Navy Justice
An examination of the seaborne service's scandal-ridden police agency

By Peter Cary
11/9/92

More than a year has passed since Catherine Jakovic's son, Marine Lance Cpl. Scott Jakovic, died of a gunshot to the head in a tiny guard shack at the Earle Naval Weapons Station in New Jersey.

Today, she still can't get a straight story about whether her son was killed or took his own life. First, the Navy said there was no evidence of foul play. Scott Jakovic, a Navy spokesman said, died in "a self-inflicted accident." Two months later, citing the lack of eyewitnesses, the Navy said Jakovic's death was a mystery. A month after that, the Navy conceded that there was an eyewitness after all; the next month, the eyewitness, Pfc. Edward Markovitch, was accused of shooting Jakovic. Then, the Navy dropped the shooting charge and tried another tack. Scott Jakovic died, the Navy now says, while playing russian roulette with Markovitch.

Last week, Catherine Jakovic traveled to Philadelphia to sit in on Markovitch's court-martial, but a judge says the Navy's bungling will make it hard for justice to be served. First, Navy agents failed to read Markovitch his rights before his first interview. The agents then lost the paper on which Markovitch waived his rights during a second interview on the shooting. They also let another marine handle Markovitch's fired weapon and failed to ask the FBI to fingerprint it. And the agents waited so long to test for gunpowder residue on Markovitch's hands that the results are viewed as inconclusive.

Today, Catherine Jakovic is angry not so much at Edward Markovitch as at the Naval Investigative Service, the agency responsible for law and order on U.S. Navy ships at sea and at Navy bases around the world. The NIS, Jakovic says, made a hash of its inquiry into her son's death. "I don't care if they let this kid off or if they give him 99 years," she says of Markovitch. "I want this investigation investigated."

The death of Scott Jakovic is just one of 17,000 cases the Naval Investigative Service has handled this year. The Jakovic affair will never make national headlines like past NIS embarrassments such as the spy cases involving John Walker, Jonathan Jay Pollard or the Marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow who were accused of selling state secrets for sexual favors. Nor will it attract the attention of more recent Navy fiascoes like the botched investigation of the fatal explosion aboard the battleship USS Iowa or the scandalous treatment of two dozen women by drunken Navy aviators at a Las Vegas convention last year. In many ways, though, the Navy's inquiry into Scott Jakovic's death is every bit as important as the headline-grabbing cases, because it illuminates what damage can be done to the soul of a military service when the agency designed to police it abuses its authority or falls down on the job.

A look at the record

For most Americans, military justice is an arcane field of little relevance to their daily lives. But in the leaner Defense Department budgets of the post-cold-war era, maintaining the integrity of U.S. fighting forces will be more important than ever. In the Navy now, the NIS record of administering justice to officers and enlisted personnel is the focus of an investigation by a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee; the inquiry also covers Army and Air Force police agencies. "Much of the data we're working with indicates that many failures laid at NIS's doorstep don't belong there," says Rep. Les Aspin, chairman of the Armed Services panel. "On the other hand, serious problems not previously attributed to NIS are coming to light." One that is worth illuminating, sources say, is politically driven investigations. "The entire policy process has become demeaned and criminalized," says former Navy Secretary John Lehman. "Policy disagreements seem to be normal and sufficient causes to launch criminal investigations."

The NIS's most recent problems center on its investigation of events at last year's Tailhook convention in Nevada. The annual gathering of Navy aviators turned violent when drunken pilots molested more than 24 women. The NIS investigated, but nothing happened for months. The Defense Department's inspector general finally stepped in, castigated the NIS commander, Rear Adm. Duvall Williams, and accused him of deliberately steering the inquiry away from Navy brass. Williams has denied the charges. So frustrated is Sean O'Keefe, the acting Navy secretary, that he has replaced Williams with a civilian and changed the agency's name -- to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Still, a four-month examination by U.S. News suggests that bureaucratic reshuffling may not be enough.

Senior NIS officials say their agents may make mistakes from time to time. But they emphatically assert that their agency is one of the best police organizations in the nation, that their rate of error and misfeasance is minuscule and that they police their ranks vigorously. In fact, reports by the Pentagon's inspector general document many cases that the NIS has investigated successfully, including the Ill Wind investigation that netted 57 convictions or guilty pleas for fraud. NIS agents have also caught spies and brought errant admirals to justice.

Cop shop

The plus side of the ledger is offset by another, darker side, however. Among U.S. federal investigative agencies, none comes close to the number of controversies, like the Iowa and Tailhook and other investigations, that the NIS has bungled over the past decade. Similarly, no other U.S. police agency has been the target of stinging rebukes from its own overseers.

On the face of it, the Naval Investigative Service does not look like a police agency that would be abnormally prone to problems. The NIS employs 1,050 civilian agents on ships and in 172 offices around the world. Its mission--to investigate crimes committed on Navy property or by Navy personnel--seems as straightforward as that of a county sheriff. Its agents are four-year college graduates, trained at a federal police center in Georgia, where they often graduate at or near the top of their class. Once on the job, the term used most often to describe NIS agents is "aggressive."
Properly channeled, that trait is a plus for any police agency; misdirected, it can be trouble. It is Navy commanders who order the NIS to investigate cases. As Lehman notes, influence from those commanders or bad legal advice is all it takes to send the NIS down the wrong path. Even more prevalent, Navy lawyers say, is the idea that because the commander ordered an investigation, he wants a conviction. "Our biggest problem," says a 25-year veteran of the NIS, "is that we are under the thumb of the Navy."

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