High on the Hog
Sun, 11 Apr 1999
Commercial Appeal (TN)
Letters to Editor
Authors:
Louis
Graham & Chris Conley
* POLICE CREDIT CARD BUYS FURNITURE, CLOTHING
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This card has its privileges. Travel to sunny Southern California, the ski slopes of Idaho and the bright lights of Vegas. Stay in expensive hotels. Dine in nice restaurants.
This is no ordinary credit card. It has an $18,000 limit and was issued to a fictitious company whose name City of Memphis officials will not reveal because of security concerns. The covert account was set up for use by undercover drug investigators.
But an examination of records by The Commercial Appeal shows it is available to numerous members of the Memphis Police Department and monthly expenditures, sometimes as much as $12,000, are paid for with money seized from drug dealers.
City Atty. Robert Spence said the records reveal no violations of the law, but indicated a need for guidelines to control spending.
"It's all over the board. They would use it for conferences, they would use it for oil changes, they would use it for the purchase of furniture." Spence also suggested an audit be conducted to ensure there is proper documentation of the charges.
Since 1996, everything from food for drug dogs to furniture for then Director Walter Winfrey's office to wallpaper for the executive offices have been charged to a VISA card controlled by the department's Organized Crime Unit. Total charges for the three-year period exceed $150,000.
In one instance, Winfrey's wife, Mona, used the card to purchase $64 in merchandise from a ski outfitter in Sun Valley, Idaho. Insufficient backup records were released Friday to determine whether that purchase and Walter Winfrey's purchase at a second outfitter were reimbursed. But there are numerous other instances where the former director repaid the drug fund for airline tickets when his wife accompanied him on department-financed travel.
"I did not abuse it," said Winfrey, who retired in mid-March. "If it was for anything personal I would reimburse." The city produced copies of personal and cashier's checks from Winfrey totaling more than $2,700. The former director said his wife bought warm clothes on the card after a sudden snow in June. "She bought sweaters for me . . . . It snowed, and we were not properly dressed," he said. The expenses were reimbursed, he said. Still, he conceded, "It probably wasn't a good idea."
The entire conference in Sun Valley, which he attended every year, is reimbursed to the fund by the FBI, Winfrey pointed out.
Deputy Chief Brenda Jones, who heads the Organized Crime Unit (OCU), used her card regularly for travel and restaurants and signed for several of the furniture purchases. She declined comment.
The funds are primarily to be used for drug investigations.
"If it's expanded beyond that, then I guess that's the issue...That's the real question in my mind," Spence said. Use by a family member of an officer, he said, "would be one step further."
The city attorney said he plans to seek an audit of the account. "There are some charges and transactions that raise questions," he said. He said not all receipts for personal purchases are accounted for, but it will be up to auditors to clear the account. "There are many transactions for which there are no receipts...I don't think they exist," he said. Receipts are sometimes lost, he said.
The Police Department's current director, Bill Oldham, who has used the account as well, said Saturday he wholeheartedly supports Spence's call for specific guidelines. Since taking over the department in March, Oldham already has called for a broad audit of OCU to ensure funds were being spent properly.
The department's use of the credit card may test the boundaries of state and federal drug seizure programs that vaguely specify the money be used for law enforcement purposes. The only specific prohibition is from using the money to pay salaries.
The city's purchasing department closely regulates city agencies' purchases of supplies and services, but it could not be determined whether purchases on the account - everything from oil changes to car washes to window tinting - - circumvented procedure.
Some police agencies operate under more stringent guidelines to further control how the drug seizure funds are spent. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, for instance, does not allow its agents to use drug funds for travel or meals except to purchase a meal for an informant. And when the money is used to buy an item, surveillance equipment, for example, the agency is required to use the state's normal purchasing system.
Richard McBryde, MPD's budget director, said the OCU has received $1.38 million from the state and $825,000 in federal funds this fiscal year. McBryde said the forfeiture money, normally about $2 million a year, comprises the majority of the OCU budget.
Despite those annual appropriations, the department routinely carried a monthly balance - one month, the balance was more than $15,000 - on the card issued through First Tennessee Bank. During a three-year period examined by the newspaper, that practice exposed the city to annual finance charges of nearly 16 percent, generating more than $2,000 in additional costs.
There were several instances, too, where a fee was assessed for late payment. Spence said he could not explain why the cards would carry hefty balances when money was available in the fund to pay them. Because the account is used by undercover officers, it is issued in the name of a fictitious company. Spence, in fact, said he did not know the account existed until he began fielding reporters' requests for its records.
"I don't think many people outside the police department were aware it existed," the city attorney said. Because of the covert nature of the account, Spence removed the company name and account number before making the records public. But the monthly bills make it clear far more than the unit's street level officers have access to the funds.
Winfrey, for example, charged travel to everywhere from Montreal to New York to Sun Valley. His successor said he, too, has used the charge card to finance travel to training sessions, but no longer does so. He said the fund has allowed the department to send far more officers to training than normally would be allowed by its $80,000 training budget. "We try to get as many people on the department as possible trained . ...As long as it's legal, we are going to try and do it," Oldham said.
In all, records show the card was used to purchase tens of thousands of dollars of airline tickets for dozens of department employees, from front-line officers to commanders, sending them to sessions around the nation: Las Vegas, Orlando, Detroit and Phoenix among them. But Winfrey was the most frequent flier using the VISA account.
And in the final months of his administration the account was also used to finance furniture purchases for the director's office on the 12th floor of the Criminal Justice Center at 201 Poplar. Backup documents attached to several monthly account statements show wallpaper was purchased for the executive offices as were several pieces of furniture Winfrey has since relinquished.
During a four-month period in late 1998, records show, more than $9,000 in furniture and wallcoverings were purchased, much of it from Samuels Furniture. Records show a second account, issued by MBNA America, was used in much the same manner - for everything from plane tickets to cookies.
Shortly before his retirement, Winfrey reimbursed the fund for $185 in gifts given to visiting members of a Moldova police department. Among the February 1999 charges: $21 to Pop Tunes and $78 to Trinity Wine and Liquors in Cordova.
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To reach reporter Louis Graham, call 529-2333 To reach reporter Chris Conley, call 529-2595
Thanks to the drug war mentality, immoral profit from other people's loss continues unabated among law enforcement! Same as it has been in all other prohibitions throughout history.
E N D * P R O H I B I T I O N * N O W
KayLee