Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 10, 1993 TAG: 9303100295
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
NEELY WITNESS TESTIFIES
Donald Kimbler is an unlikely looking bad guy.But in nearly three hours of testimony Tuesday, the cherubic, balding 53-year-old told a federal court jury in Roanoke how he went from a career as a respected federal firearms agent to the double life of a private eye and drug dealer.
On Tuesday he was back testifying for the government after being freed from a 15-year drug sentence because of his cooperation and because he's dying of cancer.
He is the key government witness against Keith Neely, a Christiansburg lawyer accused of racketeering, drug dealing, money laundering and using drugs to gain secret information from a federal grand jury.
Kimbler is so ill from intestinal and liver cancer and chemotherapy that his testimony during what is expected to be a three-week trial is limited to no more than four hours a day.
In testimony and in an interview Tuesday he told how he wasted his last nine years in a life of crime and corruption fueled by bitterness and anger over being fired in 1984 by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Miami.
He says he was wrongly booted on a false accusation. But federal authorities say he was kicked out for leaking secret U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration information to a relative. That leak, the government claims, resulted in a drug informant's cover being blown. "I was bitter, very bitter, and I'm still bitter," he said. But he said he now regrets that bitterness caused him to use his skills as a federal agent to build a successful drug-smuggling business.
In the first two years after he was fired, he became a private investigator helping some of Miami's best drug lawyers defend dealers.
Initially, he said, he only dabbled in drug dealing. He didn't really get going in the business and never used drugs until he met Keith Neely, he said.
That was in 1986 when he and Neely, 43, both participated in federal court in Roanoke in what was then one of the most significant drug trials in the country. Neely represented one of the more than a dozen international smugglers on trial, and Kimbler was a private investigator for a Miami attorney representing another dealer.
He and Neely hit it off, so much so that Kimbler said "it got to the point where I considered Keith Neely my best friend."
The first time he snorted cocaine, he said, was with Neely and a few others in a parked car in the parking lot of the Roanoke Mariott Hotel. "It felt pretty good," he told the jury, and he became a regular user, often sharing cocaine with Neely.
"I was running around with women. I was snorting cocaine. I thought it was a great, exciting life. . . . I was so bitter. . . . I thought society failed me," he said.
As the jury stared intently at the almost grandfatherly appearing defrocked federal agent, Kimbler told them how he ignored the warning of a fellow drug dealer who told him cocaine use would destroy him. He liked the drug, Kimbler said, because it made him feel invincible. But, he said, "eventually it did ruin me."
Kimbler said he and Neely soon began their own cocaine-smuggling business. He brought the drugs from Florida, Neely arranged for sales to other local drug dealers and they split the profit.
Because Neely was a lawyer and he an ex-federal agent, they got extremely cocky, he said. So brazen that during the 1986 international drug trial in Roanoke, they both snorted cocaine on their way to the federal courthouse. Kimbler said he even passed vials of cocaine to Neely in court and snorted it in the restroom outside the main courtroom.
He and Neely continued dealing for about three years, Kimbler said. They invested in land at Claytor Lake, stored cocaine at Neely's law office and used electronic "bug finders" to determine if Neely's office was bugged by government investigators.
During that time, Kimbler said, he regularly smuggled 10- to 16-ounce quantities of cocaine that he and Neely sold. He often smuggled cocaine through airport security inside sealed and taped plastic baggies hidden in his clothes and briefcase.
Throughout the years and deals, he said, he kept a daily diary, just as he did when he was a federal firearms agent. He used that diary Tuesday to help him recall dates and events.
The entries are coded to make it appear that he was on legitimate private investigative trips, he said. But Neely's attorneys contend Kimbler is a liar and is using the diary as a way to make his lies look like the truth.
Kimbler's life as a drug dealer ended after police caught him in a Miami hotel room with a kilo of cocaine, his 19-year-old girlfriend and a gun. He was sentenced in 1990 to 15 years in a Florida prison.
There he had time to get off cocaine and reflect on what he had done. He agreed to testify against Neely in the hope of getting a cut in his sentence, but mainly, he said, in an effort to make it up to his family.
He said he kept his secret drug life from his wife. She learned about it when he was caught with the girlfriend and the cocaine.
"I tell you the truth, sometimes I look at my wife and I can't imagine how she put up with it all. . . . It took her a year and a half to put back on her wedding ring."
He says he also embarrassed his children and "cheated my family out of a lot of time." He has three daughters, one a schoolteacher and two engineers, and a son who is a police officer near Miami.
Because he was in prison, Kimbler said, he wasn't with his wife last year at their Homestead, Fla., home when Hurricane Andrew destroyed thousands of homes and severely damaged theirs.
It wasn't until December that Kimbler learned he was dying of cancer. He had been in the Roanoke County Jail for much of the two years before that, helping FBI agents put together the case against Neely and others accused of drug dealing.
Jail doctors never bothered to check him for cancer, treating him instead for ulcers and feeding him raisins, federal authorities said. By the time he was transferred by private jet to a federal prison hospital in Missouri, doctors told him he had just months to live.
Worried that he might die before Neely's trial, federal prosecutors got a court order to videotape his testimony while he was still at the prison hospital.
Late last month he was allowed to go free on probation so he could go home to die.
But Kimbler said he's responding to chemotherapy and may live several more years. But even that, he said, may not be enough time to make up for what he's done.
Memo: correction ***CORRECTION***