about the attorney general s statement was she described a frayed relationship between the community and the police frankly and she said it s an understatement because it s to the point of being severed. so she is using some very tough language to describe what a big job this police department has in baltimore to try to regain trust there. tom, something else that intrigued me about what loretta lynch said. this investigation and others will be helpful to police departments across the country. is that right? absolutely carol. first of all, i would like to say i have the highest respect for loretta lynch. i worked with her when she was a young assistant united states attorney in the eastern district of new york when i was working in the organized crime program. she prosecuted many organized crime cases where she worked closely with fbi agents other federal agents local police officers. she went to china in one of our cases to work with the chinese police officers that worked eded
they ve lost confidence in the entire justice system here in the united states. well, they have. and i would agree that black people get poor treatment in the criminal justice system. but as i said, i don t think it s because they re black or hispanic. it s because they re poor. the guys that walk into court or the women that walk into court that are well-represented with the best lawyers money can by get a better treatment than people that rely on public defenders who are so overworked and so underresourced. from what i ve seen, that s the difference. at the federal level, i dealt with the organized crime program of the fbi which i ran for five years. when those gangsters walk into court, they also had tremendous legal representation and even though we were able to get the convictions we got, the federal system doesn t see this happen to the great extent that the state and local systems do. more of a socioeconomic factor. one issue that i think underlines how interrelated
the case for the release of robert levinson, the former fbi agent who s been held captive, maybe in iran, maybe some place else for the last seven years. it s now been revealed by the associated press and the washington post that he was in fact, working pore the cia in some sort of fashion when he was abducted in iran seven years ago. let s bring in our cnn law enforcement analyst, the former fbi assistant director tom fuentes. tom, i understand you worked with robert levinson at the fbi. you knew him. tell us a little bit about this man. yes, wolf. we worked together not directly together because i was running the fbi s organized crime program in washington, d.c. he was an investigative agent in the miami division. specializing in russian organized crime cases. so he worked pretty much those cases exclusively up till the time he retired. so at the time that we were, woulding together, this would have been in the late 1990s time
langley, virginia or wherever he was going to travel to, but again, at the most, and i defendant s exhibit know for sure that he ended up doing it, but the discussion at the time was that he was going to be an analyst for them. he was going to just report information if it came to him. he was operating many criminal informants with knowledge of russian organized crime back in the 90s, and that was a very key program of the fbi s organized crime program. and so you know, informants were telling about russian crime groups operating all over the world, including throughout the middle east, asia, europe, the russian federation and in north america. so he would have been in a position to hear things that might be of interest to the cia but not be tacked as a spy. very quickly, i want to play what jay carpy, the white house press secretary just said about the a.p. s decision to break this news that he was actually working with the cia when he was
the attorney general s all-out wall against organized crime. you say that s.o.b., i ll break his back? who? you. if they were caught killing robert kennedy, the president will send the marines after us. if they killed john kennedy, lyndon johnson would be president. down, down, down, down. cornwell tracked mob indictments during the hsca. this enormously effective organized crime program that bobby kennedy headed in the department of justice disintegrated after his brother was assassinated and bobby left as attorney general. robert kennedy s vendetta targeted the county and particularly carlos marcello in new orleans whom he wanted to deport. he was in the united states illegally. he was not a citizen. our investigation led us to a special sting operation in 1985.