The federal witness protection program depends on the unlikely combination of fear and truth.
Facing long prison terms with little hope of ever emerging, criminals will try anything to get out, including telling the truth about others they watched do dreadful deeds.To prosecutors, that information is often worth trading protection and freedom for the source.
But, according to documented cases and dozens of protected witnesses who told their stories, truth has been a casualty of desperate inmates and a federal program out of control. In buying freedom, lies are often the currency.
George Taylor, who spent six years in a witness protection prison unit, said inventing stories is so commonplace among the witnesses that it has become a game of pin the crime on the donkey.
"That's what they do - as long as they have enough credible information to get the feds interested, they can make up the rest. It happens all the time."
William Koopman was a tough guy - an enforcer - with the Buffalo mob for 15 years. His heritage (a Puerto Rican mother and an Irish father) didn't technically qualify him for Buffalo's La Cosa Nostra, but at 6-1 and 300, with a penchant for violence, dealing drugs, gambling and burglary, Koopman worked his way up to a full life of crime.
He carried a gun, wore gold jewelry and could lie with the best of them. When charged with executing John Pinelli, the estranged son-in-law of his mob mentor, Luciano Spataro, Koopman's crime career turned on a three-minute conversation with a prosecutor.
Koopman said he had just been along for the ride when Pinelli was murdered, and agreed to testify against the triggerman, and against perpetrators of four other murders, in exchange for a short sentence and entry into the witness protection program.
Koopman named Carmine Spataro - Luciano's son - as the man who placed a semi-automatic pistol to the back of Pinelli's head and blew his skull apart. Carmine was convicted and is serving 25 years to life.
Under his witness agreement, Koopman received five to 15 years and served a little over four, including nine months in a hotel while waiting to testify.
Last year, while testifying again about what he knew of the Pinelli murder and other crimes, Koopman changed his story dramatically during questioning by attorney Thomas Eoannou.
"You knew the homicide was going to happen," Eoannou began, recapping Koopman's original testimony years earlier.
"Yes."
"You kind of drove along for the ride. What was your participation, sir?"
"I was the shooter."
"You did the shooting?" a startled Eoannou asked.
"Yes."
"You pulled the trigger?"
"That's correct."
"You lied about that at trial, didn't you?"
"In trial, yeah."
To Eoannou, what was even more startling than the testimony was what he learned later - local, state and federal officials admitted in court records that they had known or suspected for years that Koopman pulled the trigger. They tried to coax the truth out of him, but when he refused to relent, they said nothing, and continued to rely on his versions of events in this case and several others.
Koopman, after his admission of lying, was not even charged with perjury. Eoannou was outraged.
"In this case, it is quite clear that witnesses like Koopman can lie right through their teeth and get away with it. I realize (law enforcement officials) are not going to stop using these liars, but I believe they will think twice about perjury if we attack these guys for what they are, liars looking for a way out."
Frank Clark, assistant district attorney who first decided to use Koopman's testimony to prosecute Carmine Spataro, denies emphatically that he or anyone else connected with Koopman did anything improper. He does admit that he had heard conflicting stories about who pulled the trigger. He also confirms that Koopman was never given a polygraph test to establish his credibility.
"I agree he has lied, but like I told the jury, `Is a liar always a liar, does he lie all the time?' I should think not."
In cases subsequent to the Pinelli murder trial in which Koopman was used, juries seemed to answer that question another way. Defense lawyers were able to win acquittals in federal drug cases because Koopman's testimony wasn't credible.
Under questioning by Eoannou, Koopman said he lied about who shot Pinelli "because of embarrassment of my family."
Peggy Giglia, a good friend who helped clean up the blood after the murder, says Koopman had another reason for lying.
"He was scared to tell them in fear they would pull back his deal."
Mushtaq Malik is a Pakistani heroin dealer who latched onto the witness protection program as his passage to freedom. His reputation as a snitch is only surpassed by his reputation as a liar.
Malik has bartered for freedom by offering information on drug dealing in Pakistan, the role of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, and many other sensational cases. He got nowhere with those because his testimony was unbelievable. But he keeps trying.
During testimony in Chicago, he explained his philosophy to a judge: "If my lawyer tells me, `You lie,' I am going to lie. If I am your witness, if you tell me lie, I am going to lie, because I depend on you."
Malik once testified that 30 percent of his testimony while he was a protected witness was false. His own sponsor in the witness protection program said he would not believe anything Malik said unless it was "extensively corroborated."
For all of that, the government has used Malik's word in several cases, including one in which he testified about stories he heard in prison about prosecutorial misconduct.
When Ricardo Bilonick, a Panamanian who was a long-time intimate of Manuel Noriega, agreed to testify against his former president, he got a dramatic reduction of his possible 60-year prison term.
Despite his admission that he smuggled $400 million of cocaine into the United States, the government thought his information was so important to convicting Noriega that his prison time was cut to four years. As a bonus, he was permitted to keep the drug money, and his family was allowed to stay in the United States.
But in one of Noriega's post-trial motions, Noriega's lawyers said they had information that the Cali cartel, which believed Noriega had betrayed them, paid Bilonick $1.25 million to frame Noriega by lying about his role in several drug conspiracies.
Although that has not been proven, the judge in the case is holding off a ruling until the allegation is checked. In the meantime, Bilonick is free and living under an assumed name in the witness protection program.
When federal officials reduced the drug-smuggling sentence of Carlos Lehder Rivas by more than 100 years, they believed his testimony against Noriega would be key. But when Lehder got on the stand, he said he never actually met Noriega and "just assumed" that money he was handing over to intermediaries was going to him.
Furthermore, he impeached even that testimony by following it with stories that the prosecutors themselves found dubious. One was that U.S. authorities gave him a "green light" to smuggle cocaine into this country because he let them smuggle weapons to the Contras via a Bahamanian island he controlled.
Despite that, top officials from the U.S. Justice Department continued to use Lehder as a witness against Noriega.
Another witness in the case, Luis Del Cid, a former close Noriega associate and military official, received a substantial sentence reduction after agreeing to testify against his former general. Under direct examination, Del Cid spoke of delivering drug pay-off money to Noriega and implicated him in the operation of a Medellin-controlled cocaine laboratory in a remote Panamanian province.
Noriega had testified that he actually authorized the raid that destroyed the lab. But Del Cid tried to impeach that version by saying the lab wasn't raided until the general left the country.
In order to further implicate Noriega, Del Cid said the raid was followed by an emergency meeting in Cuba at which Noriega and Fidel Castro discussed how to placate the Medellin cartel.
Del Cid retracted much of his testimony after defense lawyers showed that Noriega was, in fact, in Panama at the time of the lab raid.
As for the Noriega-Castro meeting, the defense showed it didn't occur until much later, and that it had been arranged long before the raid.
Still, the government made good on its deal with Del Cid, even though his information was largely misinformation.
A protected witness who left the program after 20 years in order to run for mayor of Austin, Texas, has now launched a different campaign. John Tully had cut a deal with federal officials in the 1970s. He pleaded guilty to four murders and one attempted murder. In exchange for a 7 1/2-year prison term, he testified against several members of the Campisi crime family in New Jersey.
In a separate case, Tully's brother, Ronald, had been convicted of cocaine trafficking after being implicated by another protected witness. Now Tully is trying to prove his brother, who died in the meantime, was framed. He has publicly denounced the prosecutors, who, he said, "knowingly used lying government witnesses" against his brother.
Tully claims special expertise in the area. He says that prosecutors in the Campisi case manipulated witnesses, including him, into lying about the extent of the family's crimes.
In 1991, Tully "came out" of his protected witness status when he revealed his past in order to run for mayor of Austin under his alias, John Johnson. He lost then and again in 1994.
In Pittsburgh, a protected witness who traded information to avoid a possible life sentence for drug trafficking was the star witness against Lee Chagra and 12 other defendants accused in a large cocaine and marijuana distribution ring.
In making his deal, John King Jr. told prosecutors he had committed many violent crimes, but no murders. Then another protected witness caused a furor during the 1994 trial when he testified that King told him he had killed two men over drug debts.
Defense lawyers, claiming King perjured himself, wanted to cross-examine him on the murders, but a judge ruled such questioning would be too inflammatory.
King later admitted that for years he had lied to judges, law enforcement authorities and others about his criminal activities to escape punishment or retaliate against his enemies. His testimony resulted in convictions of almost every one of the defendants in the Chagra case.
King was never charged with the two murders, even though his agreement - and every protected witness agreement - is technically voided by lying.
And the government kept its end of the bargain. King is serving five years and three months instead of 20 years to life.
It is an axiom in legal circles that any testimony that is "bought" by money or promises has little, if any, value since its credibility is always suspect. Yet the federal witness protection program is based on a system of "buying" such testimony with reduced sentences, money, and sometimes - for those facing the death penalty - even life itself.
Some believe that when the stakes are that high, lying is encouraged.
As early as 1926, Learned Hand, renowned as one of the most astute judges ever to serve in the federal system, wrote: "A man faced with perpetual imprisonment until he discloses his confederates will in the end find confederates to disclose."
John Irwin, a retired sociologist and criminologist from San Francisco University who has testified against use of protected witnesses in trial, said the government is relying too heavily on informants.
"When it goes down that road, the government becomes so entwined in corruption that you actually can't believe they do it. I think it's out of laziness. It seems the art of investigation has been lost. They sit back and wait for someone to phone them," he said.
"If you start believing too much in these informants, you can really get into trouble."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)