E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr.

E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr. was a Washington, D.C. attorney and former federal prosecutor. He served as chief counsel for the House October Surprise Task Force, the bipartisan investigative panel co-chaired by Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Indiana) and Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) that investigated allegations that the Reagan campaign had secretly negotiated with Iran to delay the 1980 hostage release. Before taking that post he had been one of the Washington lawyers of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

Prosecutor

Ernest Lawrence Barcella Jr. was born in Washington on May 23, 1945, to Ernest and Louise Berniere Barcella; his father was a reporter and news executive for United Press International. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1967 and received his law degree from Vanderbilt in 1970, and soon afterwards was hired as a clerk in the United States Attorney's office in Washington.¹

His first major international case was the government's initial investigation of the September 21, 1976, car-bomb assassination in Washington of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean foreign minister, and his aide Ronni Karpen Moffitt, which was traced to the Chilean intelligence service DINA; the DINA agent Michael Townley pleaded guilty in the United States in 1978. With a fellow prosecutor, Carol Bruce, Barcella spent four years gathering evidence against Edwin Wilson, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative who had supplied the Libyan government of Muammar Qaddafi with 21 tons of C-4 plastic explosive and had fled to Libya. In 1982, when Barcella was deputy chief of the major crimes division, Wilson was lured to the Dominican Republic by a former associate who proposed a deal involving support for the clandestine war against the government of Nicaragua, and was arrested on arrival in Santo Domingo. Wilson then plotted to have Barcella and Bruce killed. He was sentenced to 52 years; in 2003 a federal judge in Texas vacated his conviction for selling explosives to Libya, ruling that prosecutors had used false testimony. The case was the subject of the 1986 book Manhunt by Peter Maas. Barcella also worked on the inquiries into the 1983 bombings of the American embassies in Beirut and Kuwait and the Marine barracks in Beirut, and into the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro.¹

He left federal service in 1986. In private practice he conducted internal investigations for corporations and defended clients charged with securities fraud, antitrust violations, tax evasion and money laundering. His client Lyn Nofziger, a political adviser to President Reagan, was convicted of illegal lobbying in 1988; an appeals court overturned the conviction the following year.¹

BCCI

The Senate subcommittee of Senator John Kerry listed Barcella with Lawrence Wechsler and Raymond Banoun as the former federal prosecutors in BCCI's Washington "cadre of professional help," which also included Clark Clifford. He was brought onto the case shortly after BCCI's indictment in Tampa in October 1988; Wechsler, with whom he had worked at the Department of Justice, recruited him "to coordinate the bank's defense." The report stated that "the full extent of Barcella's activities on behalf of BCCI remains unknown" and recorded the following. In 1988 he tried to persuade the lead partner of his firm, former Senator Paul Laxalt, to meet BCCI's chief executive, Swaleh Naqvi, in London and to lobby for the bank on Capitol Hill; the subcommittee could not determine what, if anything, Laxalt did for BCCI. In 1989 and 1990 he joined John Vardaman of Williams & Connolly and Robert Altman in warning the journalist Larry Gurwin, then writing about BCCI and First American for Regardie's magazine, that it would be improper to link the two institutions, and called Gurwin's allegations "absurd." In early 1990, after members of Congress criticized the bank's plea bargain as too lenient, he met Senator Dennis DeConcini, one of the critics, "in an effort to persuade him that BCCI was not the corrupt institution that he and others had claimed."²

In mid-December 1989 Barcella and Wechsler represented BCCI in the meetings with the Tampa prosecutors at which the bank offered to plead guilty to money laundering in return for an end to its exposure for all offenses then known to the government; the agreement was reached in January 1990. After the United States Attorney in Tampa, Robert Genzman, told Florida regulators on January 31, 1990, that he took no position on BCCI's state license, "BCCI's lawyers, principally former federal prosecutors Lawrence Wechsler, Lawrence Barcella, and Raymond Banoun, dissatisfied with this result, decided to talk to others in the Justice Department to bring about a different result." Two weeks later Charles Saphos of the Criminal Division wrote to the Florida comptroller, Gerald Lewis, asking that BCCI be permitted to operate. Genzman's first assistant, Greg Kehoe, testified that "[they] tried to go behind my back."³

Antigua

In April 1989 a network of Israeli arms traffickers operating out of Miami shipped 500 Israeli-made machine guns through the Caribbean island of Antigua for members of the Medellin cartel; one was later used in the assassination of the Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan. The principals included Yair Klein, Pinchas Shahar and Maurice Sarfati. The government of Antigua commissioned an investigation of the affair from Barcella, which, according to the Senate report, "left many questions unanswered." The shipment had grown out of a "melon farm" set up in Antigua in 1983 by Sarfati and financed by a two million dollar loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, granted partly on financial references supplied by BCCI's Miami branch.⁴

October Surprise Task Force

The Task Force operated from 1992 through January 1993, conducting over 250 interviews. Barcella and his staff directed the investigative work and managed the documentary record. As the investigation drew toward its close, Barcella reportedly requested that Hamilton extend the probe by three months, citing substantial new evidence that had arrived in the final weeks of the investigation. Hamilton declined the request, a decision that Barcella and others subsequently cited as a significant limitation on the Task Force's completeness.⁵

The Task Force's final report, released January 1993, concluded there was "no credible evidence" of a secret deal. Barcella's request to extend the investigation was not reflected in the public report, and only emerged through subsequent reporting by journalist Robert Parry, who obtained information about the Task Force's internal deliberations.⁵

The Senate BCCI report, issued in December 1992, noted that Barcella had been hired by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to investigate the October Surprise allegations, and that Greg Kehoe was on leave from the Justice Department to assist him; Kehoe was "the Justice Department official with whom BCCi lawyers, including Barcella, negotiated the bank's plea agreement in Tampa."²

Death

Barcella died of bladder cancer on November 4, 2010, at a hospital near his home in Washington, at 65. He was survived by his wife of 40 years, Mary Lashley, from whom he was separated, his daughter, Laura Barcella, and his sister, Andrea Kelleher.¹