Wife says FBI suspect incapable of charges

Friday, June 22, 2001 | 10:58 a.m.

The pain on Patty Hill's face was obvious as she described the "nightmare" that she and her husband, James J. Hill, the FBI security analyst charged with selling criminal files, have gone through in the last week.

"I don't know why this is happening," she said, as she held back tears during an interview with the Sun on Thursday. "People always think something like this happens to the other person. You can't even trust an organization (such as the FBI) that you think is reputable."

Patty Hill said her husband, whom she described as a "regular guy" and "her soul mate and best friend," is incapable of committing the theft and obstruction of justice crimes alleged in a six-page FBI complaint filed in New York.

"I can't even conceive of him doing what they said he did," she said. "There was never a hidden agenda with this man. Everything was above board and up front. What you see is what you get."

She added that there are "no gaps" in his life and that she always knew where he was every spare moment of his time.

The complaint charged that James Hill, who's in federal custody on no bond, had been paid $25,000 since November 1999 to provide a private investigator with sensitive case files that were turned over to mob figures and other FBI targets.

The investigator is believed to be former Las Vegas FBI agent Mike Levin, who is cooperating in the investigation. Levin reportedly claimed he had received hundreds of classified FBI documents from Hill, who has worked for the local FBI since 1991.

To Patty Hill, who professed to know her husband better than anyone, the allegations in the complaint just don't make sense.

"I want them to go within the bureau and see who else is involved in this, or who committed these crimes because I want my husband to be exonerated," she said during the interview in the office of her husband's attorney, Barry Levinson.

The couple, married for 15 years, had been living a normal middle-class existence in a modest Las Vegas neighborhood until James Hill's arrest last week created a firestorm of local and national media attention.

"He said, 'Wake me up from this nightmare,' " Patty said. "I'm a hard-working person. Jim's a hard-working person. All we ever did was try to work and make a living and have a halfway comfortable existence."

According to Patty, a big night out on the town for the couple was going to dinner and a movie. On their vacation this summer, they were planning to visit family in North Carolina.

Patty said she first met her husband 18 years ago in Las Vegas while the two were taking country western dancing lessons. She immediately was struck by his warmth and kindness.

"I'd been a single parent raising my children for almost 12 years, and I knew when I met him that he was a special person," she said. "He wasn't like a typical hustler that you have a tendency to meet in this town."

Her husband, she said, is loved by their neighbors and her two grown sons.

"He's willing to help anyone out," she added. "Everybody in the neighborhood knows what a wonderful guy he is."

Patty pointed to the time James Hill put together a garage sale to raise money for a neighborhood teen who had cancer. The money was used to help the boy's family travel back and forth to California for medical treatment.

After news of Hill's arrest spread, Patty said, messages from well-wishers poured into their home.

"There were 35 voice messages one day from people telling me they're supporting us and asking if there's anything we need."

Patty said the hardest part of this ordeal has been being away from her husband. The two have been inseparable during their marriage always doing things together.

"We've always had a pact that if ever we're away from each other, we call each other every night," she said.

Within the last week, however, the FBI has let her husband telephone her only three times, including the night of June 14 when he was taken into custody, she said.

On that night, after talking with her husband, Patty explained, she took a walk with a girlfriend. When she returned, she encountered three FBI agents poring over items at her home.

"All of a sudden there were people in my house, and I asked them what's going on, and they said they couldn't tell me," she said.

Her husband, she said, had given the agents permission to search the house. They ended up taking, the hard drive to their computer, a paper shredder, some computer disks, an address book and a couple of handguns.

"It was devastation like I've never had in my life," she said.

Patty Hill intends to stand by her husband and "pray to God" that he's cleared of wrongdoing.

"I love him, and I always will love him."