Judge refuses to dismiss suit against Del Papa

Former state investigator Mike Anzalone said Monday he feels "vindicated" now that a district judge has refused to dismiss his wrongful termination lawsuit against Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa.

Anzalone has alleged in the 3-year-old suit that Del Papa forced him to resign in February 1996 because he wouldn't participate in an unlawful intelligence investigation of top casino regulators, including Del Papa's political adversary, then-state Gaming Control Board Chairman Bill Bible.

"The people of the state of Nevada have to know what this woman is all about," Anzalone said in a telephone interview from his home in Florida. "I'm looking forward to going to trial."

Following a two-hour hearing, District Judge James Mahan refused Monday to grant Del Papa and several of her top employees a summary judgment in the bitterly fought case, which the judge likened to the Watergate conspiracy in the 1970s that brought down President Richard Nixon.

"It's almost like Watergate," Mahan said in ordering the case to trial on July 10. "You can't prove anything unless you crack the conspiracy."

Mahan said Anzalone and his Phoenix lawyer, Christine Manno, will bear the responsibility at trial of proving whether Del Papa's motivation in the Bible investigation was unlawful. She has denied any wrongdoing.

"I still don't know why they investigated him," Anzalone told the Sun. "Everything they looked at regarding Bible and the other members of the Control Board had been investigated previously and found to have no merit."

Anzalone alleged in his February 1998 lawsuit that Del Papa also defamed him a year after his resignation after he had helped expose the secret intelligence investigation, spearheaded by Del Papa's trusted deputy, David Thompson.

On Monday, two of Del Papa's other deputies, David Wasick and Patrick King, and her private attorney, Gene Wait, argued furiously in court for the dismissal of the suit, saying Manno had not presented enough evidence to take the case further.

But Mahan said he was determined to see the case go to trial.

"I think there are genuine issues of fact that a jury needs to hear," Mahan told the disappointed Del Papa lawyers.

The attorney general's office had stacked the courtroom during the hearing with current and former employees. Among those on hand were Thompson and former investigator Ron Wheatley, who wrote a 21-page intelligence report on Bible and top elected leaders, alleging they could be bribed on gaming matters. Both Thompson and Wheatley are defendants in the suit.

Wheatley's unsubstantiated report, which was turned over to the FBI in March 1997, suggested that several of Del Papa's Democratic colleagues, including then Gov. Bob Miller, Sen. Harry Reid and then Sen. Richard Bryan, were on the take.

The FBI, which received the report at the time Bible was being considered for a presidential appointment to a national gambling commission, recently said it found no merit to Wheatley's allegations and never pursued an investigation against any of the officials. Bible ended up getting his appointment a month after Thompson had delivered the report to the FBI.

Del Papa said in a sworn deposition in the case last month that she never saw the report before the FBI got it.

On Monday attorneys also argued over Anzalone's claim that Thompson had asked him to unlawfully obtain Bible's bank records without a subpoena during the intelligence investigation.

Del Papa's lawyers contended Anzalone had acknowledged in his own deposition last year that Thompson never instructed him to break the law.

But Manno suggested her client was led to believe that he would have to get the records clandestinely.

Anzalone has submitted a sworn affidavit from another former Del Papa investigator, Gary Wright, who has said he also was asked to obtain Bible's bank records without a subpoena.

Thompson has denied unlawfully seeking the records.

The attorney general's office maintains that Anzalone was asked to resign because he was impeding a broad investigation into the slot cheating activities of former Control Board electronics expert Ron Harris, a claim Anzalone denies.

In August 1996, several months after Anzalone was removed from the investigation, Harris pleaded guilty and cooperated in the probe, which had turned its attention to the Control Board employees who had built the case against the electronics expert.

Prior to gaining the help of Harris, Thompson also secretly began pursuing allegations that Bible and other higher level regulators had taken bribes.

Bible, who had been pushing the hardest to prosecute Harris, had clashed with Del Papa during the 1995 Legislature over the attorney general's failure to provide solid legal assistance to the Control Board. The two have been at odds since then.

Del Papa denied investigating her political foe for three years until last April, when Wheatley's "confidential intelligence report" was made public in the Anzalone case.

She has since acknowledged conducting "limited" background searches on her former client.

Bible has said that Del Papa had no legitimate base to secretly investigate him.

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