INFORMANTS WHO CORRUPT THE LAW

Law enforcement agencies have long relied on informants associated with
criminal groups to provide information about illegal activities. But the
value of these inside sources inevitably carries with it the risk that they
might abuse their alliance with the law to enhance their criminal careers,
making the government a partner in crime. The Justice Department recently
issued rigorous new guidelines designed to prevent such abuses. The new
rules, if vigorously enforced, should help ensure that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law
enforcement agencies manage their informants properly.

The reforms grew out of a notorious case in the F.B.I.'s Boston office that
came to light in 1997. The case involved two high-level mobsters who thrived
for years as informants for the bureau even as they were allegedly involved
in the murders of more than two dozen people in the 1970's and 1980's. In
January, a Massachusetts court freed a man who had served 33 years for
murder after Justice Department officials learned that F.B.I agents had
covered up evidence that he and three others had been wrongly convicted to
protect the two informants.

The problems in Boston were extreme but not unprecedented. In New York a
federal judge in 1997 found that an F.B.I. agent had improperly given
protection and information to a high-level Mafia informant who was waging
internecine warfare in the early 1990's over control of the Colombo crime
family; in that struggle, 10 mobsters and an innocent teenager were killed.

The new guidelines are designed to break down the traditional barriers that
have shielded F.B.I relationships with confidential informants from Justice
Department scrutiny. The rules would give prosecutors a say in decisions
about which criminals are accepted as informants and which are retained for
extended periods. The bureau for the first time will be required to share
important information about informants with federal prosecutors. The
guidelines also require the F.B.I., the D.E.A. and other agencies to report
unauthorized criminal activity by informants to federal prosecutors in their
districts and to alert federal prosecutors when the subject of a federal
criminal investigation is an informant. Agents will be required periodically
to justify their continued use of informants to Justice Department
officials.

Informants often come with criminal records, but they can also be valuable
sources of information when properly used. Without the information and
testimony provide by confidential informers, the Justice Department might
not have been able to disable the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960's, although its
informants were accused of participating in or even promoting some of the
Klan's violent acts. Informants have helped prosecutors convict drug
traffickers and prevent acts of terrorism.

Even the most scrupulous guidelines will not automatically safeguard the
integrity of the bureau. Instructions on the relationship between the F.B.I
and Justice Department prosecutors were issued by Attorney General Edward
Levy in 1976, and reinforced by Benjamin Civiletti in 1980. They included
directives for notifying the Justice Department about unauthorized crimes
committed by informants. The judge who conducted hearings in the Boston
case, Federal District Judge Mark Wolf, concluded that the bureau had
routinely disregarded those directives.

The new guidelines will be only as good as the Justice Department's
commitment to enforce them. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the nominee
to head the department's criminal division, Michael Chertoff, a longtime
organized crime prosecutor in New Jersey, must work closely with the F.B.I.
director, Louis Freeh, to make sure that the guidelines are scrupulously
honored.