Columnist Jeff German: Investigator continues his pursuit of Del Papa

More than a year after filing a lawsuit in District Court to find out why he lost his job, a former investigator with the attorney general's office still is running into roadblocks.

Mike Anzalone, unemployed since he was forced to resign in February 1996, has accused Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa in the suit of letting him go because he wouldn't participate in an aborted intelligence investigation of former Gaming Control Board Chairman Bill Bible and other casino regulators.

Del Papa has denied conducting an intelligence probe.

But that hasn't stopped Anzalone, who now lives in Florida, and his Phoenix attorney, Christine Manno, from trying to gain access to more than 40,000 documents in the attorney general's files that they believe will prove their case. The struggle has been difficult, primarily because the attorney general has fought them every step of the way.

The files -- which revolve around the criminal case of jailed ex-Control Board computer whiz Ron Harris -- now are in the hands of Discovery Commissioner Thomas Biggar, who has promised to let Anzalone know this week which documents he can have.

Among the items are videotaped interviews with Harris, who leveled wild allegations about the regulatory process after he decided to plead guilty to slot cheating in 1996. Copies of the tapes were leaked to ABC's "PrimeTime Live" in 1997, further intensifying a rift between Del Papa and Bible, who had pushed the hardest for the computer technician's prosecution. Anzalone was the lead investigator in the Harris probe until it veered off course.

Manno, who believes Del Papa and her deputies deliberately have thwarted her discovery requests, has tried to persuade Biggar to issue sanctions against the attorney general's office.

But at a March 11 hearing, Biggar refused to call Del Papa on the carpet, saying the apparent lack of cooperation was more the result of "bungled" efforts to turn over information.

Manno, however, has since asked District Judge Mark Gibbons to overrule Biggar.

Two weeks after Biggar's hearing, Bridget Branigan, of the attorney general's Litigation Division, informed the discovery commissioner that several new boxes of documents in the Harris case had turned up in the evidence room at the Las Vegas office.

This is the same evidence room that Del Papa once said could stand up to court scrutiny when Anzalone and another former investigator charged that procedures there were lax.

Branigan told Biggar that the latest discovery prompted a review of every file in the evidence room to determine whether any other phantom documents exist.

It all has heightened suspicion among gaming regulators and others within state government watching this case.

Del Papa takes the position that the Harris files should remain closed to protect the integrity of the gaming industry. There apparently are reputations other than Bible's at stake here.

But Bible, who retired last year, isn't worried about what might be in the files about him. Like Anzalone, he believes there are documents that will show Del Papa's office wrongly singled him out as a target.

Last year, after Harris was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in a slot cheating scam, Bible called upon the attorney general's office to open the case. No evidence ever was found to corroborate claims that others at the Control Board had committed crimes.

Harris, it turned out, had never even implicated Bible in any wrongdoing, so how the probe came to bite the respected former chairman remains a mystery.

At a hearing before Biggar in December, Manno charged that Anzalone's supervisors had asked him "to commit criminal acts" while he worked on the Harris investigation.

"They asked him," she said, "to obtain bank records of Mr. Bible, Mr. (Steve) DuCharme and Mr. (Jerry) Cunningham without the issuance of a subpoena from the grand jury ... They asked him to do it clandestinely."

DuCharme was named chairman of the Control Board this year, and Cunningham retired several years ago.

Manno alleged that phone records of the three regulators also were sought and checks were done on their cars and driver's licenses.

Someone in the attorney general's office, it seems, was dead serious about pursing the board members. Anzalone wasn't. And he lost his job over it.

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