God has turned his back on Judas and me.
Jeff, from an unpublished memoir
THE SNITCH IS sitting at a back table in Tommy's Joynt, the meat, meat, and more meat cafeteria on Van Ness. A black leather trench coat hangs from his shoulders, slate-colored wool slacks cover his lower half, his face is lined and taut, and his mouth is stuffed with long teeth.
I slip into a seat next to him and can't help but think those teeth look somehow menacing, like the flesh-rending incisors of some feral beast. But it's not the teeth that matter when you're a snitch. It's the tongue. The tongue of this man has put at least 50 people, most of them small cogs in the illegal drug industry, in jail cells.
His eyes glance in my direction as he stabs his fork into a pile of meatballs. Mostly though, he surveils the room, scanning the place for unfriendly faces. Eternal vigilance keeps rats alive.
He's agreed to rendezvous with me at 10 p.m. on this blustery March night because there might be something in it for him. He's got a handwritten memoir he'd like to sell. He figures the narrative, scratched out in pencil on a thick sheaf of yellow paper, could be transformed into an HBO miniseries, or a big-budget feature like Blow, the Johnny Depp film about a drug kingpin who winds up doing an interminable sentence in the pen. But instead of spending eternity in a cage with a guy named Bubba, this coke dealer gives up his partners, his customers, his friends, his lovers. And the snitch, whom I'll call Jeff, strides away, scarred but free.
Jeff thinks letting a journalist survey the rubble of his life is a first step toward getting Hollywood interested. For me, the snitch is an entry point into the dark subbasement of the war on drugs. He becomes the first of several people I meet in this murky realm, a place where the cops break their own rules, deception is king, and self-preservation is the only virtue. Snitching is as old as crime, but in the past two decades the drug war has created a whole new stratum of bottom-feeders, an army of long-term informants who are part criminal, part law enforcer, part mercenary.
To move through this shadow world, I must agree to a condition. I must shroud the identities of the informants I meet (because to do otherwise could get them killed) and those of their law enforcement handlers (because they could lose their jobs for speaking frankly about what they do).
My effectiveness, I found, was directly proportional to my ruthlessness.
Jeff, from an unpublished memoir
In April 2004, Jeff was locked in a glass-walled holding pen in the Santa Clara County Jail with about 10 other guys when the guards opened the door. In walked Roy.
Some 10 years earlier Jeff had set up a bogus drug deal with Roy, a blues musician who'd gigged with the late John Lee Hooker. As Jeff recounts it, "I called him and said, 'Hey, Roy, can you come down to my house and bring me some meth and two pounds of weed?' " Before Roy could deliver the goods, 10 San Jose narcotics cops pounced on him. They'd been tipped off by Jeff.
Now the two men were intently staring at each other. Jeff knew this was fucked. Real fucked. He wasn't worried about Roy beating him down. The guy was skinny, not much of a hard-ass, and Jeff figured he could take him. The real problem was all the other guys in the cell.
All Roy had to do was open his mouth and tell the other inmates, "Hey, that guy's a snitch," and Jeff could count on a severe, possibly fatal, pummeling or shanking. In jail the one thing everyone can agree on – regardless of age, race, or gang affiliation – is their hatred for informants.
But Jeff is nothing if not gifted at the art of bullshitting. He conned his way out of it. "He didn't realize it was me. He thought I was two inches taller because I'd been wearing cowboy boots," Jeff says. "I convinced this moron that I'm a different guy. Unbelievable."
At the time Jeff was staring down indictment number 11 – or was it 12? His five-page rap sheet already included busts on drug charges, lots of 'em, both federal and state. Identity theft charges (that particular indictment included seven aliases). Statutory rape charges. Now he'd caught a new case, a felony indictment for allegedly stalking an ex-girlfriend.
Santa Clara County prosecutors, Jeff says, had put a deal on the table: seven years in the pen. As usual, however, Jeff was able to trim time off his sentence by ratting on other cons, in this case a thoroughly tattooed Norteño gangbanger allegedly responsible for a string of liquor store robberies. "The Norteños will be after me," he says. "It's probably even worse than the coke dealers I set up. They're crazy. Even in fucking prison they're like warriors. They'll kill you."
For his effort, Jeff returned to the streets after 10 months; the Norteño's case is still unfolding.
Too many people wanted to kill me, We are talking in a tiny, thick-walled concrete room in the San Francisco county lockup. Donny (not his real name) is witty, cerebral, likable. I have no doubt that in another life he could've been anything – a successful entrepreneur, a Broadway actor, a biochemist, a cop, anything. In this world, though, he's the Betrayer.
Donny and Jeff share the same basic M.O. When Donny's doing time, he convinces his cellies to spill the grisly details of their crimes to him and then passes the salient nuggets on to the cops. On the streets, he leads the SFPD to drug peddlers, purchasing crank or heroin with marked bills and shuffling off when the narc squad swoops in to cuff the dealer.
He says he participated in his first covert operation when he was 15, buying acid from a small-time southern California dealer. The cops "paid me $50, which was a lot of money at the time," Donny recalls. "I was nervous. I was wearing a wire, and I couldn't carry a gun."
For Donny, snitching is a by-product of his penchant for ingesting verboten substances – he's been fucked-up on speed and heroin since 1969 and has worked straight jobs "only on rare occasions."
Junkiedom has kept him rotating in and out of jail and prison. He snitches to put a little money in his pocket, and, of course, to reduce the amount of time he's got to spend caged. "I've worked with SFPD, state Department of Justice, DEA, San Mateo Narcotics Task Force, San Jose P.D.," Donny tells me, before reeling off the names of a half-dozen SFPD detectives who've employed him.
I ask how many people he's ratted on. He pauses. "You know, I've never really thought about that." After some reflection, he says, "probably 20."
Donny says he was paid $1,200 by the DEA for his role last year in a two-pound meth bust in Antioch. S.F. cops, he claims, generally pay $60 for the average drug buy. "I've had cops pay me $20, $40, $60, depending on the situation. I know it's not official because they didn't have me sign anything."
(Later I mention this to the S.F. cop. "Oh yeah, a lot of times the department doesn't give us the money we need," he says. "Sometimes I'll just go to the ATM, take out money, and give it to the informant." He slips me a confidential memo sent by several undercover officers to an assistant police chief; they're asking to be reimbursed for more than $3,000 they've paid out to informants.)
I ask Donny if he's ever been pressured to give bogus testimony. He answers by way of anecdote: "I've had cops shove a case file in front of me and say, 'I'm going to get a Coke. Do you want anything? I'll be back in five minutes.'"
How much should I trust Donny? I don't know. All I can say for sure is I was introduced to Donny by a credible source with an extensive knowledge of the criminal justice arena. This person says Donny's for real. He also says I shouldn't write anything that'll get Donny whacked.
The old adage about the truth setting you free is not necessarily true.
Jeff, from an unpublished memoir
As ruthless and unsavory as they can be, Jeff and Donny are, in many respects, tragic figures, captives of the drug war just like the people they put away. They'll never truly be free. They'll always be looking over their shoulders for men palming guns or knives. Outside of the shadows, this society has no place for them.
Donny is doing time. He is providing information in several felony cases. When his term ends, he'll likely take up residence in a cheap hotel.
These days Jeff is living in the East Bay, pulling down a paycheck as a barber, attending regular sessions with a shrink as part of his probation in the stalking case. Aside from an array of business suits and dress shoes, he owns very little. He lives in fear of encountering figures from his past.
When it comes to the war on drugs, he's ambivalent. "It's a war we can never win. It's like Vietnam. Weed should be legal. But you can't legalize methamphetamine or cocaine. It would only make it worse."
Despite his misgivings, he's still informing.
E-mail A.C. Thompson |
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