NEW YORK – A Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory agent and another employee led double lives as they lied to the government by not disclosing ownership in a New Jersey strip club because they knew it could spoil their careers, a prosecutor told jurors in an opening statement Tuesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni said the charges facing Glen Glover and David Polos are “not about the morality of this club” the Twins Plus Go-Go Lounge in South Hackensack, New Jersey. Glover is a suspended DEA telecommunications specialist. Polos is a retired former assistant special agent in charge of the New York office.
Rather, he said, the charges pertain to the failure of Glover, of Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and David Polos, of West Nyack, New York, to be truthful to the government as it carried out a routine national security background check so the men could maintain top-secret security clearance necessary for sensitive international drug investigations.
He said they knew their ownership in an adult entertainment club would have “slim to none” chances of passing scrutiny from government investigators. At the very least, he added, their ties to the lounge would have been referred to the DEA’s internal special investigations unit.
Investigators would not have “shrugged and moved on” after learning the men owned a business where prostitution and drug sales can occur, he said.
“It would have been a major problem,” Monteleoni said. “Adult clubs aren’t churches or ballparks or regular clubs.”
He said the DEA would be concerned its employees might compromise their integrity at a bikini bar where lap dances occur.
Monteleoni said Polos began an extramarital affair with a dancer who entered the country illegally from Brazil.
The prosecutor said the government’s proof would include testimony from Twins Plus employees as well as photographs, bank and phone records, tax returns and electronic correspondence between Glover and Polos in which they express concern about illegal activity at the club.
Defense attorney Marc Mukasey said prosecutors wrongly took an investment and hobby and insisted it should have been described as a job on a government document.
He said Polos never considered anything else to be work during the 25 years he spent at the DEA investigating some of the highest level narcotics traffickers in the world.
“His job defined him,” Mukasey said. “It was his calling. It was his identity. It was who he was.”
Mukasey said Polos invested more than $20,000 in the club after Glover told him about it.
“He liked the idea of a go-go bar,” the lawyer said. Mukasey said Polos found it to be “a good little hobby, a good way to blow off steam.”
Mukasey said it was true Polo had an affair with a dancer but only after he filled out his DEA security form.
Attorney Cathy Fleming, representing Glover, said her client also considered the club an investment rather than a job.
She noted he also did not report on the security form his investment in a dog grooming business in Paramus, New Jersey.
