Even the snitches need protection

Jeremiah Valentine, 27, gave police an insider's view of gang life after he was arrested on a cocaine charge three months before the December 26th 2005, gunfight that killed a 15-year-old girl who was an innocent bystander. Even another arrest two months after that arrest, for obstructing a police officer and drug offences, wasn't enough to keep him off the streets. He was actually walking free when the girl was shot on Yonge Street, one of the main streets in Toronto, Ontario. I don’t know if it was his gun that the fatal bullet was fired from but he did fire his gun at others (six were injured during that gun fight between two gangs) so on December 23, 2009, he was sent to prison for twelve years with no parole after pleading guilty to second degree murder.

This article isn’t so much about his role in the shootings but rather about the the risk he took when he decided to snitch on his fellow gang members.

On Sept. 19, 2005, the day he was arrested on cocaine charges, Valentine told detectives he was fed up with the gangster life. He said he was tired of watching friends kill friends. Despite past refusals to break the ‘code of the street’ against snitching, he was willing to talk about the secret world of the Driftwood Crips and his own related crew, the Killer Crips, in the Jane St. and Finch Ave. W. area; a very violent area where young thugs are often shooting at one another. According to a court document summarizing the interview, he pointed fingers and named names, detailing the gang hierarchy. He also offered information about two unsolved homicides. At the end of the interview, he was released from the police station after signing an undertaking to appear in court on the drug charges.

Investigators are often faced with dilemmas when unsavoury witnesses come forward with information, particularly in cases of gang activity where the anti-snitch code is so prevalent. Such persons often have valuable information about very serious crimes and without some flexibility on the part of police investigators with respect to making deals, many homicides would go unsolved.

Valentine's statement was one of the cornerstones of the Toronto police application to obtain wiretaps on the Driftwood Crips in March and May 2007. In June 2007, Project Kryptic investigators carried out 134 search warrants, mostly around Jane and Finch, charging more than 80 people – including members of the Driftwood Crips. Of the people charged, 55 pleaded guilty, 19 entered into peace bonds and eight signed statutory releases. Fourteen remain before the courts. It is safe to say that without Valentine’s cooperation, most in not all of crimes investigated by the police with respect to those two gangster groups may not have been solved.

This man has a violent, dangerous, drug-filled record and sending him to prison for twelve years was appropriate but despite that, he is also entitled to protection. With that in mind, I can’t help but wonder why the police gave the news media a picture of him sitting in an interview room in a police building being questioned by two police detectives. To make matters worse for him, the Toronto Star splashed across its front page that this man was an informer who snitched on his fellow gang members; information that became obvious to the reporter covering the trial when the police testified that he was a snitch who ratted out on his fellow gang members.

Valentine will have to be kept in protective custody while he is in a federal penitentiary. Life in protective custody will be extremely boring for him. Many years ago during the 1950s, I visited the Headingley Correctional Centre, a provincial prison that is a short distance from the outskirts of Winnipeg, Manitoba. At that time it was a old building whereas now it is a very modern complex of buildings. I was shown the protective custody area below ground where inmates who were in need of protective custody were kept. Each of them was kept alone in a cell. They were out of their cells only for an hour each day and although they could communicate with one another, they didn’t mingle.

During the the late 1960s, I was invited to conduct seminars to senior prison staff in the penitentiaries in the area of Kingston Ontario. The protective area in the main Kingston Penitentiary was next to the main dome and unfortunately that range wasn’t secure. I suggested that it be locked and that the key to it be only kept in the main control room. My suggestion was ignored. Later in 1971 when the prisoners in the prison rioted, they simply walked into the protective range and beat and tortured the so-called protected prisoners. Two of them were murdered. Now-a-days, almost the entire prison is a protective custody institution with each inmate given his own cell. Some are there at their own request whereas others are there on an involuntary basis because they are child molesters or their crimes were so horrendous, the inmates would want to murder them.

Valentine knowingly assumed a considerable risk that his former gang members might very well eventually discover where he is living after he is released and seek to take their revenge on him.

Juwan Gatlin, a man who lived in Minneapolis, was a long-time member of the MC gang. In June 1997, while serving time in the Hennepin County Jail on charges of armed robbery, Gatlin told authorities he wished to cooperate in exchange for assistance with his state charges and a chance to start a new life free of gang ties. In April 1998, based on information obtained from Gatlin, Arthur Hurd (Hurd) was indicted and arrested for another man’s murder whose name was Dawson and a related attempted murder.

In May 1998, the Minnesota state court reduced Gatlin’s twelve and one-half year sentence for armed robbery to three years probation in return for his vital assistance. The sentencing judge ordered Gatlin to maintain contact with the prosecutor and police, to cooperate fully in Hurd’s prosecution, and to testify when called to do so. While awaiting trial, Hurd was incarcerated in the Carver County Detention Center.

In June 1998, during a routine mail inspection, Carver County Sheriff officials discovered Hurd had attempted to mail a transcript2 of Gatlin’s police statement to Andrew Neal, a MC gang member, along with a handwritten note stating, “Check this out. Something must be done about this.”

Officers and the prosecutor's office, with court approval, gave the informant permission to leave town until he was needed to testify, and furnished some funds from a witness protection program to allow him to relocate. Gatlin then left town and relocated to Arkansas. Less than a month later, police found the informant's body in an alley in Minneapolis, where he had been shot between 14 times. Three Mickey Cobra gang members were later indicted for the murder, with two of them convicted and one who was killed in Chicago before he could be arrested.

A man who prosecutors say was under orders from a top Hell's Angels leader was convicted in December 2009 of murdering a woman, her twin 6-year-old girls and a 19-year-old family friend 17 years ago by shooting them each in the head. The defendant, Robert G. McClure, 47, was sentenced immediately after the verdict to four consecutive life terms in prison. McClure had bragged about making Ms. Compton watch as he shot her daughters first and had claimed that they had died clutching their teddy bears. The prosecutors contended that Mr. McClure had been under orders from Odis Garrett to kill Ms. Compton in retaliation for her testimony against several Hell's Angels in a San Francisco prostitution trial.

Paul Bergrin, 53, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey and defense attorney for rappers and U.S. soldiers, who later became an attorney, was arrested in May 2009 and charged with conspiring to kill a witness in a drug case. He was indicted in a five-year-old murder by a grand jury in Newark, New Jersey. He was charged in the death of an informant who was preparing to testify against one of his clients. The indictment alleges that in November 2003, Bergrin instructed associates of his client in a drug-trafficking case, William Baskerville, to kill a witness expected to testify for the prosecution. Bergrin told the associates they would have to pay Baskerville's legal bills if he were convicted and jailed. He was also accused of trying to hire a Chicago hit man to kill a witness in another federal drug case. The assassin recorded their conversations and was cooperating in the case. The murder at the center of the indictment took place in March 2004, when a drug informant was shot three times in the back of the head while crossing a street in Newark, New Jersey. The government said the gunman was Anthony Young, who is now in prison. The victim was identified by authorities by the nickname Kemo. He was to be a witness against an accused drug dealer named William Baskerville who was being represented by Bergrin.

After his January 5, 1998 arrest for methamphetamine possession, seventeen-year-old Chad MacDonald from Brea, California agreed to become a police informant. The Brea police told MacDonald that if he volunteered to work as an drug informant, they would explain to the district attorney that he was fully cooperating with them, increasing his chance for a reduced sentence. MacDonald agreed, and provided information about drug sales and made one undercover methamphetamine purchase. On January 19th , police arrested Daryl William Hood and Ryan Patrick McGreevey in their methamphetamine lab based on information from MacDonald. Two months later he was murdered, in retaliation for his alliance with the police. On March 1, MacDonald and his girlfriend went to a Norwalk home where she was raped and shot, but survived. MacDonald was found dead in a Los Angeles alley on March 3rd.

With inside access to the criminal underworld, informants are a crucial investigative tool for police and prosecutors. But their cooperation presents legal and ethical problems for a justice system that couldn't function without them.

Professor Edward Imwinkelried of the University of California Davis School of Law is an expert on evidentiary procedures. He said, "It has to be an exceptional case where a prosecutor in effect 'burns' a snitch and discloses the identity, especially in an era when retaliation appears to be on the upswing across the country. More gangs are going after informants, and as that becomes public knowledge informants are going to become reluctant. If I were a prosecutor, I'd think long and hard before I made that decision."

Emily Garcia Uhrig, an assistant professor at McGeorge School of Law, said police and prosecutors have "an ethical and moral responsibility" to keep informants safe.

I don’t think the police or the news media have gone out of their way to keep Valentine’s cooperation secret. I realize that the information came out at trial but the judge could have ordered the media not to publish particulars of his cooperation with the police. There is no doubt in my mind that his former gang members are well aware of what he has done to them but now the entire country knows. Where can this man hide when he is finally released since many of the undesirable citizens in Canada will know that he snitched on his fellow gang members and wreak their own kind of vengeance on him.

I don’t have any sympathy for criminal thugs but I recognize that when they cooperate with the police and their cooperation results in other criminal thugs being arrested and sent to prison, I feel that we as a society owe the snitches a degree of safety, irrespective as to what their motive were. If we deny them this, then their co-operation will eventually trickle down to nothing.