FRONTLINE

SNITCH

DEA AGENT: Please open the door!

ANNOUNCER: In the war on drugs, one of the more important weapons the
government uses is the informant.

"TONY": What would you do if the government came knocking on your door
telling you that you will get 30 years in prison unless you inform on
somebody? Or that your child will get 20 years unless he informs? Think
about it.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: The attorney told me, he says, "Jim, he could go to jail
for 30 years." I says, "Thirty years? Are you crazy?" And he said, "Yeah,
30 years." I says, "He's 18 years old." You know, "How can someone go to
jail for 30 years for selling drugs?"

ANNOUNCER: With mandatory minimum penalties now for drug offenses, the
pressure is on to name names. But with so much at stake, can an informant
be trusted to be telling the truth?

ERIC STERLING: In New York City police officers call it "testalying." In
Los Angeles, they call it "the liars club." Everybody knows that lying
takes place. The prosecutors don't feel bad about it. This is simply part
of the system.

ANNOUNCER: Tonight on FRONTLINE, an inside look at the way the very nature
of justice has been altered by the "Snitch."

NARRATOR: "Tony" lives in a world of shadows. His name has been changed and
his identity hidden. Facing a life sentence, he made a deal with the
government and become an informant, a snitch.

"TONY": I was in drugs, the sale of drugs, for a total of about three
years. And I made enough money to open up a legitimate business, and I got
out of it. So basically, I was in and out very quickly.

INTERVIEWER: So how did they get you?

"TONY": Well, the people that I was associated with in the very beginning
of my drug-dealing days, they continued on. So eventually they got caught,
and they wanted to get their sentences reduced, so they started naming
names. And they used my name to try and get out of jail quicker.

NARRATOR: Nowhere in the criminal justice system are informants used more
than in the war on drugs. They are used by the FBI, DEA and Customs, among
other law enforcement agencies. Almost every bust, every seizure, every
arrest is the result of an informant's, or snitch's, work. Tony was
snitched on years after he stopped dealing drugs.

"TONY": I was never arrested with any drugs in my life. I was never even
arrested with a large amount of money. I was very far away from drugs when
they finally came and arrested me.

NARRATOR: But he knew that there were informants ready to testify against him.

"TONY": You have a prison population, guys that are doing life sentences
who will do anything to get out of prison. In my case, there were actually
people who were reading the newspaper. When the newspapers came out, there
were people who, I found out later, called the government, and they said
"Hey, I can testify against this person." So how do you- how do you fight
against something like that, when it's just somebody's word against yours?

NARRATOR: The government had him over a barrel because of the harsh
penalties it enacted in the late 1980s. If Tony had refused to cooperate
and testify against his old-time drug supplier, he could have received life
in prison. Still, he said, he held out.

"TONY": I decided not to cooperate. I had my mind made up to go to trial.
So what they did is, they indicted my mother and my brother.

INTERVIEWER: To pressure you?

"TONY": Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Were they involved at all in drugs?

"TONY": Absolutely- No. They were involved in nothing. Never did they even
know what I was doing. I had to make the toughest choice of my life. It was
either let my family possibly go to prison for something they had nothing
to do with, or cooperate with the government.

NARRATOR: He cooperated and served 10 years in prison in a unit reserved
for informants. Tony asked to be interviewed in silhouette. He was
concerned, he said, about the reaction of the government.

"TONY": They don't like any witnesses to come forward to talk to the media,
and witnesses who have done this in the past have been retaliated against.
I'm not getting paid for this interview. I'm talking to you because there's
a need for the public to know what's going on with this- with this
so-called "drug war."

J. DON FOSTER, U.S. Attorney: As far as snitches go, if they're helping to
solve this terrible drug problem we have in this country, then we will
continue to use them, as long as they're truthful. I have no problem using
snitches. You have to to prove the cases under our system of laws.

NARRATOR: By the early '90s, the government was paying informants or
snitches more than $100 million a year. They paid thousands of others by
reducing their sentences. Over the last five years, nearly a third of the
people sentenced in drug-trafficking cases in the federal system had their
sentences reduced because they informed on other people. Ronald Rankins is
one of the informants. He now wants the world to know why.

RONALD RANKINS: I wrote Janet Reno. I wrote President Clinton. I wrote
Oprah Winfrey. I wrote "60 Minutes." I wrote "Hard Copy." I wrote "New York
Times." I wrote "Mobile Press Register." And the list just goes on and on
and on.

NARRATOR: He wrote claiming that his testimony was coerced. He was arrested
in 1992 and was charged with conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine and
money laundering. He faced life in prison.

RONALD RANKINS: I was a drug user, you know? And I sold drugs more or less
to support my habit, you know? And I wasn't nothing near what they would
call a kingpin or what the judicial system would refer to as a kingpin.

NARRATOR: His co-defendant was his friend, Algernon Lundy, called "Lonnie."

RONALD RANKINS: The prosecutor, Donna Barrows, she said, "One of you is
going to receive a life sentence, Mr. Rankins." She said, "Now, it don't
matter to me which one of you receives a life sentence." She say, "I can
assure you the federal government have a 98.6 conviction rate, and if I
tell you you're going to receive a life sentence, you can call your family
and tell them to break your plate because you won't be coming home again."
Those was her words, verbatim.

NARRATOR: He finally took the stand and was the star witness against his
friend, Lonnie Lundy. In exchange, he received a reduced sentence of 15
years in federal prison. Now he regrets it.

RONALD RANKINS: And as God is my witness, it hurt me to my heart to take
the stand again, like, and sit there and tell all them lies.

INTERVIEWER: But you finally did.

RONALD RANKINS: Let me ask you a question, if I may. If you was faced with
a life sentence right now, and they tell you, "Well, Miss Ofra, if you
don't testify on this guy, your next-door neighbor, that you seen him
selling drugs, we're going to give you a life sentence, we're going to make
you part of this conspiracy and give you a life sentence," what're you
going to do? You going to take that life sentence?

INTERVIEWER: Probably not.

RONALD RANKINS: Okay. You human. Everybody's human. No matter what type of
tough exterior they try to represent, you know, people is human. They're
not robots. Regardless to how tough you try to be on the street and how
tough you try to be in prison, when it comes down to it, them letters,
L-I-F-E, it'll put a whole new perspective in the ball game. You ain't just
talking about "One of these days I'm going to be out of here." The only way
you're coming out of here is when you got a tag on your big toe and no
breath left in your body.

GORDON ARMSTRONG III, Defense Attorney: You see it frequently where people
come back years later and say, "Well, I lied then. I lied." And then the
judges and the lawyers who come back years later say, "Well, are you lying
now, or did you lie then? Are you lying now just to try to help somebody?
Are you trying to help somebody out of jail or help somebody with their
appeals?"

INTERVIEWER: How can you tell?

GORDON ARMSTRONG: You can't tell. That's the whole problem. You don't know
and that's- that's the danger of using them from the very beginning.

Rep. BILL McCOLLUM (R), Florida: I want to tell you I am much more
concerned about the loss of life to drugs and to the crime that's going on
out there, and the need to stop it and to protect our innocents and our
citizens, than I am about anybody's concern over informants. Good lord,
informants are a way of life in American justice, whether it's a drug issue
or not. How else are we going to find the bad guy?

NARRATOR: In the mid-1980s, the bad guys dominated the news with a new
scourge, crack cocaine.

REPORTER: The newest and one of the deadliest drugs sweeping the country
today is crack, a potent-

REPORTER: Crack is in 25 states coast-to-coast and in every major city.

REPORTER: In New York, crack-smoking is an epidemic.

REPORTER: Police say there may now be as many as 1,200-

REPORTER: -are singing in courts, and the refrain is crack.

NARRATOR: Congress responded immediately by passing new laws of mandatory
minimum sentences that would apply to drug traffickers. The proposed
sentences that became the law of the land were Draconian. They were clearly
directed at the major drug traffickers. People who had previously been
considered minor offenders could now draw 20 years to life in prison.
Parole had already been abolished.

Many judges were appalled, United States District Judge Robert Sweet among
them.

ROBERT W. SWEET, U.S. District Court Judge: There are a lot of people in
jail for a lot longer, and a lot of the low-level people are in jail, as a
consequence. And when you start figuring out the economics of this, it's
staggering- I mean, the $25,000 it costs to build the cell, the $30,000 it
costs every year that they're in. And the bottom line of all of it, if
you're talking about social policy, is no benefit. Who can point to the
benefit? Who can point to the value of these mandatory minimums?

Sen. ORRIN HATCH (R), Utah: Well, we found- the reason why we went to
mandatory minimums is because of these soft-on-crime judges that we have in
this society, judges who just will not get tough on crime, get tough
especially on pushers of drugs that are killing our youth. And so that's
why the mandatory minimums, so that we set some reasonable standards within
which judges have to rule, rather than allowing them to just put people out
on probation who otherwise are killing our kids.

NARRATOR: The mandatory minimum laws left only one way for defendants to
escape the full force of the sentence: to provide the government with what
the prosecution would deem substantial assistance. In other words, to
inform on someone else. It is an issue which is now hotly debated.

BOB CLARK, Defense Attorney: If I offered a witness a $100 bill to come
down and say it my way, I'd go to prison for that. But yet the government
can give them something far more precious than money, far more precious
than diamonds or gold or anything. They can give them freedom.

Sen. JEFF SESSIONS (R), Alabama, Former U.S. Attorney: There is no
incentive for a person to plead guilty and to confess if there isn't some
benefit from it because usually these co-conspirators are friends,
sometimes even relatives, so they don't want to testify against them. But
if you can say, "You're looking at 10 years, and we'll recommend 5 years.
And we want to give you- you've got to corroborate your testimony, but
you've got to"- you know, "We want you to tell what you know, where you've
been getting your drugs and who you've been selling your drugs to."

JONATHAN TURLEY, Law Professor, George Washington University: The
sentencing changes created an overwhelming pressure to cooperate, even to lie.

NARRATOR: Jonathan Turley is a constitutional law professor at George
Washington University. He has worked with Congress on criminal legislation
and has written extensively on sentencing issues.

JONATHAN TURLEY: A first-time drug offender will get a 10-year mandatory
minimum without chance of parole in the federal system. That's a long damn
time. And there's no out. You're looking at an office that has an over 90
percent conviction rate. And if you're convicted, you spend 10 years, and
there's no more parole in the federal system.

Now, you tell that to a young kid at 18, and it concentrates the mind. And
he asks his lawyer, "What can I do to get out of this?" and you say, "Well,
you have to turn someone in. You've got to cop a plea. You've got to give
them something they want." And they do. And if they don't know anything,
they make it up. And that's the way it works.

And it's not good. It's not good for any of us. But it's the way that the
system more and more seems to operate. We're beginning to become a society
of informants.

NARRATOR: It was with the help of informants that Lula May Smith of Mobile,
Alabama, was found guilty of conspiracy to distribute drugs. She was in her
late 50s when she was sentenced to seven years in prison, where she had two
strokes. She is now under supervised release until the year 2002.

LULA MAY SMITH: I went in in '89, I got out in January the 10th of '96.
There he go, right passing! There he go. There the snitch go. There he is.

NARRATOR: The man who she says informed on her is now free in her
neighborhood.

LULA MAY SMITH: Just about every day, if I come out here and sit down out,
and when it's cool on the outside, he walks daily up and down this street.

BOB CLARK: Lula May Smith was a maid at the Holiday Inn downtown, a
hard-working woman, had worked hard all her life.

NARRATOR: Her defense attorney was Bob Clark.

BOB CLARK: I met Lula because my office is next door to the Holiday Inn,
and she would sometimes- the heat in the kitchen over there would just get
overwhelming, and she'd go out the back door and stand out for a few
minutes to get some fresh air. And that's how I met Lula Smith.

NARRATOR: Willy Huntley, former assistant U.S. attorney, prosecuted the case.

WILLY HUNTLEY, Former Assistant U.S. Attorney: Lula Smith was the mother of
Darren Sharp. Darren Sharp had been identified through an investigation as
being one of the largest crack cocaine dealers in the Prichard, Alabama,
area. She was aware that Darren Sharp didn't have any income. However, he
owned several houses, several automobiles. He was able to purchase a car
for her. He paid cash for it.

BOB CLARK: There's no question about her son being a drug dealer. Her son,
when he found out he was going to be indicted, ran. The whole time that she
was being tried, the government says, "If her son will come in, we'll
dismiss. If her son will come in"- it was just a- trying a means of
extorting her son to come in to give himself up. That's the only reason
they tried Mrs. Smith.

WILLEY HUNTLEY: That's exactly true.

INTERVIEWER: What is exactly true?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: That as part of the conspiracy, her son, who was at the
top, was the primary target.

INTERVIEWER: What would have happened if her son came to you and gave
himself up?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: The case against her probably would have been dismissed.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think they were after you?

LULA MAY SMITH: Because they wanted my son just that bad, so they used me
to do what they had to do with him.

INTERVIEWER: So she was a hostage?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: I don't think she was a hostage. If she was a hostage, it
was by her own creation because she chose to ignore the signs that her son
was giving out- no income, and he can buy houses and clothes and cars and
tractor-trailers, and no work.

INTERVIEWER: And should have reported him?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: No, I didn't say she should've done that. I think she
should have said, "Don't come to my house."

NARRATOR: Lula Smith did not tell her son not to come around, and she
didn't question his various acquisitions. She went to trial.

WILLEY HUNTLEY: The trial lasted about 14 days because of the number of
defendants, and all the different counts we had to prove. And the jury
started reading the verdicts, and the first one came out guilty, and I
think Lula's name was way down near the bottom. I think she was probably
the last person that was indicted. And the verdicts kept coming back,
"Guilty," "Guilty," "Guilty."

And the closer we got to her name, the more I kept hoping, "Please let them
say not guilty." They kept saying, "Guilty, "Guilty," "Guilty," and getting
closer, and I'd pray a little bit harder, saying, "Let them say not
guilty." But it got to her name, and they said "Guilty," too. And you know
the rest of the story.

LULA MAY SMITH: Do I blame Mr. Huntley? If he done admitted to you that he
was sorry that what happened to me, who else could I blame? Could you
answer that one for me?

INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about it now?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: I still say she shouldn't have gone to jail

INTERVIEWER: She shouldn't have?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: No. I said it then she shouldn't have gone to jail.

INTERVIEWER: You were the prosecutor, and you said it then?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: I did.

INTERVIEWER: What was the thought process?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: That the jury would find her not guilty.

INTERVIEWER: You hoped?

WILLEY HUNTLEY: I hoped. But I guess I did too good a job. [www.pbs.org:
Read interviews with the prosecutors]

"TONY": There are a lot of prosecutors who don't feel good about what
they're doing. There are prosecutors who say, "I didn't want this person to
go to prison for such a long time, but it's my job." There are a lot of
judges who've said on record, "I did not want to give that person 10, 20,
30 years in prison, but it's my job!" So if it's a part of your job, you
have to do a good job. You have to put as many people in prison as you can,
whether you want to or not.

JONATHAN TURLEY: You know, there's a bunch of people out there who are told
to arrest as many drug felons as possible. And it goes to a bunch of people
who are told to convict as many drug felons as possible. And it goes to a
bunch of people who are told to incarcerate as many felons as possible. And
all of them have strong incentives through federal grants and state grants.

Often state prosecutors have the added incentive of politics. When they
stand for election they want to say that they've put in more people in jail
than their predecessors and that their rate of conviction is even higher
this year than it was last. The problem is that these statistics ultimately
come down to people.

NARRATOR: Kathleen Kriete is a businesswoman in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
She has one child, Joey.

KATHLEEN KRIETE: My sister and I were partners in a family business. And
one afternoon in 1992 I got a phone call from some lawyer who was at the
jailhouse down in Fort Lauderdale to tell me that my son had been locked up
overnight and that he had been caught on a drug- in a drug deal and that he
was going to be spending many, many years in prison. And it was really that
cut-and-dried.

And of course, I was in shock, and I didn't believe it. And my sister and I
have no idea how we got down there. It was very quick. But we went down
there, and there he was- very young, scared to death, beard. And we had to
sit there and wait to bail- bail him out for- you know, post bond so that
we could wait for a trial or whatever we had to do. Had no idea what
happened. Couldn't believe it. This just couldn't happen in our house. And
it did. Sorry.

NARRATOR: Joey's father, James Settembrino, divorced and re-married, also
got a call.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: You have to picture yourself that your- your son or
daughter's in jail. And of course, I'll never forget that- that night when
I got that first telephone call, as he was in jail for the first evening.
It was rather a quick telephone call, and the shriekingness will live with
me till I die, probably, because all he said was, "I'm here. Get me out.
I'll never be able to do 10 years," and broke down for the first time, and
the phone went dead. That's all he said to me. I'll never forget that.

NARRATOR: It happened in 1992.

JOEY SETTEMBRINO: I was 18 years old, and I'd just graduated high school.
And a friend of mine which I'd known for many years called me up one day,
and he asked me if I could get some drugs for him. It was funny because I'd
never sold drugs before. I had used drugs, but I'd never sold drugs.

KATHLEEN KRIETE: The night before, we'd had a slight argument about, you
know, "If the insurance isn't paid, the car is going away." And you know,
that's pretty frightening when you're- when you're 18, and he'd just turned
18. So we- the call came at a good time. He was very vulnerable, and I
guess he said yes.

JOEY SETTEMBRINO: About five days after- five or six days after we
initially spoke, the acid came in. My buddy had it, and he told me that it
was there, and I could come get it. And we went- I went and picked up my
friend, and we were to meet his friend, who he was getting it for, at a
shopping mall.

KATHLEEN KRIETE: When he actually went, got the drugs, delivered the drugs
in a manila envelope, he delivered them to an agent of the Drug Enforcement
group. So he knew. He knew exactly what happened. You know, he knew that he
had been set up. He knew that it was all staged.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any idea what the punishment would be?

JOEY SETTEMBRINO: No. As a matter of fact, when the cop put me in the car
and he told me I was looking at 25 years, I- I believe I got a little fresh
with him, and I told him I wouldn't do a day. I mean I honestly felt, "I'm
a first-time offender. This is the first time I've ever been in trouble in
my life. You know, I won't- nothing will happen to me. I won't do any time."

NARRATOR: But it soon became clear that Joey, who was supposed to have made
$500 on the deal, was in real trouble.

JAMES SETTEMBRINO: I got an attorney for him, and found out the severity of
it. The attorney told me, he says, "Jim, you know, this- you don't want to
hear this, but he's in bad shape here. He could go to jail for 30 years." I
says, "Thirty years? Are you crazy?" He said, "Yeah, 30 years." I says,
"He's 18 years old." You know, "How can someone go to jail for 30 years for
selling drugs?"

(Continued in part 2 of 3 parts)