An Edmonds [WA] Municipal Court judge admitted yesterday in U.S. District Court that he accepted a backpack stuffed with $100,000 in dirty money from an international drug-trafficking ring.
Judge James L. White -- a former Edmonds city councilman and candidate for the state Supreme Court -- took the money this year from an accused drug kingpin who paid to retain his services as a defense attorney. Instead of giving the kingpin a receipt and depositing it in a bank, he hid it in his home, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Friedman.
Then White referred to an attorney friend, A. Mark Vanderveen, another man accused in the same scheme to move millions of dollars in cocaine and marijuana across the Canadian border. Vanderveen -- a former assistant Seattle city attorney who has served as a pro-tem judge in Edmonds and other area municipal courts -- admitted yesterday that he picked up half his $20,000 legal fee in March at the Edmonds courthouse, where White had stashed it in a plain brown paper bag. White passed the rest to him in a parking lot.
Details here from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.