Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:
The East Bay private investigator who invented the "dirty DUI" - elaborately staging the drunken-driving busts of targeted men - said the ploy grew more efficient after he paid off a Danville-based cop with cocaine and a pistol to ensure the arrests occurred.
Christopher Butler was once a police officer himself, before he sought wealth and fame as a private investigator with side appearances in magazines and on television. On Monday, he became something else: a government witness.
Butler, who cut a plea deal and is serving eight years in prison on drug and conspiracy charges, took the stand at the federal corruption trial of Stephen Tanabe, the former Contra Costa County deputy sheriff who Butler said carried out three drunken-driving arrests on his behalf.
Tanabe's attorneys have said the officer worked for an agency that pressured its employees to make frequent DUI stops - and took tips from Butler in the same way officers learn of drug deals from informants. Tanabe, 50, of Alamo has denied he accepted drugs or any compensation from Butler in exchange for the arrests.
'Designed coincidences'Sounding at times like the police officer he once was, Butler gave a stoic overview of his once-thriving investigations firm, which was the subject of a reality TV show called "P.I. Moms" - it was never broadcast - and specialized in creating what Butler called "designed coincidences."
"We'd create the illusion that something was happening when it really wasn't," said Butler, who wore a red inmate jumpsuit for his appearance at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. He said he was hired, at times, to plant drugs on clients, install listening devices in cars and commit insurance fraud.
But it was the dirty DUI stings that Butler described at length. He said he conceived the ruse when a client approached him in 2007 and complained that her husband was driving drunk with the couple's children in the car.
The woman wanted recorded video proof, Butler said, so he dispatched a female "decoy" to approach the man at a bar, flirt and see if the target "would take the bait" by following the decoy in a car to another destination.
Butler, who often represented estranged wives in divorce and child-custody disputes, said he carried out the DUI sting a dozen times on unsuspecting men throughout the Bay Area, but sparked only five arrests.
He said he adhered to strict rules when deciding whether to accept a client's request: The man needed to have a propensity to drink and drive, and children needed to be involved.
"I don't know why," Butler said when asked why children needed to play a role. "It was just my requirement."
At first, Butler said the scam was inefficient. He would call the local police dispatch center to report a drunken driver, but sometimes a patrol car arrived too late or not at all. Then in 2008, he said, he called a close friend who was a Concord police officer on his cell phone to make sure the officer was working the same night as a planned sting.
Officer friends involvedButler said that the Concord officer arrested the targeted man and that he called on several police friends after that.
"I put together a plan where I was able to have direct access to a law enforcement officer," he testified.
Butler also described his friendship with Tanabe, whom he met in the mid-1990s when both men were Antioch police officers. After Butler resigned in 1999, while under investigation for conducting a 33-minute patrol chase that ended in an accident, he opened his firm, Butler and Associates.
He said he often hired Tanabe, who also had resigned, for bodyguard and surveillance work. But Tanabe, he said, used cocaine and once asked Butler to help him quit the drug.
Years later, Butler said, he was at a bar with Tanabe - who had joined the county Sheriff's Office in 2006 - as one of his decoys flirted with a targeted man. Tanabe, he said, asked him to be paid for his involvement with the arrests.
"Mr. Tanabe wanted to be compensated for his time and efforts," Butler said. "I didn't expect him to work for free."
Paid in cocaineThe private investigator said he was surprised when Tanabe asked to be paid with $200 worth of cocaine instead of cash - he thought his friend had quit using the drug long ago. Butler said he delivered the drugs to Tanabe when the officer was in uniform and parked in his patrol car outside a market in Danville.
"I put the car in park, reached out the window, and handed him the baggie," Butler said.
Tanabe faces more than 20 years in prison if convicted. His attorneys will begin their cross-examination of Butler on Tuesday.
Source....
http://www.sfgate.com
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