Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.
.
For three days this week, the media were saturated with speculation from unnamed sources that just-discovered video surveillance tapes do not show Rep. Jim Gibbons and Chrissy Mazzeo inside a parking garage where she claims the Republican gubernatorial candidate assaulted her Oct. 13.
Metro Police stood silent on the speculation - orchestrated by the high-powered Gibbons camp - until 4:20 p.m. Tuesday, when they issued a surprising statement saying they had not yet concluded that Gibbons and Mazzeo weren't on the parking-garage video. Police hadn't even finished viewing the tapes.
By that time, however, a District Court judge who was appointed to the bench after lobbying by Gibbons campaign adviser Sig Rogich had granted a hurried request by the Gibbons camp to release the still-unauthenticated tapes. Gibbons understandably was trying to stop his slide in the polls a week before the election.
In the process, however, the rights of the alleged victim, a 32-year-old single mother and cocktail waitress, were lost in the shuffle. Evidence in the criminal case was being turned over to the potential defendant before any decision had been made on the filing of charges.
Yet as odd as that was, it is just one of many strange twists in the nearly three-week saga of how tapes that purportedly didn't exist ended up existing, after all.
From the beginning:
Mazzeo was under the impression the tapes existed when she called 911 three times between 10:23 p.m. and 11:14 p.m. on Oct. 13 to report that Gibbons had accosted her inside a Hughes Center parking garage. The structure was across from McCormick & Schmick's restaurant, where she, Gibbons, Rogich and three other women had been drinking earlier in the evening.
"And all that stuff will be on tape if there is a camera there, which I'm assuming there is," she told a police dispatcher in her third 911 call.
Mazzeo told police that Gibbons grabbed her arms, threw her up against a wall in the parking garage and tried to coerce her into having sex. Gibbons said he merely was helping Mazzeo find her truck when she stumbled just before they entered the garage and he grabbed her arms to break her fall.
Officers who interviewed Mazzeo assured her that they would obtain videotapes of the incident. But when they contacted a Hughes Center security officer that night, identified in police reports only as "Aaron," they were told the cameras in the garage weren't recording.
The next day, after officers told Mazzeo there was no video after all, she decided to drop the case. She told them she didn't want to press charges against a powerful political figure such as Gibbons.
Police closed out the investigation without checking any further for recordings of the incident.
In the meantime, the media picked up on the story. The Gibbons camp hired attorney Don Campbell and private investigator David Groover to help the congressman with his defense, which included an Oct. 19 news conference in which Gibbons strongly denied the allegations.
Still missing were any videotapes that might possibly contain the truth. Despite repeated inquiries by the Sun for over a week, officials with Crescent Real Estate Equities, which owns and manages Hughes Center, refused to shed any light on the mystery.
Mazzeo hired attorney Richard Wright to represent her interests, and on Oct. 25 she held a news conference to stand by her story and level new allegations that the Gibbons camp had harassed and pressured her into dropping the charges. The Gibbons camp strongly denied those accusations, too.
But Mazzeo forged ahead. She said she would be willing to cooperate with police once more if the case was reopened.
Again, at this point, there were no tapes to support either side.
But not for long.
After hearing that Mazzeo was willing to press charges again, police decided to "tie up some loose ends" from the previous short-lived probe, Deputy Chief Greg McCurdy said Wednesday.
Although there was no formal investigation (Metro officially still was waiting for Mazzeo to come forward), McCurdy said, detectives paid a visit to Hughes Center security offices in an attempt to find a last name for Aaron, the security officer who told police the night of the Oct. 13 incident that there were no recordings. They anticipated that they would have to interview him again once the probe started up again, McCurdy said.
During that visit, detectives learned much more than Aaron's last name. Robert Clavier, director of security for Hughes Center, showed up to say that videotapes indeed existed from Oct. 13.
"He said, 'We had the tapes and didn't know what to do because it was a closed case,' " McCurdy explained. "He said he had (them) locked up in his possession."
Detectives, McCurdy said, took possession of the tapes and took a voluntary statement from Hughes Center officials.
Sources said Hughes Center security officials viewed relevant portions of the tapes before turning them over to Metro and did not see Gibbons and Mazzeo on the recordings.
For a while, the tapes remained a secret at Metro. Indeed, at a press conference last Thursday, the day after police acquired the tapes, Sheriff Bill Young was asked several questions about possible tapes. Young did not disclose their existence.
The recordings stayed secret until Saturday, when Campbell said he learned about them from Kirk Lenhard, a lawyer then representing Crescent. It is unlikely that their conversation occurred by chance, for there are numerous connections between the Gibbons camp and the company that now says it had the tapes all along.
Lenhard is with the politically connected Jones Vargas firm, which has Republican National committeeman Joe Brown as one of its leading partners. Brown was with Gibbons at his Oct. 19 news conference denouncing Mazzeo's allegations.
Brown's firm held a fundraiser for Gibbons the day before the Oct. 13 incident, according to the candidate's latest campaign report. And on Oct. 17, Brown and Lenhard each gave $1,000 to Gibbons' campaign, the report shows.
In court papers filed this week, Campbell said Lenhard told him the tapes had been turned over to Metro Police.
Soon, another of Campbell's clients, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was onto a story about the newly discovered tapes - and coverage by that newspaper and other media contained Campbell's spin: The tapes absolve Gibbons of wrongdoing.
Nobody from Metro was willing to confirm that statement on record, but Gibbons and his team spent the next several days saying the candidate had been vindicated. That position stood until Metro issued its surprise disclaimer on Tuesday. They hadn't finished reviewing the tapes.
On Wednesday, police finished copying the videos and issued a news release saying they were providing copies to Campbell, Wright and the district attorney's office.
McCurdy said police now believe that Aaron, the Hughes Center security officer, did not knowingly mislead officers into believing there were no tapes on the night of the incident.
"He may have been given wrong information," McCurdy said.
McCurdy would not say what police have done in the last week to try to authenticate the tapes.
But he added: "At this time, I have no information that leads me to believe that there has been any alterations made to the tapes."
Security experts have told the Sun and Las Vegas television news organizations that the tapes are likely to be inconclusive.
If the tapes are to prove Gibbons' claims that he never entered the parking garage, thus destroying Mazzeo's account, authorities must find a way to verify the tapes as authentic and to demonstrate that the cameras unquestionably would have captured Mazzeo or Gibbons had they entered the garage.
That is a tall order, especially in the view of security experts who say the biggest hurdle to verifying the tapes is the 11 days between the night police said they were obtaining the tapes and the day Crescent handed them over to police.
In between, the tapes reportedly were locked up in the Crescent offices. The problem with that 11-day gap, security experts said, is that police cannot guarantee a "chain of custody," and that surveillance tapes can be fabricated fairly easily.
Campbell scheduled a news conference for 10 a.m. today to discuss the release of the tapes.
archive
