One Month for Fake Coke Sale
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:48 PM

When you are ripped off in a transaction involving an illegal drug, just try going to the police. But when one of their informants is ripped off, well then, that is a different matter entirely. In the Pittsburgh area, Lloyd Amos just pleaded guilty to "theft by deception":

Police busted Amos in 2003 for selling a plastic bag of about 5.9 grams of bread crumbs to a police informant who paid $180 for what was supposed to be an eighth-ounce of cocaine.

Mr. Amos had been in jail for a month prior to the guilty plea, so the judge granted an immediate parole from a sentence with a 30-day minimum jail term.

Fake coke stories on Vice Squad date from our second day of operation.

Labels: cocaine, informants, policing, sentencing

 
Jack Cole on Undercover Drug Work, and Regret
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:44 PM

That outrageous undercover operation at Milford High School in Ohio is still, shall we say, a bee in my bonnet. (Or it would be, if I had a bonnet.) Today I was reading "End Prohibition Now!", by former undercover narcotics officer (and now Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) Jack Cole. In the previous Vice Squad post I expressed concern for the high school informant, who might one day recognize that her actions were perhaps not all that praiseworthy. Former officer Jack Cole learned this the hard way:

As we all know, when you fight a war you must have spies and so much more so in the war on drugs. The use and sale of illegal drugs are in effect victimless crimes; both the dealer and the user get something they want from the transaction. In the war on drugs the police undercover-operatives are the spies. A spy must necessarily be insinuated into the middle of a drug transaction if it is to be discovered and arrests are to be made. In the longest war this country has fought, spying was my job. For fourteen years of the more than three decades America has been fighting the drug war, I held that position. When I worked undercover I imagined I was a chameleon. As children, my friends and I had bought these little lizards at the circus. When we put them on our shirts, their skin changed to the color of the material - protectively blending in with their external environment for safety. Each time I met a new person the police targeted me against I became that chameleon. Changing everything but the color of my skin I quickly blended in with their environment and became exactly what they expected or wanted - easily gaining their trust. As an undercover agent my job was to do whatever was necessary to become each individual's best friend - his or her closest confidant - so I could betray them and send them to jail. And my job was to repeat that scenario with each new target: friendship - then betrayal - over and over again with hundreds and hundreds of individual human beings.

The main problem I experienced as an undercover agent was that I was never able to emotionally detach myself from the people whose lives I was affecting so dramatically; the vast majority of whom were non-violent offenders, their relatives and friends. When I posed as their confidant, for even a relatively short time, I was witness to their humanity as well as their faults. Instigating each person's ultimate arrest and imprisonment cost me something also. I am not a religious man but locked somewhere in my mind from my earliest childhood memories is the Golden Rule, as my mother taught it to me, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Facing my quarries in court, testifying that all I had shared with them was lies and manipulation designed to enhance my ability to betray their trust, could in no way be interpreted as living by that rule. Why I chose to abandon my deepest belief is still something of a mystery to me but I know it had something to do with falsely agreeing that "The ends justify the means" - the golden rule as taught by many drug-warriors.

I would guess I took part in over a thousand arrests during the time I worked in narcotics. I don't know how many kids' lives I have ruined but I'm sure the count is huge. I was responsible for putting away young people in their formative years whose only "crime" was testing their newfound freedoms, "dipping and dabbing" in the illegal drugs so easily accessible in our culture.

Labels: drugs, informants, policing, teens

 
Drug Czar Speaks on the Milford High Informant Case
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:51 PM

Somehow I hadn't seen this before. The outrageous high school sting operation in Ohio apparently has received a hearty endorsement from our nation's Drug Czar. According to this article, the Drug Czar's reaction was: "I don't think there's any alternative. We've had 30 years of watching young people suffer. ... You can break the cycle. You don't have to watch kids die." No alternative? But hold it, isn't such a sting fairly rare? Doesn't that suggest that almost every education superintendent and high school principal finds an alternative? Why is the Drug Czar so unimaginative?

The Czar hasn't convinced everyone. The same article offers a slightly different reaction from a sensible citizen:

"There is no question drugs have no place in our school system, however, do they realize what message they are sending with such outlandish action? Every new student entering any school in Greater Cincinnati will be automatically labeled a narc and suffer the repercussions. What kind of Gestapo tactics are being employed to 'nab' a paltry amount of drugs? What kind of grandstanding nonsense should we put up with, leading handcuffed students out of school in front of TV cameras? Are their lives going to be sacrificed to create some sort of scare tactic?''

Paul Schwan, 56, Fairfield

Labels: Drug Czar, drugs, informants, teens

 
High School Infiltrator Update
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 4:46 PM

A few weeks ago we mentioned the case of Milford High School in Ohio, which had 16 current students and 1 recent graduate arrested on drug selling charges. The arrests all came from a sting operation, the brainstorm of the District Superintendent. This brilliantly-conceived operation involved placing a recent college graduate in the school to pose as a student. After she was acclimated to the environment, she would ferret out drug trafficking by making it known that she was interested in buying some drugs. Voila', seventeen arrests! All sixteen of the current students who were arrested were expelled! A phenomenally clever piece of law enforcement.

Now they have their first conviction! Oh, they must be so proud.

The teen said he called another student to help the undercover officer find some marijuana after she called him several times. He said he and the student, along with another, delivered an eighth of an ounce to the agent near the school last September for $60.

Let me lay out some of my objections to this undercover operation. (I sent a version of these to a columnist who wrote about the case last week.) First, no one thinks that high school kids should be taking or selling illegal drugs, of course -- but that does not mean that all measures taken to limit such activity are sensible. The direct monetary costs of $60,000 could have been spent on, well, $60,000 worth of useful stuff. On those grounds alone, I think, this operation is questionable, and surely at some level of monetary costs such a sting becomes a bad idea.

The false pretences under which the informant attended the school also are troubling to me. (They will also prove troubling to the next few "new kids" who start attending Milford and nearby high schools, I imagine.) To do her job, this person had to establish friendships, and perhaps even develop strong emotional ties, with students, all the while misleading them as to her real purposes and intentions. It is easy for me to imagine that the students who befriended her feel betrayed, even if they had nothing to do with the drug operation. And of course, the same feelings of betrayal might surface in her teachers, who graded her papers and worked with her only to find out that her "studenting" was all a sham. (Even the school's principal was not told of the deception.) If one of my current students turned out to be taking my class under such false pretences, I would certainly not be pleased.

The main other issue, it seems to me, is that the penalties for drug sales sometimes can be very severe, even for extremely minor activities. Some of the arrested students did not sell her drugs, but are accused of having somehow led her to a connection -- this was the case of the first student convicted, apparently. Such behavior in previous cases has resulted in many years in prison. Will this operation be a success if we learn that one of the students that the informant befriended eventually acceded to multiple solicitations by introducing the informant to someone the student thought might be able to find drugs for her -- and now gets to spend years in prison for the favor to his or her 'friend'? Even if we are happy to send convicted students down the river, we might want to pity the informant, who will have to live with her role in this affair when she is too old to pass for a high school student.

Only five of the seventeen folks arrested were charged as adults, so that should help to keep the penalties low. Further, the charges against three of the "adults" were dismissed -- though of course, prosecutors hope to have them reinstated. But how many of these seventeen were really bad actors, people whom the school is better off without? My guess is very few -- after all, it should have been possible to round up the real troublemakers without an 8-month undercover investigation. So what we have is a bunch of kids badly damaged, $60,000 in education funds drained, numerous trusts betrayed, and all for....?

Labels: drugs, informants, teens

 
Petard Watch: The Prostitution Informant
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 6:03 PM

If you are like most people, you probably like to videotape acts of prostitution so that you can help police fight the nefarious commercial sex industry. When you find out that television programs are willing to pony up some cash for your evidence, you probably are willing to expand your public service, by paying women to solicit customers who will then be videotaped without their knowledge. But in Oklahoma City, such sacrifices, made for the common weal, apparently will put you at risk of prosecution. Another informant's good intentions punished by liberal prosecutors!

Vice Squad occasionally looks at the underappreciated efforts of vice informants.

Update: Turns out there's a lot more to this video vigilante thing than appeared in the story linked above -- in particular, it seems that some of the informant's past work may have upset the district attorney and the police. Here's an article with more details, though a lengthy registration is required. The accused has a website, www.videovigilante.com.

Labels: informants, prostitution

 
Informants Wanted
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 7:48 PM

The ongoing crackdown in prostitution in Korea will soon have a new twist: monetary rewards to folks who report instances or locations of commercial sex. It seems that this measure is in part a response to one effect of the crackdown itself, the chasing of the trade onto the internet and residential areas. The informant angle isn't exactly new in vice regulation. The "victimless" nature of adult vice means that when it is criminalized, extraordinary police maneuvers, including stings and the widespread use of informants, become part of the standard enforcement package. Maybe some children will even be induced to turn in a parent!

Meanwhile, the US Army continues to beat the anti-prostitution drum in Korea. When we first checked into this story, we found that suggested alternatives to visiting a prostitute included "expanded chaplains' activities." Today's story notes such wholesome pastimes as frequenting libraries and cybercafes. Cybercafes? Hey, you aren't using the web to connect with a prostitute, are you, soldier?

Labels: informants, internet, Korea, military, prostitution

 
Doctor or Informant?
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 3:12 PM

Remember that fellow in Pennsylvania who lost his driver's license after he told his doctor that he drank more than a six-pack of beer per day? (The doctor probably felt compelled to bring his case to the license authorities, given state law, though the doctor later refused a request to clear him to drive.) He claimed only to drink at home after work, without driving afterwards. Anyway, the patient went to court to get his license reinstated, and the judge yesterday fashioned a compromise. The man can get his license reinstated, but only if he installs in his car an ignition locking system that will prevent him from driving unless he passes an in-car breath test. The locking device will cost about $1,000 per year, apparently.

I do worry about laws that require doctors to become informants, especially when there is no clear and present danger of a crime about to be committed. Patients will be even more likely to lie about their alcohol use, and the extent of alcohol consumption can be an important piece of information in determining a proper diagnosis and treatment plan.

In Minneapolis, a hospital doctor refused to take a blood sample from a suspect arrested in a fatal stabbing. Police wanted a measurement of the suspect's blood-alcohol content. The doctor did not have the suspect's informed consent. The doctor also refused to take the sample following a phone call from a judge. The doctor was arrested, and the blood sample was eventually (5 hours after the initial "presentation") taken by another physician following the arrival of a signed court order. It now looks as if the arrested doctor will not suffer any further legal or administrative sanctions for his decision, which on the surface appears to have been in compliance with hospital guidelines.

Labels: alcohol, breathalyzer, driving, informants, interlocks

 
Informants
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 1:24 PM

When vice is criminalized, regulating it generally involves the use of informants. (As the vice transactions themselves are voluntary, there is typically no victim with an incentive to summon the police.) Informants aren't even popular in elementary school, so why would someone be willing to inform against a drug buyer? In many instances, because it is part of their law-enforcement job, or because they otherwise get paid, either in cash or a reduced sentence of their own, for their information. But paying informants also creates an incentive to fabricate information, or to entrap others into committing crimes. Collecting the information, even without entrapment or fabrication, can also be quite dangerous.

One drug defendant is taking the fight to informants -- and now a federal district court has ruled that he can continue to do so:

A US District Court judge has ruled that an Alabama man charged with money laundering and drug trafficking offenses can keep a web site that posted the names and photos of informants and DEA agents involved in his case. The man, Leon Carmichael, told the court that the web page, done in the style of a "WANTED" poster and which asked for information about the informants and DEA agents, was part of his defense effort.

Here's the full story, from this week's Drug War Chronicle. The defendant's lawyer says that the website has already led to people contacting him with information that might discredit the informants.

Labels: drugs, informants, policing

 
"Drugs Sting Put Innocent Lives at Risk"
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:44 PM

That's the title of a front page special report in today's Guardian. The incidents referred to in the story took place in the early 1990s, and they have many standard elements, including an entrepreneurial informant and the attraction of drug crime to a jurisdiction to serve law enforcement purposes. In a nutshell, it seems as if the informant, who had dreams of being a millionaire from his informing activities, arranged with Colombian drug sellers to bring 250 kilos of cocaine (with promised follow-ups) into Britain -- cocaine that would not otherwise have come to Britain. The informant was working with Customs in Britain at the time in setting up the sting. Now how did the informant convince the Colombians to work with him on this new deal? In part, it seems, by furnishing a human hostage, a person who would be killed if the deal turned sour -- and as it was a sting, the deal was designed to go sour. When the sting was pulled off, two Colombian men were arrested in Britain, and according to their lawyers, associates of the two arrestees were indeed killed in Colombia. So it looks as if UK Customs (through the informant) initiated a drug deal (in contravention of guidelines), and went ahead with the sting even though it was likely that an innocent hostage (provided through the informant) would be killed.

One customs supervisor refused to take part in the operation, and he raised his objections in advance in no uncertain terms. Here's the relevant paragraph from the Guardian story:

The officer went on: "At the conclusion of the briefing on October 27 1993 you stated that the informant had provided a hostage to the supply organisation in South America who would be killed if anything went wrong with the importation. As we in the Division [Customs] together with the informant are the importer and the only end-users of this cocaine, we ultimately will be responsible for the death of this hostage and probably his family as well."

Labels: Britain, drugs, informants, policing

 
OxyContin Developments
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 4:48 PM

Purdue Pharma LP sold almost $2 billion worth of the popular painkiller OxyContin last year. OxyContin (with active ingredient oxycodone) was designed to be a time-released opioid that provides 12 hours of pain relief from a single tablet. Crushing the tablet prior to injesting, however, undoes the time release chemistry, and the crushed powder can be chewed, snorted, drunk in an alcohol or water cocktail, or further prepared and injected for an intense high. This discovery has led to lots of problems and even death for some OxyContin addicts and experimenters.

The Wall Street Journal reports today (page D3) that a reformulated version of OxyContin (which is no longer under patent protection) developed by Pain Therapeutics, Inc., may make it harder to undermine the time-release mechanism. From the WSJ article:

The company mixes oxycodone with three other substances it declines to identify, yielding a viscous fluid that Pain Therapeutics says won't release the oxycodone when crushed or dissolved in water or alcohol. Taken normally, the company says, the drug is still slowly released in a 12-hour period through the stomach and intestinal lining.

Pain Therapeutics issued this press release today.

Pressure has been growing on Purdue Pharma to do more to prevent OxyContin abuse. Last week, one of the manufacturing subsidiaries of Purdue paid $2 million to settle a case brought by the DEA alleging insufficient record-keeping. In December, the Government Accounting Office released a report (63-page pdf available here) concerning the abuse and diversion of OxyContin. Among the factors that the GAO identified as contributing to abuse was the original warning label, which advised against crushing the pill as that would lead to rapid release of the oxycodone. Purdue also has taken to training doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and law enforcement officers on how to detect potential abuses:

Two years after beginning their law enforcement training efforts, the three trained directors are in big demand, booking nearly six months in advance. Ritch Wagner was a former Nebraska Drug Enforcement Officer, and is now director of the Purdue Pharma program. Wagner says his team is training law enforcement and health care professionals about what to look for and what steps they can take to minimize prescription drug abuse.

Vice control has a way of enlisting "civilians" as informants. Meanwhile, the feds continue their dreadful, over-the-top campaign against pain-treatment doctors and their patients -- a campaign mentioned previously by Vice Squad in December and in February.

Labels: informants, pain, prescription drugs

 
The Subcontracting Informant
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 2:38 PM

One of the underappreciated effects of criminalizing consensual adult activity is that you have to rely on innovative police methods to enforce your prohibition. Sure, you can try stings and reverse stings and dog sniffs and pretext stops, but there's always room, even a place of honor, for informants. Reward them generously enough -- perhaps through reduced jail time, or perhaps through direct monetary payments or a share of the forfeited assets -- and you can have as healthy a supply of informants as you could possibly want.

Mr. Guillermo Francisco Jordan-Pollito has earned some $350,000 in the last ten years by informing for the DEA (and another $50,000 for informing for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies). He's been involved in some 80 cases! That is quite a bit for one person, but you see, Mr. Jordan-Pollito actually heads an organization of informers. He hires others to arrange his drug buys for him.

This is all well and good, of course, an efficient procedure for uncovering drug offenders. The fly in this otherwise pleasant ointment, alas, is that the use of the subcontractors hasn't always been mentioned in the subsequent legal proceedings. What difference does it make, the Vice Squad reader might ask, given that the illegal drug transactions took place in any case? Well, one technicality, alas, is that the law still provides for entrapment defenses -- what if the subcontractors worked really, really hard, to try to set up the sale? Mightn't that be a case of entrapment?

Read all about it in this story (registration required) from the Los Angeles Times. (Thanks to MAP for the pointer.) Here's a somewhat lengthy excerpt:

Ronald O. Kaye, a former federal public defender now in private practice, uncovered Jordan-Pollito's use of "sub-informants" last year after combing through telephone records turned over to him by federal prosecutors in a methamphetamine-trafficking case.

The prosecution contended that the sub-informant in Kaye's case had done nothing more than introduce Jordan-Pollito to the three defendants. But Kaye was able to show that the sub-informant, Jose Agapito Gomez, made 29 telephone calls to the defendants during a one-week period leading up to their arrests. The defense attorney also documented 68 calls between Jordan-Pollito and Gomez during the same period.

After hearing arguments from both sides, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ordered the government to disclose the names and file numbers of all cases in which Jordan-Pollito or Gomez had been employed and how much they had been paid.

When the prosecution refused to do so, Cooper tossed out the indictment and ordered the defendants freed.

"The government's representations regarding the use of confidential informants in this case have repeatedly proven to be unreliable," the judge stated in a strongly worded opinion. Cooper said that either the government did not know about the sub-informant's existence, which she called "highly unlikely," or the government deliberately lied to the defense.

If the government did not know, she went on, then its ability to monitor the activities of its undercover informants has been seriously compromised. And if the government did know and withheld the information from the defense, "that is an even greater evil," the judge wrote.

Cooper said it appeared at first that an entrapment defense was not feasible, because there were so few contacts between Jordan-Pollito and the defendants, and those tape-recorded encounters showed no pressure being applied by the DEA informant.

But the series of phone calls by the sub-informant to the defendants, which were not tape-recorded, supports "an inference that pressure was being brought to bear by the sub-informant, which could have been used to support an entrapment defense."

"A law enforcement agency must not be allowed to shield itself from accountability by hiring someone outside of law enforcement who is free to violate citizens' rights," she said.

Labels: California, drugs, informants, policing

 
Another Victory
- posted by Michael @ 6:15 PM

I am proud to report another great victory in the war against drugs in Monroe County, IN, as reported in Saturday, March 6, 2004 edition of The Herald-Times (subscription required). As you will see from the story, the enemy was smart and cunning, but the law enforcement has prevailed. Two Monroe County work-release inmates, Shawn and Anthony, were charged on Friday with “conspiracy to commit trafficking with an inmate and trafficking with an inmate, respectively.” (BTW, this quote reminds me of an old Soviet joke that under capitalism man exploits man, and under socialism it’s the other way around.) According to the story, on Thursday, Shawn called the jail to report that Anthony had marijuana hidden in his sock. Later it turned out that it was Shawn himself who gave the drugs to Anthony. The investigator hypothesized that Shawn wanted to turn Anthony in, because Anthony was competing with Shawn in the business of smuggling drugs into the jail. Shawn apparently did not realize that he would get in trouble as well.

The article also reports of a third work-release inmate being charged with smuggling drugs. It is unclear if this breakthrough in the war on drugs was related to the first two, but it is interesting in its own right. The inmate was taken to Bloomington Hospital for X-rays that revealed “something lodged in his body cavity.” “Once he was confronted with [the pictures] he went ahead and pulled it out on his own,” the investigator said. Now, not only all the law-abiding residents of Monroe County can feel safe in their homes, but even the inmates of the county jail can sleep peacefully knowing that the three of their friends no longer would be able to enjoy the wicked weed or even their work-release privileges.

Labels: drugs, informants, marijuana, policing

 
Cook County Pursuing Major Coke Dealer
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 2:05 PM

You have to admire the Javert-like qualities of Cook County prosecutors. After two mistrials, they are still hoping to hang a 6-year sentence on a guy who apparently helped secure some cocaine (in 1999) for a seemingly desperate "friend" he ran into in a bar. The friend turned out to be an informant. Chicagoans will not be able to sleep soundly until this trafficker, this drug kingpin (45 years old, father of seven adopted kids), is locked up for a long, long time. Read the woeful tale in today's Trib (registration required).

Labels: Chicago, cocaine, informants, policing