ANTI-SNITCH CAMPAIGN RILES POLICE, PROSECUTORS

Is It A Grass-roots Backlash Against Criminals Turned Informers Or
Intimidation?

PITTSBURGH -- It was not the first time prosecutor Lisa Pellegrini had been
enraged by the sight of the T-shirt with the traffic-sign message: STOP
SNITCHING. But this guy was about to wear one into court, with matching
baseball cap.

Worse, he was a witness -- her witness -- and the intended victim in an
attempted murder case that had brought him, her and the defendants to court
that day last fall.

This was Rayco "War" Saunders -- ex-con, pro boxer and walking billboard
for a street movement that has sparked a coast-to-coast beef involving
everyone from professors to rappers.

Pellegrini, thinking "witness intimidation," told Saunders to lose the hat
and reverse the shirt. Saunders, crying "First Amendment," refused. He left
the courthouse, shirt in place. Case dismissed. "In almost every one of my
homicides, this happens: 'I don't know nothin' about nothin', " the
prosecutor says. "There is that attitude, 'Don't be a snitch.' And it's
condoned by the community."

Omerta, the Mafia's blood oath of silence, has been broken by turncoat
after turncoat. But the call to stop snitching -- on other folks in the
'hood -- is getting louder.

Is it an attempt by drug dealers and gangsters to intimidate witnesses?

Is it a legitimate protest against law enforcers' overreliance on
self-serving criminal informers?

Or is it bigger than that?

Take the case of Busta Rhymes.

The hip-hop star has refused to cooperate with police investigating the
slaying of his bodyguard Feb. 5 outside a Brooklyn studio where Rhymes was
recording a video with performers such as Missy Elliott and Mary J. Blige.
Police say that although Rhymes and as many as 50 others may have seen the
shooting, no one came forward -- an echo of the silence that followed the
unsolved murders of rappers Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. and
Run-DMC's Jam Master Jay.

It's the code of the street: To be a credible rapper, you have to know when
to shut up.

"Under pressure, I lie for ya, die for ya," Lil' Kim once rapped. Now she's
in a federal jail in Philadelphia for failing to tell a grand jury what she
knew about some friends involved in a shooting.

Rhymes' silence in the death of Israel Ramirez seemed to puzzle New York's
seen-it-all police commissioner, Ray Kelly, an ex-Marine, career NYPD cop
and U.S. Customs chief. "Your employee is murdered in front of you," he
told reporters, so "you'd think he might want to talk to the police."

Not necessarily, says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime
Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
"There's such animosity toward the police in some urban communities that
even people who aren't afraid, and who hate crime, still feel cooperating
is something good people don't do," Kennedy says. "That's the Busta Rhymes
story. He has nothing to fear. He just doesn't want to talk. His reputation
would take a dive if he did."

The code of silence, he says, "is breaking out in a way we've never seen
before."

Saunders agrees: "It's a movement, that's what it is -- a stop snitching
movement."

The stigma against snitching is an old one, but the Mafia never took out
newspaper ads to promote omerta. So why is an unwritten rule printed on
thousands of T-shirts?

Start with the war on drugs. Over the past two decades, law enforcers have
made more drug arrests and turned more defendants into informers than ever
before. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the agency that
establishes federal court sentencing practices, about one-third of drug
trafficking prosecutions involve informers' "substantial assistance." That
makes them eligible for reduced sentences under otherwise inflexible
federal sentencing guidelines.

Informers are a necessary evil, says Cmdr. Maurita Bryant, a 29-year
veteran of the Pittsburgh Police Department. "We have to deal with who we
have to deal with. ... If a dealer needs to make a deal, he'll tell on his
mother. It may not be right, but it's all we have."

Some criminal informers who are allowed to remain free commit more crimes;
some return to crime after a shortened prison sentence; some frame others,
or tell prosecutors what they want to hear. Boston defense lawyer Harvey
Silverglate says the system encourages defendants "not only to sing, but to
compose."

According to a study by the Northwestern University Law School's Center on
Wrongful Convictions, 51 of the 111 wrongful death penalty convictions
since the 1970s were based in whole or in part on the testimony of
witnesses who had an incentive to lie.

Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, says
that, based on federal statistics, one of every four black men from 20 to
29 is behind bars, on probation or on parole, and under pressure to snitch.
She estimates one in 12 of all black men in the highest-crime neighborhoods
are snitching.

She says informers strain the social fabric of poor minority neighborhoods,
where as many as half the young men have been arrested. "Every family
gathering, every party, every backyard barbecue probably has someone who's
secretly working as an informer."

This is the world Rayco Saunders inhabits. It's filled, as he puts it, with
"guys doin' all this crime and not doin' no time, because they're telling
on the next man."

Hence a backlash -- "stop snitching." The slogan appeared in Baltimore
about two years ago as the title of an underground DVD featuring
threatening, gun-wielding drug dealers and a brief appearance by NBA star
and Baltimore native Carmelo Anthony. Anthony, who later said he didn't
know the video's theme, told ESPN The Magazine that the
dealer-turned-informer excoriated in the DVD "ran our neighborhood. Now
he's working with the state and the feds. You can't do that. He turned his
back on the 'hood."

The black community is divided. Rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy has blasted
the Stop Snitching campaign on the hip-hop group's website: "The term
'snitch' was best applied to those that ratted revolutionaries like Huey P.
Newton, Bobby Seale, Che Guevara. ... Let's not let stupid cats use hip-hop
to again twist this meaning for the sake of some 'innerganghood' violent
drug thug crime dogs, who've sacrificed the black community's women and
children."

Whatever its intent, the Stop Snitching movement has galvanized officials
already apoplectic about witness reluctance and witness intimidation.

States and localities spend a fraction of what the federal government
devotes to witness protection, although this month Pennsylvania restored $1
million for that purpose. The move came as more than a half-dozen witnesses
recanted earlier testimony in the trial of men accused in the Philadelphia
street shooting death of a third-grade boy.

"If the word 'snitch' comes out of someone's mouth, I go insane," says
Pellegrini, the Pittsburgh prosecutor. "When young men and women see
rappers refuse (to cooperate), they think it's cool. How do we tell them,
'we'll support you,' when they see that?"

Especially, she says, when the slogan is blatantly used to intimidate
witnesses. Last year, supporters of an accused drug dealer on trial in
Pittsburgh federal court wore T-shirts around town bearing witnesses'
photos and the inscription "Stop Snitching. " U.S. Attorney Mary Beth
Buchanan says one, Garry Smith, had a $100,000 price on his head.

"Everybody in law enforcement is beside themselves," says Kennedy of John
Jay College. "They can't investigate cases. They can't prosecute cases. The
clearance rate for some serious crimes is tanking."

Stop Snitching T-shirts have been banned from a number of courthouses.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, whose city recorded the most homicides in a
decade last year, threatened to send police into stores to pull them off
the shelves.

Following the furor over the Stop Snitchin' DVD, Maryland raised witness
intimidation from a misdemeanor to a felony, and Baltimore police made a
tape of their own, Keep Talking. "People have to snitch," says Peter
Moskos, a former Baltimore street cop. "That's how criminals get caught."

Saunders' life may have been saved by a snitch.

Pellegrini says an informer told police that an ex-con had hired another
man to kill Saunders because the boxer was having an affair with his
girlfriend. The man and his accomplices were arrested before the hit could
be carried out. They were scheduled for a court hearing the day last fall
that Saunders showed up in his Stop Snitching T-shirt.

Saunders and Pellegrini agree he was there to warn the men not to testify
in other pending cases. But they disagree on why: Pellegrini says Saunders,
whom she calls a "thug," is in cahoots with other criminals who feared the
men's testimony. Saunders says he thought the defendants would try to save
themselves by selling out others.

Saunders says he hates snitching so much that he not only wears the
T-shirts himself but has given them as gifts to friends and relatives.
"They love the T- shirts," he says. "It's way overdue for somebody to step
up and speak about these things that's going on with these informants and
these guys walking around here with immunity to do whatever they want to do."

At 31, Saunders has had a hard life. He says he never knew his father; his
mother died of a drug overdose when he was 11. He was stabbed in the back
at 15, shot in the chest at 21. He says he shot at people himself and dealt
drugs. He was arrested six times from 1994 to 1997 and served four years in
prison after a shootout with a police officer. He says he was framed.

Since leaving prison, he has pursued a career as a pro boxer, compiling a
record of 15-7-2. In 2004 he won the North American Boxing Council
cruiserweight championship. In an interview at the gym where he trains, he
outlines a stop-snitching creed:

- - Don't snitch on others just to save yourself. "Stop snitching is for
those guys out there ... selling more drugs than Noriega, and their only
out is to tell on somebody. ... If a (criminal) wants to be a Good
Samaritan, OK. But send (him) to jail. Don't give him immunity to do what
he wants on the street."

- - Stop Snitching doesn't mean stop talking to police. "It's always
misconstrued by the public, or the powers that be, that we're trying to
intimidate the regular people or the law-abiding citizens. That's not what
it's about. ... If that is your only outlet, to call the police, that's
what you do."

- - But witnesses have no obligation to help police. "Do your job -- you're
the police. ... I've been wronged by the system. Do you think I would help
the system? ... Do cops snitch on other cops?"

- - The authorities can't protect witnesses. "What's happening to the
innocent witness? They get dead or ... terrorized for life."

- - Sometimes you must right wrongs yourself. "I'm a man, and I can handle my
own situations like a man. ... I've done dirt. I'll admit that. So I can't
run to the police."

Later, he's out on the street, wearing one of the T-shirts. Standing nearby
is a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty to advertise the services of
her employer, Liberty Income Tax.

"The people who are snitching, a lot of them end up dead, a lot of them end
up hurt," says Lady Liberty -- Ernestine Whitaker of Wilkinsburg, whose
nephew was threatened after he witnessed a crime. "So the snitching doesn't
do anything for the person who's snitching."

She looks at Saunders, whose muscular chest bulges beneath the T. "I'd wear
one of those," she says.