Brown U.: SDS protests CIA, Raytheon Recruiters

A member of SDS, soaked in fake blood, represents the child of an Argentinian leftist allegedly ordered killed by the CIA in 1978



Group simulates dead bodies
Nicole Dungca
Issue date: 9/24/08 Section: Campus News
Media Credit: Justin Coleman

Protesting the presence of representatives of the CIA and defense contractor Raytheon to recruit on campus, members of Students for a Democratic Society simulated dead bodies in the back of Sayles Hall during Tuesday's crowded Career Fair.

About seven protesters covered themselves in fake blood and held the names of people said to have been killed in connection with either the CIA or Raytheon. About 16 others handed out literature to passersby at the fair, which was sponsored by the Career Development Center. Five lied down near the adjacent booths of the two organizations, slightly obstructing the paths of students and creating some traffic in the back of the room, while two others were positioned near the entrance of the hall.

Protesters passed out small slips of paper that said "Raytheon Kills" because it produces weapons and is the fifth-largest military contractor in the world. The paper also declared the CIA to be "a human rights abuser" because of its "long history of illegal detainment and torture of civilians and overthrowing of democratically elected governments."

During much of the four-hour fair, students attending the fair passed by a male student in a white T-shirt and blue jeans lying next to a pool of fake blood as they filed into Sayles. Behind him, a cardboard sign read: "Child of Argentinian leftist killed in a CIA-ordered explosion with Raytheon radar detonator, 1978."

SDS members demonstrated inside Sayles for about 25 minutes before administrators and police officers asked the protestors to clean up the corn starch they had used in a demonstration and get up off the floor, citing health and safety concerns.

"They clearly made their point, but at what cost?" said Terry Addison, associate dean of student life. "They certainly have the right to protest - no one denies that - but it causes others to be unduly disrupted."

The SDS protest was largely aimed at the University, attempting to dissuade the CDC from inviting the companies back to campus, said Michael da Cruz '09, a member of the activist group. The CIA had an information session early this week, and Raytheon representatives said more employees would come to the school later this month.

"We've asked the CDC multiple times to stop inviting these companies that are widely regarded as gross human rights violators," da Cruz said. "We think Brown's better than that."

Last year, the group sent an e-mail to the CDC and dropped off a letter at its main office, asking them to stop inviting the companies, da Cruz said. "If they come and talk to us after this, we're more than happy to talk with them," he said. "Hopefully, at some point they'll get tired of us protesting and they'll be willing to talk with us."

Kimberly Delgizzo, director of the CDC, said she never received the letter and vaguely recalls reading an e-mail about a protest. In a brief interview after the career fair, she refused to comment on whether the protest would affect the relationship between the University and the targeted companies, but justified the center's reasons for allowing the companies to recruit.

"We at the CDC have an obligation to welcome recruiters who may be of interest to our students," she said. "Our students have a diverse range of interests."

SDS members also wanted to reach out to students, especially those interested in working for the two companies, SDS member Alexander Wankel '11 said. "We just want people to be aware of all these human rights issues associated with these organizations," he said.

Student reactions were mixed. While many stopped to read the cardboard signs and accepted the literature describing problems with Raytheon and the CIA, several gave the protesters little more than a second glance as they stepped over and maneuvered around them to pass.

Some seemed slightly annoyed. As Michelle Moses '09 accidentally stepped into a pool of the dyed corn starch, she grimaced. The protest was inconsiderate to some of the students, she felt.

"We're here trying to network and advance our career, and something like this really makes me lose my focus," she said.

She also doubted the effectiveness of SDS's approach. "I don't think it will be discouraging any of these companies from coming back," Moses said.

http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/media/storage/paper472/news/2008/09/24/CampusNews/Sds-Protests.Cia.Raytheon.Recruiters-3448919.shtml

Nazi Antibiotics - a Science Adventure Story

" ... The discovery of the first antibiotic was made in Germany, at the Bayer laboratories. Bayer became part of a company called IG Farben, which was the largest corporation in Europe in the 1930s and was infamous for its association with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. ... "

How to turn air into bread - and explosives
Posted by Jeff Baker
The Oregonian
September 03, 2008

Thomas Hager was researching the discovery of the first antibiotic when he learned about the machine that turns air into bread. It was just another day in the life of a "science-adventure" writer who'd rather write about science than practice it and rather live in Oregon than anywhere else.

Hager is the author of six books and many more magazine articles, most dealing with science and the history of science. He's written three books about Linus Pauling, Oregon's most famous scientist, and another book with his wife, Lauren Kessler, a journalism professor at the University of Oregon.

All that book-writing feeds on itself, which is what happened to Hager when he was working on his previous book, The Demon Under the Microscope. The discovery of the first antibiotic was made in Germany, at the Bayer laboratories. Bayer became part of a company called IG Farben, which was the largest corporation in Europe in the 1930s and was infamous for its association with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Farben's first director was a man named Carl Bosch, a Nobel Prize-winner (with Fritz Haber) for a machine that, through a process called nitrogen fixation, makes fertilizer. Haber-Bosch machines capture nitrogen out of the air and allow billions more people to be fed than would otherwise be possible -- turning air into bread. The machines aren't all good, however. Nitrogen fertilizer is a huge source of pollution, responsible in part for "dead zones" in the ocean, and is also easily converted to gunpowder and TNT. Hager writes that Germany would have surrendered two years earlier in World War I without Haber-Bosch technology, and nitrogen fertilizer was used in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

It's a fascinating story, well-told by Hager in The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (Harmony Books, $24.95, 316 pages). Hager is particularly sympathetic toward Bosch, "a tragic hero, a guy who had high aspirations and who hated Hitler."

Hager identifies with scientists and describes their work clearly and accurately thanks to a background that includes a degree in biology from Portland State and a graduate degree in microbiology and immunology from Oregon Health & Science University.

When it came time to begin his career as a research scientist, Hager, who grew up in Portland and now lives in Eugene, couldn't stand the thought of going out of state, where the jobs were. He turned his attention to writing and began a freelance career before starting work at the University of Oregon. He was the editor of Oregon Quarterly, the UO alumni magazine, and directed the university's office of communications. He left the school in 2003 and is now a full-time writer.

"I could do these science-adventure stories forever," he said, "because I love them."

http://blog.oregonlive.com/books/2008/09/how_to_turn_air_into_bread_and.html

Digital TV: A Giveaway to Corporate Media

By Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report
September 5, 2008
www.alternet.org

Digital TV means four to ten times as many channels for each and every broadcaster with no obligations to the public. The FCC quietly awarded broadcasters this colossal gift of public property worth $70-$80 billion during the Clinton administration back in 1996. In the 12 years since, under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, corporate broadcasters and their stooges at the FCC have diligently peddled the cover stories that digital TV is all about the advent of high definition television, and that the only nagging questions are how and whether enough converter boxes will be available for consumers who can't or won't buy brand new TVs.

In a final act of brazen misdirection to conceal this grand theft digital, FCC Commissioners are scheduled to tour dozens of cities between now and February 18, 2009, doing a lot of talking, but not much listening.

FCC Anounces 80 City "We're Not Listening" Digital TV Tour

All most of us know about the transition to digital TV are two things. The first thing we know is that some people will need converter boxes on their old TVs to receive the new digital broadcasts. The second thing we know is that digital broadcast technology will enable high definition TV. As far as corporate broadcasters and the FCC are concerned, that's all we need to know, and those are the boundaries of legitimate public discourse.

What the FCC and broadcasters are actively concealing from the public is that digital broadcasting technology enables thousands of new digital TV channels on the public broadcast spectrum, all of which broadcasters have allocated to themselves without the inconvenient public scrutiny issuing thousands of new station licenses might have attracted. Thus minorities and women, local entrepreneurs, colleges and universities, community, civic and labor organizations and local governments who otherwise might acquire a portion of the new digital TV channels and used them to broadcast local news, arts, information and public service in hundreds of U.S. markets have been frozen out of the chance to serve the public over the public's airwaves without even the bother of public explanation or debate.

Utterly captured by the private broadcasters it is supposed to police and regulate, the FCC has been tasked with selling this piece of grand theft digital as a public service, and farmed out the job to the notorious PR firm of Ketchum Communications.

According to PR Watch, Ketchum Communicaitons are past masters of corporate disinformation, responsible for a string of suspect activities including:

Drafting ads for tobacco firms denying the links between smoking and disease, and promoting the myth that low-tar cigarettes are somehow less deadly; Co-ordinating PR for the KOOL Jazz Festival, intended to pretty up the name of Big Tobacco; Running fake business-funded science organizations touting the "safety" of pesticides, hormones and food additives; Spying on, smearing and facilitating the firing of pro-environmental FDA scientists; Recommending, as early as the nineties, the labeling of environmentalists as "terrorists", and the suing of investigative journalists, and conducting a 30 city PR blitz against an EPA report on the health; Covertly hiring TV host and syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams to discredit public education and shill for the administration's No Child Left Behind Act, and manufacturing dozens of fake video news releases which were distributed to hundreds of TV stations where they were broadcast as news.

Predictably, Ketchum's elaborate "public education" campaign on digital TV makes no mention of any obligations broadcasters might have to serve the public over publicly owned spectrum. It is calculated to confine public input on the DTV transition to those things the public must do in order to passively consume whatever commercial broadcasters decide to give them.

As part of this campaign, the FCC has announced plans to send staffers and commissioners to 80 cities across the country in what looks suspiciously like a "Not Listening Tour" between now and February 18, 2009. With few exceptions, FCC staffers and commissioners will be totally unprepared to explain their complicity in handing over the digital airwaves to commercial broadcasters who not only don't have programming for the new channels, but who will probably squat on the new frequencies till some profitable use appears. For the most part, the FCC won't be entertaining questions about why broadcasters are not obligated to broadcast news, local public service or other local content on the new channels, or why consumers ought to prize high definition TV over high quality content. The FCC will be talking. But it won't be listening.

Back in 2003, the FCC's OK of unlimited consolidation of print and broadcast media inspired a wave of public revulsion which almost nobody predicted, and almost nobody in the mainstream print and broadcast media reported. Nonetheless, it resulted in millions of letters and emails to the FCC, millions more signatures on petitions to Congress, and consequent intervention by the courts and congress nullifying the FCC's decree. It also resulted, to hear some tell it, in the formation of a self-aware movement for media justice in cities and towns around the country. If such a movement really exists, this may be its defining moment. ....

Story continues

"Useless Eaters?": British 'Moralist' says Dementia Patients Have a 'Duty to Die'

By Hilary White
9/23/2008
LifeSiteNews
(www.lifesitenews.com)

"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives - your family's lives - and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service."

LONDON, (LifeSiteNews) - In an interview, Baroness Mary Helen Warnock has said that people suffering dementia have a duty to commit suicide. Baroness Warnock, called the "philosopher queen", is regarded as Britain's leading moral philosopher. She said that she hopes people will soon be "licensed to put others down" who have become a burden on the health care system.

She told the Church of Scotland's Life and Work magazine, "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives - your family's lives - and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service." In another article for a Norwegian periodical, titled "A Duty to Die?" she suggests, "There's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so [commit suicide] for the sake of others as well as yourself. In other contexts, sacrificing oneself for one's family would be considered good. I don't see what is so horrible about the motive of not wanting to be an increasing nuisance."

Baroness Warnock's comments come as prominent voices in Britain's House of Lords continue to advocate for legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide. Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, said she was concerned about the influence Warnock has. "Because of her previous experiences and well-known standing on contentious moral issues, Baroness Warnock automatically gives moral authority to what are entirely immoral view points."

Contemporary utilitarianism - the idea that individual lives are of no inherent value and can be sacrificed for the good of society - is widely held in modern academia and medical circles. The principles of utilitarianism form the foundation for the modern "bioethics" (of which Baroness is a prominent proponent) that has largely replaced traditional Natural Law medical ethics that follow the principle of "do no harm" in many modern national health care systems.

John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, wrote that Warnock's comments are "a regression to the brutal ancient world, when enforced suicide as a punishment was commonplace."

Warnock's ideas, however, can also be traced to a period of history much closer to our own. In his book The Origins of Nazi Genocide: from Euthanasia to the Final Solution, US holocaust historian Henry Friedlander chronicled the growth and application of utilitarian and eugenic philosophies identical to Lady Warnock's.

Under the influence of utilitarian eugenic philosophies, also called "social Darwinism", German officials in the 1930s instituted a program of mass euthanasia for persons the state considered undesirable, labeling them "lebensunwertes leben": life unworthy of life and "useless eaters." Among the groups targeted for euthanasia were developmentally disabled people, disabled children, and elderly people suffering from dementia.

In Nazi Germany's Aktion T4 programme, in which the gas chamber technology was developed, patients "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination," were killed by physicians on the grounds that they were a burden to their families and to the state. After the war, the Nuremberg Trials found evidence that about 275,000 people had been euthanised.

An important part of the Nazi euthanasia program was a campaign of propaganda to convince the public that euthanasia was a "compassionate" solution for patients and their families and that it would control the costs of health care.

As one of the world's most prominent proponents of the "new" utilitarianism, in 2005, Baroness Warnock said that Britain should follow the Dutch euthanasia model in setting an age limit below which premature babies would not routinely be resuscitated. She said that only those infants who show a strong chance of living to be healthy should be allowed to survive.

Her interview this week was not the first time she has suggested that there is an obligation for suicide among seriously ill people. In 2004, she told the Times that parents who want to continue medical treatment for their seriously ill children should have to pay for it themselves. "I don't see what is so horrible about the motive of not wanting to be an increasing nuisance," she said. "I am not ashamed to say some lives are more worth living than others."Maybe it has to come down to saying: 'Okay, they can stay alive but the family will have to pay for it.' Otherwise it will be an awful drain on public resources," she said.
•••
http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=29538

Nazi Waffen SS veterans honored in Austria

afp.google.com

ULRICHSBERG, Austria (AFP) — Hundreds of neo-Nazi sympathisers honoured Waffen SS veterans at the 50th edition of the controversial Ulrichsberg gathering in southern Austria Sunday.

Grouped on top of the Ulrichsberg mountain in the Carinthia province, a stronghold of the far-right nationalist leader Jorg Haider, about 500 people paid homage to the Third Reich soldiers' "sense of sacrifice."

Among the supporters were representatives from veterans' groups and from the Austrian army, as well as younger neo-Nazis and retired soldiers carrying the banners of the Flemish SS volunteers.

"We want to promote peace and remember that a war does not have any winners, only victims," said Rudolf Gallob, the president of the Ulrichsberg Association, during a religious ceremony.

"But we also want to remind people that we only did our duty" in fighting with the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS after the Anschluss between Austria and Nazi Germany in 1938.

Skinheads from several European countries applauded the proceedings, while women served out schnapps to stave off the cold weather.

Held since 1958 amid tight security, the gathering sparks controversy every year, not least because of its official status. Anti-fascist demonstrators staged a protest near the venue Sunday.

Haider triggered international outrage at the event in 1995 when he paid tribute to the Waffen SS, describing it as a group "of honest citizens who knew how to stay true to their convictions."

Valentin Sima, a historian at Klagenfurt University, told AFP that since then, the event's organisers had asked that the more provocative elements of the gathering -- such as the Kameradschaft IV (Comradeship 4) -- a veterans organisation of former Waffen SS members, be toned down.

Appearances by Gudrun Burwitz, the daughter of the former Waffen SS chief Heinrich Himmler, have also become more rare, she added.

Nevertheless, the memorial on top of the Ulrichsberg mountain still carries commemorative plaques dedicated to the Kameradschaft IV as well as to Spanish, Flemish, Norwegian, Croatian and Danish Waffen SS volonteers.

Those who received the Ritterkreuz (Knights cross) -- the second highest military order of the Third Reich -- are also honoured.

Such is the controversy still surrounding the Ulrichsberg gathering that Haider, facing legislative elections in a week, chose not to deliver a speech at Sunday's 50th commemoration.

Harry Cooper, head of the American Neo-Nazi Sharkhunters organisation, who sent a delegation of 20 members, said the event was unique of its kind because one could still pay tribute to soldiers who has been "honourably defeated."

Meanwhile, Wolfgang Zinggl, an Austrian Green deputy who acted as an observer at the gathering, told AFP that his party had lodged a complaint over the commemorative plaques and the fact that the army had attended the event.

"It is also inexcusable that during this ceremony, there was not one word about the victims of Nazism, or the crimes of the Wehrmacht (army)," he added.

The owner of the site, Peter von Goess, whose father Leopold fought in the SS, said the complaint was "without purpose."

"Everything is perfectly legal. And the turnout, which attracted thousands of people in the past, is dwindling each year as more and more veterans die," he told AFP.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jq0wpaonzTeYLVwllhHQm6e3e4mg

Risieria San Sabba

(Painting: Death Sentence, by Deena Warner)

www.popmatters.com
21 September 2008

For a designated national monument, Risiera San Sabba, in Italy, is not an easy place to find. While road signs in Trieste routinely point you toward restaurants, hotels, roman ruins, the town center, Castle Miramare, and so on, we saw only one sign for San Sabba, at the bottom of a long list of arrows pointing to other cultural destinations. This is not a surprise. The citizens of the city are probably not all that eager to be reminded of the former Nazi concentration camp in their midst.

In the end, we had to ask at the bureau how to get there, and even with her explicit directions it was hard to find. It’s a nearly entirely unmarked building down a small street that’s a difficult turn to see coming off the autostrada. The humdrum brick structure stands innocuously enough in a somewhat rundown part of town, down the street from a soccer stadium and next to a Lidl discount supermarket. A circus was set up around the corner. I happened to park our rental car next to the bricked over windows of a chamber now called “the death room,” where new inmates were processed by the Nazis amid corpses waiting to be cremated. Only a small plaque by the long gray corridor into the complex marks the site’s significance now, unless you count the swastika someone painted on the highway riser back by the autostrada. The fact that the site is a national monument but all but invisible suggests strongly the tension between remembering and forgetting that seems to characterize attitudes toward World War II atrocities and the methods by which the Holocaust was carried out within view of the ordinary life of civilians. Apartment buildings still stand in the blocks that surround San Sabba; they probably stood when the horrors were being carried out.

San Sabba’s ordinary exterior is a large part of what is awful about it now. It seems a perfect representation of the matter of fact way the Nazis assimilated killing into industrial organization. The building was originally a rice-husking factory; when the Nazis occupied the city they simply converted it into a different, horrific kind of factory, retrofitting in prison cells (some of which still remain) and installing a crematorium (which they dynamited as they fled when the city was liberated in 1945). At the site now, there are commemorative inscriptions, sculptures meant to evoke the crematorium smoke rising, an exhibition detailing the history of the Nazi occupation of the region, and a grim collection of inmate uniforms, confiscated property, a replica of a truncheon used to beat inmates to death, grainy photographs of the perpetrators. It wasn’t a lot to see, but it was enough. I started to understand why the place was so hard to find. Though we made a special effort to tour the place, I wanted nothing to do nothing but forget what I had seen after we left; I stayed up late that night watching whatever bad shows I could find on Slovenian television to keep my mind off it all. I never expected to be so grateful for old episodes of The X Files.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/63624/risieria-san-sabba

Italian Minister Pays Homage to Fascist Troops

Tom Kington in Rome
The Guardian
September 9 2008

Ignazio La Russa has added to the row stirred up by Rome's mayor. Photograph: Pier Paolo Cito/AP

Italy's defence minister yesterday paid tribute to fascist soldiers who fought in Italy alongside German troops during the second world war, inflaming a row prompted on Sunday when Rome's mayor refused to condemn fascism as evil.

Speaking at an anniversary event marking Rome's resistance to Nazi occupation in 1943, the defence minister, Ignazio La Russa, yesterday chose to stress the patriotism of those Italians who fought against the advancing allied forces.

A day earlier, the mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, a former neo-fascist youth leader, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera he "did not and never has" considered fascism to be "absolute evil". That definition he saved for the racial laws passed by Italy's fascist government in 1938, which removed Jewish Italians from state jobs. "Fascism was a more complex phenomenon. Many people signed up in good faith," he argued.

Alemanno's comments drew criticism from the Italian Jewish community leader Renzo Gattegna, who said: "The racial laws were created by the fascist regime, and it therefore seems difficult to separate the two."

The leader of the centre-left opposition, Walter Veltroni, reminded Alemanno that Mussolini had destroyed Italian democracy before 1938; Veltroni also said he was resigning in protest from a committee, overseen by the city, to plan a Holocaust museum.

Both La Russa and Alemanno are members of Italy's National Alliance party, which has evolved from its "post-fascist" roots to join the political mainstream. It is now a coalition partner in the government of Silvio Berlusconi, which has been accused of a crackdown on immigrants and Gypsies since taking office in April.

Alemanno appeared to be on the retreat yesterday at the anniversary of the anti-fascist defence of Rome, claiming he had not sought to condone the "anti-democratic" tendency of the fascist government. But his party colleague, La Russa, then stood up to keep the row alive.

"I would betray my conscience if I did not recall that other men in uniform, such as the Nembo from the RSI [Italian Social Republic] army, also, from their point of view, fought in the belief they were defending their country," the minister said in a speech.

Anna Finocchiaro, the Senate opposition leader, said: "There is no such thing as good fascism and bad fascism."

After the allied landings in Sicily in 1943, Mussolini was dismissed by Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III before setting up the Italian Social Republic in the north, from where the allied advance was checked. As the Germans retreated in 1945, Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/09/italy

Convictions Reinstated in Mob Case

By BENJAMIN WEISER
NYT
September 18, 2008

The racketeering convictions of two retired New York City detectives who helped to kill at least eight men in their role as mob assassins were ordered reinstated on Wednesday by a federal appeals court. It ruled that a trial judge wrongly overturned the jury’s guilty verdicts two years ago.

The decision means that the two highly decorated detectives — Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa — will now face sentencing for their convictions in one of the most spectacular cases of police corruption in city history.

The two men seem certain to spend the rest of their lives in prison. In 2006, after they were convicted of racketeering conspiracy, the trial judge, Jack B. Weinstein of United States District Court in Brooklyn, issued but did not officially impose life prison sentences for each man.

Then, saying the five-year statute of limitations for racketeering had run out, the judge overturned the convictions despite what he called “overwhelming evidence” that the two men were “heinous criminals” who were guilty of the “most despicable crimes of violence and treachery.”

But in a 70-page opinion released on Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, concluded that Judge Weinstein’s view of the conspiracy was too narrow, and that it had continued to exist within five years of when the men were charged.

Although murders and other serious crimes that the men were accused of occurred in Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s, prosecutors used more recent and less serious charges — money laundering and narcotics distribution in Las Vegas in 2004 and 2005 — to bring the earlier acts under the umbrella of an ongoing criminal enterprise.

Judge Weinstein, in throwing out the men’s convictions, had found that the recent crimes were “singular, sporadic acts of criminality,” and could not be considered part of the earlier conspiracy, which included kidnapping, bribery and obstruction of justice. Because the older crimes dated back more than five years, the men, thus, could not be prosecuted for them.

“The government’s case against these defendants stretches federal racketeering and conspiracy law to the breaking point,” Judge Weinstein wrote.

Judge Weinstein had also decided that the earlier conspiracy ended when the two detectives retired and left the New York area and other co-conspirators were arrested.

But Judge Amalya L. Kearse, writing for the appellate panel, said Judge Weinstein’s views of the criminal enterprise were too restrictive, given the evidence presented at the trial.

For example, Judge Kearse said, even after the two detectives retired in the early 1990s, one gave his pager number to Burton Kaplan, a former associate of the Luchese crime family who was the government’s key witness and testified about the services that both detectives had provided to organized crime.

She said the appeals panel concluded that the criminal enterprise had not ended before 2000, and thus the prosecution was not disallowed. Joining in the decision were Judges Robert D. Sack and Peter W. Hall.

Benton J. Campbell, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office had appealed the case, said: “We are gratified by the decision of the Court of Appeals reinstating the jury verdict against the two defendants, who can now be sentenced for the extremely serious crimes that they committed.”

A police spokesman had no comment. Lawyers for each of the two men, who have been held without bond, did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

Prosecutors charged that the two men, who both joined the police force in 1969, had taken thousands of dollars to carry out the mob murders and to leak law enforcement information, disclosing the identities of witnesses and compromising investigations.

In the first of the mob killings, in 1986, the two detectives, driving in an unmarked police car and using a siren, pulled a jeweler named Israel Greenwald over on a Long Island road, according to a government brief summarizing the trial testimony.

The detectives told Mr. Greenwald that he was needed in a lineup concerning an automobile accident. They then drove him to a garage, where he was shot to death.

Prosecutors said the detectives had first offered their services to Mr. Kaplan through a cousin of Mr. Eppolito’s who was also a mobster.

Mr. Kaplan entered into an agreement with the detectives to pay them regularly.

“The defendants were paid $4,000 a month for information, and tens of thousands of dollars for murders and kidnappings,” the government brief said.

At the trial, the jury also found that the men murdered a capo in the Gambino family in his Mercedes-Benz on the Belt Parkway; and that they kidnapped a Staten Island man, put him in a trunk, and delivered him to another mobster who tortured him for hours before killing him.

Judge Kearse, in the decision, cited the payments to the detectives as one factor that supported the prosecution’s view that the conspiracy spanned the entire period of the indictment, from 1979 to 2005.

She said that the jury had been told the principal purpose of the enterprise, as the indictment charged, was to generate money for the detectives, through legal and illegal activities.

Judge Kearse also noted that prosecutors had told the jury that the two men had “received money for each crime in New York, and they broke the law for money in Las Vegas.”

Thus, she ruled, the jury could have inferred that the conduct was “sufficiently similar in purpose” to show that “the enterprise that began in New York continued to exist in Las Vegas.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/nyregion/18cops.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin