Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Informant Crime

First official boss of a NY crime family cooperates with FBI

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Joseph Massino, longtime boss of the NY Bonanno crime family, testified on Tuesday against his predecessor Vincent Basciano in a murder trial in which Basciano is accused of ordering the killing of Randolph Pizzolo. Massino himself has previously been convicted of eight murders and is facing two consecutive life sentences — he has been cooperating with the government since his convictions in 2004. He told the jury that while he has not expressly been promised a sentence reduction in exchange for his testimony, he’s “hoping to see a light at the end of the tunnel.” The defendant Basciano has also been previously convicted of murder and racketeering and is already facing a life sentence for those offenses. NYT story here: A Mafia Boss Breaks a Code in Telling All.

Over the years, the FBI’s handling of its high level mafia informants has been a major force shaping the law and culture of informant use. The Boston FBI’s mishandling of its murderous informants Stephen Flemmi and Whitey Bulger led the U.S. Department of Justice to impose strict new guidelines (see link to Attorney General Guidelines at left), while the need to protect mob informants led to the creation of the federal witness protection program WITSEC in the 1960s. See Peter Earley & Gerald Shur, WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program (Bantam Books, 2002).

Contract killer avoids death penalty by cooperating

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Washington Times journalist Jim McElhatton has written another revealing story about the violent dynamics of snitching: this one on seven-time killer Oscar Veal who cooperated against the violent Washington DC drug gang that hired him. In exchange, Veal escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to 25 years, half of which he has already served. Story here: A killer deal: be a star witness, escape execution. Based on thousands of pages of newly obtained documents, the Times story offers a rare window into the secretive dynamics of such arrangements. From the story:

Veal, 39, shot and killed seven people. A contract killer for a large drug ring and murder-for-hire operation a decade ago, he cooperated with prosecutors and became a star witness for the government. Kevin Gray, the lead defendant in one case in which Veal testified, alone was convicted in Washington of taking part in a record 19 murders.

But there is a price to be paid for such testimony. Veal could have faced the death penalty. Instead, he has completed about half of a 25-year prison term — less than four years for each of the execution-style murders he committed. At his 2005 sentencing, which has not been previously reported, a relative of one victim said she will pray until her dying breath that Veal never sees the streets again. And attorneys for the men he testified against portrayed him as a snitch willing to lie in court to save himself.

The Veal story starkly illustrates the trade-offs of the criminal informant deal. On the one hand, deals with murderers like Veal are one of the only ways the government can go after violent criminal organizations. On the other, society pays a significant price, not only because Veal will walk the streets again but because offenders like him know that the most heinous of crimes can be worked off in exchange for cooperation.

What goes around: violent snitch sentenced for shooting witness

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When someone is a “longtime police informant,” as the Seattle Post Intelligencer described Devaughn Dorsey, it means that person has had a long-term relationship with police and/or prosecutors in which the government has ignored his crimes, or lessened his punishment, in exchange for information. When that person also happens to be “one of Seattle’s most violent criminals . . . [who] has shot no fewer than eight people since 1990,” it illustrates the most troubling aspect of criminal informant use–that the government is tolerating crime from its information sources in pursuit of new cases. See this previous post —Violent robber-snitch formed new home invasion gang–discussing the dilemma of informants who continue to commit crime while working for the government.

Primetime: U.S. customs authorizes informant to import cocaine

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Another large-scale informant crime spree, this one courtesy of a Grits comment. In this story, ABC News Primetime documented how U.S. Customs authorized its informant, Rodney Matthews, to import tons of cocaine into the U.S., much of which ended up on the streets. Here’s the link to the Primetime transcript. Caught with a few hundred pounds of marijuana, Matthews became a Customs informant and starting importing cocaine with the government’s blessing. While all the Customs officials interviewed acknowledged that such deals are routine, they disputed whether the drugs were permitted by the government to hit the streets: Agent Tom Grieve said it wasn’t authorized, while Mark Conrad of Customs internal affairs concluded that Grieve was lying to cover up the debacle. From the transcript:

FORREST SAWYER (Primetime) Was there anything said, anything that could have been in your wildest imagination misinterpreted to mean that Rodney Matthews could bring in a load and let it hit the streets?

AGENT TOM GRIEVE No. Not hit the streets. No, no, no, no. No. See, that’s-no, no.

FORREST SAWYER Tom Grieve says that there was no carte blanche, nothing like carte blanche.

MARK CONRAD, US CUSTOMS INTERNAL AFFAIRS Tom Grieve is simply a liar.

FORREST SAWYER ( VO ) Mark Conrad runs internal affairs for Customs in Houston. A 27-year veteran, Conrad spoke to PrimeTime in New York over the objections of the Customs Service.

MARK CONRAD We got in bed with Rodney Matthews and the importation of a humongous amount of narcotics coming into the United States.

FORREST SAWYER And the reason wasn’t because they were dirty?

MARK CONRAD No. The reason is there’s a great deal of pressure on agents in the field to make cases, to make the big one. And the bigger, the better.

FORREST SAWYER ( VO ) In fact, more than a dozen agents and former drug enforcement officials told us that letting dope hit the streets is the cost of doing business, that while the Matthews case is extreme, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Matthews’ former partner Jimmy Ellard got an even more dramatic deal. He had fled to Colombia and became a top transporter for drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. When he was caught in Florida, Ellard pled guilty to importing $6 billion [sic] worth of drugs into the U.S., and orchestrating a fatal airplane bombing. Ellard earned leniency by accusing several Customs officials of corruption. The officials were exonerated; Ellard served only six years in prison.

Violent robber-snitch formed new home invasion gang

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Thanks to Grits for Breakfast for this story from the Dallas Morning News:

A confessed robber out on bond after he masterminded a series of violent North Texas home invasions apparently formed a new gang and went right back to his old ways.

In February 2008, William Sedric Autrey reached a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to work as an undercover informant against others in a gang believed responsible for dozens of home invasions and burglaries between 2005 and 2008.

He was out on bond for almost two years, after negotiating a plea deal to ensure he would not spend more than 15 years behind bars. Authorities say that while he was free, Autrey, 41, formed a new gang that burst into houses, exchanged gunfire with a Dallas homeowner and burglarized and robbed almost two dozen homes around the area since November.

By now the story of criminal informants who continue to commit crimes while working for the government is depressingly familiar news; see, for example, these posts: Killer FBI Informant, and House of Death informant and Committing Crime While Working for the Government. Ongoing crime is an inherent feature of the snitching phenomenon, at least in the U.S. (some countries formally restrict their governments’ authority to tolerate informant crime, but the U.S. is not yet one of them.) Accordingly, we need to figure out whether snitching is worth it. Do we solve more crimes than we permit with these deals? When criminal informants re-offend, can we tell the victims that their suffering produced a greater good? In Dallas, the prosecutor said that Autrey “‘cooperated and helped get indictments on cases that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars’ in mortgage fraud, student loan fraud and other white-collar crimes. He also said that Autrey continued to work with authorities on violent crimes, including some home invasion robberies committed by other people.” Is that worth the dozens of robberies that Autrey continued to commit, including one in which robbers shot at a homeowner, and another in which they tied up a 15-year-old girl?

We can’t have a full public debate about these questions because the government doesn’t produce the data–we don’t know how many crimes informants commit and solve. This is a central reason why I argue that data collection and transparency reforms are so fundamental. As I wrote in the book’s introduction:

“The most important [snitching reform] is the most difficult: changing the culture of secrecy and deregulation that permits informants and officials alike to bend rules, evade accountability, and operate in secret. It is this culture that fosters snitching’s worst dangers: wrongful convictions, unchecked criminal behavior, official corruption, public deception, and the weakened legitimacy of the criminal process in the eyes of its constituents. It is also the feature that prevents us from addressing the ultimate public policy questions with clarity. The system currently handles the problem by asking us to accept on faith that unregulated snitching is worth its risks, without either demonstrating its full benefits or revealing its true costs. For a public policy of this far-reaching importance, such faith is not enough.”