Informants: Working Hard or Hardly Working

When I first started out as a young police detective, I would spend hundreds of hours, often times for naught, trying to solve a heinous or complex crime.  After a while, I discovered that if I spent about fifteen minutes with the right person, in the right place, and maybe throw in a cigarette and a candy bar, I could often crack the case.  In investigating terms, the right person was an informant.  This goes for both police detectives and private investigators.  Often times there is someone out there who has knowledge of the case, but you have to use the right approach and do it in the right location, in order to get the right results. 

Try not to let police movies or TV cloud your vision of how to work an informant.  You don’t approach someone on the street and expect them to talk to you.  By doing this, it also shows your lack of knowledge of the street and you won’t be trusted.  For police detectives, an individual can be interviewed back at the police station or in the lock up. 

I used to scan the daily arrest logs to see if anyone got arrested near one of the crimes I was investigating, or if any of my informants had managed to get themselves locked up.  I’d talk to the detective that was handling the individual’s current arrest to clear it with him, and then I’d go and talk to him.  It’s amazing how many arrestees, knowing that their looking at going back to prison, will talk to you if you have the right approach.  You have to be able to convince them that you will protect them and not reveal their identity.  Start small, and once they give something up that appears to be good, that’s when they get rewarded with the coffee or soda.  The more they give up, and the bigger the case, is when the candy bars and cigarettes come out.  Remember, they get the goodies after they cooperate, not before.

The same holds for private investigators.  You can meet with a possible cooperative informant off-site from his workplace or home.  Whether you’re a cop or a PI, you always pick the time and location.  You want to make sure you’re not being setup.

Different motivations motivate different people to give up information.  It can be fear, revenge, retaliation, power, honesty etc.  You need to find which one is the one that turns your informant.  Find the right one, and your case can be solved.

Solving the NYC Hollywood Mask Robbery

At the end of February 2012 there was a unique crime in New York City that made national news.  Three suspects robbed a check cashing store of $200,000 dollars.  The thing that set this crime apart from other robberies was that the suspects were wearing blue police-like jackets with the NYPD logos on them along with police type badges around their necks.  They all wore sunglasses and two of the suspects were wearing NY Yankee baseball hats.  The media also reported that the police think the suspects may have been wearing expensive, whole head Hollywood style masks.  They may not even know the ethnicity or race of the robbers.

How do detectives go about solving this type of crime?  Because the crime was caught on the store’s video, they will examine every frame of the film to look for any idiosyncrasy they can find on the suspects, such as a scar, tattoo, mark, watch ring etc. that the film reveals.  They’ll canvass every store and mail order business that specializes in whole head masks looking for similar purchases.  They’ll be contacting makeup artists who may have had some recent clients around the time of the robbery.  They’ll be contacting other police agencies nationwide to see if they have had any similar crimes and suspects.  Get-a-way SUVs were used in the crime.  They’ll be looking for stolen vehicles that were similar to the ones used and looking to find both where they were stolen and recovered.  There’s a chance that one or more of the suspects may have been arrested in their past for a similar robbery using the same MO.  If so, they’ll want to know everything they can about that crime, including interviewing the detectives who handled that investigation.

One of the most important tools in solving this crime is getting information from informants.  Suspects have friends, wives, girlfriends, drug suppliers and competitors who all have information about what went down.  The suspects had to get police-like badges, jackets, masks and vehicles to pull this off.  That’s a lot of working parts and other people would have to either be involved or have some knowledge.  Vice, narcotic and plainclothes detectives will be or should be talking to every arrestee in the city along with their regular informants to find out who knows something.  Whether they’re working off an arrest, greed or revenge, somebody is going to talk.  When that happens, the heat is on and the case will be solved.  

INTERVIEWS/INTERROGATING PAROLEES & EX-CONS

Many police detectives and private investigators think you can’t get any information from parolees and ex-cons.  Going one step further, many think it’s all but impossible to get them to cop out to a crime during an interrogation.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I think in many ways their the easiest to get to give it up.  The other side would argue their case this way.  Why would a guy with a 40 page rap sheet tell you anything?  My response is, if a guy is supposed to be so smart, why does he have a 40 page rap sheet!  We’re not dealing with the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler or some other master criminal.  As to giving up information, they probably respond easier than someone who is new to the criminal justice system.  Whether it’s to show off how much they know, greed, envy, revenge or self protection, you just have to find the psychological key that turns on the spigot.  I’ll give you an example. When I was a police detective, I’d go into the jail at my division everyday and see who got arrested the previous day.  I was always looking to see if anyone got arrested in the area where a major crime had recently happened.  After I cleared it with the detectives handling an individual’s specific case, I’d go in and talk to a number of arrestees to see what they knew and how they could help themselves.  This one time I gave my usual pitch to a hard core ex-con who had already been incarcerated for many years and now was looking at another long stretch.  He respectfully listened to my pitch and then said to me, “No disrespect, Detective, but I ain’t ever been a snitch, and I can do the time standing on my head!”  As a last ditch effort, I told him I respected him for that.  I then asked him if there was someone he didn’t like, maybe someone who was doing his old lady when he was in the joint.  It was like a light bulb went off in his head.  He smiled at me and said he did have somebody like that.  He gave me information on a guy that we were able to act on and make an arrest.  They’ll be times when you strikeout, but if your persistent, and keep your word to them, you’ll start making cases.