A SNITCH IN TIME

It's not easy being a rat. During the course of four decades, one San Jose
snitch has run drugs, been busted, informed for the police, stalked
girlfriends and tried to save drug addicts. Now, he wants to talk about it all.

'I HATED RATS more than anything," the Snitch says. It is one of his catch
phrases whenever he spins the tale of his long journey from drug smuggler
to police informant. Still, the Snitch ended up becoming one of San Jose's
best dime droppers.

"He was probably one of the most prolific people who worked for me," says
Jeff Lee, a lieutenant for the California Highway Patrol. Lee recalls doing
more than 30 cases with the Snitch. "He put a lot of fairly good-size
dealers away. I don't know if he was exceptionally smart. He was more of a
player who had a lot of contacts."

Surprisingly, the Snitch (whose name is being withheld for his protection),
actually wants his picture published. He keeps leaving messages on the
voicemail: "You have a good artist. He's a good sketcher. I like your paper."

As he drones on, his initial confidence is replaced by an almost innocent
earnestness and then by a wheedling tone, as if he's bargaining. "If you
were to do a sketch, you can actually do an exact sketch from what I look
like in those photos. The most recent one is 2 years old. But I've changed
my appearance. I'm a hairdresser, so I know how to do that. I dyed my hair;
I've grown a mustache; my eyeglasses are different. You wouldn't recognize
me if you did one of the exact sketches from those photos."

The Snitch pauses as he prepares a different angle of attack: "I'm also
writing a book in conjunction with a good friend of mine; he's a joke
writer. ... He knew John Belushi. He still knows Robin Williams and a few
other people.

The reference to his friend is a well-practiced tactic, one that the Snitch
uses with any acquaintance whose name or title has weight. In this way, he
shows that his friend is "literary," and, thus, his friend becomes an
expert who validates his point of view.

"The suggestion was that he thought that a sketch looks like a courtroom
sketch like you see in the Channel 11 news. He suggested, you know, if they
did a photo, in silhouette or blacked out or some other way, that they
couldn't tell exactly who you are, he said that's a lot more scary. It
makes the reality of a person real. But it's not our call; it's your call.
It's just a suggestion. Thank you for your time. Bye-bye."

The Snitch's attention span is short; his ideas many. His sentences bounce
around in confusing patterns of unpredictable associations. "I just keep
listening until he tells me something I'm interested in," shrugs one
narcotics officer who has worked with him.

Today, after four decades of dealing with the drug world (much of which is
documented in court records), after being a freedom-loving hippie busted
for five marijuana seeds in Florida, after smuggling marijuana from Mexico
and cocaine from Peru, after becoming a turncoat and setting up local
dealers as an informant, the Snitch is gamely trying to better his life.

But, as one former narcotics officer who's familiar with the Snitch
explains: "To catch rats, you have to go to the sewer." And despite the
Snitch's aspirations, the sewer is never far away.

Stuck on Stupid

Black tar heroin isn't fun to kick--ever. And Joyce (some of the names have
been changed for this story) knows it. Now clean for almost five days,
since early Friday morning, when Jay, her live-in boyfriend, was taken to
the county jail for an outstanding warrant, Joyce has been on edge. Her
insides are constricted, her nerves wired and--the way she explains it--her
sensations no longer natural and familiar but, rather, raw,
hyperpronounced, like the jolt when the door slams shut unexpectedly.

And so the Snitch understands when Joyce makes a scene in the Walgreens
pharmacy just off Capitol Expressway and McKee Road. She curses
prolifically at the pharmacist, a turbaned Sikh, before storming out of the
store.

The Snitch graciously apologizes on her behalf. His friend has just kicked
heroin, he tells the Sikh, and she has just finished her last dose of
methadone; she is actually very sweet and not normally like this.

And, as is the Snitch's garrulous nature, he explains more than the Sikh
probably wants to know: that Jay has stolen all of Joyce's valium to sell
on the street, that she can't get into a 30-day detox-program because she
would lose her apartment, that the methadone she was using was bought
illegally with an $80 loan from a childhood friend of the Snitch's.

At this point, the Snitch's narrative takes a plunge into a very deep
stream of consciousness. That childhood friend is the same one the Snitch
hit with a rock when they were both in the sixth grade; the stoning victim
chased the Snitch around the schoolyard three times, but when he finally
caught him, the Snitch pleaded that the boy not beat him up until the next
day, and surprisingly, he agreed to wait a day and cool off, and the Snitch
escaped a beating and made a friend--and later, when he sold cocaine, his
best customer.

The Sikh nods passively, more perhaps to quiet the rambling Snitch than
anything. Realizing that his apology has been accepted, the Snitch goes
looking for the distressed Joyce. He is proud of Joyce. He has been nudging
her away from heroin since he moved into the apartment above hers three
months ago, in May of this year.

It isn't always an easy job though, what with Jay around--not to mention
the toll Joyce's addiction is taking on the Snitch's unemployment checks.
Jay is no good for Joyce. The Snitch's four decades of being around drugs
have taught him that--taught him that certain people can kick, and certain
people can't.

Joyce owned some jewelry once--diamonds, gold, that sort of thing--but Jay,
who'd been in California's prisons almost as long as he'd been on the
outside, had sold it. All for that black tar heroin, an addiction so vile
even the Snitch himself had refused to sell it during his dealing days.

"I took Joyce for a walk last week," he says. "I told her, 'You know what?
I will help you, but you better be damn certain then that you are not just
pulling my leg, because you are really going to make an effort to get off
this shit.' I said, 'Your whole life is ruined.' I said, 'You're stuck on
stupid.' I said, 'You're with this man, and I like the guy, but that guy's
on a straight destruction course to hell, and he's bringing you with him.'
So we're gonna see. We're just gonna see."

Air Peru

The Snitch is not an imposing figure. He's 56, from pure Mediterranean
stock with striking green eyes, of average height and slim build. He enjoys
fine clothes--silk shirts, handmade Italian shoes (his collection is vast),
$700 watches--though these days his clothes and footwear come from thrift
stores and his jewelry largely from drug addicts hawking stolen rings.

Once, he drove a Porsche; now he tools around in a weary '70s-era
Volkswagen Beetle with a souped-up engine that's in the shop as often as
it's parked outside his apartment. He sprinkles his conversations with the
names of various celebrities he claims he has either sold drugs to or taken
drugs with: Jimi Hendrix, John Belushi ... the list goes on.

However, Clark says, those in the prior category are not as common as
people generally believe. Individuals arrested on drug charges are often
given a choice to be an informant, but "most people do not do it," Clark
says. "After they get over the initial panic [of the arrest], they realize
the benefit is just not there. Your own life is in jeopardy."

Most informants, Clark continues, only guide the police department and try
not to get involved in specific cases. If the informant becomes too
involved, then the police are obligated to submit the informant's
identifying information to defense attorneys. This is why the best that an
informant can usually do is give officers enough information to apply for a
search for warrant for a suspect's home.

"If [the informant] becomes a witness, then the police have to disclose
that witness," Clark explains. "What they normally try to do is get a
search warrant. They don't say when a guy went in [a suspect's home]
because they don't want to tip off the defendant. Instead they say
something like, 'Within the last five days, we have purchased drugs from
this residence.'"

Incognito: The Snitch doesn't mind being photographed, because he keeps
changing his appearance.

Debt to Society

Nevertheless, in the case of this particular snitch, working dozens of
cases for absolutely no formal incentive--he has had no drug charges
pending for the last decade--does tend to raise questions.

The way the snitch looks at his long-running tenure is that he's busting
drug dealers out of the goodness of his heart.

"I'm slick," he proclaims. "I don't need credit, because I'm not working
off any cases. ... I'm also not about getting paid. The DEA has a lot of
people who are paid informants. I told them that I wanted to make this
really clear: for any information I give you, I don't want to be paid on
it. I don't need that.

"I said, I already paid my debt to society but that I feel morally that I
owe a bigger debt to society, to my karma, so maybe I'll just do something
good for you guys just because I owe it to the world. They liked that.
We'll see."

Do the police officers he's worked with believe this noble creed? Nary a word.

"For us to assume that he's pure as the driven snow is just not
reasonable," says the same officer who admits an affinity for him. "It's
not unusual to have his motivation be personal. You have to corroborate
everything he says. Some sources are tested and reliable. With [him], there
are times, for one reason or another, that he's been angry and decides,
well, I'll use the police to get even. When he makes it clear it's
vindictive in nature, you as a police officer have to corroborate everything."

Payback's a Bitch

April 22 of this year wasn't a good day for the Snitch. In 1998, he had
taken up with a fellow hair stylist at the salon where he worked, but the
relationship soured early this year. The Snitch's response--yet another
figurative rock tossing--quickly took a turn for the worse.

The police report provides a bare-bones account of what went down. At about
a quarter past 7 on Aug. 22, a San Jose officer responded to a complaint at
a local hairstyling salon.

At the salon, a female stylist told the officer that she had found a
listening device planted in the ceiling tile above her workspace. She had
used a broom to dislodge it and turned it over to the police for evidence.

Later that same night, just before 10pm, the same officer was dispatched
back to the salon. This time, he found the stylist, whom he described as
"visibly shaking and upset," and another officer, who had the Snitch in
custody.

After questioning the stylist, the officers learned that because she knew
that the Snitch would be back for his listening device she, along with a
small group of relatives and friends, had closed the salon and waited in
the back. Shortly thereafter, the front door opened and in walked the Snitch.

According to the report, the stylist's friends restrained the Snitch until
police arrived, and he was arrested. When another officer came to assist,
the Snitch spontaneously blurted out: "'Yeah, I planted a bugging device in
there, but I'm not admitting that."

The arresting officer's version continues. "I contacted ... [the Snitch]
and asked him if he could tell me what was going on here. [The Snitch] ...
mostly rambled but did say that he and [the victim] were together for three
years and now 'the bitch' is seeing someone else. [The Snitch] ... says
that 'yes,' he is very jealous. While trying to talk to ...[him], [he] ...
looked over toward the business where [the victim] was standing and yelled
out to [her]: 'it's all gonna stick to you, you're going down, bitch.'"

And in a victim's statement the next day, the stylist told police that she
and the Snitch had worked together at the salon for about four years, that
their relationship had always been strictly professional and never
romantic, that she had recently divorced her husband and began dating
another man, that he called her 100 times over the past three weeks, that
he threatened her and her ex-husband and that she "didn't understand why
the suspect would think that they had been involved in a dating relationship."

The Snitch had tossed another rock, but he wasn't snaking his way out of
this predicament. As a result of the salon incident, the Snitch spent a
month in Santa Clara County Jail (the stalking charge was eventually
reduced to disturbing the peace and a $100 fine). He dropped $7,000 in
legal fees and lost wages ($3,000 of which he had to borrow from the same
friend who loaned him the $80 for Joyce); and he was fired from the salon.

"He's going to put himself in prison," a police officer familiar with him
warns sternly. "His ability to work himself out of jams works less and less
each time. He lives a seedy sort of life--drugs, women, screwing one over
one day, another the next day. That seedy life is eventually going to catch
up with him. I hope it's prison as opposed to being killed.

"He hasn't stopped his behavior yet. I don't believe he's going to. Look
what he's done: he jeopardized the lives of his parents and their future;
he's close to three-striking himself; he plants listening devices and calls
people he shouldn't be calling; he's hanging out where he shouldn't be
hanging; he dealt dope to people he shouldn't. He can't stop himself.
Ultimately, I told him, I'd rather see him get out of this life than be a
snitch."

Nailing the Sources

Women, especially during his hippie and cocaine-dealing days, had always
come easy for the Snitch. He saw sex as part of the territory (he estimates
he has slept with hundreds of women). His eyes still light up when he talks
about skinny-dipping in Mexico with four girlfriends when he smuggling the
430 kilos over the border in the '60s.

Women became his right as a drug dealer; it was not unusual for him to
demand sexual favors as a tip when he sold cocaine, with the woman's
husband sometimes waiting in the car downstairs.

But with the stylist (he had met her at the salon soon after he was
released from San Quentin State Prison, where he served two years on a
felony statutory rape conviction for having sex with an underage teen who
would eventually become his second wife), there was something about her
that gave him lasting pleasure.

The two, he insists, regardless of what the stylist told the police, had a
3 1/2-year affair. With other girlfriends, he never minded if they were
seeing other people; with her, it was different. He says it was because of
the way she was when they slept together. Perhaps that's true, or perhaps,
at 56 years old, he knew he couldn't relive the past anymore and that he
needed to hang on to the present.

The arrangement was simple: He kept her supplied with methamphetamines; she
kept him satisfied. The catch, of course, was that he was a snitch, and
while he was technically dealing drugs, he played it safe by telling the
police department everything he was doing, saying his ultimate objective
was to nail her sources.

"She would come to me when she needed something, when she was mad at her
husband, when she needed drugs," the Snitch says. "So when she came to me,
she said, 'Can you get me something?' I'm not stupid; I'm two-striked
through the statutory rape case, so I go to the cops."

Going to the cops, in this instance, blurred the line between his personal
life and his work as an informant. Was he letting a narcotics officer named
Bret Moiseff know he was providing methamphetamines for the stylist in
order to finger her other sources (the stylist and four others were
eventually busted; none of them got in any substantial trouble) or was he
feeding the cops nickel-and-dime busts so they would allow him to safely
supply her methamphetamines in order for him to pursue a romantic
relationship? Or was it both?

Before, the police had had his back while he was supplying the stylist with
methamphetamines. After she gave him the cold shoulder, he expected the
police to help him as he proceeded to make her life hell.

"I was stalking her," he admits. "I was plainly frickin' stalking her, but
not so much for her. I could find out who she was with by sending my
friends down by her house. I wanted to see who else would bring her drugs.
That's what I wanted because that would really mess with her. Even when I
was stalking her, I'd call him [Moiseff] up and say I'm stalking the bitch
right now. I told him straight out. I told him, hey, I got a listening
device up in the salon. I ain't telling him no lies. ... I told Moiseff
everything. He didn't say much."

First came the phone calls, then confrontations between the two at
work--she allegedly shoved him into a door frame one day. Then he set her
up for a drug bust--the police found only Vicodin in her car.

Eventually, the two traded restraining orders. The Snitch escalated by
intervening in the custody proceedings between her and her ex-husband for
their 4-year-old son. At family court on April 20, he handed over a manila
folder to her ex-husband containing some 20-odd Polaroids of him and the
stylist in explicit poses.

He also possessed a microcassette of the stylist asking for drugs. Up until
that point, the stylist had been telling the judge (as she told the
officers at the salon) that she had never been involved with the Snitch,
that she had never cheated on her husband and that she had never done drugs.

The Snitch's admitted goal is to separate the stylist from her child.
"She's really attached to her kid," he says. "The kid liked me--that really
pissed her off. Just because she messed with me, I'm messing with her back.
Ten years from now, if I'm married, I'll still figure out some way to mess
with her."

Two days after handing the pictures over to the stylist's ex, the events at
the salon transpired. The Snitch maintains that he did not come back for
the listening device but only to retrieve his cosmetology license.

"I didn't want the listening device," he says. "That's what she thought. I
thought she was gone. She was just hoping--she knew I was stalking her. ...
So I'm at the front desk looking at her schedule for the week. The back
door opens, and she sticks her head out. They [her sister, her sister's
nephew and her nephew's friend] rush me from the back. They beat me to the
ground. One of them hit my in my [already] damaged shoulder three times and
bent my glasses. The cop's sitting out there watching--that sucker, right?
I found out later she had called 911 as soon as she found the listening
device that afternoon. Even my friends said, 'She got your ass good.' Well,
payback's a bitch. Now it's my turn."

And even worse, the support the Snitch was counting on because of his
service to the police department didn't materialize. The rock had been
thrown, but the damage was far from controlled.

"I had the [arresting] officers call Moiseff. Moiseff's coming off a
narcotics bust. You know what I get from Moiseff? 'I'm clearly disappointed
in you,'" the Snitch recalls. "The hell with you, Moiseff. I'm not stalking
the bitch. I'm just getting my stuff; it's way over between me and the
bitch. Moiseff's a good guy. I'm pissed off at Moissef, though. Here's why
Moiseff let me rot [in jail for a month]. Moiseff thought I was still
stalking her."

Currying Favor

And so, the Snitch, a man who wants the police department behind him, is
still scheming on how to curry favor. He has left Moiseff behind and is now
busy calling other agencies to offer his services--the FBI, the DEA. And
he's still snitching.

Word was out that Jay, who was arrested on the outstanding warrant, had
been preparing for a 90-day shock session at the county jail. He knew his
arrest was coming. He had been stocking up on heroin and talking of
stuffing a bundle up his rectum and turning himself in.

The morning Jay was arrested, the Snitch, because Joyce could not find the
extra heroin that her boyfriend had saved, had reason to believe that Jay
had managed to carry out his plan. Now he faced a dilemma: rat out Jay to
save Joyce or leave him alone? Ratting him out would probably mean serious
prison time (as opposed to a 90-day stay at the county jail) for Jay
because of his priors.

The day of Jay's arrest, about two months ago, the Snitch took a trip to
the county jail.

"I had made no progress with Joyce; Joyce was still stuck with Jay," he
explained a week before she kicked. "I mean, she kept saying I'm going to
give him one more chance. If somebody ran over your leg a couple of times
and broke it in a couple of places, and they came back and broke your left
arm, and then they went away, and then they went away, would you give him a
chance to come back and do it again? I thought, well, do I save Joyce's
life, because Jay sure ain't going to save his life--say he gets out in
October, he's going to do the same thing he's doing right now, and now he's
doing any drug that comes his way all day long. I probably saved his life,
too; he won't get as much drugs in prison."

And, as is his custom before dropping a question, he pauses:

"Who am I? Mother Teresa?"