Prosecutor Lays Out Espy Case;
Defense Plays The "Race Card"

WASHINGTON — Businesses with millions of dollars at stake saw President Clinton's first agriculture secretary as "easy pickings" and plied him with sports tickets, airfare and limousine rides to win favor, the prosecutor in Mike Espy's corruption trial said in opening arguments late last week.

Espy’s attorney, in turn, portrayed his client as a victim of racial discrimination.

Espy took illegal gifts from companies or lobbyists regulated by his agency throughout his tenure in 1993 and 1994, Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz charged.

Espy was a huge sports fan and chronically short of money, Smaltz told jurors in his opening statement, and companies affected by Agriculture Department rules or decisions knew they could get the secretary's ear by giving him tickets to such events as a Chicago Bulls championship game or the U.S. Open.

"They used Mr. Espy's fondness for sports to get on his good side," Smaltz said. "He was easy pickings for companies that wanted to slip him something special."

Espy pleaded innocent to all 38 charges and his lawyer argued he never knowingly did anything wrong.

"He's completely innocent. He did not commit any criminal acts. He's not a crook," lawyer Theodore Wells insisted.

Espy, 44, resigned in 1994 after the independent counsel began an investigation of favors he allegedly received from chicken giant Tyson Foods Inc. and other companies.

The trial, expected to last two months, is the culmination of Smaltz's four-year, $17 million investigation of Espy, his former girlfriend and associates.

Espy is the first Cabinet-level official to face trial since Raymond Donovan, who was labor secretary under President Reagan and was acquitted in 1987 on charges involving old business deals.

Espy is charged with taking about $35,000 in illegal gifts, lying about it and trying to get a friend to cover for him. He is not charged with taking bribes, and prosecutors do not have to prove that the companies got anything in return.

Nonetheless, Wells told jurors the notion of a quid pro quo is key to the case. Espy sometimes made decisions his supposed benefactors did not like, he contended, which Wells said shows Espy was above board.

"He called it straight down the middle. If you were his friend and you were right, he called it your way," Wells said. "If you were wrong, and you were his friend he called it against you."

Wells ridiculed Smaltz's focus on the five football, basketball and tennis events Espy attended on someone else's tab.

"If you look at the indictment you'd think all he was doing was going to sporting events," Wells said. "Look. There are five sporting events in this indictment in 14 months. That's it."

The attorney insisted that Espy did not think he was doing anything wrong by accepting the tickets, some of which cost thousands of dollars. And Espy's girlfriend lied to him about letting Tyson pay her airfare to attend one football game, he claimed.

Wells also laid the groundwork early for a defense that may be based at least in part on the "race card." Playing to the mostly black jury, he traced Espy's roots in the poor Mississippi Delta and told jurors how the ambitious law school graduate became the first black person elected to Congress from Mississippi in more than a century when he won a House seat in 1986.

Wells hammered the racial message home by claiming that Espy had to work hard to overcome critics who felt he was too young at 39, "from the wrong state, or even from the wrong race" to become agriculture secretary.

Espy did make mistakes in filling out financial disclosure forms and in forgetting to repay Quaker Oats Co. for a sports ticket, Wells conceded.

"When you make a mistake and it's done in good faith, that's not criminal — that's a mistake," Wells said.

Another onetime Clinton Cabinet official, former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, is awaiting trial on charges he lied to the FBI about payments to a former mistress.