By Dane Schiller
The Houston Chronicle
HOUSTON — To cops and the courts, they are confidential informants and cooperating co-conspirators. In the streets, they are snitches and rats.
They make deals to avoid prosecution or do less time, sometimes paid with tax dollars to burrow in where undercover officers cannot. But once deals are made with authorities, what may seem like a stroke of luck can become a life imperiled.
Countless criminals, lovers, brothers and friends havegone down in part on the word of an informant or government witness, a high-stakes turn-of-play that fuels distrust and sometimes leads to death.
Authorities do not track how many informants are working for local, state and federal officers; nor are there standard guidelines for how they are used or protected.
But their secretive roles in law enforcement increasingly are being made public in Texas and elsewhere as the collateral damage plays out in killings, arrests and attacks.
“A huge part of police work is developing a network of people who are plugged into those who are violating the law,” said Mark White III, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice. “You have to leverage contacts with the underworld in order to do effective police work.”
Now in hiding
When federal agents wanted to snare a prison gang leader, they went to his Tomball wife and threatened to charge her with hefty crimes if she didn’t offer up information about his dealings. So Sharleiy Cooke did, ratting on husband Steven Cooke, an Aryan Brotherhood of Texas “general” who is serving time for a weapons conviction and awaits sentencing for his role in a murder.
She’s now in hiding.
“I have no idea what the rest of my life is going to be,” she said by phone from an undisclosed location. “I am afraid to get a job, afraid to have a phone in my name, afraid to have anything associated with me.”
One informant interviewed by the Houston Chronicle said he cooperated with authorities to save himself and get even with a Mexican drug trafficker who had ordered a friend’s murder.
“It is an essential thing. You can’t do it any other way,” said the man, who dealt in millions of dollars in cash and bulk loads of cocaine and helped agents take on a Mexican cartel. “They need informants.
“Even going back to catching Geronimo, they had informants,” he said. “Who got (Osama) bin Laden? The SEALs got him with an informant.”
The ‘backbone’
Generally, informants provide intelligence on how an organization works, who handles money or drugs, who are the top dogs, as well as identifying voices caught on tape.
The Drug Enforcement Administration is guarded about how it uses informants.
“The use of human intelligence - confidential sources - has long been the backbone of DEA’s enforcement and intelligence programs,” said Barbara Carreno, a DEA spokeswoman in Washington. “They can make observations in places where strangers would be immediately suspect; they can conduct undercover negotiations with cautious suspects; and they can gain firsthand, timely intelligence.”
That intelligence can be costly.
When a Mexican cartel-connected hit squad attacked a truck delivering a load of pot in Harris County in November, the driver was shot to death. Only then did his family learn the truth: He was earning extra money working as a spy for the government.
And a Houston man who allegedly confessed to being a weapons trafficker for the Zetas crime syndicate is now on the run - both from the law and from fellow criminals - after helping authorities make busts, then dropping out of sight.
“While much of the work DEA does with confidential sources is understandably sensitive, it is important to note that they have proven to be one of the best sources of information regarding drug trafficking,” the DEA’s Carreno said.
Insulted, cursed at
There is long list of high-profile criminals taken down with the aid of informants, or co-conspirators who turned government witness.
Among them are Barry Bujol, the Texan who was recently convicted of attempting to aid al-Qaida terrorists; Aryan Brotherhood of Texas’ Cooke; accused swindler R. Allen Stanford - whose former college roommate and business colleague testified against him; and former leaders of the Gulf Cartel, Juan Garcia Abrego and Osiel Cardenas Guillen.
Garcia is serving life without parole; he refused a deal. Cardenas cooperated with the government and is imprisoned under heavy security.
“We used to yell, ‘Snitch, we know you are a snitch,’ ” said Mike Mendoza, a gang member who was temporarily locked up near Cardenas at a detention center in Conroe. He said fellow inmates hurled insults and curses at the man, once a powerful drug lord.
Increased use
Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at the Loyola Law School Los Angeles, notes an explosion in the use of informants in the justice system.
“The nature of the deal is that someone the government might otherwise arrest, charge and prosecute will escape some or all of that threat by cooperating with the government,” Natapoff said. “The unfairness is often that the worst criminal benefits the most from the informant deal because they have the most information to trade.”
In 2010, a prison gang member got 30 months following his cooperation in a racketeering case that began with the probe of a murdered FBI informant. He took the deal but was warned that his life would never be the same.
“You cannot go back,” prosecutor Tim Braley said. “They will kill you.”
The drug trafficker informant interviewed by the Chronicle for his part in taking down top members of a Mexican cartel believes that most of his enemies are in prison.
As for the rest, “They’re all dead,” he said.
Copyright 2012 The Houston Chronicle