‘Victory’
Eight days after Spagnoli sent the memo, Gonzales asked the Parole Commission to “clarify” its “initial decision.” Parole experts say it appeared to be the first time an attorney general had interceded in a parole case already decided by the full commission.
Spagnoli still did not mention her memo to other commissioners, according to court records. The Fraternal Order of Police issued a news release claiming credit for Gonzales’s move.
The commissioners had no guidelines for handling such a request from Gonzales. They quickly decided to put a hold on Bowers’s release. Then they worked on a procedure for taking a formal vote to reconsider his parole.
On Oct. 6, 2005, the commission voted 4 to 0, with one abstention, to keep Bowers in prison.
After the vote, Spagnoli sent a one-word e-mail to a Justice Department official: “Victory.”
Reilly, the commission’s chairman, discovered Spagnoli’s memo in 2007 and revealed it in a letter to Bowers. He told Bowers that there was no evidence that it was Spagnoli’s memo that prompted Gonzales to intervene. Despite the irregularities in the case, he wrote, the votes he and the other commissioners gave to keep Bowers imprisoned were based on their individual assessments. Reilly said in a recent interview that he changed his vote after reviewing the details of Bowers’s attempted escape in 1979.
Bowers’s attorneys said in a statement that the commission “caved in to political pressure and broke the law.” They declined to discuss the matter in detail while the case is pending in court.
A spokesman for Gonzales referred questions to the Justice Department, where a spokeswoman declined to comment because Bowers’s status is pending in court.
Spagnoli said she acted properly within her role to make certain the relevant facts and applicable law were considered.
“I never campaigned to deny parole to Veronza Bowers,” she said in a statement. “I do not believe that there was any impropriety in reviewing the case and the applicable law and providing a summary to the Attorney General who has a statutory right to appeal certain parole commission decisions.”
Copies on a Sunday
Spagnoli complained in an interview that Reilly appeared to have turned the commission into his “personal little fiefdom” and strayed from the mission of looking after crime victims.
Reilly, a former Kansas state legislator, said there was no discord with Spagnoli. He said the inspector general’s office asked him not to discuss the surreptitious entry of his office in June 2006. The Post obtained a letter from that time in which Reilly described the events to the inspector general’s office.
Shortly after Reilly arrived at his office on Monday, June 19, the letter said, his secretary brought in a stack of his personal papers that had been left on the office copier. Problem was, Reilly wasn’t the one who had left them there. The machine’s log showed that someone copied 68 pages on Sunday afternoon.
Reilly’s office is located in the commission’s fifth-floor suite, which is protected by an alarm system on the weekend, the letter said. Reilly wrote that his office doors also were locked. The letter identified four commission employees who entered the building that Sunday, including Spagnoli, who also had an office on the fifth floor.
Reilly described the invasion as “deeply troubling,” because the material copied included his notes of a conversation with a senior FBI official.
A spokesman for the inspector general’s office declined to comment.
Ten months after the incident, in April 2007, Spagnoli announced that she planned to resign, citing her stress level and resistance to her attempts to make “positive change” at the commission.
In a recent interview, Spagnoli said she could not discuss the unauthorized entry because of the inspector general’s investigation.
A Missouri Highway
Late last year, packets of documents arrived anonymously at The Post and at the inspector general’s office. Inside were photocopies of correspondence that Reilly had mailed to local and federal officials in 2006 and 2007.
The letters showed that while chairman, Reilly had repeatedly pushed public officials to improve Missouri Highway 92, which connects his home town of Leavenworth, Kan., to Kansas City, Mo. Reilly owns property in Leavenworth and, with his family, owns the region’s leading real estate firm.
“As you are aware, this highway serves both Ft. Leavenworth, one of the Nation’s major military bases, and the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, and has long been in need of improvement.” Reilly wrote in an April 2006 letter to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.).
Justice Department guidelines say that an official’s “position or title should not be used . . . to give the appearance of governmental sanction.”
In an interview, Reilly said he never meant for anyone to conclude that the Justice Department endorsed his campaign. He said that, in hindsight, he should have written the letters on his private stationery.
“I never really thought about it until you brought it to my attention,” Reilly said. “I’m very sorry it occurred.”
A week after being questioned by The Post, Reilly said the inspector general’s office informed him that it was investigating.
Records at the commission, released to The Post under a Freedom of Information Act request, show that Woodruff, Spagnoli’s husband, has requested copies of commission correspondence on at least two occasions since Spagnoli’s resignation.
In an interview, Woodruff confirmed that he had made the requests and that he mailed copies of the documents he received to the inspector general’s office and The Post. He said he did so anonymously because he did not “care to be a hero.”
He said he had no connection to the surreptitious entry at Reilly’s office.
Woodruff said his goal in sending the documents was to protect taxpayers and expose what he considered illegal activity. He showed The Post additional letters that appeared to have been written by Reilly and a photocopy of a credit card bearing Reilly’s name and that of his family’s real estate firm. Woodruff said that the letters indicated Reilly conducted other personal business on official stationary and that the credit card raised questions about whether the chairman was receiving benefits from the firm.
Woodruff said those documents did not come from his formal records request to the commission. “In some cases, I am literally not sure what the source is,” he said.
Reilly’s attorney, Joseph diGenova, said his client’s family owns no land along the Missouri highway. He said Reilly pays the credit card bill himself and receives no compensation from the real estate firm. Reilly estimates he has written about 200 personal letters on his official stationary over 17 years and now “understands that that was a mistake,” diGenova said.
For her part, Spagnoli said: “This was my husband’s thing. . . . He’s being a good husband. I’m not interested in being a whistleblower.”
No work has begun on improving Highway 92. No suspect has been publicly identified in connection with the entry of Reilly’s office. And Bowers, now 63, remains in prison in Atlanta.
As of today, November 28, 2017, Bowers is still imprisoned.