Agents treated disabled veteran like drug smuggler?

Did agents go too far by setting up sham fishing trip, posing as rehab therapist to catch accused fraudster?
The Oregonian/OregonLive
By Bryan Denson
January 10, 2015

A federal judge in Portland chided government agents Friday for running a series of elaborate ruses to catch a U.S. mail carrier they accuse of fraudulently obtaining workers' compensation benefits.

Agents went so far as to set up a phony business to lure their target – 41-year-old Brian W. Hendricks – into a 7 ½ -hour deep-sea fishing expedition. They also duped him into an interview with an undercover agent posing as a vocational rehabilitation specialist.

Throughout the investigation, agents of the U.S. Postal Service's Office of Inspector General secretly videotaped Hendricks, a former Marine sergeant who served in the Middle East. Much of that surveillance came from a camera mounted on a utility pole outside his Vancouver home.

Senior U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones, hearing arguments over the constitutionality of the government's evidence gathering, said the amount of electronic eavesdropping devoted to Hendricks was more befitting a large-scale drug ring than a suspected workers' compensation fraud.

Hendricks' lawyer, Assistant Federal Public Defender C. Renee Manes, contends in a court filing that the government greatly exaggerated her client's activity during the deep-sea excursion.

"The reality is that Mr. Hendricks' participation in the fishing trip was far from 'able bodied,'" Manes wrote. In fact, she noted, a deckhand interviewed by the defense team confirmed that Hendricks spent most of the excursion in the cabin complaining of back pains and spasms so severe he threw up. Hendricks caught one fish.

Jones pointed out in court that the fish, a cod weighing no more than 5 pounds, scarcely offered the fight of a large salmon.
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