Edition: U.S. / Global

Prosecution That Spared Espy Leaves a Top Aide in Ruins

Published: June 6, 1999

At first glance, Ronald H. Blackley, a high school graduate who says he never earned more than $30,000 a year back home in Mississippi, does not seem like the kind of target Congress had in mind when it created special prosecutors.

A decade ago in his home state, he worked for a Congressman named Mike Espy on farm issues. When Mr. Espy was named Secretary of Agriculture in 1993, Mr. Blackley was hired as his chief of staff for $115,000 a year.

''He came to Washington as an idealist,'' Mr. Blackley's lawyer, Sheldon Krantz, said the other day.

Mr. Blackley left Washington a convicted criminal, owing more than $300,000 in legal fees and loans, his suburban Virginia house lost to foreclosure. And soon, unless his appeals are successful, he will go to prison for 27 months.

His wife, Sharon, sat beside him and cried as Mr. Blackley told of being swept up in an investigation aimed at Mr. Espy, who was accused but ultimately cleared of taking favors from companies who did business with the Agriculture Department. The special prosecutor in the case, Donald C. Smaltz, had hoped Mr. Blackley would help him convict his former boss. ''I could have,'' Mr. Blackley drawled, ''if I'd lied.''

Instead, Mr. Blackley himself became a target of Mr. Smaltz and, his lawyer says, another victim of a statute that has spawned boundless multimillion-dollar investigations that have often gone on for years.

Now many in Congress are considering letting the independent counsel law lapse when it comes up for renewal in Congress this month.

Mr. Blackley, who is 48, was convicted in late 1997 of three counts of making false statements about $22,000 in outside income he received while serving as the Agriculture Secretary's chief of staff.

Mr. Smaltz convinced a jury that Mr. Blackley took the money from longtime Mississippi friends in return for helping them get Agriculture Department subsidies, then lied about it, first on financial-disclosure forms and later to investigators for the department and for the United States Agency for International Development, where he worked after leaving the department in 1995.

Mr. Blackley was guilty of nothing more than ''being in the wrong place at the wrong time,'' Mr. Krantz said, adding that what happened to his client ''is an example of what is wrong with the independent counsel statute,'' and why it should be allowed to die.

To compare the prosecutor's version of the case with the defense lawyer's is to wonder whether they are talking about the same man and the same events.

Mr. Krantz said $10,000 of the $22,000 was a loan from an old friend who wanted to help Mr. Blackley get settled in the Washington area. About $10,000 more came in installments for the sale of a rice brokerage Mr. Blackley owned before coming to Washington, and another $1,000 was a high school graduation gift to Mr. Blackley's son, the lawyer said.

Mr. Blackley simply tried to cut through red tape and get subsidies for people entitled to them, Mr. Krantz said.

At the trial, Mr. Krantz elicited testimony that many people have trouble with the financial-disclosure forms. He tried to show that Mr. Blackley's violations, if any, were technical and attributable to the documents' baffling language, including ambiguous wording on how to list money earned in a certain year, compared with money actually received in a given year.

The prosecutors characterized those explanations as ludicrous and said there was overwhelming evidence that Mr. Blackley had cashed in on his position.

No matter which version is true, or whether the ''truth'' lies in some undiscoverable terrain in between, this much is clear: If there were no independent-counsel law, Mr. Blackley would not have been prosecuted.

Passed in 1978 when memories of Watergate were fresh, the Ethics in Government Act provides for court-appointed independent counsels to go after wrongdoing at the highest levels of Government. The statute has been endlessly debated. Its critics complain that some special prosecutors stray far from their original missions, spending millions to pursue people on the periphery of scandal, as well as the truly guilty.

In 1994, Mr. Smaltz was appointed to investigate Mr. Espy, who resigned amid suspicions that he had accepted tickets to sporting events, luggage and other gifts worth thousands of dollars from people and companies he was supposed to be regulating, like Tyson Foods, the giant poultry producer based in Arkansas.

Mr. Smaltz went after Mr. Blackley mainly to get information to use against his former boss. ''Blackley was a link in the chain to Secretary Espy,'' the prosecutor said in a television interview last year.

Mr. Blackley said: ''They wanted me to do for them what they couldn't do, which was convict Mike Espy. I didn't have anything.''

Mr. Blackley said he made that clear in several interviews with investigators. He said they told him, at first, that he was not a target. But the questioning became less friendly, and Mr. Blackley said he began to hear from friends in Mississippi that investigators were checking on him.