Word: stingingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...another FBI sting. The public sequel to Operation Abscam and Operation Brilab was Operation Miporn, an abbreviation of Miami pornography. This time, the FBI opened a little pornography business in Miami called Golde Coaste Specialties, Inc., and began buying sex books, movies, video tapes. After 2½ years of investigation, the FBI last week got indictments against 45 alleged pornography merchants in ten states. Said one official: "This wiped out the whole top echelon of the pornography business...
...results of such sweeps-and the FBI now has 50 sting operations under way-are not necessarily that permanent. In the Abscam probe that rocked Congress the previous week, there was little new action except a probe of who had leaked the story. In the Brilab investigation that disclosed official corruption in Louisiana and Texas, high state officials paraded before a grand jury and professed their innocence of all wrongdoings...
...Abscam leaks also caused a premature closing of the Brilab sting. By then, though, the Brilab investigators had tapped the Washington telephones of I. Irving Davidson, a longtime capital public relations man who admits being a friend of Marcello's. The FBI taps overheard Davidson regularly calling some low-level assistants to various presidential aides to discuss his clients' problems...
...sting is embodied in American law as an acceptable police device. In a 1973 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that infiltration by undercover agents is "one of the only practicable means of detection" in certain kinds of crime, notably drug transactions. In general, the court has ruled that as long as a defendant is "predisposed" to commit a crime, he cannot plead entrapment-that he was lured into breaking the law against his will or without his knowledge. An entrapment plea can be successful only if a law-enforcement agency has pressured or induced him to commit the crime...
Apart from the legality, there is an ethical question of whether the FBI carried the Abscam sting to the point of inducing the politicians to take bribes. It was not the usual sting. The agency was not simply participating in ongoing criminal activity. To some degree, it set up the conditions for the crime. The bounteous Arab sheik was strictly the creation of the bureau. The targets of its probe were sometimes subjected to a pretty hard sell-never by the FBI, but by contacts who were anxious to set up deals with the high-spending sheik. When Middleman Joseph...