In an extraordinary blunder, the government has made public a confidential document outlining its entire prosecutorial strategy in an investigation of what officials described as the most ambitious scheme by organized crime to infiltrate Wall Street in decades.
The memorandum, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix by mistake late last year, contains the names of victims and potential witnesses in the case against reputed members of the Genovese and Bonanno crime families, who are among the 19 defendants in the case, according to court records.Prosecutors, fearing that the disclosure could threaten their case and imperil the safety of witnesses, moved to retrieve the memo, which runs about 97 pages. They dispatched investigators to simply remove the document from the public courthouse file. But when they discovered that a defense lawyer in the case already had a copy of the memo, they took the matter before a judge in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
On Dec. 18, Judge Denny Chin, over the objections of defense lawyers, ordered all copies of the sensitive memo returned to his chambers until he could review the matter. He did not say when he would make a ruling.
"In a case involving allegations of organized crime and threats of violence, innocent victims and witnesses should not be exposed to any further risk," prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan wrote to Chin, in a letter he made public Monday.
The prosecutors said that the memorandum also contains information relating to other investigations and the names of the targets of some of those investigations. "If the information contained in the memorandum becomes public, those investigations could be jeopardized," the prosecutors said in their letter.
The government had asked that not only the memo be kept secret, but also the legal arguments about the memo. But in making the government's letter public Monday, Chin said that only the memorandum itself will remain secret until he decides whether it should be given back to the defense.
But the error has raised questions about whether a private document, once made public, can be made private again.
"If it weakens their hand, so be it," said Ivan K. Mathew, the lawyer who first obtained the document and wants it back to use in the defense of his client, Gordon Hall of Arizona. "This is a criminal trial. A man's liberty is at stake here," said Mathew, who refused to discuss the contents of the memo.
The indictments of Hall and 18 others were announced with great fanfare last November by top officials of the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York City Police Department. Hall and the other defendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Monday, federal prosecutors declined to discuss the memorandum. One senior law enforcement official in New York, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said he did not believe the mistake would have a major effect on the prosecution.
But other legal experts said the government was probably concerned because of the candid way in which such documents typically lay out the strengths and weaknesses of their case, as well as the identities of victims and witnesses.