The Pointlessness of Prohibition (Pt. I)

Last of the breed: Legendary Frontier Marshal Bill Tilghman, a casualty of our nation's first "War on Drugs."


On this day (December 5) in 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified by Utah, thus bringing to a merciful end one of our nation's most deranged experiments in social control: The federal ban on “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States....”

It is a pity that this exercise in civic derangement, which began in 1920, hadn't ended a decade earlier. Had reason reasserted itself by 1923, numerous tragedies could have been avoided, including the murder of legendary frontier lawman Bill Tilghman by a drunken, corrupted prohibition agent named Wiley Lynn.

At the time of his death in November 1924, Tilghman was seventy-five, and had spent a half-century in law enforcement. As a teenage buffalo hunter, Tilghman had dropped thousands of the prairie bison, an accomplishment not to be mocked even though he and other hunters were being used (often unwittingly) in a federal scheme devised by General Sherman to herd the Plains Indians into reservations. During his hunts the young Tilghman made the acquaintance of Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and others with whom he would later collaborate as members of the legendary Dodge City Peace Commission.

During the 1890s, Tilghman, as a federal marshal in Oklahoma, led the effort that defeated the Doolin-Dalton gang; he single-handedly captured gang leader Bill Doolin in 1895. Widely and properly admired for his insane courage (“Tilghman would charge hell with a bucket,” said an admiring Teddy Roosevelt), the marshal was also respected for his kindness and integrity. “The man I consider it an honor to have known and to have ridden with was Bill Tilghman,” wrote George Bolds, a widely respected frontier marshal in his own right. “Wyatt Earp was a great Western marshal, but to my mind, Bill Tilghman was greater, both in character and in deeds.”

After a brief career in politics and a short stint as a Hollywood consultant, Tilghman was dragged out of retirement in 1924 to serve one last term as a city marshal. At the time the venerable lawman was dying from cancer, something known only to himself and his intimate friends (including, of course, his second wife, Zoe; his first wife Flora had died several years earlier). Oklahoma Governor Martin Trapp gave Tilghman the assignment to clean up Crockett, an oil town widely reputed to be the “wickedest city in Oklahoma.”

Cromwell was dominated by a criminal syndicate headquartered in Oklahoma City. Like many other murderous cliques of its sort, the OKC mob was profiting handsomely as a result of prohibition, which led to vastly inflated prices for sub-par booze. Killian, the mob boss who ran Cromwell, diverted a portion of the profits into the pockets of federal Prohibition Agent Lynn.

Tilghman, aware that the federal agent was in the pocket of the mob, had sharp words with Lynn on more than one occasion, generally after the Fed had released a criminal suspect the marshal had put in jail. Tilghman was also aware that the mob had put a price on his head. Tilghman was fatally shot during an attempt to arrest and disarm a drunken Lynn on the night of November 1. Despite being identified by one of Tilghman's deputies as the one who fired the lethal shots, Lynn was acquitted of the crime he's still widely believed to have committed.

Bill Tilghman was the last of his breed, a Frontier Lawman devoted to maintaining a civic order intended to protect life and property. His murderer could be regarded as a particularly corrupt specimen of the New Model Federal Lawman, a parasite serving the whims of social engineers determined to use the State's coercive power to correct what they consider to be defects in the way others choose to live.


It's always "For the children": A 1920s-era federal propaganda poster urging compliance with the national ethanol price support program (aka Prohibition).

Biologist and political commentator Bill Walker describes Prohibition as the first federal effort to “regulate the bloodstream of all US citizens.” It was also a huge subsidy to both the criminal Underworld and the bureaucratic political class with which organized crime lives in corrupt symbiosis.

One of the little-appreciated benefits of alcohol is its use as a termagant repellent.

At the time alcohol Prohibition (what Walker calls the “federal ethanol price support program”) went into effect, the equivalent program for narcotic drugs was in its infancy. Like its long-dead sibling, the narcotic price support program, known colloquially as the “war on drugs,” has done nothing to reduce consumption of various controlled substances, but a great deal to enrich the criminal underworld and, even worse, to empower the much deadlier criminal syndicate called the State.

I'll have more to say on that subject tomorrow....

Pig-Men on Patrol

“No question, now, what has happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, man to pig, and pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm

The first reaction of most people to the sight of a police patrol car in their rear-view mirror is a reflexive twinge of anxiety.

This is true even for those with clean records and a clear conscience: Policemen – even the best of them – are heavily armed agents of the State who exercise broad discretionary powers to deprive people of life and liberty.

It's not difficult to imagine how the irrepressible unease most people feel over being shadowed by a cop would be greatly magnified by the knowledge that the patrol car in question contained a patrolman who was a decorated former officer of the KGB. In his former occupation, the police officer now riding the anxious motorist's rear bumper served a stint managing “detention facilities” for the masters of the Soviet gulag.

After coming to the United States, this patrolman had been employed for an unspecified amount of time by a CIA front company now notorious for its role in “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist subjects to torture chambers abroad – some of which, incidentally, are dungeons in former Eastern Bloc countries that were once operated by the KGB.

This is not a hypothetical exercise.

Not a welcome sight in the rear-view: Lt. Colonel Emin Gadzhiyev of the Second Chief Directorate, Soviet KGB (ret.) tries on his Broward County (Florida) Sheriff's Department Uniform


Ten years ago I wrote a lengthy and detailed profile of Emin Gadzhiyev, a former Lt. Colonel in the Second Chief Directorate of the Soviet KGB who came to the United States in 1989 and ended up in Broward County, Florida.

In the mid-1990s Gadzhiyev was studying to become an American police officer, a goal he achieved in 1999. He spent a few years with the Broward Sheriff's Office while also working for CTC International Group Inc., a West Palm Beach-based business consulting group that also employed former CIA, FBI, IRS and Drug Enforcement Administration personnel, in addition to veterans of British Intelligence (and most likely other foreign intelligence agencies).

CNN's financial news affiliate reported in 1999 that CTC acted as a sort of investment Sherpa for U.S.-based corporations considering joint ventures in the former Soviet Union.

It's likely that Gadzhiyev's gig with the CTC grew out of his earlier engagement with a Florida-based CIA front called Premier Executive Services, for which the ex-KGB agent supposedly compiled a large dictionary of Soviet counter-intelligence terms. Yes, it's possible that Gadzhiyev did just that, and nothing more. But it should be pointed out that Premier Executive Services has been deeply involved in the "extradorinary rendition" of terrorist suspects -- including some completely innocent people -- into the hands of Soviet-trained torturers in countries like Syria.

The Pain Plane: Premier Executive Services, a CIA front company that employed Emin Gadzhiyev, operated a fleet of executive jets like this one to deliver terrorist suspects to off-shore torture facilities in Syria, Egypt, Romania, Poland, and elsewhere.


Gadzhiyev had considerable expertise to offer in both fields -- international business, as well as detention and interrogation. He was well acquainted with both security personnel and key criminal figures (but I repeat myself) in energy-rich Soviet Central Asia, a region whose resources are greatly coveted by the American Power Elite.

A native of Azerbaijan, Gadzhiyev claims that he had to flee the Soviet Union after uncovering widespread corruption and ties to organized crime among his KGB superiors in that former Soviet republic.

That claim is entirely plausible, since the KGB – by what ever designation it has been known, from the Cheka to its current incarnation, the FSB – has always controlled the most powerful elements of the Russian/Soviet underworld. When I interviewed him, Gadzhiyev claimed that the KGB under its founder, Feliks Dzherzhinsky had effectively eliminated organized crime, before the agency mutated into something less commendable than it had been at its founding. Gadzhiyev also emphasized that his break with the KGB was prompted by his disillusionment with the agency's corruption, rather than its “ideals.”

The flavor of the KGB's “ideals” is offered by an interview given by its founder on Bastille Day, 1918 to the periodical Novaia Zhzin:

“We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession.”

Gadzhiyev, as far as I can tell, never disavowed the founding ideals of the secret police agency he served with such distinction. His employment application for work with the Broward County Sheriff's Office proudly listed the KGB and the CIA as former employers and references, and mentioned the “Red Star of the Soviet Union” among his professional commendations. He earned the Red Star for his role in a scheme to steal classified Space Shuttle technology during a conference in Baku.

So at the time of his arrival to the U.S., Gadzhiyev's professional background consisted of exemplary service to the world's most capable terrorist organization. Which is most likely why he was recruited to work for the CIA.

A 1999 story by the Broward-Palm Beach New Times reported that Gadzhiyev's work with the CIA front Premier Executive Services involved compiling “a 400-page dictionary of Soviet counterintelligence terms,” which, as noted above, seems like a pretty sterile exercise in busywork. During the same period he worked as a consultant with federal and local law-enforcement agencies “in investigating cases involving organized crime figures from the republics of the former Soviet Union....”

His employment application, as noted in my 1996 article in The New American, listed three FBI agents as references.

When I spoke to him in December 1996, Gadzhiyev insisted that the KGB and its satellites were not allies of Russian organized crime syndicates, but rather their devoted enemies. He also pointedly mentioned that there were many other ex-KGB operatives in the United States who should be recruited into the ranks of U.S. Law enforcement and intelligence organs:

"I'm not the only one out here.... I know many others, [including] some from the Second Chief Directorate, from organized crime units, from the militia ... not only from the former Soviet Union, but from the East European Bloc as well, who are working odd jobs or working with computers. There's a tremendous resource that's not being used."

After speaking with Gadzhiyev ten years ago, I bounced his suggestion off Sergeant Mike Smith, head of the Philadelphia Police Department's Russian Organized Crime Task Force.

Sgt. Smith observed that "it is extremely difficult to know how much we can trust anybody who has been connected to any of the Soviet security services. Many of the most vicious KGB officials have set up private security firms in Russia, which offer 'protection' from the mafia but are actually working in collaboration with them. It's possible that some of the Russian gangsters might import the same tactics here."

Smith also described an unsettling example of KGB operatives attempting to co-opt the militarization of local police agencies throughout the United States:

“[In 1995], a law enforcement agency in San Francisco got a visit from a group calling itself the Moscow Police Organized Crimefighting Regional Department -- supposedly a SWAT team-style elite unit to battle the mafia. They were supposed to go on a multi-city tour to consult with various law enforcement agencies. But we checked with an intelligence source and learned that the original members of that group had been replaced by former KGB operatives who are now involved in organized crime.”

Although “we were able to derail that particular venture,” Sgt. Smith pointed out, “with the kind of travel that takes place today, it's difficult to know how many other situations of this sort we might find."

Of course, it's not just the ease of travel that gives rise to “situations of this sort.” Much more important is the increasingly Sovietized nature of our own law enforcement and intelligence system, which is now a militarized, centralized entity under the authority of a lawless executive exercising (as Lenin put it) “power without limit, resting directly on force.”

The relationship between pre-Soviet America and post-Soviet Russia is akin to that described at the end of Orwell's Animal Farm, in which revolutionary “Pigs” and the oppressive Farmers had morphed into indistinguishable human/porcine hybrids.

One illustration of this alarming reality was offered in the 1999 New Times profile of Gadzhiyev, which described his former employer, the KGB, as “a centralized monstrosity that was essentially the equivalent of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and INS rolled into one. With more than a dozen divisions under its umbrella, KGB headquarters in Moscow controlled spies overseas, border guards, counterintelligence officers like Gadzhiyev, and the infamous `thought police,' who threw dissidents like Andrei Sakharov into gulags.”

Under the 2004 National Intelligence Reform Act, the Director of National Intelligence (or “Intelligence Czar”) presides over a vast monolith with exactly the same organizational schematic followed by the old KGB. A provision of that act permits the Intelligence Czar to employ any federal agency for the purpose of covert operations; another permits the Czar to re-allocate congressionally authorized funds for any purpose he sees fit.

In similar fashion, the Department of Homeland Security has (in principle) plenary authority over every law enforcement body within our borders. It's likely that in the event of a jurisdictional dispute, the Commissar for Homeland Security would defer to the Commissar for National Intelligence.

The apparent assassination of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvenenko has made vivid the murderous potency of the supposedly moribund Soviet intelligence apparatus, and illustrated to good effect the difficulty of navigating through that tenebrous and deceptive realm. Litvenenko, as Justin Raimondo points out, was typical of his "ex"-Chekist comrades in his eagerness to use his professional contacts to enrich himself through illicit means -- such as smuggling radioactive materials like the Polonium 210 isotope that was used to kill him, and compiling compromat (blackmail material) for use against rivals and political enemies.

(That Litvenenko was a bad guy doesn't mean that Putin and his faction are any better, of course, and just because Putin's a bad guy doesn't necessarily mean that he ordered Litvenenko's assassination.)

Recall, once again, Emin Gadzhiyev's words to me ten years ago: "I'm not the only one out here.... I know many others."

How many of Gadzhiyev's comrades are active in this country, working both sides of the law on behalf of the Pig-men of the Power Elite? What role do they play in helping to craft the institutions of our Homeland Security State? What politically exploitable mischief could they be planning for the purpose of breaking down the remaining opposition to full-fledged totalitarian rule?

Obiter dicta

For several years, various commentators have claimed that former Russian Premier Yegeny Primakov and former East German Stasi commissar Markus Wolf have been employed as advisers or consultants for the Department of Homeland Security. While this is certainly (and lamentably) plausible, I've yet to see any suitable confirmation of this account. Primakov did address a seminar on Homeland Security-related issues sponsored by the Center for International Strategic Studies in Washington, but that's the limit of what I've been able to confirm.

Emin Gadzhiyev, to the best of my knowledge, is no longer employed by the Broward Sheriff's office. He apparently moved to eastern Tennessee about a year ago, and that's where the trail -- at least for me -- grows cold.

He earnestly claims to be pursuing "the American dream," and if he is sincere I wish him well. But as a wise friend of mine frequently says, we can "never, ever trust a Spook" -- particularly one who worked the Soviet side of the street.

On another note -- I provide regular commentaries on global affars for The Ex-Pat Show, a weekly syndicated radio program produced by, and featuring, my hermano Tai Aguirre. Please check it out!

Police Perjury, and Burglars with Badges

“I've got a gun and a badge. I'm always right.”

Sgt. Chuck Schoville of the Tempe police department probably thought he was being facetious when he made that remark to two men he had stopped on suspicion of littering. But "jokes" of this sort, like George W. Bush's oft-repeated thigh-slapper about how things would be easier if he were a dictator, are more revealing than amusing.

At the time he decanted that line, Sgt. Schoville was mugging for the camera: The August traffic stop was taped for broadcast on the Tempe P.D.'s community access program "Street Beat."

This might explain why after he had made the stop and demanded that the two men present identification, he offered to release them without writing a ticket if they would spontaneously compose and perform a “rap” about the evils of littering.

Oh, did I mention that the driver and his passenger were black?

“No littering ticket if the two of you just do a little rap about ... what do you want to do a rap about? Littering? About the dangers of littering – OK,” stated Sgt. Schoville, intoxicated with a sense of his own cleverness.

On first reading about this incident, I was irresistibly reminded of the classic MASH episode “The General Flipped at Dawn.” In that installment, General Bratford Hamilton Steele (Harry Morgan, in an Emmy-winning guest role before he was cast as Col. Potter), is preparing to question a black helicopter pilot during an inquiry. “But first,” Gen. Steele says as the pilot prepares to testify, “a number.”

The chopper pilot replies with a puzzled stare.

“You know, a musical number,” prompts Steele.

The pilot's shoulders slump and he gives the other officers a “You've-got-to-be-kidding” look.

“C'mon, son, it's in your blood!” exclaims Gen. Steele, before improvising his own buck-and-wing dance to illustrate what he had in mind.

In General Steele's defense, he was pretty clearly insane. Oh, and he was a fictional character as well.

As to Sgt. Schoville, well ... as unlikely as it seems, given Arizona's climate, it appears that he was just recently chipped from a glacier.

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer Kirock apparently has a relative working for the Tempe Police Department.

“You must forgive me,” Sgt. Schoville, aka Unfrozen Caveman Police Officer, might insist. “I'm a simple unfrozen caveman whom your scientists recently revived. Many of your ways are strange and frightening to me. For some reason, I didn't get the e-mail memo explaining that crude racial stereotypes are impermissible in polite society; perhaps my Blackberry malfunctioned, or my Wi-Fi coverage was inadequate. But even to an Unfrozen Caveman Police Officer like myself, one thing is perfectly clear: As long as I have a gun and badge, I'm always right!”

And therein lies the real outrage here – namely, the assumption that toting a piece of State-issued costume jewelry confers open-ended authority and something very close to impunity.

Sgt. Schoville is not the only police officer to get caught yukking it up at the expense of a detained motorist.

Last January, Tom Cox was stopped and detained on suspicion of DUI by more than a half-dozen police officers near Huntington Beach, California. During a search of Cox's Hyundai, Officer Brian Knorr popped the trunk and tossed a snub-nosed, loaded pistol inside. A second officer, who apparently hadn't seen Knorr plant the gun, was brought in to search the car and quickly found the firearm.

Holding it with both hands, the second officer turned to Cox, who was terrified at the prospect of being arrested on a weapons charge – or perhaps being swarmed and beaten by the cops.

“I thought I was in for a butt-whipping,” Cox later testified. “I just thought I was going to die that night. I realize now that they were making me look like a fool in front of everybody else.” All of the officers on-scene enjoyed a good laugh at Cox's expense.

The police at the scene acted like “gang members,” contended Cox and his public defender during his DUI trial in October. For several months, Cox was under the impression that he was facing a weapons charge, as well. And that misunderstanding didn't dissipate until shortly before Cox went to trial: After he filed a complaint with the police, “cops, prosecutors, and city bureaucrats attempted to keep the incident a secret by sealing records and stalling discovery of related documents,” reported the O.C. Weekly.

“By the time of the late October trial against Cox, however, four officers testified that the gun toss was no reason for public alarm,” continued the journal. “They admitted that none of them had mentioned the gun in official reports before Cox's complaint. And, though the officers professed amnesia on certain details, they all shared with jurors an identical excuse: the planted gun was merely a prop in a routine `training exercise' for the junior cop at the crime scene.”

Uh, yeah, right.

Officer Knorr threw a loaded gun into the trunk of Cox's car. And Knorr actually admitted under oath that he had planted guns before.

According to a department spokesman, the Huntington Beach Police Department's official policy forbids the use of loaded weapons in training exercises. Stan Goldman of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, who has many hundred hours of courtroom experience, told the Weekly: “I've been in many, many trials and I've never heard of anything stranger than this.”

Cox, rattled by the prospect of a weapons charge, failed his field sobriety test. Blood tests showed “insignificant” traces of alcohol and marijuana in his bloodstream. (Cox has a prescription for medical use of marijuana.) A retired L.A. County Sheriff crime lab supervisor testified in Cox's defense that the heroes from the Huntington Beach P.D. Had botched the DUI investigation.

Nonetheless, a bored, distracted, and indifferent jury sided with the police, finding Cox guilty of DUI and four other misdemeanors. His sentence will be handed down a week from next Friday. The police, on the other hand, will most likely suffer neither civil nor professional sanctions. “Current conventional wisdom,” notes the Weekly, “says that officer privacy in the performance of their powerful government jobs supersedes public accountability.”

Cox isn't the only citizen to get caught in a police “training exercise.” Last year, Las Vegas police admitted to planting narcotics in a suspect's car – once again, as a “training exercise,” this time for a drug-sniffing dog (most likely bought and trained with a federal subsidy). The officers, upon “finding” the drugs, arrested the suspect, and charged with him drug possession.

In court, the officers claimed to have “forgotten” that the drugs had been planted. This oddly convenient case of detail-specific amnesia, so much like the condition that afflicted the officers in Huntington Beach, doesn't explain why the Las Vegas officers fabricated police reports and otherwise covered embarrassing details of the incident. The fog of forgetfulness lifted sometime before two police officers perjured themselves in the witness box in an attempt to send the innocent suspect, Mark Lilly, to prison.

That's right: These heroic guardians of the community, these self-sacrificing exemplars of civic virtue, were willing to send an innocent man to prison just to avoid embarrassment.

Yet another incident of this sort took place in Brooklyn last April, during a vice squad investigation of a massage parlor. An undercover officer strode into the reception area for roughly 43 seconds without attracting attention, and then left. Shortly thereafter, the vice squad raided the business and shut it down, on the strength of the undercover officer's claim that he had been propositioned for prostitution by all eight of the women present.

As it happens, the entire affair had been captured on surveillance cameras. Following his arrest, the massage parlor's owner told police that he could use the surveillance footage to prove that no solicitation had taken place.

So the owner was released, and the police were disciplined, right?

I mean, given the “new police professionalism” extolled by Supreme Court Justice Scalia, that's what we should expect, right?

Well ... not so much.

The day after the bust, the undercover officer and another policeman broke into the parlor and stole the incriminating videotape. Which is to say, they committed an act of armed burglary.

At one point, the undercover officer spied a pinhole camera, which he triumphantly ripped out of the wall, doubtless with the smug expectation that he and his cohort had destroyed all of the evidence.

But the owner, seamy and disreputable as he may be, works in the private sector, which means he's more astute than the government employees who burgled his business. The surveillance footage was stored on the system's computer hard drive. (Click here for a complete report, including video footage.)

The prosecution dropped the case (one of dozens built by the corrupt vice unit), and the squad commander was transferred. But so far nothing has been said about prosecuting the corrupt cops for false arrest or staging an armed burglary.

Summarizing one lesson of this sorry affair, former federal prosecutor John Sims (who is representing the massage parlor's owner and employees) states: “Certainly I do not think people should always accept the word of a police officer.... I don't know why they would lie in this case, but they did and nine people got arrested as a result of it.”

We should also remember that innocent people are getting killed because of the assumption that the power to carry a badge and gun confers something akin to legal and moral infallibility -- which includes permission to plant evidence when it suits them. (Click here, and then on the media window "NRH Police Plant Evidence," for one particularly egregious example.)