The Case of the Purloined Tapes

By Michael S. Serrill

Concerning the free press, fair trial and a porn king

The videotape was devastating. There is John Z. De Lorean, the sleek, charming onetime Wunderkind of General Motors, meeting with several purported cocaine traffickers in a tacky Los Angeles hotel room. De Lorean appears thrilled as one of the "dealers" drags a suitcase containing 55 Ibs. of cocaine into the room and opens it on a table. "It's better than gold," exclaims De Lorean after fingering the packets of snow-white powder. "Gold weighs more than that, for God's sake." Later he raises a champagne glass in a toast: "This is to a lot of success for everyone." Moments afterward, he is standing with his hands behind his back, dazed, while FBI agents handcuff him.

With that minute and 48 seconds of videotape, CBS-TV last week gave the nation a riveting summary of the core of the Government's case against the fallen business hero, charged with conspiring to distribute $24 million worth of cocaine to save his faltering De Lorean Motor Co. The broadcast came only nine days before jury selection was to start in the trial in Los Angeles. While CBS officials were pleased by their scoop, prosecutors and defense lawyers, plus many of the network's peers in journalism, denounced CBS for unnecessarily jeopardizing John De Lorean's right to a fair trial.

The network had obtained the tapes from Larry Flynt, the millionaire publisher of lurid Hustler magazine. Flynt made copies available both to 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt and to a reporter for KNXT-TV, the CBS station in Los Angeles. The news executives concluded that there would be little impact on De Lorean's ability to get a fair trial and that the tapes' newsworthiness more than outweighed the risk. The CBS arguments about lack of impact and newsiness seemed to carom into each other. "This story is an old story," insisted Hewitt.

"There was nothing in those tapes that the Government hadn't described in detail" a year ago, at the time of De Lorean's arrest. So what was the news? All CBS had done, Hewitt explained, was to put "the real picture alongside the Government's word picture and show that they matched." In short, CBS believes that it performed the service of showing that the prosecutors were not lying.

De Lorean's chief defense attorney, Howard Weitzman, was naturally upset at the premature presentation of evidence that would have been hard enough to deal with during the trial. The lawyer had tried to prevent the broadcast after he learned from CBS that it had the tapes. Weitzman raced into the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi, who will preside over the trial, and demanded a temporary restraining order. Judge Takasugi quickly complied. But an appeals court just as quickly struck down his order. After CBS aired the tapes, Takasugi denounced the network for "interference" in the judicial process, lamenting that the TV reporters had not taken "moral pause" before rushing onto the air waves. He then postponed the trial.

Constitutional experts agree that CBS had a legal right to broadcast the tapes, but there was debate on whether it was ethical and responsible to do so. On balance, it was, says Columbia University Law Professor Benno Schmidt. "The case is, obviously, highly newsworthy, and it deals with a matter of proper general public concern, namely a criminal offense of some importance for the public to know about and to be able to evaluate."

But many attributed the decision to run the tapes to baser motives, and wondered what purpose had been served by not waiting for the trial. Nat Hentoff, a New York City journalist and longtime First Amendment defender, charges that CBS's purpose was "titillation and sensationalism," an example of how the "scoop syndrome sometimes becomes a disease." Concludes Hentoff: "They have every right to do it, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves."

Can a fair-minded jury now be impaneled? Though De Lorean's lawyers will argue otherwise, courts have regularly ruled that even the most notorious defendants can be given fair trials if care is taken in selecting members of a jury. "Jurors base their decisions on the facts presented in court. They forget what they have read or heard," says Jack Landau, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Meanwhile, the source of the brouhaha, Larry Flynt, is about to come under some official scrutiny. The U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles has launched an investigation to find out how Flynt got his hands on what was presumably closely guarded Government evidence. The mercurial publisher, basking in the media lights, claims that the tapes came from a Government agent. Flynt says he paid $25 million for them. Flynt, who is running for President on a platform that alleges various Government conspiracies, says his purpose here was to prove that De Lorean had been framed. Since he hardly seemed to have done that, Flynt late last week conjured up yet another showy stunt. He summoned reporters and played what he said was an audio recording of a Government informant threatening the automaker and his daughter if De Lorean refused to participate in the drug scheme. De Lorean has claimed such a conversation did occur, but before the new tape could be checked by experts, it somehow disappeared at the press conference. Reporters had made tapes of the tape, but poor reproduction quality will make verification difficult.

The upshot of the sorry spectacle was doubt, delay and the sense that the public interest had not been so much served as manipulated to cause chaos in the case.

--By Michael S. Serrill.

Reported by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles

With reporting by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.