I woke up yesterday morning and started skimming the news of the day. It didn’t take long to get hooked on the story about the motion filed by federal prosecutors to disqualify two attorneys representing Katherine and Louis Kealoha, who are facing federal felony charges for their role in a still-unfolding corruption scandal involving Honolulu’s police department and prosecutor’s office.

I started with the Star-Advertiser’s story by Gordon Pang (“Dismissal of 2 attorneys for Kealohas sought“). Unfortunately, it didn’t include a link to the government’s motion or related documents.

So I turned to Civil Beat’s story by Nick Grube (“Explosive Motion Calls For Ouster Of Kealoha Attorneys“). Grube’s story includes a link not only to the motion to disqualify, but to all of the other documents attached to it in court. And it’s these exhibits that provide a new level of detail to allegations made so far.

That’s when it hit me. Clearly, the Star-Advertiser is no longer a leader in local news.

It has nothing to do with the quality of their reporters. Gordon Pang is one of the best, so it must have to do with the constraints their reporters operate under.

This particular story makes that clear.

Grube’s Civil Beat account is rich with details drawn not only from the government’s motion, but from supporting documents where the really good stuff is buried.

While the government’s motion aims to disqualify the two defense attorneys, it also provided a stage for introducing a series of startling new allegations against Katherine Kealoha.

In these documents, she is accused of leaking confidential information about grand jury proceedings, including in at least one instance the name of a confidential informant, to defense attorneys and, by extension, to their clients. She was, according to this account, a key leak within the prosecutor’s office. The government alleges she attempted to influence the testimony of a likely grand jury witness, a beneficiary of a trust that Kealoha allegedly looted when it was under her control. And there are more hints of manufactured documents and fraudulent signatures.

Grube quotes a UH law prof:

“It’s mind-boggling how many different forms of conflicts there are here,” said Kenneth Lawson, a co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project and a criminal law instructor at the University of Hawaii Manoa. “It’s a quagmire.”

Tracy Yoshimura, a defendant in the state’s high profile case trying to shut down gambling machine businesses, added his own assessment, contained in the transcript of a his sworn statement during an interview last year by the federal prosecutor leading the Kealoha grand jury.

Yoshimura was describing a conversation with his attorney, Myles Breiner, where they discussed information being leaked to them by Katherine Kealoha.

According to Yoshimura:

And first thing I told him was, I says Myles, does she not understand Rule No. 1 of conflicts, and he goes — he laughed and he said evidently not.

It looks to me like the motion to disqualify had a secondary purpose, perhaps to signal to Katherine Kealoha that the list of charges against her is likely to grow, and to increase pressure on her to cut a deal and cooperate with federal prosecutors. I would expect a superseding indictment with additional charges reflecting the many new allegations contained in this round of court filings.

Could this eventually evolve into our own “Whitey Bulger” case, as one reporter friend has suggested? I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.