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In the movies, cops slip their snitches $20 or $50 in a back alley and give them a black eye so their friends don't think they're squealing. In real life, informants are registered and have government-sounding titles -- "DEA-numbered source," for example. They operate under offices with cryptic acronyms such as CIRC, for Confidential Informant Review Committee. They even have their own bureaucracy, like the Drug Enforcement Administration's Confidential Source Unit. In real life, informants get their money, sometimes in five- and six-figure amounts, in the form of checks from the U.S. Treasury Department. And in real life, informants get bonuses for exceptional work. I'm not sure whether they write "CI" for "confidential informant" on their tax forms, but the industry appears to be more regulated than Wall Street. And it isn't easy to regulate a world that sanctions breaking some laws and is built around killers, addicts, pushers, snitches, liars and cons providing useful and truthful tips. It is a murky, secretive place where cops and crooks mingle and exchange information for money, a place where the line dividing law and disorder often blurs. Sometimes it disappears altogether. In one notorious case, a retired FBI agent was convicted of murder last year for leaking information to his mob informants, South Boston gangsters James "Whitey" Bolger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, whom authorities said the pair used to kill a businessman in Florida in the early 1980s. Three years ago, a federal jury convicted two Baltimore police officers, William A. King and Antonio L. Murray, of dealing drugs from unmarked squad cars and running their own drug fiefdom on the city's west side. Their defense: They supplied their informants with drugs and allowed them to keep some because that's how they were trained to get information. They complained that the Police Department hung them out to dry and refused to admit the dirty work required to arrest drug dealers. A federal judge sentenced Murray to 139 years in prison and King to 315 years. Baltimore police are again dealing with allegations that one of their undercover detectives got too close to his informant. On Sept. 24, federal authorities charged Officer Mark J. Lunsford with putting his informant's name on drug cases in which he was not involved, then recommending that he be paid bonuses for any arrests and convictions. Authorities said the informant then shared the bonus money with Lunsford, who was part of a DEA task force. In describing the alleged kickback scheme, a Baltimore FBI agent with the public corruption squad wrote about some of the inner workings of running informants. This informant worked so closely with Lunsford, the FBI agent said, that he helped him install wood flooring and an air conditioner in his Sykesville home. The agent noted that the informant had been rejected by the FBI after being deemed unreliable and failing a polygraph test, but he apparently was satisfactory for the DEA and Baltimore police. Documents show that the informant got one bonus of $10,000. In a conversation secretly recorded by the FBI, Lunsford explained to the informant how he was added to a case he had nothing to do with: "I put in there that you gave me the information about, ah ... what's the guy's name, [deleted]. That's the [expletive] house we're going to hit. Who knows? We might get lucky." Later, the informant asked Lunsford: "Me and you are the only ones that know we split that ten grand, right?" The officer answered, "Oh yeah, nobody knows. ... Don't nobody know nothin' about that money ... but me and you." Later, the supervisor with the DEA's Confidential Source Unit in Arlington, Va., called Lunsford and demanded that he explain his informant's role in a case. According to court papers filed by prosecutors: "He put me on to the guy and um, he got the guy and was able to get to the guy's house and he showed him, you know, the 'coke,' the product of the 'coke,' and he told him, you know, what it looked like, it was, you know, it's good [expletive]. He even, while he was there, he talked to him about buyin' a gun and he was able to tell me exactly where the [expletive] was in the house. You know, he said it was in the basement." Law enforcement officials are reluctant to talk about how they use informants, but Andrew C. White, a defense attorney and former federal prosecutor in Baltimore, said he's heard of cases around the country in which informants were paid in the six figures. There's a whole industry in "cultivating, protecting and paying informants," he said. Cops who use snitches must walk carefully along an ethical line, especially when they send informants out to buy drugs to build cases. "The line between right and wrong gets blurred with an effective informant," White said. "The best informants are the ones most deeply ingrained with criminals." Gordon Mehler, a former federal public corruption prosecutor in New York and now a defense attorney who has written a well-received book on criminal law, said informants are "universally despised" but "seen as necessary evil because they provide access to criminal organizations that law enforcement doesn't otherwise have." With informants, he said, rather than following a guideline of "trust and verify," police should use "don't trust and verify." Mehler said the biggest problem in running informants is allowing them to exaggerate their worth either to gain bigger payouts or leniency toward their own criminal troubles. "The incentive to nail somebody is sometimes so strong that the temptation to lie increases," Mahler said. "You can talk all you want about purifying the territory with informants. It will never happen. You're entering a den of iniquity, and you aren't going to do it with choirboys." The U.S. attorney general's office has published a 28-page booklet on how police should legally and ethically develop, use and properly register informants. Paid informants can break some laws to help law enforcement, but the guidelines warn that they must be carefully supervised and that they are not, under any circumstances, allowed to "participate in an act of violence." They also cannot break laws that cops themselves can't break, such as enter a home without a search warrant or tape a conversation without approval from a judge. Sanctioning an informant to break the law even has its own lingo -- called committing "Otherwise Illegal Activity." The attorney general's rules require police or federal agents to "ensure that the [informant] does not profit from his or her participation in the authorized Otherwise Illegal Activity." Federal prosecutors said the informant in the Lunsford case snitched on his own handler. (I wonder what the bonus is for that?) Undercover FBI agents staked out a parking lot in Sykesville and said they watched the informant hand Lunsford his share of a bonus. The bills had been marked and logged. The conversation was taped on hidden microphones. Now that's the stuff of movies. |
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