Gazette photo by STEVEN ADAMS
Kanawha County Deputy Public Defender LaDonna Saria, shown here in her
office in the Union Building on Kanawha Boulevard, said her clients who
choose to become confidential informants almost always fear for their lives
and are often forced to leave the area following their tenure with the
Metropolitan Drug Enforcement Network Team.
By Lawrence Messina
STAFF WRITER
Ernest Lee White probably never would have murdered Robert Morris if they hadn't both been secret drug informants.
There would have been no reason for White, a Charleston mechanic by day, to lure Morris to a West Side cemetery one night in December 1993 and shoot him six times with two handguns.
Charleston drug agents had wrongly plunged White,
an alcoholic with mental problems, into the drug underworld, his lawyers
would later argue. The agents failed to protect him and his girlfriend,
also an informant, despite repeated threats, the lawyers said.
Critics contend police can rely on the wrong people as informants, and that drug agents wrongly expose their informants to threats and harm.
Police and prosecutors say that informants are rarely killed or even threatened, and that they take steps to protect the identity and safety of those who help them target drug dealers.
Never handled threats well
White wasn't worried about pending drug charges when he became an informant for the Metropolitan Drug Enforcement Network Team, or MDENT, in December 1990. He joined to help his girlfriend, Shirley "Sissy" Long, after her arrest for allegedly selling cocaine to an informant.
They set up an alleged marijuana dealer, Robert Childers, in March 1993. Morris and Childers were friends, and Morris somehow suspected the couple. He left a May 1993 message on their answering machine threatening to kill Long if she had "ratted" out his friend.
Morris later broke into the couple's Dunbar residence to steal the answering machine tape. He was still there when the couple returned home. He threatened the pair with a knife before White summoned police.
Morris was never prosecuted for breaking into the couple's residence and threatening them. Instead, MDENT signed him up as a confidential informant.
Gazette file photo
Lawyers for confidential drug informant Ernest Lee White argued during
his 1993 murder trial that he never would have been put in the position
to kill had he not become an informant.
White had never handled threats very well, according to his case file. He sometimes imagined people were after him, and after another job as an informant, one that ended with his car being shot full of holes, he began buying guns: a .380-caliber pistol for himself and a 9mm pistol for Long. He shot Morris with both.
At his murder trial, White's defense argued that he never would have had guns or met Morris if he hadn't become an informant. Besides a drinking problem, White also took drugs for a nervous disorder. His defense lawyer alleged that White became unstable when he mixed the two.
The jury convicted White of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after 10 years.
Afraid to stick around
Kanawha County Deputy Public Defender LaDonna Saria said her clients sometimes become drug informants to avoid criminal charges. She worries about that choice.
"Sometimes, the best thing for my client is that we work out a snitch deal, but that doesn't mean I'm not concerned with that," she said. "Drug agents don't do a whole lot to protect their confidentiality, they put them in all kinds of danger situations and they don't do a whole lot of training."
Saria said the clients who become informants almost always fear for their lives, and believe MDENT treats them with contempt.
"They're always scared to death that they're going to get killed," Saria said. "I think that the cops don't have any respect for them at all. They just work them 'till they burn them."
Saria remembers one case where she represented someone accused by an informant of selling drugs. She called the informant, identified in court papers, to prepare for the upcoming trial.
"The informant had never been told that her name had been disclosed or that she would have to testify," Saria said. "She was surprised to hear from me, and scared."
Saria also said that a number of clients move out of the area after turning informant.
"A lot of times they just take off," Saria said. "They don't want to stick around with whoever they informed on."
Lt. Steve Utt of MDENT defends the unit's record of protecting informants. He said that while threats may be somewhat common, informants are rarely, if ever hurt.
Utt also questioned why MDENT would not protect the identity of informants.
"Once the word gets out that someone's an informant, they're of no use to us," Utt said. "We're very careful about the information getting out that they're informants, so hopefully we're able to use these informants for a long period of time."
The Judd brothers
Court records show that threats and violence against informants are not isolated to the White murder case. The May 1993 murders of Tyrone and Jermaine Judd remain the most publicized killings of drug informants in Kanawha County.
The two brothers, natives of New York City, were walking out of a Summers Street bar when at least five men began shooting at them. The brothers, aged 19 and 20, died from several gunshot wounds.
Police soon revealed that both men were drug informants. Jermaine Judd had recently set up two out-of-state crack dealers. Tyrone Judd had accompanied his brother when he sold crack to one of the dealers, less than a month before they were murdered. Police had listened in on the deal with a microphone hidden in Jermaine Judd's clothing.
The Judds were killed on behalf of rival dealers unhappy
with the brother's dealing with police, court records indicate. The murder
suspects also believed that the Judds continued to deal drugs on the side
while working for police, gaining an unfair market advantage.
More recently, a drug informant ended up shooting a man he had turned in to police, after the man threatened him with a gun.
Dunbar police were called to the home of Archie Edward Thaxton late one afternoon in April 1997. Thaxton had shot Brett McClaskie, the son of a Charleston city councilman, outside his residence.
The Dunbar officers summoned an MDENT agent to the house. They knew that Thaxton had worked for the unit as a confidential informant. They soon learned that McClaskie was one of the drug suspects Thaxton had set up.
A 9:30 a.m. knock on Thaxton's door revealed McClaskie waiting on the front porch, a pickup truck idling outside. McClaskie appeared at Thaxton's that morning with a small, semiautomatic handgun. McClaskie wanted some heroin for the pistol. Thaxton balked.
McClaskie snapped a bullet into the pistol's chamber and pointed it at Thaxton. He threatened to shoot him or his wife. Thaxton called McClaskie's bluff, then fetched a shotgun and blasted away, hitting McClaskie.
McClaskie later pleaded guilty to attacking Thaxton. The drug charges against him, secured by Thaxton's informant work, were dropped as part of the plea deal. Thaxton was also convicted in the case. Though he may have shot McClaskie in self-defense, his prior felony record barred him from possessing the shotgun.
Secret drug informants risk being exposed every time they work for police. A suspicious girlfriend and a faulty wire almost blew one informant's cover during an October 1995 drug buy, MDENT records show.
Carl Douglas Elkins walked up to Terry Hamer's house in St. Albans with $100 in his pocket and a tiny microphone hidden in his shirt. MDENT gave him the wire, the cash and orders to buy LSD from Hamer.
MDENT agents waited in cars parked up the street, listening in. As he entered the residence, Elkins passed Hamer's girlfriend on her way out.
Hamer was counting out 18 hits of acid for Elkins when the phone rang. Elkins could hear that Hamer was talking to his girlfriend, but he couldn't hear her describing suspicious cars she had seen parked near the house.
Hamer accused Elkins of wearing a wire, then insisted he join him for a drive around the block. They saw no strange cars, and Hamer drove Elkins back to the house to complete the deal.
Elkins later learned that the agents heard the tipoff and drove away in time. But Elkins was lucky: his wire "cut out" at least twice during the buy. If the agents had not heard Hamer, the buy may have ended differently.
Drug agents later described the October 1995 buy during Hamer's drug trial. Elkins testified against Hamer, though he told the jury he remembered little of the buy. Hamer was convicted.
Court records and news accounts from across the state further underscore the danger faced by informants:
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Christopher Leonard believed
he had found the informant who betrayed him to police when he broke out
the window of Alicia Stroble's car and threatened her last year.
"You're the bitch that did me," Leonard told Stroble. "I know you're the one who turned me in to the police."
Leonard was right. He pleaded guilty to a felony drug charge in February, and prosecutors dropped a drug charge against Stroble for her assistance.
A Charleston woman called the
Gazette in February begging for a story declaring that she was not a police
"snitch."
Niya Lawson said her neighbors believed that she set up a city man arrested the previous month on drug charges. Lawson had been herself arrested just before the raid on Leon Arthur Mitchell's apartment, and she said people thought she had turned confidential informant.
"I'm having problems out on the street," Lawson said. "People are writing "snitch" on my door."
Lawson said both she and Mitchell were betrayed by the same informant, who remains unidentified.
Two Martinsburg drug dealers
received life sentences last month for killing a woman whom they mistakenly
labeled a drug informant. Jennifer Folmar was 23 when Eric Turner and Pernell
Sellers shot and stabbed her to death as she sat in her car in Shepherdstown
in October 1996.
The FBI continues to investigate
the February death of a Huntington drug informant killed by a crack overdose
at his residence.
Delbert Jobe Jr., 31, was found in his living room. Police and family members later discovered crack cocaine wrapped in police evidence bags in the residence, the Associated Press reported.
The bags had come from the evidence locker of the Huntington Federal Drug Task Force, the area's drug unit and Jobe's employer as an informant. Jobe had been eating pizza with task force officers, celebrating a successful burglary arrest aided by Jobe, just hours before his death. Jobe had worked as an informant in more than 100 cases, police said.