The Informant Quandary (Part II)

...continued.

Read also "The Informant Quandary (Part I)"

	Informants often manipulate their status for personal gain
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However far too often informants have done more harm than good.

Informants often manipulate their status for personal gain. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) use of organized crime figure James “Whitey” Bulger, for example, enabled Bulger to eliminate competition by informing on other organized crime families, then taking over their territories after their members went to prison.

Harvey Matusow, an informant during the “Red Scare” era of the 1950s, later admitted, in a book entitled False Witness, that he had often been paid to provide false testimony about alleged communists, and was even encouraged to lie by Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief legal counsel, after their anti-communist “crusade” catapulted them into the national spotlight.

Also there is a proclivity for law enforcement to conceal the criminal activities of informants, even at the expense of justice. Recently a judge awarded Joseph Salvati and Peter Limone, and the families of Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco, a judgment in excess of one hundred million dollars after it was revealed that the FBI, in order to shield an informant, allowed these four men to go to prison for a murder they did not commit. Salvati and Limone both served over thirty years, while Tameleo and Greco died in prison.

In addition, informants are prone to lie, especially to please their “handlers.” According to a recent article from the Associated Press, the informant in the Van de Kamp case had stated under oath that he received “no benefit” for his testimony, when in fact he had been given a lighter criminal sentence.

This same type of dishonesty was also used to wrongfully imprison former Black Panther Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt in California. Pratt was convicted almost exclusively on the testimony of an informant, who under oath denied being one. There was also evidence that this informant’s testimony was possibly influenced by jealousy, since Pratt, rather than him, had become leader of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) after former leaders John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were murdered in January of 1969 by members of “US,” a black nationalist group founded by Maulana Karenga (aka Ron Everett).

Pratt subsequently spent twenty-seven years in prison, eight of them in solitary confinement, before his conviction was vacated. Even then, despite clear evidence of the perjury used to convict him and a former FBI agent’s admission that Pratt had been framed, the Los Angeles County Prosecutor’s office, then headed by Gil Garcetti, demanded that Pratt remain imprisoned.

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