The ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER’S ONGOING STRUGGLE WITH THE TRUTH by Phil LeConte "Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference." Samuel Johnson The Orange County Register recently re-ran Ronald Campbell's article "All Glitter, Little Gold" -- a story suggesting David Dierks (America Association of Police Officers' Chief Financial Officer) and I (AAPO's Executive Officer) are part of a conspiracy with one Mitchell Gold, a former California-based fundraiser. (Just last week, a major newspaper, repeated this vacuous claim.) I don’t have the time to fully rebut Campbell, but I must address a few of his more deceitful and asinine points. Knowing where to begin is difficult. Borrowing a line originally intended for Lillian Hellman, every word Campbell writes is a lie, including "and" and "the." His story, when read in light of the facts – information which is laid upon the public record -- should be a source of never-ending embarrassment for a major newspaper to have printed. That it appears not to be, speaks volumes about the state of the Orange County Register and this country's Media in general. Below I will explain our tenuous connection to Mitch Gold and why writer Campbell desperately needed David Dierks and me to make his story appear newsworthy.

THE FACTS The American Association of Police Officers did contract with Mitch Gold to conduct fundraising in 1998. 1998 was also the year that the American Association of Police Officers fired Mitchell Gold for fundraising in states where he was not registered. Upon our notifying Gold that his contract was terminated, Gold decided he did not require a contract to raise funds for AAPO. Over the next three weeks, Gold neither ceased, nor desisted -- reckoning that David Dierks and I would look the other way once we received one or two of his commission checks. A WINK AND A NOD By our cashing Gold's checks and accepting commissions from funding raised after his contract was terminated, we would have given Gold his ideal business arrangement: a "restrictive" contract he could ignore with impunity, along with our tacit approval to sally forth -- business conducted not so much on a handshake, as with a wink and a nod. What happened next will not surprise those of you who know David and myself -- and before you jump to any conclusions or form rash judgments -- take into consideration that back in 1998, AAPO was a relatively young organization: money was short, and David and I were unaccustomed to dealing with a slick operator like Mitch Gold.

WE DID THE ONLY THING WE COULD DO Ultimately we did the only thing two young men with great ambitions could do: We reported Mitch Gold to the California Attorney General; seized his uncashed settlement checks and, laughing all the way to backroom (where we keep the Sharpie-pen) and wrote 'VOID' across the face of both checks, then faxed them to Gold (The checks are still on file in our office.); and then hired the best damn attorneys just this side of the Mississippi to file a lawsuit against Gold for representing AAPO without authorization. Shortly thereafter, Gold gave in. We won. NOT NEWSWORTHY, YET At the time, our strange victory passed unnoticed in the media. There was nothing particularly newsworthy to report: we acted properly on a very small scale. Our professional dealings with Gold were brief and ended abruptly. As for any kind of ongoing personal acquaintanceship, there was none. Now you may be thinking that was a rather dull story – hardly a tale of epic proportions, spanning generations. To which I would say, patience. THE SPAN OF A DECADE You see it would take another 10 years before I was to hear Mitch Gold's name again. Only this time my Gold story was to be transformed -- elevated to mythic proportions by the investigative extrapolations of writer Ronald Campbell. In Campbell’s re-telling, I was to become Mitch Gold's heir-apparent, David and I his fully groomed protégés -- toiling to keep our master’s “money machine chugging along without him.” Sound ludicrous? Welcome to my world. Campbell’s fanciful and insane re-telling of my once dull story has appeared not once, but twice in the Orange County Register, then cast into the internet to continuously crop up across America. Reprinted here and there by an incurious copycat media, co-opted as gospel by internet watchdog sites, posted and reposted in blogsphere, entered into State’s evidence in a civil proceeding(!), at one point prompting an outraged politician to call a national press conference; triggering coverage from the Washington Post and Westwood One Radio Networks, culminating with the inevitable local Action News Team clandestinely video taping my daily walks to the park with my dog to provide visuals for its special Sweep’s Week Investigative Report. Campbell had breathed life in to my dull story – but it took the strange nature of the internet to make it mutate. To be more specific it took the detached ubiquitous power of the one they call GOOGLE -- that capricious, cherry picking Dark Duke of Data. Want to track Campbell’s mutated, tall-tale as it slouches its way from blog to news site back to blog – just Google Me-gently.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION (OR WHY MITCH GOLD -- AND WHY DAVID & I?) Mitch Gold was for years, I am told, the perfect target for reporters. As a telemarketer, Gold gave broadcast news, and to a lesser degree the print media, what they crave -- a target for ambush-style investigations that typically culminate in an orgy of on-camera, self-righteous, self-promotion. Then suddenly, in 2002, the party was over. Gold got himself incarcerated for his role in a complicated bait-n-switch scheme selling golf clubs. Hey, you can't make this stuff up.

Well, actually, you can make this stuff up, which brings us to the subject of Ronald Campbell (pictured right), author of the Orange County Register's article, “All Glitter, Little Gold.” (The title's a riff on Shakespeare's, "All that glisters is not gold." That's Bard-speak for "what appears to be of value, may be totally worthless.") "EVERYTHING GOLD, IS NEW AGAIN" Like I said, I tell a dull story, so let me boil this one down a bit.

The year is 2006. Campbell is an investigative reporter. Investigative reporters love to muck-it up with telemarketers. Gold was a telemarketer, but that was years ago. In 2006, Gold is "old news" -- unless, unless.......you can somehow link him to something "current", something "ongoing". This is where David Dierks and I meet the Stalinistic Stylings of Ronald Campbell. Through Campbell's imaginative pen, we were to become Gold “students" -- trained like Manchurians to carry on the Gold "Network of Deception." Why us? Simple: There was no one else. Every other organization with some history of business with Gold -- and there were many, some good, some bad -- had either followed him down the drain or were simply no longer in business. All but one: the America Association of Police Officers, the organization that resisted Gold in the first place. We were still in business. Indeed thriving, not because, as Campbell would have you believe, we adopted the Mitch Gold business ethic, but because we rejected it! David and I were to be force-fit into the role Campbell needed. Although our connection to Gold was ten years in the past and slight at that, we remained the only individuals that could be linked to Gold that were still in business. We were Gold's link to the present and Campbell’s ticket to page one! To make the connection, Campbell would ultimately fall back on what he knew best, his professional niche so to speak -- that of Database Investigator. I'm talking spreadsheets, Rolodexes, triangulating tab-delineated files. In the hands of a seasoned "Database Investigator" like Campbell these things connect the dots, or at least they can give the appearance of having done so. And for Campbell's needs, that would be good enough. Campbell’s “All Glitter, Little Gold” reads like a spreadsheet flapping in the wind. My name, then David’s name – juxtaposed and catty-corner to the words "students of". Sidebars and pull-quotes rustle and then shout phrases like "fully groomed protégés," “group’s inventor” “pupils surpass mentor” -- surrounding our names in otherwise innocuous sentences. Here Campbell shows himself to be a master of modern journalism -- he states little, his facts dissemble, his phrases connive and by the time the casual reader has finished skimming the actual words -- having said nothing – they appropriately fade, replaced by a vague, but lingering notion of what they "seemed" to say. A GLITTERING USE OF JAVA SCRIPT In his quest to link David Dierks and myself to a criminal network, absent any facts, or, indeed, any actual "criminal network”, Campbell would turn to JAVA script. What Campbell is only able to insinuate in print -- he, with the assistance of the paper's tech-wizards -- quite literally visualizes in 3-D on the OCR website.

As breathtakingly deceptive as any contrivance of Mitchell Gold, these interactive graphics claim to expose for the first time a conspiracy. Campbell even appears on screen in a pre-recorded video, claiming his investigation has connected all the dots -- revealing a vast conspiracy he dubs, "Gold's Network of Deception". Charted in 3-D is every charity and business professional with some connection to Gold, all represented by tiny icons floating in orbit around our glittering center of gravity: Mitch Gold. And indeed, there I am, hovering in Gold's constellation of shame. Oh, and there is my colleague David Dierks, hovering next to me: both of us tethered to Gold by an uncomplicated, Java-generated line. Victims of Campbell’s “Six Degrees of Mitchell Gold”

methodology, we float in what is quite simply the most mindboggling exercise in smoke and mirrors journalism since Clifford Irving. THE DULL TRUTH BEHIND CAMPBELL’S “NETWORK” Campbell’s original inspiration for a “Gold Network” can be found in a document written by Virginia Regulator Jo Freeman and provided to the federal judge presiding over Gold’s 2002 sentencing hearing. In the document, Freeman tells the judge that “[handing Gold a long sentence] will be sending a strong message to the rest of his 'NETWORK.'” The document then goes on to provide an eight-page list of these individuals and their organizations or companies. NOTE TO MR. CAMPBELL: The names David Dierks and Phil LeConte are NOT found on that list— nor are any of the non-profit programs within our organization. Campbell goes on to make a number of even more deceptive claims concerning ourselves and AAPO: CAMPBELL’S CLAIM: That we, as “Gold’s fundraising students, have flourished by sticking to a formula he perfected. The first step is to find a small, struggling charity or create one with an appealing name. Next fundraisers tie that name to one of a litany of causes, often ripped from the day’s headlines.” FACT: The American Association of Police Officers is a grassroots organization co-founded by Officer Robert LeConte, a 22-year police veteran. In 1997, when we first heard Mitch Gold’s name, AAPO was closing in on its 10-year anniversary. We had already grown into a nationwide organization, with an Advisory Council of professional volunteers, many of them law enforcers lending their good names and reputations to a worthy cause. Exactly what part Mitch Gold’s “formula” were we “sticking to?”

CAMPBELL’S CLAIM: The Police Protective Fund, a wholly owned related organization to AAPO, put only 13 cents on the dollar toward its charitable programming. FACT: Actual charitable expenditure in 2005, as defined in an outside audit by a certified public accountant, is around 34 cents on the dollar. This figure is well above the average spent by police charities that provide similar services funded through telemarketing. CAMPBELL’S CLAIM: That Mr. Dierks and I paid ourselves $1.1 million. FACT: Again, Campbell fails to tell the reader that this figure represents the nearly five-year total of our combined salaries. Distribute that $1.1 million dollars evenly over five years, then divide it between the two executive officers, and it becomes apparent that our salaries are considerably more modest - approximately one-tenth of what Campbell would have his readers believe. RONALD, REALLY? What to make of all this. Would any rational person contend that the OCR owes us nothing. Not a retraction, correction, clarification, apology. Not even an expression of regret. This, by the way, is the Orange County Register’s position. James Grossberg, attorney for the Orange County Register, has stated in writing that “no remedy is necessary” given AAPO’s failure to include the details of our organization’s contractual history and subsequent legal sparing with Gold in our response to 20 questions provided AAPO in writing by Ronald Campbell in preparation for his story. Mr. Grossberg, of the twenty questions prepared by Campbell, only one, Question #17, even mentioned Mitch Gold: “How did you become acquainted with Mitchell Gold/What were your impressions of him”. Next to question number #17, David Dierks wrote “N/A”. After all, our one and only occasion to meet Mitch Gold had been ten years earlier – for less than one hour. By then, neither David nor I could even remember having met Mitch Gold. “N/A” was the truth, but how it must have stirred the imagination. IN CONCLUSION I write this not to seek anyone’s pity nor pick a fight, but rather, to borrow a line from A Man for All Seasons: “I show you the times.” It is also my obligation and privilege to defend this organization, its dedicated staff, and the many law enforcement officers who have joined our cause. It is perhaps worth noting that through all of the slings and arrows of the past two years, every single member of our two law enforcement advisory councils has showed nothing but support. To each of these law enforcement officers, both retired and active duty, stationed from Alaska to the Florida Keys, from Southern California to upstate New York, [and to Officer John Clapp, our good friend just back from the other side of the world training police officers in Bagdad and Greg O’Hara fighting his own personal battle with cancer], I will never be able to adequately express my gratitude. Phil LeConte AAPO Executive Officer May 30, 2008