Jail Informer First Told of Scam in ’87

Jail-house informant Leslie White, who sparked a major investigation last week by demonstrating that he could convincingly fabricate a murder confession, first outlined his methods 11 months ago in open court. But nobody believed him.

Testifying at a preliminary hearing in Pasadena Municipal Court in December, 1987, White said informants frequently fabricate confessions. But he was not asked to name cases.

The deputy district attorney in the courtroom said this week that he did not report White’s testimony to his superiors because he did not believe him.

“In retrospect,” said the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Walter Lewis, “(because) he demonstrated this to sheriff’s personnel, I see this in a different light. But at the time I didn’t believe him. He sounded like a guy who was just bragging.”

Lewis noted that, despite the demonstration, he has still “never heard of any case where this happened.”

In a telephone interview Wednesday, White still would not name any cases.

“I’m not at legal liberty to discuss some of these cases,” he said. “I am not going to incriminate myself.”

But White indicated that he took his role as an informant lightly at times. He cited several jokes that he said are making the rounds among informants, including, “You better call 1-800-HETOLDME”; “Don’t go to the pen, send a friend,” and “If you can’t do the time, drop a dime.”

Defense Witness

White testified at the December preliminary hearing as a defense witness for David Sconce, who was charged with stealing dental gold from corpses at his parents’ funeral home, selling body parts and soliciting the murder of prosecutor Lewis.

Pasadena Municipal Judge Victor H. Person, who also heard the testimony, said he could not comment on White’s credibility because the case against Sconce has not yet been resolved. But he said it was not his responsibility to start an investigation based on White’s claims.

“I’m not certain that the judiciary is supposed to do anything other than decide the cases that are brought before them,” he said. “ . . . If Walt Lewis and others in the courtroom felt there was nothing to be reported to their superiors and checked on, that was up to them. . . . The judiciary is not an investigative branch of government.”

White, a jail-house informant off and on since 1977, was called as a expert witness on informants at the hearing by Sconce’s defense attorney, Roger Diamond.

White testified that the informants, whose testimony figured in the case against Sconce, use a number of tricks to fabricate a confession.

He said they sometimes obtain information about another inmate’s case, then pass the same information along to a second informant.

The second informant, “although never having talked to the defendant at all, will call the police and say that he has information in order to seek leniency in his own case,” White testified.

This practice--called “getting in the car”--serves to corroborate the first informant, he noted.

White also went into detail about some of the techniques he demonstrated recently for the Sheriff’s Department, showing how he could parlay a small amount of information on an inmate’s case into enough to put together a plausible confession.

This method involves gathering data from unsuspecting authorities by posing as a law enforcement officer while using a jail telephone.

“If you call up the D.A. witness coordinator and tell him you are somebody else, that you are not a jail inmate, they will reveal information on (their) computer by bringing up the case number,” White testified.

“And you ask certain questions . . . that wouldn’t be in the (newspaper), and they will give you information, including victim names, exact addresses where the crime occurred, the date and location of the arrest, and the location and time of the crime itself.

“I’m not saying this for all courthouses that would do this, but there are a few that do.”

Sharing a Bus Ride

White also explained how inmates frequently arrange to share a bus ride with another inmate so that they can create a written record of their having been in proximity.

White said one way of doing this is for the informant to call a prosecutor he knows in a suburban courthouse where the other inmate is headed for a court appearance. The informant can tell the prosecutor that he needs to talk to him to convey some information. The prosecutor then arranges transportation to the suburban courthouse, which puts the informant and his intended victim on the same bus.

White demonstrated a similar method for the Sheriff’s Department.

White also said--and later demonstrated to sheriff’s personnel--that he could get information from a prosecutor by posing as a police officer from an agency other than the one investigating the case. In his demonstration, he claimed that he had informants of his own talking about the case and that he needed information from the prosecutor to test their veracity.

In his testimony, he said, “I have known persons to (do that regularly).”

White also testified that he had been fed information about a case by detectives asking leading questions. He was not asked to specify a case, but at one point, he was asked to offer his opinion on the credibility of the other informants testifying against Sconce.

“I wouldn’t believe one person in the informant tank, to be honest with you,” he said.

“Does that include yourself?” he was asked.

‘Not My Job’

“That’s up to you whether you believe me or not,” he responded. “I’m not going to judge myself. It’s not my job.”

In the telephone interview Wednesday, White said for the first time that he had actually fabricated another inmate’s confession in a murder case by using information he had obtained from other inmates, that is “getting into the car.”

He said he and 16 other jail-house informants made up confessions in a case this year against another informant whose name he refused to give. White said that when he told a deputy district attorney handling that case--before the preliminary hearing--that he and the other informants in the case had lied, she used them as witnesses anyway.

District attorney officials said the case White described was probably that of Stephen Vulpis, a jail-house informant who was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole this year for the 1986 strangulation murder of a 34-year-old businesswoman during a burglary at her Studio City home.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Michelle Rosenblatt, who prosecuted that case, said White was one of numerous informants who came forward with vague information.

Later, she said, after the preliminary hearing, White alleged that Vulpis had confessed to him.

Still later, she said, White called her and said he had fabricated the confession and that he and some of the other informants had exchanged information.

In between, it turned out that Vulpis and White had become friends, the prosecutor said. She said White even called her once as Vulpis’ spokesman.

Although an investigation did not substantiate White’s allegation that the informants had shared information, the prosecutor said, none of the informants White had accused testified at Vulpis’ trial.

Early Releases Claimed

Also in the interview Wednesday, White asserted that he has told sheriff’s deputies he could arrange another inmate’s early release by calling the sheriff’s document control section and posing as a jailer. But he said the deputies expressed no interest in seeing this demonstrated.

White said he had arranged for one inmate to be released one day early.

He provided the name of that inmate and the date of his release to The Times, which asked the Sheriff’s Department to attempt to verify the claim.

“White has struck out this time,” said Assistant Sheriff Dick Foreman, who is in charge of the county’s jails. Foreman said the inmate in question was released on time.

Foreman said he did not know whether White had offered to demonstrate how he could arrange an early release but would check.

White, who is in jail awaiting sentencing for grand theft, said he decided to come forward because, “I’m trying to make a contribution to the system. I’m not asking anybody for anything.”