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Jewish World Review Feb. 22, 2001 / 29 Shevat, 5761

Bob von Sternberg and Pam Louwagie

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Consumer Reports


How a rich man's son was pardoned by Clinton

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- ON a December day in 1994, a stunned father sat in a Minneapolis courtroom and heard a jury foreman declare his son guilty of violating federal drug laws.

After bailiffs led Carlos Vignali away, his father, Horacio, huddled with the prosecutors. Was there anything he could do to obtain leniency for his son? No, they answered. He wrote to the judge who presided over the trial and got the same answer.

But Horacio Vignali wouldn't take no for an answer.

Marshaling his considerable wealth, Vignali waged a six-year campaign to free his son that culminated with Bill Clinton, on the final day of his presidency, commuting Carlos Vignali's 15-year sentence.

Among the 176 pardons and commutations Clinton issued Jan. 20, the controversy ignited by Vignali's clemency has been second only to that engulfing the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Much of the ferocious indignation in the Vignali case is coming from law enforcement and judicial officials in Minneapolis, the center of the cocaine ring in which Vignali had a major role.

Officials closest to the case say that Vignali, now 29, was not remotely worthy of clemency and are furious that they weren't consulted about it - or that their recommendations against it were ignored. They note that Vignali was near the top of the Minneapolis cocaine ring - not some low-level dealer suffering under a harsh sentence.

Clinton and his former aides have said nothing about why they singled him out.

Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., said the case "raises serious questions about fundamental fairness and the potential influence of campaign contributions in the pardon and commutation process."

Horacio Vignali, 55, owns the biggest auto body shop in Los Angeles and dozens of parcels of prime downtown real estate. He lives in a $3.2 million house he bought from Sylvester Stallone and measures his annual income in the millions.

He also buys damaged and recovered stolen cars, repairs them and resells them.

In the early '90s, Vignali's youngest son, Carlos, was working by his side. "I treated him like my best friend, my partner," the elder Vignali said.

From the time Carlos Vignali was 12, he liked cash, his father said. When he got an allowance, "he would iron the money and put it away ... in his closet," Horacio Vignali said.

When Carlos reached his early 20s, his father was showering him with cash, setting him up in a $315,000 townhouse in Burbank, paying him as much as $17,000 at a time, giving him a $10,000 down payment on a Jeep Cherokee and $38,000 to start a music company.

"Anything he needed, I would always provide for him - always," Horacio Vignali said.

In the early '90s, Minneapolis police were trailing a woman and her two sons who they suspected were major cocaine dealers in the Twin Cities. Once they started wiretapping telephone calls, their investigation eventually stretched to California.

"It was one of the biggest and most important drug cases during my time as U.S. attorney, not just in the amount of dope involved but from the number of defendants," said David Lillehaug.

The main suspects, Gerald Williams and his mother, Shirley Jean Williams, had been running a finely tuned operation. Bundles of cash and kilos of cocaine tucked inside caramel popcorn tins and basketballs were shipped via UPS, court testimony revealed. The deliveries were shipped to a network of addresses, including one nursing home.

Dealers sold some of the cocaine as powder and cooked the rest, turning it into crack that sold for $1,000 an ounce.

In 1993, one of the California contacts, Dale Evans, hooked up with a young Los Angeles man he called C-Low who had a passion for expensive cars and rap music.

Hearing that name on a wiretap, local investigators flew to California to find C-Low. They said that when they held up a picture of C-Low from a rap video still, a West Coast drug enforcement agent immediately identified the man as Carlos Vignali.

Prosecutors described Vignali as an indulged young man who hung out with a trash-talking crowd. He dealt in fancy cars and lived in his own townhouse, where he stashed wads of $100 bills. Part owner of a music company, he appeared on a rap cassette tape titled "Gang Related."

Defense attorneys tried to paint a picture of a naive young man who worked hard at his father's body shop. They argued that Vignali was duped by drug dealers he thought were friends. He had no involvement with drugs, they said, but was just trying to fit in and talk their talk.

"Sometimes Dale (Evans) would talk and say some things that I would just say yes, you know, not to sound like a nerd or anything," Vignali testified.

Vignali also testified that he thought he loaned $20,000 to a friend for business deals involving Evans and basketball players. The friend had just been released from jail and wanted to invest money so he could afford to buy Christmas presents for his children, Vignali said.

He said the loan was for business deals. "I didn't know it was drugs," he testified.

The jurors didn't buy it. They found him guilty on three counts, and U.S. District Judge David Doty sentenced him to 175 months in prison.

He served 67.

Over the years, Vignali had not given much of his money to politicians - until his son faced a long prison term. In late 1994, he began dispensing cash - $160,000 in all - to a wide array of California officeholders.

Most of them were Democrats, including Gov. Gray Davis; Sen. Dianne Feinstein; Reps. Xavier Becerra, Mike Honda and Lucille Royball-Allard, and former Vice President Al Gore. Last Aug. 17, the day the Democratic National Convention ended (right next door to Vignali's body shop, C&H Used Cars), he donated $10,000 to the Democratic National Committee.

Why? "I'm a Democrat," he recently told the Los Angeles Times.

But he didn't neglect Republicans, donating $32,000 to former Gov. Pete Wilson and $1,000 to President Bush.

After sitting through his son's three-week trial, Vignali next financed his son's appeal. Appeals court judges rejected it on Oct. 1, 1996.

Vignali then approached some of the politicians he had helped financially and asked them to plead with the White House and Justice Department officials to commute his son's sentence.

Among those who did were Becerra and former California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, former U.S. Rep. Esteban Torres and Los Angeles County Sheriff Leroy Baca. The Roman Catholic cardinal of Los Angeles, Roger Mahony, also appealed.

Bob von Sternberg and Pam Louwagie are writers with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. Comment by clicking here.

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