The Terror Factory by Trevor Aaronson

Author:Trevor Aaronson [Aaronson, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781935439677
Publisher: IG Publishing

6. “TO CATCH THE DEVIL, YOU HAVE TO GO TO HELL”

Using informants with criminal backgrounds has long been a controversial FBI practice. The most famous example involves Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, who served as an FBI informant for nearly twenty years in exchange for federal law enforcement’s not referring for prosecution his organization’s criminal activities, which included extortion, loan sharking, bookmaking, hijacking, and the trafficking of guns and drugs. After losing his FBI protection in the mid-1990s and being indicted on federal racketeering charges, Bulger spent the next fifteen years as a fugitive from justice—twelve of them on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive List—before federal agents found him in Santa Monica, California, in 2011. Bulger, who was eighty-one years old at the time, had $800,000 in cash and a weapons arsenal in his apartment.1 He has become legendary in the Bureau—a kingpin-turned-informant who committed crimes far more serious than the ones he dropped the dime on.

Since 9/11, there have been many instances of federal informants committing crimes worse than the ones they were helping to investigate. In South Florida in 2003, Luis Martinez—a Mariel boatlift refugee and career criminal who became a federal informant assisting with investigations of home invasions in which firearms were taken—murdered retired Genovese crime family member Charlie Moretto in a mansion on Millionaire’s Row in Lighthouse Point, in Broward County.2 Nearly a decade later, in 2011, across the country in Seattle, a federal informant sexually abused an eighteen-year-old woman while holding her prisoner for several days in a cheap motel room.3 These are but two examples of the hundreds, if not thousands, of crimes, from fraud to murder, committed by FBI informants in the last ten years. Some have been reported and resulted in criminal charges, while others were simply made to go away by the FBI or other law enforcement agencies. There’s a saying in the Bureau that sums up the criminal tendencies of informants: “The only problem worse than having an informant is not having an informant.”

The use of criminals as informants is due in large part to a pervasive belief within the Bureau that only criminals can catch other criminals, an idea summed up neatly by another FBI saying: “To catch the devil, you have to go to hell.” If an agent can find a thug over whom he or she can hold criminal or immigration charges, it puts that agent in a position of control over someone who can navigate the depths of criminal hell for an investigation. This practice has only grown since 9/11, and in particular since George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential directive to increase the number of informants used by federal law enforcement, which put substantial pressure on agents to recruit and use informants. This has in turn brought more and more criminals, many of them violent offenders, under the contract employment of the FBI.

During a conversation in early 2011, I asked Dale Watson, who had been the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism on September 11, 2001, about the Bureau’s use of criminals as informants.

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