LAWYERS WHO ACCEPTED DRUG MONEY TO SERVE PRISON TIME

SEATTLE -- Two criminal defense lawyers - one who served as a city
judge, the other a prominent member of his church - were sentenced to
prison time Friday for accepting drug money.

The sentencing judge said he was deeply troubled by their conduct.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez ordered James L. White, 49, a
practicing lawyer and judge in Edmonds, to serve a year and a half in
prison. White pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering, and
admitted accepting $250,000 in tainted money from a drug trafficker
he represented.

White admitted delivering $20,000 in cash to fellow lawyer and friend
A. Mark Vanderveen, to retain Vanderveen's services in representing
another suspected drug runner. Vanderveen, 46, a former Snohomish
County deputy prosecutor who sometimes preaches at his Lutheran
church in Kirkland, was sentenced to three months in jail, three
months of home confinement, 250 hours of community service and a $10,000 fine.

"The effect of this, whether intended or not, was to facilitate the
operation of this criminal organization," said Assistant U.S.
Attorney Ron Friedman.

Both defendants wept in court and apologized as dozens of friends and
family members watched. They received some leniency for cooperating
once they were caught, though Vanderveen's sentence was longer than
the one month recommended by prosecutors. Both will be disbarred.

The case has spawned an investigation of possible similar conduct by
a small number of other Seattle-area lawyers, though no one else has
yet been charged.

Last spring, White was approached at his office by Robert Kesling,
who was under investigation as a major player in a drug ring that ran
cocaine and marijuana between the United States and Canada. Kesling
gave White a backpack that contained $100,000, bundled with rubber
bands, to secure White's representation, and White accepted it - even
though he knew it was drug money.

White later took $20,000 of the money and gave it to Vanderveen to
represent one of Kesling's couriers, Wesley Cornett. White handed
over half the money in a parking lot, and left the other half sitting
on his chair at the Edmonds courthouse, where Vanderveen picked it up
- - a detail that particularly bothered Martinez.

At one point last spring, after federal agents seized $1 million
worth of marijuana from a trailer Kesling had parked in Woodinville,
White and Vanderveen became suspicious that Cornett was acting as an
informant. They followed him and tried to force him to take a
polygraph test to determine whether he was cooperating with federal
agents; the polygrapher refused to ask the questions, deeming them improper.

Martinez noted that if Kesling or others in the drug ring had learned
from the lawyers that Cornett was cooperating - which he was -
Cornett could have been killed.

"Drug dealers do not take kindly to the loss of millions of dollars
of product," Martinez said.

The judge called the defendants "intelligent, educated, sophisticated
attorneys" and said for that, he held them to a higher standard.

Vanderveen pleaded guilty to failing to report his receipt of cash in
excess of $10,000.

Cornett was sentenced last month to three years in prison after
pleading guilty to drug charges. Kesling has also pleaded guilty to
drug counts and is to be sentenced Dec. 9.

During a sentencing hearing last month in the case of Douglas Spink,
another of Kesling's runners, the federal prosecutor said that with
regard to the payments to attorneys, "I'm turning a light on in the
room and it's exposing some conduct that perhaps wasn't illuminated
before. ... And it's frankly generated a lot of conversation in the
legal community.

"And the discussion is good, because the discussion serves as a
reminder to all of us that we ... need to make sure that we're all
doing our jobs, you know, in an ethical way," Friedman said.

Defense attorney David Gehrke, who represents a low-level player in
the drug ring, said the laws White and Vanderveen broke were
no-brainers, and that the overwhelming majority of the defense bar
didn't need a reminder.

"We know it," Gehrke said. "It's like, do you need a reminder not to
step in front of a speeding locomotive?"