THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512170071
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: CASPER, WYO. LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
Over the past 22 years, federal land managers have culled tens of thousands of wild horses from the open spaces of the West, rounding them up as part of a popular program that offers the animals for public adoption.
Now, government documents indicate, some employees and officials of the Bureau of Land Management, the government agency that runs the program, are under investigation in connection with a profit-making scheme to divert adopted horses to slaughterhouses.
The government is explicitly forbidden by law from selling wild horses for slaughter.
The investigation, in its fourth year, has cast a cloud over the program, which has removed 146,000 horses from a 10-state region from Mexico to the Canadian border.
The roundups were initiated at the behest of ranchers. Left unchecked, they say, the horses proliferate, ruining the rangeland where they pay to graze their cattle.
While the investigation has yet to yield indictments, a criminal investigator for the Bureau of Land Management said last month that bureau officials tried to obstruct justice in a case now before a federal grand jury in Texas.
In a letter to the U.S. attorney in San Antonio, the investigator, Steven Sederwall, who has since retired, said that bureau employees tipped off suspects in the case to an impending search warrant, and divulged other critical law-enforcement information. Sederwall said that allowed suspects - some of whom worked for the Bureau of Land Management - to remove, alter or destroy evidence.
In an interview, Sederwall said bureau officials pulled him and six other agents off the Texas case in February 1995. After the agents were removed, he said, they were ordered not to provide information directly to the assistant U.S. attorney in Del Rio, Texas, who was overseeing a grand jury inquiry. The agents were threatened with dismissal if they did so, he said.
Bureau officials declined to comment specifically on Sederwall's accusations, but they did say that the agency would welcome a Justice Department inquiry into the accusation of obstruction of justice. The bureau denied that its employees had been involved in widespread illegalities in connection with the wild horse program.
The Texas case began in 1992 when the bureau opened an investigation into James D. Galloway, of Colleyville, Texas. Galloway was hired by the bureau to help with wild horse roundups, and he also helped the agency arrange adoptions for surplus wild horses.
Affidavits said an informer told investigators that Galloway planned to obtain government horses, graze them on the friend's ranch until they put on weight, then sell them to the ``killers'' - slaughterhouses - for a large profit. by CNB