TIME Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.

Current subscribers for full access. Not a TIME subscriber? .

The Cover-Up Defense

GEORGIA LAWYER BOBBY LEE COOK HAS MADE A career of goading government. His latest battle is an eleventh-hour effort to derail the Justice Department's prosecution of Christopher Drogoul, the banker accused of making $4 billion in loans to Saddam Hussein's regime before the invasion of Kuwait.

The case was all but closed. In June, Drogoul, 43, former manager of the Atlanta branch of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, pleaded guilty to 60 counts of a 347-count federal indictment that accused him of devising an elaborate "off-books" scheme to hide $4 billion in unbacked loans and unauthorized U.S.-backed credits to Iraq....

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish.