Columnist Jeff German: Snitch’s credibility questioned

Sunday, Aug. 13, 2000 | 9:13 a.m.

Jeff German is the Sun's senior investigative reporter. He can be reached at (702) 259-4067 or by e-mail at german@lasvegassun.com.

You name the crime -- short of murder -- and David Gomez probably has committed it.

Gomez, a reputed member of the Mexican Mafia, has convictions for battery, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and perjury.

While facing lengthy prison time, he has become adept at earning favors from his jailers by snitching on fellow inmates. He has become the rat of all jailhouse rats, attaching himself to high-profile cases.

A couple of years ago Gomez reportedly helped prosecutors from his Los Angeles jail cell convict Mikhail Markhasev of killing Bill Cosby's son, Ennis. Later in Las Vegas he gave corrections officers the lowdown on his ex-Mexican Mafia pals.

And now he has thrust himself into the Ted Binion murder case, the most well-publicized criminal proceeding of all time in Las Vegas.

But this time he's working for the defense.

He has become important to Rick Tabish and Sandy Murphy as they try to persuade District Judge Joseph Bonaventure to toss out their murder convictions in Binion's Sept. 17, 1998, death.

Gomez supposedly is prepared to testify Monday that Chief Deputy District Attorney David Roger conspired with Clark County Detention Center officials to plant him in the same protective custody cell block with Tabish to steal his confidential defense notes.

Courthouse insiders who know how straight and ethical Roger is have gotten a big laugh out of that claim.

Roger simply says there was no such plot. He says he spent months generating more than 40,000 pages of documents in the Binion investigation and didn't need additional paperwork from a lying snitch to convict Murphy and Tabish.

To demonstrate how clever Gomez is at deception, Roger points to his recent federal conviction for perjury.

It turns out that Gomez snookered FBI agents when they arrested him here in 1996 on bank robbery charges. He passed himself off as Robert Herndon, who happened to be a dead man.

Before agents could confirm his true identity through fingerprints, Gomez pleaded guilty and received a lighter sentence than he would have if his real criminal record had been disclosed.

Agents, however, had the last laugh. They later charged and convicted Gomez of perjury for lying about his identity.

William Terry, a seasoned defense lawyer representing Tabish, is well aware that Gomez, who's now in federal custody, has a huge credibility problem. Terry knows that if Gomez actually testifies under oath Monday, prosecutors will have a field day with him.

"We're not defending Gomez," he says. "We're in the position that the state typically is in when they put a jail informant on the witness stand. The informant's credibility is always subject to attack, and we expect that will happen here.

"But there will be independent corroboration of what he indicates."

The defense, meanwhile, isn't helped by a just-disclosed jailhouse memo in which Gomez tells a corrections officer that he was going to be paid by Tabish to trash Roger and company.

The memo brings back memories of the murder trial, when Jason Frazer, a former Tabish business associate, testified that Tabish had hatched a plot from his jail cell to pay off witnesses to give him an alibi in Binion's death.

Gomez himself has been a bad witness for the defense in the past.

When the allegations of the plot to plant him next to Tabish first surfaced in February, Gomez took the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions on the witness stand. Then he told reporters there was no such scheme.

And now that he's no longer residing at the county jail, he says the conspiracy took place after all.

Terry may know something we don't. But Gomez doesn't seem like someone you'd want in your corner when your freedom is at stake.