Thursday, April 13, 2000 | 11:43 a.m.
The Ted Binion murder trial is rich in personalities but none more colorful than a defense trial consultant who studied under the Dalai Lama, performed covert assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency and sold a classified weapons system overseas.
Bill Cassidy has done all those things and more. Most people around town know the 49-year-old Cassidy as an aide to Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman who conducted investigations for the mayor when Goodman was a trial attorney. Cassidy took a leave of absence without pay from City Hall to serve as a consultant to the attorneys defending Rick Tabish and Sandy Murphy, who are accused of killing former gaming executive Binion in September 1998.
But few people in Las Vegas know about Cassidy's cloak-and-dagger past or that he is one of the nation's foremost experts on Vietnamese refugees.
He counts among his friends former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos and current President Joseph Estrada. Cassidy met Marcos at a party in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, and they continue to exchange Christmas greetings.
Cassidy also did security and intelligence work for Estrada when the latter was vice president of the Philippines. They last spoke to one another about six weeks ago.
He also headed security for a U.S. visit by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader who tutored Cassidy for more than two years.
"I certainly learned critical thinking from him," Cassidy said. "The Dalai Lama taught me investigation. And he taught me that every investigation begins with an investigation of oneself. As for the analytical process and logic process he taught me very well. There's no rocket science to it.
"In cases like the one I'm on now I try to be the victim. I've tried to put myself in the mind of Ted Binion and then try to explain the circumstances surrounding the death. You never completely succeed, of course, but you can certainly try."
Cassidy also claims credit for contributing to the end of the trade embargo between the United States and Communist-led Vietnam.
"Asian studies has always been my specialty," Cassidy said. "My father was a Buddhist, and American Buddhists were rare. I started out studying Central Asia, places like Tibet and the Himalayan region. Then there was trouble in Southeast Asia, and I got sucked into that."
A devout Buddhist who helped finance a Tibetan center in California, Cassidy speaks fluent Vietnamese and Tibetan, as well as a "little Thai and a little Lao." From the 1970s through the early 1990s he performed intelligence work for the CIA, U.S. Customs Service and U.S. Senate, specializing in illicit drug and money laundering operations involving Southeast Asia. He also married a Vietnamese refugee.
One of his covert operations, which he dubbed the "bones caper," involved a 1986 trip to Laos and Thailand to recover the remains of downed Vietnam-era U.S. military airmen whose body parts reportedly were being sold by locals as souvenirs.
Cassidy, serving as a consulting investigator to then-Sen. William Armstrong, R- Colo., wrote in a classified report obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle that anti-Communist Laotian rebels handed him the partial remains of one U.S. airman and that he received a second package from a Thai military officer.
"The second parcel consisted of a parachutist's shroud knife, a small pocket knife, assorted U.S. military fasteners, a variety of small-caliber center-fire ammunition exhibiting signs of secondary detonation, a U.S. 25-cent piece, a quantity of parachute cloth and a quantity of bone fragments inclusive of what appeared to be a section of cranium," Cassidy wrote.
But he said his most significant work involved Vietnamese refugee communities in California.
Between stints with the federal government, Cassidy teamed with the late Alan May, an eccentric Southern California attorney and former Green Beret who fought in Vietnam and later served as the Nixon administration's liaison with the CIA. May and Cassidy eventually defended dozens of refugees in Southern California criminal trials.
"We found that the Vietnamese refugees were getting (screwed) by the judicial administration," Cassidy said. "When we came to town, they were handing out 100-year sentences to refugees when they would hand out 10-year sentences to Americans."
Cassidy is passionately anti-Communist, a self-described "old Cold War warrior." He said the work he and May did helped to curtail institutional discrimination against the refugees, who fled Communist oppression in their homeland only to face resentment from job-hungry Americans once they relocated in California.
"I'm prouder of that than anything else I have done," Cassidy said.
A nationally publicized case handled by May and Cassidy involved their defense of Minh Van Lam, a Vietnamese-born college student accused of killing California State Fullerton Professor Edward Cooperman in 1984.
Cooperman's family alleged that the killing was sponsored by right-wing Vietnamese patriots who were angered that the professor had sent medical supplies to the Communist government.
Lam claimed the shooting was accidental and murder charges were dropped, but he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and spent slightly more than a year in prison.
"I worked very hard on that case," Cassidy said. "He didn't commit murder."
Cassidy later used May as his registered agent in 1987 when he founded the Triad Armaments Corp., a short-lived Westminster, Calif., company that sold a classified weapons system to a foreign government.
This is one of those topics Cassidy declined to discuss in detail, other than to say that the sale was legal under federal arms export laws and was approved by the U.S. government. He said it was the company's only transaction.
Another topic Cassidy was uncomfortable discussing was his 1993 arrest by customs agents in Honolulu for allegedly trying to smuggle two handguns onto a flight that originated in San Francisco and was bound for the Philippines. Cassidy, who said he was not in the best frame of mind then because of poor health, recalled initially handing the guns over to an airline security officer who then handed them back to him.
Conceding he was "embarrassed" by the incident, Cassidy said he was eventually fined $500. The security officer, who doubled as a San Francisco policeman, was forced to resign from the airline.
Cassidy was far more willing to discuss his successes such as Project Victor, a Customs investigation he launched in 1984. He discovered that pro-Communist sympathizers had funneled hundreds of millions of dollars annually in cash, jewelry and precious metals from the United States to benefit the Vietnamese government. Most of the smuggling, according to Cassidy, originated in Orange County, Calif., San Jose, Calif., and San Francisco.
His revelation was significant because of the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam since the Communist takeover of the Southeast Asian country in 1975. Cassidy concluded that the smuggling was a way for Vietnam to get around the embargo.
"I had nothing against the people of Vietnam and didn't want them to suffer, but their government had no reason to bargain," Cassidy said. "I brought it out into the open that the embargo was not being enforced."
Project Victor wound up embarrassing high-ranking U.S. officials, including some of Cassidy's Customs bosses. When Cassidy later went to work for Armstrong's Senate Banking subcommittee on financial institutions, one of the officials he subpoenaed for a Senate hearing on the subject was then-Customs Commissioner William von Raab.
"I dragged in Customs for not enforcing the embargo," Cassidy said.
He said the ultimate result of Project Victor was that it forced the United States to crack down on the money laundering to Vietnam and brought both countries to the bargaining table. The trade embargo eventually was lifted in 1994.
By then Cassidy had long since moved from Southern California to Las Vegas, where he went to work for Goodman. Cassidy said he first met the mayor in Muskogee, Okla., where Goodman represented Jose Leonardo Contreras-Subias and May defended Benigno Armando Contreras-Subias in the brothers' highly publicized 1989 cocaine trafficking trial. The brothers eventually pleaded guilty to drug-related offenses.
But Cassidy said Goodman was impressed with his work on the case and lured him to Las Vegas permanently after May died in 1991. In addition to his trial work, Cassidy worked as an aide on Goodman's successful mayoral campaign last year.
"Oscar, more than any other person I have worked with, taught me that anything you have to do to defend a client you do and you don't stop," Cassidy said. "You don't throw on the brakes."
Goodman, who has a photo of Cassidy in his office, said he was aware of the investigator's background before hiring him as a City Hall assistant.
"He put down all of his past when he came to the city," Goodman said. "I made him do that."
Around City Hall Cassidy is known as a restless, nonbureaucratic type who chain smokes, wears dark sunglasses and possesses an equally dark sense of humor. He is low-key but often intense.
"He's intelligent. He's eccentric. He's mysterious," Goodman said. "He's concerned. He's dedicated. He's Cassidy."
Cassidy also managed to land in hot water this week when a Binion trial prosecutor accused him of unethical behavior for his part in the release of a public opinion poll that claimed an increasing number of people believed Murphy and Tabish were not guilty.
The poll was commissioned by a newly formed limited liability company, Trial Consultants of Nevada, that includes Cassidy and others who worked on Goodman's campaign. A commercial aired by the company on Las Vegas 1 during breaks in the trial coverage is believed to be the first TV advertisement of its kind in the country that has solicited public opinion during ongoing courtroom proceedings.
Cassidy makes no apologies for his work on the Binion case. He expressed particular displeasure at the fact that a key prosecution witness who admitted selling heroin to Binion shortly before he died has not himself been arrested for that transaction. And he criticized the prosecution for relying heavily on the work of private investigator Tom Dillard, who was hired by lawyers for Binion's estate.
Cassidy said there is no higher calling than his work as a trial investigator.
"What you're ultimately doing is defending the Constitution," Cassidy said. "The Constitution safeguards the whole of our society. And the whole of our society is larger than the incident in which you find yourself embroiled."
Sun reporter Erin Neff contributed to this report.
Steve Kanigher is a staff writer for the Sun. He can be reached at (702)-259-4075 or by e-mail at [email protected].
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