bible, who was feuding with Del Papa at the time.
The records are being sought by Mike Anzalone, a former Del Papa investigator who's suing his ex-boss in District Court for letting him go because he refused to participate in the secret probe. Anzalone, who had been investigating Harris at the time, has claimed in court that Thompson once asked him to surreptitiously obtain the bank records of Bible and other Control Board members.
Thompson is said to have been looking at Bible, who has since retired, and the other board members months before Harris rolled over.
According to a 52-page transcript of last week's hearing, Biggar, who oversees the sharing of evidence in civil cases, several times indicated the attorney general's office had conducted an investigation "outside the scope" of the Harris criminal probe.
He said he even found evidence that the attorney general had obtained the telephone records of Anzalone, its reluctant investigator.
Biggar, it turns out, has had a Herculean task poring over some 50,000 documents in the attorney general's secret files the past several weeks. It was evident from the transcript that his review was complicated by the shoddy way in which the files were given to him.
It appears that the attorney general's office either did a lousy job of maintaining the files or went to great lengths to sanitize information that tended to corroborate Anzalone's claims.
As for the Harris tapes, which contain the juicy, but uncorroborated allegations about gaming's movers and shakers, Biggar indicated he has no choice but to make them public. Portions of the tapes already have wound up in the hands of the national and local news media.
" ... the tapes have been leaked so much that they cannot be deemed confidential any longer," Biggar told Del Papa's deputies at the hearing.
Del Papa's one chance of keeping some of the most sensitive parts secret, he said, is to acknowledge her office conducted a wide-ranging probe of the Control Board.
But to do that, Del Papa basically would have to concede that Anzalone, her nemesis, was right all along.
And even then, Biggar said, he doubted whether he could keep the tapes under wraps for long if the media sought them.
For Del Papa, it was the worst possible news, and it came at the worse possible time in her political career.
Del Papa is gearing up to announce her candidacy for the U.S. Senate next week, and top Democrats, such as Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, are rallying around her.
But as the public gets its long-awaited chance to see what's on the Harris tapes, some of the very people Del Papa and the Democratic bigwigs are counting on to support her Senate bid may wind up being dragged through the mud.
Del Papa naturally will have to absorb much of the fallout.
It's not the scenario the Democratic hierarchy envisioned when it anointed Del Papa for the U.S. Senate.
archive
