Men's Vogue Spotlights The U.S. Prosecutor's Mysterious Death, The Botched

Investigation That Ensued, And How The Department Of Justice Turned Its Back

On One Of Its Own

NEW YORK, April 26 /PRNewswire/ -- With the U.S. Senate investigating
whether the FBI has mishandled the puzzling murder of Assistant U.S.
Attorney Jonathan Luna, writer Ethan Brown casts a three-year-old
mystery back into the public debate in the May/June issue of Men's
Vogue.

Brown retraces the route that Luna followed on the evening of December
3, 2003, when he left his office at the Garmatz courthouse in downtown
Baltimore at 11:38 p.m. and was found in rural Pennsylvania 70 miles
away, just before sunrise. The victim of what the coroner called
"fresh water drowning" and "multiple stab wounds," Luna left behind a
wife and two young sons. In the months that followed, the U.S.
Attorney's office and the FBI pledged justice for their slain
colleague in the federal law enforcement ranks. But Brown writes that
behind the scenes, investigators bungled the probe and refused to
discount the theory that Luna took his own life by stabbing himself
three dozen times.

"This is a monumental failure on the part of the feds," says
ex-homicide investigator Robert Reuland, who knew Luna. "They can't
solve the murder of one of their own. They can't even give a credible
cause of his death."

Brown finds potential clues in Luna's last appearance in court, which
have apparently been overlooked by both the FBI and the media: "Just
three days before he was killed, Luna's drug conspiracy case against
Walter Poindexter and Deon Smith-the very men whose plea deal he
negotiated the night he was murdered-was getting off to a rocky
start," writes Brown. Poindexter and Smith were charged with running a
million-dollar heroin operation, an indictment that Luna's office had
built on testimony from convicted dealer turned FBI snitch Warren
Grace. But Brown reports that Grace became a liability to Luna's
prosecution on the witness stand when he gave murky testimony and,
even worse, had escaped electronic monitoring, sold drugs and
allegedly been involved in a shooting while collaborating with-and
being paid by-the Bureau.

According to Brown, one plausible reason that the feds downplay the
Grace theory-or any other lead from Luna's last case-is that they were
responsible for Grace when he violated the terms of their agreement.
He writes, "For the FBI, the less attention he gets, the better."

"The main problem here is that the FBI refuses to provide us with a
final copy of the Office of Professional Responsibility report,"
Senator Chuck Grassley tells Brown in an exclusive interview,
referring to an internal audit of the bureau's alleged misconduct in
the Luna case. "The FBI isn't cooperating with us because they're
embarrassed."

The May/June issue of Men's Vogue is available on newsstands now.
Please visit http://www.mensvogue.com for expanded coverage of this
issue. For more information contact Elissa Lumley at 212-286-2225 or
Elissa_Lumley@condenast.com. SOURCE Men's Vogue

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